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THE PART OF YOU THAT’S YOU FOREVER

WHEN I BEGAN AT THOMAS ROAD IN THE FALL OF 2005, I WAS more worried about telegraphing a plausibly conservative image than I was about the scruples of telegraphing at all. It wasn’t that I had zero misgivings about going undercover—I did meditate on the wrongness of lying and the string of betrayals my project would likely leave behind—it was that I sort of managed to balance the whole messy moral equation on an unsteady ball bearing of cliché: You have to break some eggs to make an omelette. The collateral damage of going undercover, I thought, was mitigated by the possibility that the enterprise would open channels of understanding writ large between Evangelicals and the rest of us. I saw myself as an armchair anthropologist, mapping the evangelical culture; as reality TV troublemakers put it, I hadn’t come to make friends.

I defended this blithe attitude vigorously to myself, and it hardened into the carapace that allowed me to arrive in Lynchburg with confidence. I never expected to outgrow it.

INITIALLY, IT DIDN’T OCCUR to me that to become a member of Thomas Road I could just start showing up at church on Sunday, get talking to people and listen to the sermons. I didn’t know that no one needed to invite me and I didn’t have to be a Christian. In fact, this is the way many people eventually become Christians: you go and you go and you go and then one day a new panel in your brain illuminates, lighting up the once-inscrutable Gospel message, making it gleam with instant, permanent truth. I had no idea that this is part of the purpose of Sunday morning: win the lost.

I thought I had to be the subject of some kind of targeted evangelism effort to plausibly appear at church. So after doing a little research on the Thomas Road Baptist Church website, I decided to attend an evangelism event called Scaremare. It was several steps short of full-fledged church attendance, and here, I figured, I could force the epiphany that would lead me to Sunday ser vices.

Scaremare is a "hell house," a haunted house run by Christians capitalizing on Halloween’s spook appeal to draw in secular audiences, terrorize them with slasher scenes and then offer them the opportunity to repent and get saved. There are other, more notorious Christian hell houses, designed to erase the visitor’s perceived line between horror and hell, between fear and godlessness. These hell houses stage actual sin and damnation—dramatizing botched abortions using meat from butcher shops. Hell itself is often dramatized, evoked by foul odors, a heated room, and an encore performance by sinners now suffering under the cloven hooves of demons. One of the most prominent hell houses is run by Bloomfield, Colorado, pastor Keenan Roberts, who justifies the extremity this way: "Sometimes you have got to shake ’em to wake ’em."

Scaremare is the original hell house, started at Liberty University in 1972. Though it too is intended to "shake ’em awake," the enormity of its popularity in central Virginia is due to the fact that it can be enjoyed on a more basic level: the simple plea sure of being scared witless. The house opens at dusk for six nights in October, and Liberty reports around 20,000 visitors pass through each year.

I had read that in past years Liberty had staged Scaremare at horror-friendly locations like abandoned orphanages and hospitals. This year Scaremare was being held in a boarded-up brick building at the wooded edge of a soccer field. It was rumored to have been some kind of spooky abandoned tobacco storage house where someone may or may not have died at some point.

My visit to Scaremare was my second trip ever to Lynchburg. I was living two hours away, in Richmond, but before that I had lived an hour to the north in Charlottesville for three years as a graduate student and teacher. For most of that time all I knew of Lynchburg was what I had heard: it was a place with good thrift stores and lots of Jesus people. I had the opportunity to see for myself in November 2004, during the run-up to the presidential election, when I signed on to canvass for John Kerry in Lynchburg. On that trip I learned there was a dilapidated corner of town where demented-looking mutts prowled the streets uncollared and eviction notices stickered doors and windows. Almost everyone I met was going for Kerry.

This second trip was to be very different. To prepare to meet the Jesus people, I felt I had to forgo my usual tight jeans and T-shirt-with-the-neck-slashed-out and dress like somebody else. I put on boot-cut jeans and pearl earrings, a bulky sweater and a khaki jacket. I told myself I would fake it if I must, but that I would try very hard to be open to changing my life, believe the Gospel message, to be struck by the truth that Jesus died for my sins. A Charlottesville friend marveled that this was like "forcing yourself to go insane," which should have clued me in to the impossibility of plotting to believe in something I distinctly did not. But by showing up in a sort of costume—stuffing another layer of distance between myself and Christians—I was preventing the likelihood of a real awakening. I was eavesdropping, not listening.

