The Family Read Free Page B

depth? Just a few minutes in the morning. What they did, he said, was work and play games. During the day they raked leaves and cleaned toilets, and during the late afternoon they played sports, all of which prepared them to serve Jesus. The work taught humility, he said, and the sports taught will; both were needed in Jesus’ army.
    “Wait a minute,” I said. “Back up. What leaves? Whose toilets?”
    “Politicians,” he said. “Congressmen.”
    “You go to their houses?”
    “Sometimes,” Zeke answered. “But mostly they come to us.”
    I was trying to picture it—Trent Lott pulling up in a black Lincoln, a toilet badly in need of a scrub protruding from the trunk. But what Zeke meant was that he and his brothers raked and polished for politicians at a retreat called the Cedars, designed for their spiritual succor.
    “Really?” I said. “Like who?”
    “I can’t really say,” Zeke answered.
    “Who runs it?”
    “Nobody.”
    “Who pays?”
    “People just give money.” Then Zeke smiled. Enough questions. “You’re better off seeing it for yourself.”
    “Is there an organization?” I asked.
    “No,” he said, chuckling at my incomprehension. “Just Jesus.”
    “So how do you join?”
    “You don’t,” he said. He smiled again, such a broad grin. His teeth were as white as his sneakers. “You’re recommended.”
     
     
     
    Z EKE RECOMMENDED ME to Ivanwald, and because I was curious and had recently quit a job to write a book about American religious communities, I decided to join for a while. I had no thought of investigative reporting; rather, my interest was personal. By the time I got there, I’d lived for short spells with “Cowboy Christians” in Texas, and with “Baba lovers,” America’s most benign cultists, in South Carolina, and in Kansas with hundreds of naked pagans. I thought Ivanwald would simply be one more bead on my agnostic rosary. I thought of the transformation Ivanwald had worked on Zeke, and I imagined it as a sort of spiritual spa where angry young men smoothed out their anxieties with new-agey masculine bonding. I thought it would be silly but relaxing. I didn’t imagine that what I’d find there would lead me into the heart of American fundamentalism, that a spell among Zeke’s Believers would propel me into dusty archives and the halls of power for the next several years. I had never thought of myself as a religious seeker, but at Ivanwald I became one. Since then, I’ve been searching, not for salvation, but for the meaning behind the words, the hints of power, that I found there.
    Zeke was gone by the time I arrived. He had returned to finance, a path the brothers approved of, and to his fiancée, whom they did not—she was a graduate student and a free-spirited Scandinavian who loved to party. Jeff Connally, one of the Ivanwald house leaders who picked me up at Union Station in Washington one April evening, told me he thought Zeke might have made the wrong choice. Zeke’s fiancée did not obey God. She was, he said, a “Jezebel.” Jeff was a small, sharply handsome man with cloudy blue eyes above high cheekbones. When he said “Jezebel,” he smiled.
    Jeff had come with two other brothers: Gannon Sims, the Baylor grad, and Bengt Carlson, the other house leader, a twenty-four-year-old North Carolinian with spiky brown eyebrows. In the car, after a long silence, he said, “Well, I think you’re probably the most misunderstood Ivanwalder ever.”
    “Yeah?” I said.
    “I didn’t really know how to explain you to the guys,” Bengt went on. “So I just told him we got a new dude, he’s from New York, he’s a writer, he’s Jewish, but he wants to know Jesus. And you know what they said?”
    “No,” I answered, my fingers curling around the door handle.
    “Bring him on! ” My three new brothers laughed, and Gannon’s Volvo eased down tree-lined streets, each smaller and sleepier than the last, until we arrived at the gray colonial that was