The Power Worshippers Read online

  Tulare is host to the World Ag Expo, an annual agricultural outdoor exposition bringing together hundreds of businesses supporting the food-growing sector, from harvest machine manufacturers to agricultural colleges to producers of cattle feed supplements. In the large tents focusing on various aspects of the agricultural business—viticulture, dairy, education—guests chat with vendors at the booths, learning about new services and talking shop. Outside, families in jeans and cowboy boots walk through the dusty grid inspecting the farming equipment on display and snacking on tri-tip sandwiches and baked beans.

  The World Ag Expo in Tulare isn’t as unlikely a locale for the celebration of a politically focused ministry as one might think. From its earliest years, Drollinger’s ministry has benefited from the generous donations of agribusiness kings. But Capitol Ministries has come a long way since then. For Drollinger, the gritty fairgrounds in the red lands of California is a fitting backdrop for a triumphant homecoming.

  Over in a white VIP tent on a corner of the fairground, hundreds of guests gather to honor the success of Capitol Ministries. The crowd consists of affluent agribusiness owners and executives, local lawmakers, bankers, law enforcement people, and a few stragglers. The gender balance tips male; the invitation specified “cowboy formal,” and most guests are wearing cowboy hats or boots paired with sport jackets. A number of attendees have guns visibly holstered on their belts. I spot one man with four.

  The crowd mingles over sodas—Drollinger disapproves of alcohol—and a bountiful assortment of vegetables and cheeses, chatting about growing seasons, agricultural technologies, and the great opportunity that comes with having elected Donald Trump. Many are excited about the recent confirmation of Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch. “This generation will end abortion,” a woman is saying with a knowing look. Her companion smiles. “God is good.”

  The guests make their way to the dining area. I purchased an individual ticket for $175 and am seated at a table toward the back, which I figure is for stragglers. Nearby, a man in a plaid shirt and navy jacket is engrossed in conversation with a woman wearing a silver-and-turquoise Navajo-style bracelet. He’s letting her know that “political correctness” is what’s destroying America. She nods back at him.

  Across the room, I think I spot Steve Taylor in jeans and a sport jacket, although I can’t be sure. Taylor is a member of the board of Capitol Ministries since 2013. He is also on the board of directors of the Family Policy Alliance, the public policy arm of Focus on the Family, a well-funded Christian organization promoting socially conservative, often political viewpoints and policies. Focus on the Family was for a time merged with the Family Research Council; today, the organizations frequently work side by side on issues of mutual interest.

  Taylor’s involvement in both Capitol Ministries and the Family Policy Alliance is unsurprising, as the two entities pursue largely similar agendas in many areas. In a “ministries update” on the Capitol Ministries website, Steve Taylor said, “I have worked with candidates who have become U.S. Senators and House of Representatives members and God really impressed upon me the importance of speaking spiritual truths into their lives. It became apparent that is what Ralph [Drollinger] is doing every day.”2

  Steve Taylor is the brother of Bruce Taylor, who headed up the large produce grower Taylor Farms; they are scions of a multigenerational agribusiness conglomerate. Steve is also the former CEO of Fresh Express, which developed packaged salads in the 1980s and was acquired in 2005 by Chiquita Brands International for $855 million. Taylor and his partners from Fresh Express, including Mark Drever, started Organicgirl in 2007; the company is known to upscale shoppers for its lettuce and greens sold in sleek plastic clamshells at high-end grocery stores.3

  When a Whole Foods shopper reaches for a package of Organicgirl premium salad mix, she might be under the illusion that its contents were brought to market by a yoga mama with rainbow flags on her hydroponic greenhouse. But to anyone sitting at the table here in Tulare, these kings of the organics business are very much on board with the hard-right religion and even harder-right politics of Capitol Ministries. As the evening gets underway, Jeff Taylor, another member of the clan, who comes in late and is seated at our straggler’s table, leads a chorus of “Hallelujahs” from our corner of the tent. From time to time he claps for emphasis and fires off: “Praise the Lord!”

