Holy Jerror

ter-ror (ler-aar) n. 1. Intense, overpowering fear. Anything that instills such fear. 2. Violence toward private citizens, public property and political enemies promoted by a political group to achieve or maintain supremacy. 3. An annoying or intolerable pest; nuisance. Often used in the phrase "a holy terror."

As Americans, we don't worry much about terror. Not the way people do in the Middle East or in Northern Ireland, where terrorism has become a way of life, or in the Soviet Union, where it has been an instrument of government policy for decades. In the United States, we have seen relatively little organized violence for political ends. But terror is not really about violence. It's about fear and about the climate of intimidation, repression and the chaos such fear creates.

In the Eighties, America has given birth to a new form of terror, a campaign of fear and intimidation aimed at the hearts of millions. It is in two great American arenas--religion and politics--that this new terror has raised its head. In the past few years, America's fundamentalist right, a hybrid of religious and political absolutism led by a small group of preachers and political strategists, has begun to use religion and all that Americans hold sacred to seize power across a broad spectrum of our lives. It is exploiting our most intimate values and individual beliefs--along with our love of country--in a concerted effort to transform our culture into one altogether different from the one we have known.

Since the 1980 election, public attention has been focused on this force, which has been gathering steam for more than a decade; on the New Right; and on the self-proclaimed "awakening giant of American politics"--the nation's tens of millions of born-again Christians who have reportedly reared up in anger and come charging into the democratic process. The "electronic church" has become a fixture of mass culture. A "revolution" has swept into Congress, the White House and the highest offices of Government. And a new style of politics has come into fashion, led by a new breed of political engineers equipped with its own unyielding national agenda, a vast array of manipulative tactics and high technology and an expressed contempt for the codes of conduct and civility that have guided public debate in America for 200 years.

As authors, we come to this thorny subject fresh from a stroll in the brambles. Since the mid-Seventies, the two of us have been investigating the changing nature of religion in America. We began our work in a book called Snapping: America's Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change, published in 1978. Snapping was a look at the religious cults and mass-marketed therapies that first came to public attention in that decade and at the powerful ritual techniques they used to bring about sudden conversions and profound alterations of human awareness and personality. Six months after the publication of Snapping, that specter of cult mind control swept down, with unprecedented horror, in the People's Temple massacre in Jonestown, Guyana. The gruesome jungle mass-suicide scene shook one of the most broadly held myths of Americans: that any group that elects to call itself a religion is automatically above suspicion in its conduct and is deservedly exempt from public inquiry. In the aftermath of Jonestown, we were drawn to the forefront of a growing national debate over freedom of religion. For two years, we were in constant motion--appearing on television talk shows, speaking before civic gatherings and professional associations, testifying in courtrooms and before a U. S. Senate subcommittee investigating the cult phenomenon.

Yet, everywhere we went, the vast majority of questions we received had nothing to do with cults. They came from people who were confused and anxious about changes they saw taking place in larger, more traditional religions, in their own denominations and in the tide of born-again Christianity that had begun to engulf the nation. On were inundated with calls about personal or family problems relating to various Christian groups. On virtually every college campus we visited, we heard tales of open warfare being waged by descending hordes of Christian proselytizers. Even among many born-againers, we found widespread concern and dissent.

In 1980, we conducted a follow-up study to Snapping, the first nationwide survey of the long-term effects of cult techniques. We were startled to find that more than 30 of the 48 groups in our study--(continued on page 250) Holy Terror (continued from page 127) two thirds of them--had emerged out of fundamentalist or other conservative branches of Christianity. Moreover, those 30 Christian sects combined ranked higher, in terms of the trauma they inflicted upon their members, than the most destructive cults we studied. Long-term effects included such emotional problems as depression, suicidal tendencies and feelings of guilt, fear and humiliation--as well as such mental disorders as disorientation, amnesia, nightmares, hallucinations and delusions.

That fall, our mail increased to levels topped only during the period following Jonestown. Christians and non-Christians alike were writing to express their alarm over the growing militancy of hard-line fundamentalist rhetoric and activism. This wing of conservative Christianity, committed to the most literal interpretation of the Scriptures, had nowmerged with political forces on the far right. Together, that coalition had become loud and threatening in its drive to subsume the whole of Christendom under its banner and establish itself as the official standard of morality in America.

