Deadly Vows Read online

  “Everywhere I walked, it was like the Red Sea parting,” he said. “Everyone just got completely out of my way, so even though there were these enormous crowds, I never had any trouble walking anywhere—except for Sikhs. Everyone gets out of their way, including Americans.”

  After the trip, Sean had a new purpose in life. He was reinvigorated. Everything was about India, the huge crowds, reports of miracles, the heat, the food, the culture—everything. He spoke at great length about how the caste system, which was supposed to have been done away with in India, was still alive yet underground.

  Castes were essentially immutable social strata. If you were born upper class, you were always upper class. Brahmins always remained Brahmins, no matter what course their lives took. Untouchables, who were too low on the social ladder to belong even to the lowest caste, could never ascend above their classlessness. Most Indians, Sean said, could tell what caste other Indians were from simply by hearing their names. Even though castes were supposed to no longer exist, they were still in place in the minds of the people, he said, which infuriated many higher caste members, because people who had become Christians would abandon their Hindu names and take on new, Christian names, which essentially obscured their caste as well as their Hindu past.

  “For example,” he said, “I know a guy who took on the name Abraham when he became a Christian, and now all the high-caste Indians I know who are also Christians will still give him the cold shoulder because they can’t tell what caste he’s from.”

  More importantly, however, he said, was that Indians who converted to Christianity had to be thoroughly vetted to make sure they weren’t just accepting Jesus as one of the gods they worshiped. Because Hinduism is a religion of multiple gods, it was somewhat difficult to explain that the Christian god wanted to be recognized as the only god.

  “They have so many gods,” Sean told me, shaking his head. “I was in the street in Calcutta and this guy came up to me and offered to sell me a god for what amounted to like sixty cents. So I went, ‘don’t you mean you want to sell me that idol?’ And he said, ‘no, this is a god, not an idol.’ They have so many gods that they can sell you one for sixty cents.”

  Despite the obvious cultural differences, India firmly implanted itself in Sean’s mind, and it did so as more than just a mission field.

  “We should move there,” he told me in his signature intimate way, leaning in and speaking quietly. “You can live like a king there on two hundred dollars a month. It’s so backward over there. There were people with chickens on the plane.”

  He was more serious than it might have seemed at first about living in India. He began to research houses on the coast of the Indian Ocean, where Americans with support from churches in the United States could live in high style more cheaply than they could in spartan accommodations in the States.

  “You could seriously get people to donate like five hundred dollars a month, and you could live in a huge house near the beach and still have enough money left over to hire servants,” he said. “They’ll work for five dollars a month.”

  He began seasoning all his food with Tabasco sauce to acclimate himself to India’s more spicy palate, both for upcoming mission trips and a possible future move to the country. Once, when we were at a restaurant for breakfast, he was liberally dousing his eggs with hot sauce and I must have made a face.

  “What?” he said, smiling. “You don’t like hot food?”

  “I do,” I replied. “I just don’t have anything to prove.”

  He laughed and acted like he was about to fling an egg at me.

  For Sean, India was transformational. It even affected his speech. When he would have a conversation with an Indian national, he would speak with a very slight Indian accent. In his mind—and on his business cards—Sean became a “missionary evangelist,” a preacher who travels between churches, particularly overseas, to minister to “the lost” who have never heard the name of Jesus. It seems strange to Americans, who live in a country where it’s nearly impossible to reach adulthood without having multiple conversations daily peppered with Jesus and the Christian God, but in India, the world’s second-most-populous nation, there are villages where residents still, in the twenty-first century, have never seen a Westerner.

  To fundamentalist Christians, such a thing is one of the worst tragedies imaginable. Because the Bible states that there is “no other name under heaven whereby a man might be saved” than that of Jesus, those who take Jesus’s command to “go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature” literally believe it is their responsibility to bring the name and teachings of Jesus to the “unchurched” in those obscure and out-of-the-way places. In the most extreme of fundamentalist religions, the inhabitants of such remote places are doomed to hell by mankind’s original sin, and if someone doesn’t reach them with the message of Jesus they will roast for eternity because some missionary failed to put in enough effort to get to them.

  In their minds, it is a tragedy almost beyond imagining: people perishing in flames for time without boundaries because Christians were too lazy or complacent to hand them the only lifeline that could rescue them from their otherwise-certain fate. It’s a doctrine that makes raising money frightfully easy by simply playing on the emotions evoked by that mental picture. But for Sean, it was more than a mental picture or a good way to wrest cash from the wallets of complacent Christians in America. In his mind, the promise that the unchurched would burn in hell for eternity if someone didn’t reach them wasn’t metaphor; it was reality. With such a burden pressing on him, he invoked another scripture:

  “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.” (Luke 12:48)

  Sean knew that he was the target audience of that scripture. Though he never mentioned his mental superiority, he was keenly aware that he was smarter than the average person. Similarly, though he never compared himself to other preachers openly, he knew he was far better than the average preacher. It wasn’t, in his mind, pride to acknowledge such talents; after all, they were gifts from God but gifts with a purpose. Much had been given to him but he realized that meant much would be required of him to account for how he had handled the gifts with which God had entrusted him.

