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 By Nick Carey, Reuters CHICAGO — While millions may lose their homes during the worst housing slump since the Great Depression, some devout Christians among them will do so in part because they will not give up tithing — a voluntary contribution to their churches amounting to 10% of their gross income. "I've had home owners who face foreclosure sitting in front of me saying, 'I'll do anything, anything to keep my home," said Ozell Brooklin, director of Acorn Housing in Atlanta, a nonprofit which offers foreclosure counseling. "But after we've gone through their monthly expenses and the only thing left to cut is their tithe, they say 'I guess this home is not for me' and they walk away," he said. IDEA CLUB: Is moral hazard looming in bailout? The idea of a tithe — from an Old English word meaning "a tenth" — derives from an Old Testament reference to a tax the Israelites paid from the produce of the land to support their priests, fund religious festivals and help the poor. The Barna Group, a California-based research firm, estimated in an April 2008 study that 5% of all American adults tithed in 2007. Evangelicals had the highest percentage (24%), and the study estimated that 12% of conservatives and 10% of registered Republicans tithed. Researcher George Barna said evangelical Christians are far more likely to tithe than other denominations. INTERACTIVE: How beliefs of evangelicals compare to other faiths' "As born-again Christians they believe they have been saved and that tithing is a way to express their gratitude to God," Barna said in an interview. "Evangelicals are interested in the economy, but they don't believe governments have been ordained by God to provide all the solutions." Dr. Roger Oldham, a member of the executive committee of the 16-million strong Southern Baptist Convention, the second- largest Christian grouping in the United States after the Roman Catholic Church, said tithing was a compelling personal commitment. "It's a simple fact that here, as in any Christian culture, you will find some people for whom obedience to God comes second to none," he said. "For those people, a contract with God is worth more than their home." Code of silence While nonprofits around the country say tithing is an issue in some foreclosure cases, little data exist on the phenomenon because many counselors are trained not to bring up the sensitive issue with struggling home owners. "You can suggest that maybe they can pay their tithe in kind, through volunteer work," said Bathsheba Wyatt-Draper, a counselor at nonprofit lender NHS Chicago. "But if they react badly, you have to let it go. Period." Barna said evangelicals tend to adhere to the Gospel according to Matthew, that teaches "when you do good works, do them in private." "In the case of tithing, evangelicals feel that 'this is something between me and God. I am not doing this to put myself on a pedestal and talk about the wonderful sacrifices I have made.' The whole idea is not to draw attention to yourself." Milton Sharp, a home ownership specialist at NeighborWorks, an umbrella group of 230 nonprofits, said for many borrowers tithing is "mandatory and not a discretionary item that can be cut." Debt counselors said the borrowers most likely to face a dilemma over tithing are people in lower income brackets. "Often it's the folks who can least afford it who tithe," said Regina Grant of the Atlanta Cooperative Development Corp. Linda Ingram of St Louis, Missouri-based nonprofit Beyond Housing said, "Tithing is a very sensitive subject and you have to be careful as to how you approach it." Ingram said one of her clients was a 68-year-old woman who obtained a $62,000 mortgage on behalf of her daughter. When her daughter stopped paying the mortgage this spring, the woman was stuck with payments since her name was on the loan contract. To stay current on the $500 monthly mortgage, she was faced with giving up a tithe to her local evangelical church of around $200 a month. Instead, she let the property go into foreclosure. "I made an agreement with the Lord 30 years ago and I have tithed ever since," said the woman, who declined to give her name in an interview. "Nothing could persuade me to give that up. My relationship with God comes first." Asked why she would not be named, the woman said, "I don't want people to think I'm crazy." Home owners in similar straits are just as reluctant to talk. John Tiemstra, a professor at Calvin College, a Christian college in Michigan, said that was no surprise. "There is a very prevalent attitude among conservative Christians that their personal finances are an intensely private matter," he said. "This gets in the way of what the church could do to help them when they are in trouble." READERS: How much do you give to religious groups? Will that change due to the economy? Copyright 2008 Reuters Limited. | |||||||||||||||||||||
Monday, March 28, 2011
Some Christians keep tithing even as they face foreclosure
Monday, March 21, 2011
U-Visa: Illegal Immigrants Become Legal Residents Via Crime Victimization
U-Visa: Illegal Immigrants Become Legal Residents Via Crime Victimization
By Lauren Smiley
published: March 16, 2011
Jean-Philippe Dobrin
Jean-Philippe Dobrin
Mardoqueu Silva got a U visa last year for getting robbed at gunpoint on a Geneva Pizza delivery in 1995.
Jean-Philippe Dobrin
Each day, San Francisco Inspector Tony Flores gets three to four new U visa applications from alleged victims of crime in the city.
Jean-Philippe Dobrin
Catholic Charities CYO in San Francisco advises a new batch of immigrants each week on the U visa possibility.