THE NIGHT I WENT the line for Scaremare was a hardship line, the kind people wait in for something they can’t live without—three and four abreast, leading away from the house under a series of canopies and through switchbacks up a hill, and then all around the soccer field. I got there at 11 p.m. and was one of the last to enter—a police officer closed the entrance gate shortly after I passed through.

A small movie screen stood in one corner of the soccer field to distract the crowd from the long wait. They were showing M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, to set a spooky mood, I guess. The movie was about a community of settlers living in a clearing, surrounded by a forest infested with dangerous beasts. The perimeter of their settlement is complexly booby-trapped so that any intruders will be instantly discovered. The settlers’ peasant rags and stilted diction suggest that the movie is set sometime in the eighteenth century. But at the film’s end, we find out that these pioneers are actually plain old late-twentieth-century Americans, so alienated by the lawlessness and vulgarity of modern life that they decide to wind back the clock, exiling themselves on a wild slab of private property, reinventing life without trade, without technology, and—most curious—without people of color.

I thought the movie was a pretty nifty metaphor for the self-segregation of evangelical Christians. I had read a theory that the modern evangelical mega church was meant to serve as an alternative to traditional secular communities, and that the desire for such an alternative had its genesis in the legacy of the Scopes trial, which opened up a chasm between creationists and evolutionists. After Scopes, Christians began to perceive they were being ridiculed as Philistines; add to that shame confrontation with a culture increasingly permissive of the Seven Deadlies, the theory went, and it was easy to see why Evangelicals found it necessary to build higher walls.

As I fell in line behind three sweatshirted Liberty boys, the leading lady in The Village—on a mission through the woods to get medicine for her fiancé—was shoving a beast into a ditch.

"See, that’s why I love this movie," one of the boys ahead of me in line said. "She’s so dedicated. She’s doing all this for her dude."

His friend, features shadowed under a white Liberty cap, noticed me smiling at this observation and asked if I was a Liberty student. I told him no, that I had gone to UVA for graduate school but now lived in Richmond.

"We killed your guys’ golf team last week," said the first boy.

These boys weren’t local either—they had come to Liberty from New Jersey, South Carolina, and West Virginia. To night was the university’s night at Scaremare, they said, so I should go through with them for a discount. I was surprised: first that there were any Liberty students from the Northeast, more so that these guys—who exuded a warm, boozy odor, smoked cigarettes, and suggested I falsely present myself as one of them—were evangelical Christians.

They asked why I had come alone, so I told them a friend in Charlottesville had recommended Scaremare but didn’t feel like going again. This was half true: my friend had told me about Scaremare but she had never attended and I didn’t invite her along for fear she’d accidentally give me away.

"That’s so awesome," the boy in the cap said. He and his friends were nodding and grinning at me intently, seemingly transfixed by my dull answer. I turned my back to watch the end of The Village. I wasn’t nervous they were going to whip out their Bibles—I thought I was prepared for that. It was more that I was suddenly pierced with the fear that one of them was going to ask me out.

The line moved forward almost imperceptibly. One of the boys ran across the soccer field and down the hill to buy kettle corn from a food trailer. People waiting formed circles, wrapped their arms around each other, and jumped up and down for warmth. In the distance, a chainsaw rumbled every few minutes from the vicinity of the boarded-up brick building, and a glowing white tent periodically released figures into the night.

After The Village’s final credits rolled, a short film made by Liberty students played. It opened on a blond college kid relaxing at his desk, chatting on the phone. "It’s going to be a sweet party, dude," he says into the receiver.

When the kid gets off the phone and stands up to leave for the sweet party, there is a knock at the door. He opens it to find a boy in a collared blue shirt and khakis, a soft smile curving below his dewy cheeks.

"Hey, Jesus, come on in," the kid says.

Jesus enters without saying a word.

The kid tries to urge Jesus over to the TV—"You want to play a video game?" But Jesus just stands there, looking at him.