Suddenly, disaffected Christians started coming out of the woodwork, and we began to see an aspect of that sprawling movement that no one is talking about. Over the years, we've spoken with many Christians who are sincere in their beliefs and warmhearted in their desire to make their religion a living part of their daily lives. Recently, however, we've also met people whose faith has filled them with contempt for their fellow man, people who have been browbeaten and confused to the point of surrender by unyielding preachers and proselytizers. We've seen families split apart over absurd tests of "true conversion," communities turned against one another in heated battles over minutiae of fundamentalist dogma. Worst of all, we've seen real tragedy: people tormented, driven to emotional breakdown and, in some cases, to suicide while fellow crusaders stood by, unfeeling and uncaring. That was our first glimpse of what we've come to call Holy Terror, and we have been observing it in abundance ever since.

Something else happened in 1980 that went beyond the moral crusades of Christian fundamentalism. The mood of the country turned mean. In the months before the election, we found ourselves in the thick of it. Traveling through the Midwest and the Sun Belt on an extended speaking tour, we felt a rising anger and hostility in our audiences and in many of the towns we visited. Some of it seemed to be a natural response to the frustrations of the day, but much of that anger seemed to be engineered and fully orchestrated: The tone, the slogans, the priority of issues and the targets were virtually identical from place to place. Across a dozen states, we heard people uncork and fume at their elected leaders in set ways that seemed wildly out of proportion to political reality. And when we sat down to talk with them, we found them unable to account for their rage. Instead, very often, they hurled strings of epithets and all the bitter labels that had been slapped on so many politicians that year, catch phrases such as antilife, anti-God, antifamily and secular humanist.

Soon, the pieces of a larger picture fell into place. On November fourth, the American political landscape heaved as if in convulsion. In Washington, heads rolled. Most of the veteran legislators who had been targets of so much hostility and derision landed on the Capitol steps in a heap. Before the echoes had died out from the triumphant fundamentalist right's orgy of chest pounding, its leaders had wheeled out a new rack of targets for the next election and a laundry list of legislation they wanted passed in compliance with their self-proclaimed "mandate for change."

We were determined to find out more. So, early in 1981, we hit the road again, our intention this time not to talk but to listen, to pursue the flood of personal leads and cries for help that had come to us. We wanted to explore the web of interconnection among fundamentalist religious and political forces and to examine the range of tactics and technology that we believed had been used to reshape people's values, beliefs and opinions--and to move them to act and vote in designated ways.

For five months, we traveled off the beaten path, sweeping south and west on a route that took us from Massachusetts to Florida, through Texas to Southern California, then back eastward through the heartland--covering almost 10,000 miles. Along the way, we talked with public officials and elected representatives at local, state and national levels. We met with clergy of all religions, with leaders of major social, political and charitable organizations and with experts in the social sciences and related technical fields.

Mainly, though, we talked with just plain folks: with Christians. Catholics. Jews and Americans of no particular persuasion, who happened to be farmers and businessmen, life-insurance salesmen and telephone repairmen, teachers, housewives, secretaries and students. Together, they told a chilling story of the fundamentalist right's impact to date on our Government and on our culture as a whole. Among the people most dramatically affected by this campaign are the fragile lambs we came to call ex-Christians. One of those is a woman we met named Diane.

•

Diane was one of the trusting and innocent who almost became a casualty. She didn't approach us out of an audience. She saw us on television and, soon after, called us in New York and said she wanted to talk about her experience. She said there were some important things she wanted us to know. We knew the tone of anxiety in her voice. We told her she would be among the first people we interviewed on our tour.

Several months later, we arrived in the small town in eastern Pennsylvania where she lived with her young daughter. Her house was dingy, with a front porch sinking under the weight of garden pots and children's toys. Waiting at the door, she didn't look like your typical sparkly-eyed born-again. In her mid-30s, pale, with dark hair, she greeted us softly and motioned us into her living room, an old-fashioned salon. We chatted briefly, then started recording, and for the next five hours, she told us about her eight years as a member of different evangelical, charismatic and fundamentalist churches. In her story were all the letters we had received, all the pained faces we had seen, all the rumblings we had heard--and proof that Holy Terror has spread far beyond its roots in rural, uneducated America.