  Ralph Drollinger grew up in Southern California, the son of a successful and wealthy real estate magnate known for developing an area of Los Angeles near the LAX airport. Seven feet two inches tall, Drollinger began his career as a sportsman. He excelled at college basketball at UCLA, then played with an evangelistic team, Athletes in Action, before a brief stint with the Dallas Mavericks. He and his wife, Karen Rudolph Drollinger, an athlete and author, had three children. Then, as Drollinger told a writer with the German newspaper Welt Am Sonntag, Karen left him in order to take up a relationship with a woman.4

  It had to have hurt. Drollinger, who has characterized same-sex relationships as “detestable acts,” “profane actions of immorality,” and an “abomination,” is a committed and unapologetic advocate of gender hierarchy in the home and at church. “The respect of the submissive wife to her husband then, becomes a tremendous physical picture of the interrelationships existing amongst the members of the Trinity, i.e. the Son’s respect for the Father’s authority. This human modeling is essential to the woof and warp of successful cultures,” he writes. But “the forces and events of evil continually labor to expunge God’s model of marriage from the face of the earth.”5

  Although Drollinger endorses these ideas, he didn’t invent them. He appears to have absorbed them while pursuing his master of divinity degree at The Master’s Seminary in Los Angeles, which adheres to a strict Calvinist and patriarchal brand of theology. The school has been led since 1986 by John MacArthur, a hyper-conservative pastor who assumed the pastorate of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California. In a 2009 survey by LifeWay Research, the survey arm of an organization that “equips church leaders with insights and advice that will lead to greater levels of church health and effectiveness,” MacArthur won a spot on a list of most influential living Christian pastors.6

  MacArthur’s sermons and writings leave an indisputable record of his commitment to the doctrine that female subordination and “wifely submission” are ordained by God and cemented in Scripture. According to a February 19, 2012, sermon titled, “The Willful Submission of a Christian Wife,” MacArthur instructs women to “rank yourself under” husbands. Castigating women who are employed, he says, “Your task is at home. A woman’s task, a woman’s work, a woman’s employment, a woman’s calling is to be at home.” The problem, he explains, is that “working outside removes her from under her husband and puts her under other men to whom she is forced to submit.”7

  To those who worked with him, MacArthur’s condemnation of gender equality was palpable.8 Dr. Dennis M. Swanson, presently the dean of Library Services at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke and who worked in various capacities at The Master’s Seminary for twenty-four years, asserts that few women on campus held positions of consequence, and female academic visitors were distinctly unwelcome. When the acclaimed German Protestant theologian Eta Linnemann paid a rare visit to the area, Swanson said, she was compelled to meet with students off campus. Even at the library, he says, which he ran for some time, the acquisition of books by female writers was frowned upon.

  “If MacArthur found out your wife worked, he’d fire you,” says Swanson. “Or, if he liked you, he’d give you a raise so she could quit her job.”

  Drollinger, Swanson believes, took his cues from MacArthur. “Drollinger’s theology is hard-line within evangelical Christianity,” he says. “But if you read his work side by side with what’s in MacArthur’s books, you’ll see that’s where Drollinger got it from. I don’t think it’s any great secret.”

  Drollinger graduated from The Master’s Seminary with his career on an
upward trajectory. He became friendly with James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, and created and participated in a variety of athletics ministries in hopes of evangelizing sportsmen. Soon he was proselytizing with so much force, and with such extreme views, that the world of pro sports was spinning with controversy. Few Christian sports ministers can “match the sledgehammer outspokenness with which onetime AIA basketball team member Ralph Drollinger connects sports and evangelical religion to the political sphere,” observed Tom Krattenmaker in his 2009 book Onward Christian Athletes: Turning Ballparks into Pulpits and Players into Preachers.9

  In 1997, Drollinger decided to raise his sights from the playing fields to the state legislature. With his new wife, Danielle Madison, who formerly worked at Focus on the Family and ran a right-wing political action committee, he moved to Sacramento and began spreading the Word among state legislators. He founded Capitol Ministries with the tagline “Making Disciples of Christ in the Capitol.”