The kid sits Jesus down on the couch and offers him a Bible as I might offer a beer, saying he’ll be back later, at one or two in the morning. It seems as if they have been through this routine before.

As the kid opens the door to leave, Jesus rises from the couch and moves toward him, still silent. The kid slams the door. "I don’t want you following me everywhere I go," he says, approaching Jesus. "I don’t want you in every part of my life. You have to stay here." As he speaks, he backs Jesus against a wall. "Stay here!" The kid lifts Jesus’ arms and begins to slowly drive imaginary nails into his hands with an imaginary hammer. "Stay here!" When he finishes crucifying Jesus on the wall of his dorm, he stalks off to his party. Jesus’ head lolls on his chest. The end.

Poor Jesus. Perhaps, I thought, using his power to see into the future, Jesus knew that the boy was going to get into a fatal car accident and wanted to protect him. Perhaps he just wanted to be invited to the party, too? In any event, he seemed to have the boy’s best interests in mind, which made him come across in this representation as a kind of unappreciated dad. In that way, this film seemed aimed at those who already had a relationship with Jesus—someone has to be in your life before you can undervalue him. The boy from the film knew Jesus well enough to express no surprise at finding him in the hallway outside his dorm room.

A family that had negotiated their way through the closed entrance gate noisily got in line behind me. Less wary now with other people nearby, I tried to strike up a conversation again with the Liberty boys. The one in the white cap—the rest, at this point, no longer seemed interested in talking to me—said he’d just transferred to Liberty from the Citadel. I asked if he had wanted to be in the military.

"No," he said. "The Citadel is a really good school. I didn’t want to go to a party school." I nodded, and suddenly realized that I hadn’t smelled booze on them at all. It was simply cologne.

The boy—Randall—pointed out that I was very tall but somehow still attractive, and he suggested we exchange information before leaving so that he could take me to his favorite steak house in Richmond. I told him I had a boyfriend. Randall nodded and asked me where my boyfriend was. I said that he was a musician and was working in the studio and couldn’t come. "If you were my girlfriend," he said, "I wouldn’t let you wait by yourself in line all night."

Then he turned around and didn’t speak for a long time. Echoes of his words passed through me like sonar waves; I felt warmed and impressed by his chivalry.

The line went on and on. A cop came by and told us some people had waited for six hours that day. Up ahead, a pizza trailer collapsed its awning and drove away. The teenage girls behind me took cell phone pictures of each other for something to do. Finally, Randall asked me if I’d ever been to one of these before.

"No," I said.

He said, "At the end they try to take you in a room and talk to you about the Gospel." I nodded. "You don’t need someone to talk to you about the Gospel, do you?"

I couldn’t read his tone. "I don’t know," I said, wondering if I could work up the nerve to get religious right there on the soccer field should he start witnessing.

"Well, don’t worry," Randall said. "I’m not going to do it. There are some people who feel like they have to shove it down your throat, but I’m not like that."

Randall wasn’t the arrogant jock I had assumed he would be. I liked him. And liking Randall became the windowbox for my first seeds of guilt: I hadn’t been honest with him about why I was there and yes, I probably did need someone to talk to me about the Gospel.

Off to our left was the dark brick building we were waiting to enter, the tobacco house. With its windows boarded up it was sufficiently menacing.

After we paid at the ticket window we were herded into a brightly lit army tent. At the far end of the tent, Scaremare workers periodically waved groups through a heavy black curtain. After a few minutes, a person wearing a white mask and a black jheri-curled wig appeared on a television monitor in the corner of the tent, dispensing the Scaremare rules in a voice so slow it was as if his words were glued to his tongue. "Turn off your cell phone. Don’t touch anything in Scaremare. Don’t touch anyone in Scaremare. No smoking. If you’re claustrophobic or have a heart condition, turn back now." After hours of waiting, it seemed a little late for that last slip of advice.

The Liberty boys and I were the last group of the night, passing through the curtain at 2 a.m. I wondered if I—or anyone else, for that matter—would have the energy to accept Christ at the end of the tour.