"I never set out to become a Christian," she began, using the term as most born-agains do. "I was a Sixties person, but I had been totally disillusioned by that decade. I wasn't searching for anything anymore. I was married. Dan and I lived in an apartment. I had gone back to college and was finishing my last semester when I met this girl in art class. Sarah Ann. She would set up her easel next to mine and watch me paint, and we would talk. Things weren't going well for me at the time. Everything seemed to be going crazy, and sometimes I felt like I was, too.

"Then, one day, Sarah Ann turned to me and said. 'I know why you're going crazy and I know what will help you.' I asked her what and she said. 'Well, if you'd like to, kneel down right now and we'll ask the Holy Spirit to come and dwell in you, and Jesus can be your Lord and savior.' I dropped my brushes and started to laugh. I was sure she was kidding, but she wasn't.

"About a week later, she came to me and told me that there was a battle going on for my soul. She said that she was a representative of God and that I had to make a decision, because Satan was hot on my tail. This time, I thought she was crazy. I hadn't thought about religion in years. But as I kept painting, these images came up before me. I began to feel uneasy. I started to worry. She said I should make a decision before it was too late."

Diane didn't make her decision then. She tried to forget about Sarah Ann as she went on to complete her course work. Months later, however, the dark warnings and subtle promises she had been given continued to tug at her, and she decided to look up Sarah Ann.

"She sounded happy to hear from me. She said she was having a prayer meeting at her house on Friday and she asked me to come. I pretended I had forgotten, I said. 'A prayer meeting? Aren't you out of that stuff yet?' She said. 'Oh, no,' and I heard a voice in the background say. 'Don't tell her that or you'll scare her away again." I thought to myself. I'm not scared of anything. I told her I'd come. Then I hung up the phone, and suddenly I became very frightened. I was afraid something would happen to me.

"But then, a few days later, I received a letter from an old friend. Jessie. She said she had found true happiness and peace as a Christian. And several weeks before, one of my very best friends had told me that he, too, had become born again. Everyone seemed to be doing it. I decided to go to the prayer meeting."

When she arrived, the scene was bizarre.

"It was incredible, crazy," she remembered. "We all sat around singing songs, and then this woman began to talk about how miserable she was because she had been born deformed. Then she said she had gotten into a car accident, which made things worse. I really felt bad for her. I thought everybody else did, too. But then, everyone jumped up from across the room and gathered around her and put their hands on her and started praying for God to heal her body. Then they went back to their seats, saying. 'Thank you. Jesus. Thank you. Jesus.' They were all so happy. But this poor woman was still sitting there, and she was still deformed and she wasn't happy at all. She was very upset, in fact, and she told the group that they had made her even more upset when they did that, because all she wanted was a little sympathy. She said she didn't want people praying for her and nothing happening. It was embarrassing. Then they said that if she had no faith, she wouldn't be healed, and that put even more stress on her."

The prayer meeting was hardly persuasive, but it drew Diane closer to Sarah Ann and the group. On an intellectual level, she rejected everything she was hearing. Emotionally, however, it was a different story.

"When I left that prayer meeting. I still believed it was a bunch of nothing, but Dan went, too, and it made him angry. He started arguing with some of the men there. On the way home, he saw that I had been affected. He said, 'You really do believe it. You're going to become one. You're going to destroy our marriage."'

Dan was right. Together, Sarah Ann and Jessie applied slow, steady pressure to Diane.

"They started coming over to my house with the Bible." she said. "They would read to me. They started taking me to Bible studies at the Gospel temple. It was new and fresh. Their friendship seemed so open and hopeful. They read from the Gospel of John and talked about the true light that came to shine through the darkness and lighten every man on the face of the earth. The imagery began to affect me. I would get an emotional and physical response. Sometimes, when I would read some of the Scriptures. I would begin to feel lightheaded, like I was floating up to the ceiling. I don't know why. Sarah Ann and her friends seemed that way, too, on a high: then I started reading the Bible by myself, at bedtime, and I got high! At first, it didn't last: it would wear off. But soon my life became like that all the time.