  “Scripture is replete with illustrations, examples and commands to underscore the importance of winning governmental authorities for Christ,” explains Drollinger. “A movement for Christ amongst governing authorities holds promise to change the direction of a whole country.”10 In quick order, Capitol Ministries secured a conference room in the governor’s suite at the Capitol to lead weekly Bible study classes for lawmakers, and sought to establish similar ministries in other states. The group was familiar enough to be known by its own abbreviation: “CapMin.”

  Drollinger’s talent for eliciting controversy was soon on display again. In 2004, Drollinger angered many in Sacramento when he denounced female lawmakers with children at home as sinners. “It is one thing for a mother to work out of her home while her children are in school,” he wrote. “It is quite another matter to have children in the home and live away in Sacramento for four days a week. Whereas the former could be in keeping with the spirit of Proverbs 31, the latter is sinful.” The controversy cost CapMin its conference room in the governor’s suite.11

  Questions about Drollinger’s involvement in the political arena continued when he published a blog post on his website, titled “A Chaplain’s Worst Nightmare,” in February 2008. Drollinger claimed that God was disgusted with many lawmakers in the state. “In the past several weeks, I have visited with a Jewish legislator, a Catholic legislator and a liberal Protestant legislator—all of whom reject the Jesus of Scripture,” he wrote.12

  More conflict followed. In 2009, the California state director of Drollinger’s organization, Frank Erb, resigned from Capitol Ministries and began working with a competing ministry, Capitol Commission, which describes itself as “Reaching Capitol Communities for Christ.” The two organizations became embroiled in a trademark dispute. Around the same time, five Capitol Ministries board members resigned. Representatives of MacArthur’s Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, which Drollinger had previously attended, announced that “it is the estimation of these men that Ralph Drollinger is not biblically qualified for spiritual leadership.”13

  Drollinger sensed early that Donald Trump would be the savior of Capitol Ministries. A passionate supporter of Trump’s presidential candidacy from the start, Drollinger claims he and Trump became “pen pals” during Trump’s 2016 campaign. Although Drollinger undoubtedly has many reasons to support Trump, a key to his thinking about the 2016 election may be best encapsulated in his views on child-rearing.

  Drollinger is an enthusiastic advocate of corporal punishment. In a Capitol Ministries Bible study guide titled “God’s Word on Spanking,” one of his study guides aimed at political leaders, Drollinger quotes Proverbs 23:13–14: “Do not hold back discipline from the child, although you strike him with the rod, he will not die. You shall strike him with the rod and rescue his soul.” In his exegesis Drollinger elaborates: “When rebellion is present, to speak without spanking is woefully inadequate.”14 Drollinger’s views on presidential authority would appear to be taken from a page of the same book. “The institution of the state” is “an avenger of wrath,” he explains in another sermon, and its “God-given responsibility” is “to moralize a fallen world through the use of force.”15 President Trump, he believes, excels in these biblical criteria for leadership.

  Trump, of course, is the man who by all accounts has the least claim of any public figure in recent memory to those virtues that are commonly identified as “Christian.” But that is, perhaps, precisely why leaders like Drollinger embrace him. While many Americans still believe that the Christian right is primarily concerned with “values,” leaders of the movement know it’s really about power. Trump’s supposedly anti-Christian attributes are in fact part of the attraction. Today’s Christian nationalists talk a good game about respecting the Constitution and America’s founders, but at bottom they prefer autocrats to democrats. Trump believes in the rule of force, not the rule of law. He is not there to uphold values but to impose the will of the tribe. He is a leader perfectly suited to the cause.