Randall held the curtain open for me. We were briefly outside again in the sting of night, stalled between the army tent and another curtain, and then we plunged through it into a corrugated steel tunnel, so pitch black I felt vertigo. Thrusting my hands in front of me, I teetered along what seemed to be planks of plywood on the floor of the tunnel. After a moment, I could hear some girls behind me, their squeals amplified by the metal walls. I thought back to the warning about claustrophobia and heart conditions and I wondered how far they were going to go to scare God into us. I mean, was I actually in danger? Would the ground drop away beneath my feet? Would I be separated from Randall, whom I suddenly felt was the only person looking out for me?

I crouched over and lurched forward, Quasimodo-style. After a minute or so of this, I emerged through another curtain into woods, where I hustled to keep up with the Liberty boys as zombies sprang from the bushes and hissed in my ear. We curved a U through the woods, the girls shrieking freely behind us, up toward the tobacco house. We passed a man maniacally swinging a chainsaw, followed a black tarp hanging along the side of the house—cringing at the roars and screams muffled by its walls—and came to the entrance to another metal tunnel. Here the floor planks were wet and canted downward so steeply I found myself wishing for cleated shoes.

Skidding along, it occurred to me that so far this haunted house was designed to deliver me into the arms of a very particular God. If at the end of our torturous little adventure I was supposed to be beaten-down, vulnerable, desperate for salvation (I was sort of feeling that way already), yearning for something to put out the fires of dread; if I was supposed to fear God’s absence more than his presence, then it was unlikely I was sliding into the wrathful fist of judgment. Instead, I would be nestling in the palm of a warmer, cuddlier God—the kind who loved me and delivered touchdowns to my home team.

The tunnel dumped us out in a flagstone courtyard in front of the tobacco house, where zombies milled about a stone fountain filled with blood. We entered the house.

The first room was a yellow-lit parlor, where lifelike mannequins in nightgowns swung from nooses along one wall, and several girls in Victorian dress screamed from their seats, their hair and faces clotted with blood. A boy in a suit churned around the room, laughing menacingly, as if delighted by their pain.

Passing another room patrolled by zombies, we entered a pitch-black hallway. The hall was so narrow that as you walked you could easily run your hands along the walls to find where it turned. Nevertheless I found myself crashing face-first into plaster. The girl behind me kept slamming into me and screaming, "Who is that?" Each time I assured her, ow, it was still me, and we’d walk awhile with her hand clutching at my shoulder.

Zombies leapt out from around corners. Sometimes the floor of the hall would tilt, leaning me into the wall. I kept sensing that something was going to come down and chop off my head. In places, the hallway narrowed so much that I had to turn sideways to pass through it. I thought of suggesting that Scaremare append a warning to its orientation video that visitors better not be fat.

Finally the hall released us into a ghoulish dentist’s office, where the patients looked like they’d eaten sloppy tomatoes. The dentist danced around, brandishing his glinting tools. In another hall, an open space where the lights flashed on as vertical coffins flew open, zombies sprang out for an instant before plunging back into the darkness. More gruesome scenes punctuated the twisting dark hallways: Dead Santa slumped over in a chair, a group of ghoulish construction workers in hardhats and flannel shirts wielding power saws as they careened around kicking over orange cones and sawhorses.

Another hallway delivered us to an operating room where patients were lying on the floor moaning with their guts spilled out, or sprawled across operating tables like blood-drenched overcoats. Two doctors in bloody smocks stomped around the room. One came so close to me that I turned away, cringing. He brought a glinting butcher knife up to my face.

"Why are you turning away?" he said. "What are you afraid of?"

I could see Randall pausing at the entrance to the next hallway, looking back to see if I needed him. I didn’t have a heart condition, but I felt one coming on.

"Why won’t you look?" the doctor screamed. Before I realized I could simply walk away, I felt he might actually touch his knife to my skin. I hurried to the next hallway without answering.

After one last strobe-lit bloody zombie scene, we came to a final, silent room, in which a boy posed as Jesus on the cross, wrists bound to the planks with wire. His feet rested on a little shelf and he was covered in drippy blood, just as the other victims of Scaremare had been. Like the Jesus in the Liberty video, his head lolled on his chest. Two women in burgundy robes knelt at his feet, weeping. The change in mood, from harrowing to solemn, was a little abrupt.

Outside at last, I felt like pulling the cold air down around me and kissing its face. Freedom!