  That meant he took the responsibility of reaching “lost” people in India and other foreign nations very personally. This wasn’t just an academic scripture to Sean; it was God speaking directly into his soul.

  As such, his primary purpose when preaching in the United States was no longer to win converts here but to raise money for more missionary trips overseas to win converts there.

  He began developing a mailing list and publishing a monthly newsletter, which he titled “On The Battlefield,” named for one of his favorite songs, which proclaimed, “I’m on this battlefield for my Lord/I promised him that I/would serve him till I die/so I’m on this battlefield for my Lord.” That song revealed a militaristic view of religion that Sean said was exemplified in a verse spoken by Jesus: “The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force.” (Matthew 11:12) That violence was not physical, Sean maintained. Violent religion was explained as believers who vigorously pursued their faith, letting no obstacles stand in their way on the path to perfection. The devil was a vanquished foe to be trampled as a reminder of his defeat at the hands of Jesus. “The flesh,” meaning the desires of humans to do things unpleasing to God, was something to be mortified, shunned and ultimately defeated as well. The “battlefield” Sean’s song and newsletter referred to was the human mind—the central real estate in the struggle between God and Satan for souls. Sean was at constant war to win that ground for God—to “take the kingdom by force.”

  To him, that meant achieving knowledge and faith in God through prayer and personal mortification of the flesh, and it also meant in the real world actually going and personally delivering the “good news” of Jesus to people who had never h
eard of him.

  And if anyone was going to win that two-front war against Satan and his minions, anyone who knew Sean could reasonably assume it would be him. From outside appearances, he was clearly winning. He was a respected and in-demand speaker, a family man, a trusted advisor and morally beyond reproach. He was a successful missionary, counting thousands of conversions to Christianity as a result of his ministry, not to mention the dozens of other Indian nationals who were able to attend Bible schools because of his efforts.

  Sean’s newsletter, too, was designed to elicit donations to finance overseas preaching jaunts and Bible schools, particularly in India. He packed it with evangelism reports but he was always careful to also include Bible lessons.

  “It makes the newsletter valuable,” he said. “It gives the reader a reason to open it.”

  It also gave Sean one more forum in which to disseminate the overwhelming passion he had developed for his religion and his particular theology over the years. For him, his uncle Jake’s favorite song—Bob Dylan’s “Pressin’ On”—was a driving point of theology exemplified in another scripture:

  “I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:14)

  It was more than a scripture, much deeper than a song for Sean. No matter what plateau he reached in his personal Christianity or in his preaching, he was always seeking more, wanting to press further into God’s presence and will.

  “You know why none of you has ever seen the face of the father?” Sean preached in 1995. “It’s because God doesn’t want to kill you right now. Moses talked to God and said ‘I want to see you, God, I want to know more about the God I’m serving. I want to know who my boss is.’ But no man can see the face of God and live, so God hid Moses in the cleft of a rock and let him see the back, but not his face. We should all have that kind of desire to press in closer to God. We should press in to know the King of kings and Lord of lords.”

  That all-consuming desire led Sean to spend hours every day reading the Bible, researching different topics he discovered and discussing it at almost every opportunity with whoever would listen.

  Behind closed doors, however, cracks were beginning to show. I saw Sean treating his young wife more like his child than his spouse but I didn’t speak up, because I was told the woman’s role was to submit to the husband unquestioningly. It was a view with which I didn’t agree and one I could never have lived but it also wasn’t my business, I thought.

  For fundamentalist Pentecostals, there is an unwritten—but much preached-about—rule: don’t oppose God’s chosen one, often vocalized as “don’t touch God’s anointed.” “Anointed” is a religious way of labeling those being used in ministry by God, and Sean’s “anointing” was unquestionable. Not opposing “God’s anointed” is based on the idea that mere humans can never truly understand the mind of God, so when he is using someone you may not understand everything he is doing, but trust that it is part of his plan and leave them alone.

  That’s a simplistic explanation, but it is hammered into the minds of the faithful: Don’t mess with those God is using. To my shame, it’s the flimsy explanation I gave for shutting Sean’s wife down when, one day when we were driving to church together, she began telling me how Sean had cheated on her with an ex-girlfriend the first year of their marriage. I wanted to hear the details, but if anything is stressed harder in fundamentalist Pentecostalism than “don’t touch God’s anointed,” it’s that few sins are as insidious as gossip.

  I desperately wanted to know more; it was the first truly bad thing I had ever heard about my best friend and those who are imperfect love little more than to hear how the seemingly perfect are just as flawed. I instantly felt guilty, but I thought about it a lot, creating the spiritual dissonance that keeps so many returning faithfully to church to seek absolution: the guilt over wanting to do forbidden things is just as powerful as that of actually doing them.

  “I don’t want to know,” I told Sean’s wife, trying to avoid seeing the look of isolation that immediately poured into her face. “That’s between you and Sean.”