Jean-Philippe Dobrin
Christopher Martinez, a immigration services program director at Catholic Charities, says that the nonprofit recently had to start a U visa wait list. It has handled 800 cases.
Subject(s):
Lauren Smiley on U-Visa: Illegal immigrants become legal citizens via crime victimization
The pizza delivery guy glanced at the order for his late-night run. Trouble. In 1995, supreme pizzas were the priciest pies on the menu at Geneva Pizza, a mom-and-pop shop in the Excelsior, and this customer wanted two. Plus, the delivery was for an address near the projects in Visitacion Valley, where $30.05 wasn't pocket change.
Mardoqueu Silva was 21 then, a Brazilian student both model-handsome and choirboy-polite. Illegally overstaying his tourist visa for four years and counting, he took the jobs he could get without papers. So he headed out for the delivery that would change his life.
Silva followed his boss' instructions. Parking in the street and calling to say he'd arrived, he rolled the window down a few inches and told the twentysomething black man who approached in a 49ers jacket and white pants to pay him up front. The man stuffed bills into his hand, and Silva turned to grab the pizzas in the passenger seat.
A .45 handgun was pressed into Silva's temple. His hair stood on end.
"Give me all the motherfucking money and your wallet and get the hell out of the car."
Silva got out, his hands behind his head. He told his assailant that his wallet was in the car, and to take anything you want, just don't shoot. More thugs rushed up and searched his car, snatching his cellphone, and yes, the two pizzas. In less than a minute, it was over.
Silva sped back to the pizzeria and quit on the spot. His boss called the cops. Police officers drove him back to the block of the delivery, where they had several men lying handcuffed on the sidewalk. The police shone a light on them; Silva identified the man in the 49ers jersey, but didn't recognize the rest.
The hold-up haunted him. Silva hates to admit it, but his heart would race when a black man — any black man — sat near him on BART for years afterward. Yet life as an illegal immigrant continued. He married another undocumented Brazilian. He moved out to Tracy. He became a hairdresser, mumbling "Mmhmm" as the clients in his chair complained about illegals this, illegals that.
One day in 2009, Silva was reading the Bible when Romans 13:1 struck him like a lightning bolt: "Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities." He strode into the Oakland office of immigration attorney Robert Lewis and declared he wanted to do something most immigrants would call utterly are-you-kidding-me crazy: He wanted to turn in himself — and his wife — to immigration authorities.
Lewis was taken aback. "I've never heard that in my entire life," Silva recalls him saying. "I said, 'Let's leave it in God's hands. We'll say we are here illegally and we'll let the court decide.'"
Lewis suggested they explore their options first. He lobbed a long line of questions at Silva, including this one: Had he ever been a crime victim?
"Actually," Silva answered,"I have."
The attorney said he would see whether Silva was eligible for a U-1 visa, designed for victims of crime who'd cooperated with law enforcement. In 2009, this was a new program, and Lewis didn't know if it would work. But Silva was willing to try.
The U.S. immigration system has long offered asylum to those who face persecution abroad. But in reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act of 2000, Congress created a new visa that responded to the violence immigrants face. Domestic violence or sexual assault? Apply here. Robbery or attempted murder? Step right up.
"We have a sick sense of humor here in our office," says Fernanda Bustamante, an attorney on Lewis' team who handled Silva's case. "Like, maybe we should just go tell them to get a job as a pizza deliveryman or walk around Fruitvale with a bunch of money in their hand — of course, that's just totally kidding."
The U visa was intended to improve immigrants' unwillingness to call law enforcement. San Francisco police officers don't inquire about the immigration status of people who report crime, yet the fear persists. Mug a day laborer or beat your wife, the thinking goes —what are the victims going to do? Call 911, so they can be among the more than 300,000 people deported annually? The bad guys go unchecked, police are in the dark about entire swathes of a city, and public safety suffers. Distrust of the authorities only worsened with the recent national rollout of Secure Communities, a federal program that checks the fingerprints of local arrestees against a national database to identify illegal immigrants.
The Department of Homeland Security finally issued regulations to issue U visas in 2007, and started approving them in significant numbers in 2009. In the Bay Area, attorneys, nonprofits, ethnic media, and the applicants themselves are spreading the word that the worst thing that happens to you in the United States may turn out to be the best. To date, 18,654 crime victims, most of whom were in the country illegally, have received the special visas.
Alongside the enthusiasm comes criticism from those who wonder why people who broke the law to be here should be granted legal status for doing what most citizens would do anyway. "How many Americans are victims of violent crime and don't get squat when the trial is over?" says Richard McCain, who was tried and acquitted for domestic violence against his Mexican-born partner. "What does the illegal immigrant get? A chance to live here as an American." Some say it's unfair to those people who wait abroad for years for visas that would allow them to immigrate legally.