Down a path, the three Liberty boys trudged ahead in silence, and I wondered if their subdued seriousness was a Jesus thing. I had a hard time seeing how it could have been: Jesus’ cameo was so out of the tenor of the event. For me the tour had been like apple, apple, apple, spaceship. The spaceship didn’t fit into the sequence, so my mind erased it.

We approached a glowing white tent. Two soap-star handsome teenagers in fleece jackets waited beside a rudimentary wooden cross stabbed into the ground.

"Did you all enjoy it?" one of them asked. This seemed like the wrong verb choice, but the Liberty boys answered yes, so I did, too. The teenagers in fleece herded us into one of the sectioned-off rooms in the large tent. There seemed to be no option to leave.

Inside, five or six people were already waiting, their expressions flat. Penitence, cynicism, exhaustion—what they felt wasn’t clear. We stood on a dirt floor, in the middle of which was a lumpy mound of dirt marked by a cardboard headstone with RIP written on it in black Sharpie. Everyone looked blankly at either the grave or their shoes.

Finally, the family that had been behind me arrived in the tent, and they were followed by one of the teenagers from outside. He had dark brown hair, rosy cheeks, and an easy smile. He stood at the head of the grave, clasped his hands together and asked what everyone’s favorite room was. Several people nominated the strobe-lit room just before Jesus’ room.

"A lot of people have been saying that to night," he said. "I’m going to have to commend those guys." He smiled and looked around, taking in each of our faces. There was a good cop–bad cop disjunction in being treated with such warmth moments after having a knife held to my face. I mean, I know that Scaremare was make-believe hell, but many of the performances—particularly the doctor’s—seemed powered by something real and ferocious, which was hard to reconcile with the sweetie pie boy-next-door standing before me. What had they all been so worked up about?

"Can anyone tell me what the theme of Scaremare is?" the boy asked.

We all averted our eyes. The boy waited. "Death?" someone finally said.

The boy nodded encouragingly. "That’s right: death. Because when you die, your body goes into the ground. It goes somewhere like this," he said, gesturing at the pile of dirt at his feet. "But your soul—the part of you that’s you forever—doesn’t go with your body. It ends up in one of two places: heaven or hell. And you can’t get to heaven just by being good and doing good deeds. Even if you go to church every day and you’re religious and you’re a good person, you’re not going to get into heaven."

Around the tent, people were blinking sleepily.

"You’re only going to get into heaven if you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior. Because God loves you. God loves all of us so much that he gave his only son, who died for our sins." The boy delivered this news with unnerving cheer, I thought, as if he’d chugged a few Red Bulls. "We are all sinners. We have all done things to sin against God." He lifted one hand up near his sightline and held the other near his chest. "God’s up here and we’re down here. God wants us to be with him, but we can’t because we’ve sinned and that’s brought us down here. And the wage of sin is death." He repeated this phrase several times. "The wage of sin is death."

Excerpted from In the Land of Believers by Gina Welch.
Copyright © 2009 by Gina Welch.
Published in 2009 by Metropolitan Books Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.

Introduction	p. 1
The Rabbit Hole
The Part of You That's You Forever	p. 9
Touches of Love	p. 21
Vehicles	p. 33
Sin of Omission	p. 54
The Ear of the Heart	p. 65
In the Likeness	p. 75
The Microwave Effect
The Properties	p. 87
God Whisperers	p. 91
Brother's Keepers	p. 99
Bible Believers	p. 107
Closeted and Fearful	p. 112
Emotional Thinkers	p. 120
God's Commissioners	p. 127
Cheerful Givers	p. 146
Seekers of a Silver Lining	p. 151
Managers of Grief	p. 165
Rites and Preparations	p. 187
Salt and Light
What's in Alaska?	p. 201
The Last Frontier	p. 207
Even Zacchaeus	p. 225
Spiritual Gifts	p. 240
Race with the Devil	p. 251
Soul Winning	p. 258
Curious Creatures	p. 279
Little Switzerland	p. 291
Phantom Limb	p. 301
Epilogue	p. 318
Acknowledgments	p. 329
Index	p. 331
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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In the Land of Believers : An Outsider's Extraordinary Journey into the Heart of the Evangelical Church

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