"It was a subtle process. I read the Bible intensely for three weeks and decided that it was true. At that point. I made a decision to follow the Bible, but I didn't want to accept this man Jesus into my heart. That whole idea didn't make any sense to me. but Sarah Ann and Jessie kept telling me that it wouldn't work otherwise, that I had to accept Jesus into my heart. But I was afraid. I felt like something would happen, that I would become somebody else."

Sarah Ann and Jessie wouldn't let Diane become born again in her own way. They doubled their efforts, showering her with attention and affection. Then they pulled the string.

"They tried to make me feel ashamed. They said. 'Look at your life! You ran your own life and look where it got you. Now here's your chance. Jesus can take your life and make something out of it.' If I weren't willing to trust Jesus. Sarah Ann said. I would be lost. Then she stopped talking to me. She said she was mad at me because I was resisting. That upset me. I decided not to see them or go to their churches anymore."

But as Diane's anger faded, she began to feel rejected and alone. "That same night, this great emptiness came over me. Suddenly, it didn't make me feel good just to be myself and go my own way. Dan wasn't speaking to me at that point: I couldn't talk to him about it. So I called Sarah Ann to apologize and she invited me over to spend the night. And as I was lying in bed. I said. 'All right, now. I'm going to do this.' I just said. 'Jesus, come into my heart,' and I fell asleep. When I woke up the next morning. I felt like I had gotten rid of my lonely self, as if I were no longer just me, but now Jesus was inside of me, too, and he was going to fix everything."

That was the beginning of Diane's ordeal. As with many evangelical Christians we interviewed, her famed "born-again" experience was a quiet one. The intense atmosphere of the revival tent, with its converging forces culminating in a moment of overwhelming release, seems to be fading from the evangelical scene--even among many charismatics and pentecostalists. We were surprised, on this tour, to find so many people making cool and conscious decisions for Christ. As Diane explained, however, from the onset of her new spiritual experience, her decision-making processes had been under attack. She described the process of suggestion that made her think and act in inexplicable ways.

"When something good happened. I was told to attribute it to Jesus' having become my savior." she continued, "but I had so many questions. I would ask them all the time. Always, the reply was that I was just a 'new' born-again. that I didn't know anything but that if I kept reading the Bible, I would eventually understand. Then I started having these feelings, like messages to do a certain thing, and I'd think it was God or the Holy Spirit talking to me. I was told that I would have all these supernatural experiences for the first few months and then they would go away. They said it was happening because I had started obeying the Scriptures and that these supernatural things were just for the young--the babes in Christ. They were supposed to be a special gift God gave to new born-agains."

Then, suddenly, after her six months as a "babe," the joyful supernatural world she had entered began to darken. The turn came with her growing participation in the Gospel temple.

"They started pulling a lot of new strings." she said. "They wanted us to conform. Everything that had been important to me now became satanic. I had been active in a local women's group, but they began preaching that the women's movement was satanic. They said you couldn't follow Jesus and be a women's libber. They said that rock music was satanic. which shocked me because I had always listened to rock music in the Sixties. Then they said that the Sixties were satanic, that Satan had invaded people in that decade through rock music and sex and drugs. Finally, they began to tell us that certain books were satanic and that we were to go home and look through our bookcases, and if we found any books that were not Christian, we were to burn them because they were demonic. I loved books and that made me very upset. But I was afraid that right here in my own house, Satan would infiltrate the atmosphere. I wanted to be pure, but I couldn't burn them or throw them away. So I took all the books out of my library and put them in boxes in the basement."

In place of her library, she said, was a single book.

"I started reading the Bible all the time. Early in the morning, in the afternoon. I carried the Bible everywhere I went. I went to Bible studies. They'd pick a subject and pull out all the Scriptures that pertained to it. I memorized them. It became my whole life."

Although it occupied most of her spare time. Bible study was not Diane's only activity as a born-again. "They told us we were ambassadors of Christ. We were supposed to spread the Gospel to everyone. They said the only reason we were living was to bring more people to Christ. They said the only reason God was allowing me. Diane, to live was to bring everybody that I came in contact with to the Lord. That was the idea from the beginning. When the whole world was converted, Jesus would come back in the clouds and pick up all his children and the earth would be destroyed. Everybody would get a chance, but at the end times, those who refused would be thrown into the lake of fire."