Defense attorneys say some applicants are defrauding the system by taking cases to court they otherwise wouldn't in the hope of getting a visa. "Getting status in the United States is such a big deal that it really can create an incentive, sometimes just to exaggerate, and sometimes to flat out fabricate," says Stephanie Wargo, a San Francisco public defender who handled a sexual assault case in which the complaining witness was applying for a U visa. "I don't know the solution, but it is a problem."
Earlier this month, SFPD Inspector Tony Flores walked among tables of California homicide inspectors in a Hilton Hotel ballroom. In a well-tailored black suit and lavender shirt with his gray hair gelled into a peak, he looked every bit the role of a charismatic salesman, selling the middle-aged male cops with beer guts and shaved heads on the idea that the U visa will buoy law enforcement in their jurisdictions.
"I'm trying to change your beliefs," Flores told them. "Some of you feel this person is in the U.S. illegally, why would I help them? Bottom line: If they're a victim in the United States, they're a victim in the United States."
While the federal government issues U visas, local law enforcement plays an indispensable role. Police officers must certify the application, confirming that the person was a victim of one of the eligible crimes or has knowledge of the crime; and "has been helpful, is being helpful, or is likely to be helpful" in the investigation or prosecution.
In San Francisco, the District Attorney's office approves U visa applications if charges are filed in court. The office has signed 290 since it started keeping track in 2008. Yet Flores signs off on cases in which the suspect was never caught or prosecuted — neither of which is required to get the visa. Last year, he certified roughly 150. These days, he receives three to four new applications a day. To keep up, he says, he often has to research them "on my own dime" after his workday investigating domestic violence.
When Flores asked the audience members for questions, they seemed skeptical. Will I get in trouble if they commit a crime after I sign off on the application? "There's no way to stop that, but we can say it's not us [giving them the visa], it's Homeland Security," he answered. What about false reports? Flores admitted that he, too, was skeptical at first. "I was like, 'I'm gonna see a bunch of people making false reports to stay in the country.' I'm not seeing that at all."
Presentation done, Flores walked out into the lobby and said, "That was a tough room."
Since local law enforcement certifies U visas completely at its discretion — there is no federal mandate — the visas have become a Rorschach test for a city's attitude toward illegal immigrants. The San Francisco Police Department abruptly stopped signing the applications in 2008, around the time the city got national blowback for its policy of shielding illegal juvenile drug dealers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. After much lobbying by local immigrants' rights advocates, then-Chief Heather Fong restarted the process, and Flores became the U visa czar. Last month, acting Chief Jeffrey Godown issued a department memo noting that all officers responding to crime scenes should tell immigrant victims that they may be eligible. (Not that everyone got the memo: "Never heard of it before," says Capt. Greg Corrales at Mission Station.)
But police in other parts of the country won't sign at all. Many are like the Solano County District Attorney's office, which usually will certify only pending cases, arguing that there's no incentive to keep victims in the U.S. if there is no trial for them to testify in. Agencies can refuse to sign for any reason. Vallejo Police Lt. Ken Weaver says he rejected a petition last month of a woman whose teenage son had slapped her after she told him to get off the computer. "I just read that and I went, 'Are you kidding me?'" he recalls. "I was like, 'That's not the spirit of what this was intended for.'"
Once the application arrives at a United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) processing center in Vermont, adjudicators evaluate it and determine whether the victim has shown he or she has suffered substantial harm, either physical or mental, from the crime. Victims can submit medical records and letters from therapists as evidence. If the application is approved, the person receives a work permit and temporary residency status for four years. After the third year, if the person can prove he or she has continued to be helpful in the criminal investigation, she can apply to become a permanent resident.
"It's the humane policy in the immigration system," says self-professed "U-vangelist" Susan Bowyer, directing attorney at the Immigration Center for Women and Children in San Francisco. "You want to have a tangible way of showing [immigrants] you can call the police without fear."
But critics say the system is too generous. "It's not necessary to say, well, since you came forward to do the right thing, that therefore you're automatically entitled to a visa to remain in the United States for the rest of your life," says Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a nonprofit that advocates halting illegal immigration. Jessica Vaughan, the director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative think tank, especially faults the fact that victims can apply for the U visa even after they've been ordered deported: "It's their last-ditch Hail Mary pass to avoid being sent home."
The visa's inclusiveness doesn't stop at deportees: Victims can get legal status for their spouses and children, even those living in another country. Victims under 21 can sponsor their parents and unmarried siblings under 18. In cases of murder or manslaughter, spouses and children can apply as "indirect victims," even if they didn't witness the crime.
Since 2009, USCIS has issued 18,654 and rejected 5,639 U visas — a 77 percent approval rate. Congress capped the number available annually at 10,000, though that does not include the 14,122 family members of victims who have also received the visas.