  I still feel guilty about it. She was reaching out to one of the only people she could—Sean generally didn’t want her being alone with other men—and I closed off that door for her because of religious mumbo-jumbo that taught me to put the religion before the people it was supposedly serving. It would take me another decade to realize religion is useless if it keeps you from helping those who reach out.

  Infidelity wasn’t the only problem that began to peek out through the cracks. Sean’s sixteen-year-old sister-in-law lived with Sean and his wife for a while in the spare bedroom of a condominium on Heatherfield Lane in Norman. Sean’s dad had bought it for them while Sean attended college and worked on entering the job market. Years later, when I told the younger sister that Sean had said he would have chosen her instead of her older sister if she had been older at the time, she laughed and shivered and then she said, “Eww.”

  “He’s so creepy,” she said, shaking her head. “When I lived with them, he snuck into my bedroom one night and crawled into bed with me. I was just wearing a nightgown and I woke up when he put his hand on my breast. I freaked out and he jumped up and left.”

  Later, she said, he had apologized, saying he had mistakenly gone into the wrong room half-asleep. Just wanting the conversation to be over, she hadn’t pushed it any further, despite the fact that the two rooms and their furnishings were so different that it would be all but impossible to make such a mistake, even “half-asleep.”

  But other women weren’t the only problems that were beginning to surface in Sean’s relationship. Many times, I arrived at Sean’s house in the morning so I could accompany Sean to prayer at the church. During those early morning times, I heard Sean browbeat his wife so often that one time I felt the need to mention it to her.

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” I told her. “I don’t want to be here for that any more than you want him to do it in front of me. If you want, I’ll say something to him about it.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “Don’t do that,” she said, looking horrified. “That would only make it worse. I’m okay. I can handle it.”

  Sean was constantly criticizing her—in private—about the smallest things. She was naturally thin like her mother and sister and remained thin throughout her marriage to Sean, but that didn’t stop him from riding her about every half ounce he perceived her to be overweight.

  When she was pregnant with their son, Sean’s wife once protested that she was eating for two.

  “Yeah,” Sean had said, then held his hand up, forefinger and thumb about a quarter of an inch apart. “But one of you is only that big.”

  Sean often talked about how women used bearing children as an excuse for being fat.

  “My aunt says she’s having trouble getting rid of the baby fat,” he told me once. “But the baby is four years old. That’s not baby fat; it’s just fat.”

  It wasn’t all bad, though. Sean and his wife often joked with each other. Once, when the three of us were driving to church together, his wife, who was driving, saw a full trash bag in the road and panicked when she mistook it for a human body. Once we all realized that it was just a trash bag, we laughed about it and moved on to another subject. It must have been trash day, because ten minutes later, out of the blue, Sean pointed to a house beside the road and shrieked, “Oh, wow, there are bodies just lined up by the curb at that house!” Sean’s wife laughed and punched him in the arm.

  It typically wasn’t so lighthearted. Sean’s wife usually got into trouble if she questioned or contradicted him in front of other people.

  Writing it down years later, it seems obvious to me that I should have said something about it, but at the time, the admonition to not oppose God’s anointed was all-encompassing, and though I saw a side to Sean that few others got to see, including his hair-trigger temper, I said nothing, because I believed he was God’s anointed.

/>   The only time I did say something, Sean realized he had pushed too far even for me. He was talking about “disciplining” his wife and mentioned that he had spanked her. And not in the fun, sexy way.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” I said. “She’s your wife, not your child!”

  He quickly changed his story, attempting to imply that he had been kidding about spanking her, but it was clear he had been serious.

  The cracks in his armor were getting wider.

  Chapter 6

  “COME TO SAN DIEGO”

  We languished for another year at MetroChurch in Oklahoma City before I decided to move to Dallas to take a job as the editor of a weekly newspaper. I was twenty-two; Sean was twenty-three. We didn’t lose touch, however. It was 1991 and though the Internet existed few knew about it, so we kept in contact through letters and phone calls.

  Sean was working at a quarter horse magazine and preaching to raise money for his trips to India. I had begun attending a raw, black Pentecostal church in a dilapidated building where it seemed that you could always smell the plumbing. Sean was jealous; he had always wanted to be a member of an all-black congregation (all black except for him, of course) but had never seemed to have been able to find one that suited him. The one I was attending, These Are They World Outreach in Ferris, Texas, was about as close to a black version of Jake’s church as I had ever seen. The pastor was an amazing singer who should have been making millions of dollars with his voice, but instead was preaching at a small church, barely making ends meet. The congregation members started calling me “little Jimmy Swaggart” after they heard me preach and Sean made it a point to visit the church a time or two—and even preached there once.

  Black churches and white churches of the fundamentalist Pentecostal tradition embrace different kinds of music. Many black churches feature call-and-response singing and, in just about every service, someone “gets the Holy Ghost” and starts dancing uncontrollably, screaming praises to God the entire time. Congregation members, who are used to the phenomenon, dutifully form a circle around the affected congregant, joining hands to form a human bumper table, preventing the enraptured person from hurting themselves or someone else while they’re bouncing around in the spirit. After the person calms down, the members of the “bumper table” wordlessly slip back to their own seats, never missing a beat of the song that’s playing at the time.