As we talked. Diane's mood grew more somber. She began chain-smoking and fidgeting. We could see she was taking us into territory that was personally painful.

"They started attacking my art," she said, her resentment rising. "They said art had to be just for Jesus. Anything that isn't just for Jesus should be destroyed. We were to have no other loves besides Jesus. So I began to give up my painting, my reading and writing, my participation in the women's movement. I gave up everything. I cut all ties to the world. I no longer associated with anyone except born-agains. Then the fear and the guilt really began to get to me. Everyone was watching everyone else, picking out things that weren't 'Christlike.' Then we had to repent. One day, I went to the pastor and told him that those teachings didn't make any sense to me. I was told to leave because I asked too many questions. He said I was obviously belligerent. So I started going to another church and the battle began all over again. I asked the pastor: 'If Christ's love is supposed to be so loving, forgiving and merciful, why are you teaching something that is totally the opposite? Show me where it says those things in the Scriptures.' He never answered me. The more I resisted, the worse it became. I felt rotten, like there was something wrong with me. Everybody else seemed so happy."

She looked at us nervously, checking to make sure that we were still on her side. Her eyes brightened as she looked back on her life in the Sixties.

"I was a peace child," she insisted, "so it was very easy for me to become a disciple of Jesus. It was the other person they wanted me to become who didn't seem like Jesus. They wanted me to be a nothing, an empty shell. They wanted me to give up everything that meant anything to me and replace it with Jesus. They said. 'Jesus is sulficient for all your needs. You don't need your friends, you don't need your children, you don't need your husband, you don't need music.' Looking back on it. I can see that everybody was miserable. We had to go to all those prayer meetings and be filled with enthusiasm and the joy of the Lord. But it didn't last. It didn't last for anybody. And I couldn't fake it. I don't know how everyone else did."

Diane got by. however, for months that turned into years, carrying on in all the prescribed ways yet struggling to retain something of her former self and her former values. Then she was asked to accept something that violated everything she believed to be true.

"They said we weren't supposed to care about anybody who wasn't born again." she said. "It just made me sick to my stomach to be that kind of person. If somebody refused to accept Jesus. we were supposed to turn against him inside. They told us nobody could do good without God and that it something bad was happening to a non-Christian. we were not supposed to help. It was good for him to suffer, they said, because suffering would bring him to Christ."

As much as she rejected those notions, Diane soon found herself believing them. And with each dose of suggestion. her own feeling for humanity receded.

"When I totally succumbed was when I accepted the idea that I was saved and special and I stopped caring about people who weren't. That was the end of the line for me." She turned reflective. "I can't tell you how it happened. It was imperceptible, a gradual thing. I had been an artist, a writer, a feminist: I don't know how I became just a housewife and a mother who sat here and read the Bible all day. I never listened to the radio, never watched television, never read a newspaper. I was cut off from everything. I went to Bible study and read Christain books. That was my life."

That life began to consume her, and in her mounting inner confliet, it also began to consume her marriage.

"I had a very unhappy marriage, even before I was born again, but I stayed married because it was forbidden in the Bible to get divorced. Eventually. things got so bad that neither of us could take it anymore. We went to a number of ministers and told them it was bad for us to stay married. That we were both depressed and miserable. But they said it was my fault. They said that in my role as a woman. I was to accept Dan as the head of the household and my spiritual leader. I could not conform to that role. I tried and I tried, then I started becoming depressed. Life became hopeless, and everyone was telling me it was my tault. So I read the Bible and prayed more. I went to prayer meetings. I did everything you were supposed to do. but I wasn't getting anywhere. Christains I associated with became critical of me because I wasn't joyful. God wasn't helping me. So I decided I must be a wicked, evil person."

Her downhill slide was sudden.

"I got really sick," she said. "I became emotionally ill. I couldn't get out of bed. I had to drag myself to take care of my daughter, who was two at the time. I still went to Bible studies and to prayer meetings, but except for that, I stayed in my room for eight months. No Christians came to see me. I prayed to God, but He was gone. Then I turned to myself and found out that I was gone, too! I felt like I was falling into a bottomless pit. I was terrified."