All in all, U visas represent a blip in the vast visa system, which churns out more than a million green cards a year. But among immigrants, word about the U visa is traveling fast.
Adolfo Lopez heard about the U visa from a friend he met on 24th Street in the Mission, who passed him the number for his caseworker at the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant. Lopez, an affable 23-year old Guatemalan, called the Berkeley-based immigrant advocacy organization that same day. Lopez says he's had a bad time since crossing into the United States six years ago. A group of teens stole his cellphone in Glen Park. While loading recyclables into his pickup truck last year — his under-the-table job since construction work got slow — a man robbed him at knifepoint. In 2006, he filed a police report after several men shot at him in the Bayview while he was sitting in his truck before beating and robbing him. In a couple of months, Lopez should learn whether he gets a U visa because of the shooting. "Good thing they didn't kill me, or I wouldn't be here to talk about it," he says on a recent morning, sitting in his truck on Newhall Street, across from the site of the crime.
Further south on Third Street, there's a yellow house with a new owner: Rosa Aguilar. In 2003, her husband, Jesus Martinez, walked into the 500 Club, the iconic Mission bar with a twinkling martini glass sign beckoning outside. According to court filings, the bartender put Martinez into a choke hold on the sidewalk until he suffocated. (The bartender later committed suicide; Martinez's mother and Aguilar won a $1 million settlement from the bar in 2006.)
About two years after the incident, a relative told Aguilar how Catholic Charities had helped him get a marriage visa. Aguilar met with caseworkers at the nonprofit, which does low-cost legal work for immigrants of all faiths, who helped her put together her application. A few years later, she received her U status. Life has changed: Aguilar was able to take out a loan to buy her house. She now earns $15 an hour as a hotel housekeeper, and tells her co-workers about the requirements for the visa every chance she gets. "I feel free. I feel safe. I feel life totally changed," she says.
Since the U visa program began, a cottage industry of Bay Area nonprofits has sprung up to process applications, charging up to $1,000 a person. Catholic Charities is one of the largest. The visas have become 50 percent of its caseload, with 800 cases to date. Each Monday, caseworkers give legal advice to a clinic of about 20 immigrants, half of whom come to find out whether they're eligible.
In one recent clinic, Francisco Gonzalez talked to the group in his rapid, Cuban-imbued Spanish. "The U visa is an excellent immigration benefit ... The U visa will forgive someone who has a previous deportation order, who has left and entered the country illegally — obstacles that in any other type of immigration case cannot be overcome." (People convicted of more violent crimes will be approved only in extraordinary circumstances.)
Despite this apparent good news, the meeting's tone was somber. Gonzalez was firm and unsentimental; he reiterated that "I'm not promising anything." He looked over the restraining orders several women pushed across the table toward him and told them they'd need to return with police reports. He identified three viable cases: a Salvadoran mechanic who'd been beaten by youngsters in the Mission; a Mexican produce deliveryman who'd been stabbed 10 years ago on Bayshore; and a teenage girl who had come with her mother, sister, and Child Protective Services caseworker.
Gonzalez told them of another problem: With 400 pending U visa cases at Catholic Charities and only three employees processing them, they'd be the first on a wait list.
The delay didn't seem to bother the deliveryman. His solemn face broke into a smile as he contemplated becoming a legal resident after 17 years: "It means everything to me." The mechanic showed a reporter how his nose is askew after it was broken in the assault, and wiggled his false front teeth to show that his real ones got knocked out. Add that evidence to the police report in his hand, and it would be hard to doubt he's telling the truth.
Yet as more U visa applicants testify in court, defense attorneys are trying to persuade juries that they cannot be trusted.
Richard McCain says he and his Mexican boyfriend, Manuel Valencia, were planning "one last weekend of fun" before getting sober. Instead, it ended in a meth-infused three-way gone wrong, McCain in jail, and Valencia on the path to getting a U visa.
Their case illustrates a new battleground for the U visa: the courtroom. Defense attorneys across the country, and especially in San Francisco, are using pending applications to persuade jurors that witnesses have a motivation to exaggerate charges or push forward with cases they might otherwise abandon. After all, to certify an application, the District Attorney's office must determine that a crime occurred and the person was "helpful" to the prosecution. The District Attorney's Victim Services Division head Maria Bee says she defines "helpful" on a case-by-case basis — by the supposed victim either helping prosecutors outside of the courtroom, or testifying at trial. The federal government doesn't require that the suspect actually be convicted of the charge to issue the visa.
Still, Public Defender Megan Burns says the District Attorney's office uses the visa as a tool. "I think it's just a reality that when the government has a witness that isn't here legally in the United States, and they want their assistance in a criminal case, [a discussion of the U visa] is something that comes up," she says. As for the witnesses, "They're motivated more by the immigration benefit they can receive than the actual truth of what really transpired."