  “Good laws are informed by Biblical morality, over and above personal liberty,” as Drollinger writes. “Opposite the theory of Theocracy when it comes to lawmaking (wherein every precept and tenet of the religion is incorporated into the laws of the State) is Libertarianism,” which he disparagingly characterizes as tending “toward amorality.”16

  At the end of the day, it’s all about consolidating the power of the in-group. “Christian believers,” he writes, “will someday (soon I hope) become the consummate, perfect governing authorities!”17

  By the spring of 2018, Drollinger’s weekly White House Bible study gatherings, some reportedly taking place in the West Wing, included as many as eleven of fifteen cabinet secretaries. Alex Azar and Tom Price from the Department of Health and Human Services; Mike Pompeo, now the secretary of state; NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine; former attorney general Jeff Sessions; former secretary of labor Alexander Acosta; Education Secretary Betsy DeVos; Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson; former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt; Energy Secretary Rick Perry; and other senior officials, including Vice President Mike Pence, counted as participating members.

  With additional study groups targeting the Senate and House of Representatives, Drollinger is coming face-to-face with some of the most powerful lawmakers in the country. At a 2018 event at the Museum of the Bible as part of Ralph Reed’s Road to Majority conference, an annual gathering of activists and policymakers organized by his Faith & Freedom Coalition, Representative Barry Loudermilk of Georgia exulted, “How many of you know that we have a church service every Wednesday night right here in the Capitol building?” Conference-goers, who filled the auditorium, nodded their heads and beamed back at him. “We have dozens of Bible studies that happen throughout the week,” Loudermilk continued. “We have ministers that do nothing but walk the halls of the office buildings and drop in and pray with members.”18

  The dividends in policy have already begun to show. In 2018, Capitol Ministries Bible study group member Jeff Sessions issued guidelines for the Justice Department giving religious individuals and groups “protections to express their beliefs” when they come into conflict with government regulations. The initiative was similar in approach to the formation in 2018 of a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights, which was formerly led by CapMin member Tom Price, and whose purpose is in large part to ensure that health care providers can deny services to individuals whose sexual orientation, “lifestyle,” or other characteristics offend their religious sensibilities.

  Drollinger’s teachings appear to be touching other areas of policy. Using language straight from the Cornwall Alliance, the anti-environmentalist organization referenced in the Family Research Council’s Culture Impact Team manuals, Drollinger called environmentalism a “false religion” and asserted that certain initiatives to protect animal species and preserve natural resources “miss the clear proclamation of God in Genesis.”19 This positio
n must have been encouraging to EPA head Scott Pruitt, who told the Christian Broadcasting Network that it was “wonderful” to be able to attend and participate in CapMin’s cabinet Bible study.20 In May 2018, reflecting on his first year in office, Pruitt celebrated the rollback of twenty-two environmental regulations under his watch.

  Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has also attended CapMin Bible study, also seems to be allowing his personal religious beliefs to influence American policy. In January 2019, speaking at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, a country riven with sectarian struggle, Pompeo highlighted his own sectarian leanings, saying he had come to the region “as an evangelical Christian” and adding, “I keep a Bible open on my desk to remind me of God’s word, and the truth.”21 That March, in an unprecedented move, Pompeo held a State Department telephone conference restricted to reporters from “faith-based media only.” No transcript was provided, and the list of invitees was not disclosed.

  Drollinger is not the only evangelical pastor to target the upper reaches of government. The Family, a secretive organization that cultivates political leaders in the U.S. and around the world, has long organized prayer gatherings among the powerful. In addition, perhaps mindful of Drollinger’s successes, the politically connected pastor Jim Garlow, whom I will discuss in a subsequent chapter, founded along with his wife, Rosemary Schindler Garlow, a ministry called Well Versed that claims to hold weekly Bible study in the United Nations, Congress, and the State Department, as well as among “prime ministers, kings and other influential leaders across the globe.” The ministry hosts and sponsors “gatherings where governmental leaders can meet with people of faith as we teach them to be ‘well versed’ in biblical principles in order for them to be equipped to speak to the world’s complex cultural issues” and “lead biblically in decisions they are faced with.”22 Garlow makes regular appearances at the World Congress of Families, an annual event that brings together representatives of the “Global Conservative Movement,” including Catholic, evangelical, and Russian Orthodox leaders and an international cohort of far-right politicians and activists. In 2019, the WCF was held in Verona, Italy, which has become a flashpoint of far-right activity.