Up to that point, Diane's story seemed reminiscent of many we had heard from former cult members. But as she continued, it became apparent that we were dealing with something larger than the techniques of mind control. To us, her experience spoke of an added dimension, a frightening new form of emotional control. She was the first bornagain we spoke with who could articulate the conflict.

"You see, the things we had to give up didn't stop with just books and records," she said. "We had to give up thinking and feeling. They told us not to think or to question, because Satan used the mind to trick you. They told us not to trust our emotions, because they were deceptive. That's what happened to me. It was terrible, like looking at yourself and seeing somebody who was totally mindless. All that was inside my head were these automatic answers--'Trust in God' or 'All things work to the good for those who love God and are called according to His promises.' That one usually caught everything, but it couldn't save me from the depression I was falling into."

She took the first steps toward seeking help.

"I went to a number of Christian counselors. They said what I had already heard, that I wasn't being a good wife and mother. I started watching the 700 Club on television. Every morning, I would call the number on the screen and tell them what I was going through, and they would pray for me over the phone. When they got down on their knees to pray, I got down on my knees to pray. When they said, 'Put your hands on the television,' I put my hands on the television. I sent them money. Nothing helped. Then I met some people from a Church of the Living Word and they decided that I must have demons. They put me through an exorcism. Five people stood in front of me and yelled and screamed at the demons for three hours. They were shouting things like, 'Come out of her! Let her go! Free her! Release her, you foul demons!' I just sat there. They made me repent out loud every sin I'd ever committed in my life. I felt as if my whole self were being raped."

Softly, she described the events that followed, stopping frequently for reassurance. "The center of my being was empty, black and dark. So I signed myself into a psychiatric hospital. I told them I didn't know what was wrong with me. I was afraid to talk to them because they weren't born-again Christians. They tried to help me, but I couldn't listen. Sarah Ann called me up and told me that the whole hospital was full of demons, but I stayed for two and a half months, hoping that maybe I could find some answers. They offered me drugs, but I wouldn't take them. I went to group sessions. I saw eight different psychiatrists there and three more at another institution, but when I found out they didn't believe in Jesus, I couldn't listen to them. One doctor told me I was manic-depressive. Another said I was schizophrenic. It was all a waste of time and money. I decided I might as well go home.

"So I just came back here to die," she said. "I was sure that it would happen soon--that I would either kill myself or simply die of pain. I sent my daughter to a day-care camp for the summer. I didn't see anybody. Dan would come home and give me dinner, but we never talked."

She talked to no one, but soon someone started talking to her: a hallucination of sorts, as she described it; a voice from inside.

"I was lying in bed one day, all doubled up in pain, and I heard this little voice crying for help. At first, I thought it was Satan, so I didn't pay any attention to it. Then, the next day. I heard it again, this tiny little voice, very faint and weak. Then--I don't know why--I just said, 'I'll help you. I don't have much to offer, but in the time I have left, I'll do as much as I possibly can.' And suddenly, I began to think of things that would make me happy."

It was the right move.

"I thought of music," she went on, brightening now. "I thought about fun things I used to do. Then I started reading and writing again. I bought a journal and wrote in it every day. I went out and looked up old friends I hadn't seen in years. I started doing all the things that had been forbidden."

But it was easier said than done. For the next few months, Diane found it almost impossible to make a smooth reentry. "The world was totally ruined to me. My Christian friends rejected me, and I was afraid to get close to people who weren't born again. After eight years, I tried to read a newspaper, but everything seemed to point to Satan and the coming destruction of the world. When I tried to think, I would get a pain in my head. Things weren't connecting. I remembered their teaching: 'The mind is the stage of Satan.' I kept looking for some little thing that might poke a hole in everything I had been taught."

That crack came from a most unexpected source. "Four months later, I was dusting out my bookcase and I came across an old dictionary with a copy of the Declaration of Independence in the back," she said. "I read it: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' I looked at that and I thought, That's really curious! Being a Christian, you don't have any rights to your life. You certainly don't have any liberty. And as far as the pursuit of happiness--forget it! Then I said to myself, 'Gee. this Declaration of Independence seems so much more Christian than all the churches I've been going to.' Suddenly, it dawned on me. I said, 'My God! Our Government is more Christian, more loving, more forgiving, more free than God's government."'