McCain and Valencia had been together for two years and had never had any physical altercations. Yet one night in early March 2009 when both had shot meth, they ended up arguing on a SOMA sidewalk. Valencia, a building manager, testified he swung a bag full of keys at McCain, who then punched him in the mouth. A parking meter attendant witnessed the fight and called cops, who arrested McCain for domestic violence.
Valencia took out a restraining order against McCain after the incident, but McCain says his boyfriend relented and allowed him to stay overnight several times over the next three weeks. "We were spending time together and trying to reconcile," he says. Then, suddenly, Valencia told McCain he never wanted to see him again.
McCain didn't find out until months later what he believes is the reason for his sudden rejection. Assistant District Attorney Brian Bringardner revealed in an e-mail to McCain's public defender a month before the trial in the summer of 2009 that Valencia "has been told about the option of getting a U visa. I don't know if he has actually applied for one."
During the trial, McCain's public defender argued that Valencia had hit McCain first, and Valencia was pushing forward with the charges only because he wanted a U visa. The jury apparently bought it, acquitting McCain of the misdemeanor domestic violence charge. Still, the DA's office signed off on Valencia's application, Bee says, adding, "We have no control over what the jury is going to do."
"I was absolutely dumbfounded to find out there was such an opportunity" for illegal immigrants, McCain says. "I'm not sure I wouldn't have done the same thing, being in his position. You tried [to become legal] for so long, and it's like a carrot in front of your face." McCain has since moved to Colorado and is no longer in contact with Valencia.
That trial is one of many in San Francisco courts where the U visa has come up. In another 2009 trial, Olegaria B., a Mexican immigrant, accused a Yemeni taxi driver of forcing her to give him a hand job on the way to a New Year's party, public defender Stephanie Wargo says. The friend who hosted the party testified that Olegaria had joked about the incident at the time. But a few days later, she returned to the host's house and asked her to write an affidavit stating she had seen the taxi driver drop her off. The woman, who'd hadn't seen the cab, refused. Olegaria then asked her friend's teenage daughter to write a statement, but she also refused.
Wargo argued to the jury that Olegaria was fabricating the charges of sexual assault to get a visa, which could allow her to bring a child in Mexico to the United States. "I would say the [visa] was the icing on the cake in our case, because she had so many credibility problems," Wargo says. The jury hung, and the district attorney didn't refile charges. Still, Bee says she signed the U visa certification.
The Ninth Circuit District Court ruled in the 2004 U.S. v. Blanco decision that "special immigration treatment ... was highly relevant impeachment material," meaning evidence that can discredit a witness. Yet U visa advocates argue that information about victims seeking the visa is protected under the Violence Against Women Act. They say allowing information about the visa into court hurts legitimate victims by casting doubt on their testimonies — especially in sexual assault cases, where a trial often comes down to whether a jury believes the man or the woman. "I think they're just waving a flag around that will cause reasonable doubt," says immigration attorney Bowyer. "Honestly, most clients call the police before they've ever heard about the U visa."
If witnesses' pending visas are used against them in court, "we go back to where we were before Congress created the U visa," says Leslye Orloff, an attorney and vice president of Legal Momentum, a Washington, D.C.-based legal defense organization for women, who helped legislators craft the law. She says that means perpetrators may go unpunished: "If defense attorneys make that decision [to mention the U visa in court], there may be more legislation needed to cut off their ability to do that."
It's hard to tell whether U visa fraud is truly common, or whether defense attorneys are merely doing a good job of making it seem so. If victims commit perjury or file false police reports, they are susceptible to prosecution and deportation. Plus, some advocates warn applicants they are exposing themselves on their applications by alerting the government that they're in the country illegally. That seems to be unfounded paranoia. USCIS spokeswoman Sharon Rummery says the agency doesn't tell immigration enforcement officers about the applicants it rejects. Attorneys concede that, so far, USCIS has kept its word. Clients whose cases are rejected merely return to living under the radar. Nothing gained, nothing lost.
Mardoqueu Silva never found out whether the man who held a pistol to his head 16 years ago went to jail. But two years ago, his immigration attorney told him to find out whether the police still had a record of the incident. After a three-hour search, a police record room staffer set the official report before him: the 1995 armed robbery of a Geneva Pizza deliveryman in Visitacion Valley.
Silva's attorney mailed his U visa application in September 2009. Six months later, Silva got a call. The thug had done Silva the biggest favor of his life. He and his wife were in. He considers it a godsend: "I couldn't believe something so good could come out of something so bad."
Last year, USCIS reached the 10,000 cap on U visas for the first time. It looks like the agency is on target to meet it again in the 2011 fiscal year, having received 3,331 applications in the first quarter. Anti-immigration groups say that's a lot of work permits in a time that the United States doesn't have enough employment for its citizens. "With unemployment rates the way they are, I think it's hard to justify bringing more workers in for jobs that Americans otherwise would be doing," says Gretchen Pfaff of the Santa Barbara–based Californians for Population Stabilization. "You have to consider the chain migration that comes with that. They can bring in their immediate family, and all those people are now in America needing those jobs."
Many advocates express concern that the woeful economy and anti-immigrant zeitgeist will cause lawmakers to more closely scrutinize the program. "We do worry, because we do believe the U visa has opened a lot of doors for people, and given some nice benefits to people who wholly deserve it," says Christopher Martinez of Catholic Charities. "But there's going to be forces out there that say this is too generous."
Meanwhile, Robert Uy, a staff attorney at Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach in San Francisco, thinks the visa's law-and-order goal will save it. "Even the most conservative people tend to want people who are committing crimes to be put behind bars," he says.
Silva would likely win over many conservative critics. He attributes his visa to an intervention of God through the U.S. government. He talks about his and his wife's new legal status with the zeal of a convert: "We can now be all that we can be." He got his driver's license. He plans to travel back to Brazil for the first time in 20 years to see his family.
Earlier this month, a Seventh-Day Adventist church in Jacksonville, Fla., offered Silva a position as assistant pastor. He had dreamed about attending theology school for years, but didn't have the immigration papers to do it in good conscience. He accepted. Now he'll have a church full of congregants, many of them immigrants, to whom he can preach the gospel — be it of a forgiving God, or a forgiving visa.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Did Christianity Cause the Crash?
Did Christianity Cause the Crash?
AMERICA’S MAINSTREAM RELIGIOUS DENOMINATIONS USED TO TEACH THE FAITHFUL THAT THEY WOULD BE REWARDED IN THE AFTERLIFE. BUT OVER THE PAST GENERATION, A DIFFERENT STRAIN OF CHRISTIAN FAITH HAS PROLIFERATED—ONE THAT PROMISES TO MAKE BELIEVERS RICH IN THE HERE AND NOW. KNOWN AS THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL, AND CLAIMING TENS OF MILLIONS OF ADHERENTS, IT FOSTERS RISK-TAKING AND INTENSE MATERIAL OPTIMISM. IT PUMPED AIR INTO THE HOUSING BUBBLE. AND ONE YEAR INTO THE WORST DOWNTURN SINCE THE DEPRESSION, IT’S STILL GOING STRONG.
By
IMAGE CREDIT: MARK PETERSON/REDUX
LIKE THE AMBITIONS of many immigrants who attend services there, Casa del Padre’s success can be measured by upgrades in real estate. The mostly Latino church, in Charlottesville, Virginia, has moved from the pastor’s basement, where it was founded in 2001, to a rented warehouse across the street from a small mercado five years later, to a middle-class suburban street last year, where the pastor now rents space from a lovely old Baptist church that can’t otherwise fill its pews. Every Sunday, the parishioners drive slowly into the parking lot, never parking on the sidewalk or grass—“because Americanos don’t do that,” one told me—and file quietly into church. Some drive newly leased SUVs, others old work trucks with paint buckets still in the bed. The pastor, Fernando Garay, arrives last and parks in front, his dark-blue Mercedes Benz always freshly washed, the hubcaps polished enough to reflect his wingtips.
It can be hard to get used to how much Garay talks about money in church, one loyal parishioner, Billy Gonzales, told me one recent Sunday on the steps out front. Back in Mexico, Gonzales’s pastor talked only about “Jesus and heaven and being good.” But Garay talks about jobs and houses and making good money, which eventually came to make sense to Gonzales: money is “really important,” and besides, “we love the money in Jesus Christ’s name! Jesus loved money too!” That Sunday, Garay was preaching a variation on his usual theme, about how prosperity and abundance unerringly find true believers. “It doesn’t matter what country you’re from, what degree you have, or what money you have in the bank,” Garay said. “You don’t have to say, ‘God, bless my business. Bless my bank account.’ The blessings will come! The blessings are looking for you! God will take care of you. God will not let you be without a house!”
Pastor Garay, 48, is short and stocky, with thick black hair combed back. In his off hours, he looks like a contented tourist, in his printed Hawaiian shirts or bright guayaberas. But he preaches with a ferocity that taps into his youth as a cocaine dealer with a knife in his back pocket. “Fight the attack of the devil on my finances! Fight him! We declare financial blessings! Financial miracles this week, NOW NOW NOW!” he preached that Sunday. “More work! Better work! The best finances!” Gonzales shook and paced as the pastor spoke, eventually leaving his wife and three kids in the family section to join the single men toward the front, many of whom were jumping, raising their Bibles, and weeping. On the altar sat some anointing oils, alongside the keys to the Mercedes Benz.