And she continued with her dusting. Those months had been the hardest yet, emotionally wrenching. Cut loose from her born-again orbit, estranged from her husband and her daughter and without any real guidance, she floated in and out of the twilight between her born-again self and the old self she was struggling to reclaim. As it turned out, Diane's personal encounter with Jesus was coming to an end just as America's national encounter was beginning. In the spring of 1980, things came together for her.

"When I heard about the 'Washington for Jesus' march, something clicked inside my head," she told us. "I remembered all the things they had been teaching us over the years and I thought. They're marching on Washington. They're really going to do it. They're going to change democracy. Of course, they didn't call it political. They said it was all spiritual. But I remembered the seminars we were instructed to attend, led by fundamentalist teachers who traveled around the country. They gave us these booklets about 'spiritual dangers' that had questions and answers about democracy. They never actually came out and said that democracy was wrong. But they said that a pluralistic society was not acceptable to God. They said that freedom of religion was only an illusion and that democracy could work only if Christians had the leadership positions."

Word of the march on Washington seemed to fire some long-dormant impulse in her. With each step, another piece of her missing self seemed to fall into place.

"When I saw that they were going to try to take over the country, I knew that it was possible for them to do it. After all, if they had me, a radical from the Sixties, believing all that stuff, they could get anyone! So I grabbed my tape recorder and took a train to Washington. I was afraid--worried about the power they might still have over me. I didn't know if I was strong enough yet, but I had to confront them."

And so, on April 29, 1980, along with 200,000 other evangelicals, Diane marched on Washington: "It was exactly as I had expected. The followers had no idea that the leaders were directing them down a whole new path, a political one. They began to reinterpret all the old spiritual enemies and make them flesh-and-blood enemies. Satan and evil became legalized abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment and the Federal Government. But the people didn't know what was happening. They were like sheep being led, totally oblivious. They were just out of it--like I had been. I spoke to dozens of people and asked every one of them, 'Do you think this is political?' And in the face of all the speeches and all the literature and the very fact that it was on the Mall in Washington, every single one of them denied that it was political! They all told me, 'If this were political, I wouldn't be here.' That's when I realized that the leaders could really do it!"

Diane spent a long, unnerving day talking with born-agains at the rally. "I talked to people from California, from Illinois, from Georgia and from Virginia," she said, exasperated. "I tried to reason with them. I said, 'If this isn't political, why did you come to Washington?' They couldn't answer me. They replied with Scripture.

"The next morning, when I listened to my tapes, I cried all the way through. I just felt, all those people, they're really good people. I talked with a lot of them; most had only recently become born-agains. They sounded so happy. They were so open. They really did love Jesus. I couldn't help thinking about how they would change, how everything was going to die for them, how they were being prepared for something about which they had no idea. That broke me up. I wanted to shake them and say, 'Listen, this is what happened to me! I was a born-again!' But they couldn't hear. They couldn't hear a word I was saying."

We asked Diane what she would say if they could hear her now. She thought for a minute.

"I would say"--she paused--"don't give up your mind. When you make that decision to accept Jesus into your heart, you give up your life. You think you're giving it up to Jesus, but in truth, you're giving it up to something else, to your local pastor or church leaders. I helped myself, but I wouldn't want anybody to go through that. And there are things I haven't begun to deal with yet--big things, like Satan, like the future."

We asked if she still believed the end-time prophecies she had studied. She nodded. "Sometimes, I still feel that the earth is going to be destroyed, that the whole thing will come to an end. Only now I believe that if that does happen, the born-agains are going to bring it about themselves. They'll create the circumstances where we have Armageddon. It will be a self-fulfilling prophecy."

It was late. At our request, Diane played some of her tapes from the Washington march. We heard the din of the crowd, the singing, the clapping, the booming speeches. At first, it sounded like one of the great civil rights marches or antiwar rallies of the Sixties. Upon closer examination, however, we could hear a new and throbbing undertone: "This nation was founded on God. . . . The Lord has called us here today with his Word and prophecy that we might call this nation back to repentance. We've come to Washington in love, but we've come with the message of Almighty God. This nation is going down. The whole nation is going to be destroyed."

"Recently, we've met people whose faith has filled them with contempt for their fellow man. . . ."