Later, D’andry Then, a trim, pretty real-estate agent and one of the church founders, stood up to give her testimony. Business had not been good of late, and “you know, Monday I have to pay this, and Tuesday I have to pay that.” Then, just that morning, “Jesus gave me $1,000.” She didn’t explain whether the gift came in the form of a real-estate commission or a tax refund or a stuffed envelope left at her door. The story hung somewhere between metaphor and a literal image of barefoot Jesus handing her a pile of cash. No one in the church seemed the least bit surprised by the story, and certainly no one expressed doubt. “If you have financial pressure on you, and you don’t know where the next payment is coming from, don’t pay any attention to that!” she continued. “Don’t get discouraged! Jesus is the answer.”
America’s churches always reflect shifts in the broader culture, and Casa del Padre is no exception. The message that Jesus blesses believers with riches first showed up in the postwar years, at a time when Americans began to believe that greater comfort could be accessible to everyone, not just the landed class. But it really took off during the boom years of the 1990s, and has continued to spread ever since. This stitched-together, homegrown theology, known as the prosperity gospel, is not a clearly defined denomination, but a strain of belief that runs through the Pentecostal Church and a surprising number of mainstream evangelical churches, with varying degrees of intensity. In Garay’s church, God is the “Owner of All the Silver and Gold,” and with enough faith, any believer can access the inheritance. Money is not the dull stuff of hourly wages and bank-account statements, but a magical substance that comes as a gift from above. Even in these hard times, it is discouraged, in such churches, to fall into despair about the things you cannot afford. “Instead of saying ‘I’m poor,’ say ‘I’m rich,’” Garay’s wife, Hazael, told me one day. “The word of God will manifest itself in reality.”
Many explanations have been offered for the housing bubble and subsequent crash: interest rates were too low; regulation failed; rising real-estate prices induced a sort of temporary insanity in America’s middle class. But there is one explanation that speaks to a lasting and fundamental shift in American culture—a shift in the American conception of divine Providence and its relationship to wealth.
In his book Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears describes two starkly different manifestations of the American dream, each intertwined with religious faith. The traditional Protestant hero is a self-made man. He is disciplined and hardworking, and believes that his “success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan.” The hero of the second American narrative is a kind of gambling man—a “speculative confidence man,” Lears calls him, who prefers “risky ventures in real estate,” and a more “fluid, mobile democracy.” The self-made man imagines a coherent universe where earthly rewards match merits. The confidence man lives in a culture of chance, with “grace as a kind of spiritual luck, a free gift from God.” The Gilded Age launched the myth of the self-made man, as the Rockefellers and other powerful men in the pews connected their wealth to their own virtue. In these boom-and-crash years, the more reckless alter ego dominates. In his book, Lears quotes a reverend named Jeffrey Black, who sounds remarkably like Garay: “The whole hope of a human being is that somehow, in spite of the things I’ve done wrong, there will be an episode when grace and fate shower down on me and an unearned blessing will come to me—that I’ll be the one.”
I had come to Charlottesville to learn more about this second strain of the American dream—one that’s been ascendant for a generation or more. I wanted to try to piece together the connection between the gospel and today’s economic reality, and to see whether “prosperity” could possibly still seem enticing, or even plausible, in this distinctly unprosperous moment. (Very much so, as it turns out.) Charlottesville may not be the heartland of the prosperity gospel, which is most prevalent in the Sun Belt—where many of the country’s foreclosure hot spots also lie. And Garay preaches an unusually pure version of the gospel. Still, the particulars of both Garay and his congregation are revealing.
Among Latinos the prosperity gospel has been spreading rapidly. In a recent Pew survey, 73 percent of all religious Latinos in the United States agreed with the statement: “God will grant financial success to all believers who have enough faith.” For a generation of poor and striving Latino immigrants, the gospel seems to offer a road map to affluence and modern living. Garay’s church is comprised mostly of first-generation immigrants. More than others I’ve visited, it echoes back a highly distilled, unself-conscious version of the current thinking on what it means to live the American dream.
One other thing makes Garay’s church a compelling case study. From 2001 to 2007, while he was building his church, Garay was also a loan officer at two different mortgage companies. He was hired explicitly to reach out to the city’s growing Latino community, and Latinos, as it happened, were disproportionately likely to take out the sort of risky loans that later led to so many foreclosures. To many of his parishioners, Garay was not just a spiritual adviser, but a financial one as well.
MANY OF THE TERMS and concepts used by prosperity preachers today date back to Oral Roberts, a poor farmer’s son turned Pentecostal preacher. Garay grew up watching Roberts on television and considers him a hero; he hopes to send all three of his children to Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the late 1940s, Roberts claimed his Bible flipped open to the Third Epistle of John, verse 2: “Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health. Even as thy soul prospereth.” Soon Roberts developed his famous concept of seed faith, still popular today. If people would donate money to his ministry, a “seed” offered to God, he’d say, then God would multiply it a hundredfold. Eventually, Roberts retreated into a life that revolved around private jets and country clubs.
Roberts’s fame had faded by the late 1980s, and prosperity preaching briefly imploded soon after. We all remember Tammy Faye Bakker and her mascara tears, along with her husband, Jim, and his various scandals. They took their place in a procession of slick, showy faith healers on Christian television who ultimately succumbed to earthly temptation.
But since that time, the movement has made itself over, moving out of the fringe and into the upwardly mobile megachurch class. In the past decade, it has produced about a dozen celebrity pastors, who show up at White House events, on secular radio, and as guests on major TV talk shows. Kirbyjon Caldwell, a Methodist megapastor in Houston and a purveyor of the prosperity gospel, gave the benediction at both of George W. Bush’s inaugurals. Instead of shiny robes or gaudy jewelry, these preachers wear Italian suits and modest wedding bands. Instead of screaming and sweating, they smile broadly and speak in soothing, therapeutic terms. But their message is essentially the same. “Every day, you’re going to live that abundant life!” preaches Joel Osteen, a best-selling author, the nation’s most popular TV preacher, and the pastor of Lakewood Church, in Houston, the country’s largest church by far.
Among mainstream, nondenominational megachurches, where much of American religious life takes place, “prosperity is proliferating” rapidly, says Kate Bowler, a doctoral candidate at Duke University and an expert in the gospel. Few, if any, of these churches have prosperity in their title or mission statement, but Bowler has analyzed their sermons and teachings. Of the nation’s 12 largest churches, she says, three are prosperity—Osteen’s, which dwarfs all the other megachurches; Tommy Barnett’s, in Phoenix; and T. D. Jakes’s, in Dallas. In second-tier churches—those with about 5,000 members—the prosperity gospel dominates. Overall, Bowler classifies 50 of the largest 260 churches in the U.S. as prosperity. The doctrine has become popular with Americans of every background and ethnicity; overall, Pew found that 66 percent of all Pentecostals and 43 percent of “other Christians”—a category comprising roughly half of all respondents—believe that wealth will be granted to the faithful. It’s an upbeat theology, argues Barbara Ehrenreich in her new book, Bright-Sided, that has much in common with the kind of “positive thinking” that has come to dominate America’s boardrooms and, indeed, its entire culture.
On the cover of his 4 million-copy best seller from 2004, Your Best Life Now, Joel Osteen looks like a recent college grad who just got hired by Goldman Sachs and can’t believe his good luck. His hair is full, his teeth are bright, his suit is polished but not flashy; he looks like a guy who would more likely shake your hand than cast out your demons. Osteen took over his father’s church in 1999. He had little preaching experience, although he’d managed the television ministry for years. The church grew quickly, as Osteen packaged himself to appeal to the broadest audience possible. In his books and sermons, Osteen quotes very little scripture, opting instead to tell uplifting personal anecdotes. He avoids controversy, and rarely appears on Christian TV. In a popular YouTube clip, he declines to confirm Larry King’s suggestion that only those who believe in Jesus will go to heaven.
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Osteen is often derided as Christianity Lite, but he is more like Positivity Extreme. “Cast down anything negative, any thought that brings fear, worry, doubt, or unbelief,” he urges. “Your attitude should be: ‘I refuse to go backward. I am going forward with God. I am going to be the person he wants me to be. I’m going to fulfill my destiny.’” Telling yourself you are poor, or broke, or stuck in a dead-end job is a form of sin and “invites more negativity into your life,” he writes. Instead, you have to “program your mind for success,” wake up every morning and tell yourself, “God is guiding and directing my steps.” The advice is exactly like the message of The Secret, or any number of American self-help blockbusters that edge toward magical thinking, except that the religious context adds another dimension.
Your Best Life Now, which has fueled a TV show that Osteen claims is now seen in 200 million homes worldwide, opens with a story of a man on vacation in Hawaii. He was “a good man who had achieved a modest measure of success, but he was coasting along, thinking that he’d already reached his limits.” While sightseeing, he and his wife admired a gorgeous house on a hill. “I can’t even imagine living in a place like that,” he said. For this bit of self-deprecation and modesty, Osteen pities the man: “His own thoughts and attitudes,” he writes, “were condemning him to mediocrity,” or what is known in the gospel as the “defeated life.”
A few pages later comes the corrective, the model of a “victor” and not a “victim.” Osteen and his wife, Victoria, are walking around their neighborhood in Houston when they pass a beautiful house being built. “Most of the other homes around us were one-story, ranch-style homes that were forty to fifty years old, but this house was a large two-story home, with high ceilings and oversized windows,” he writes. “It was a lovely, inspiring place.” Victoria desperately wanted a house “just like it,” but Joel was worried about how stretched they already were. “Thinking of our bank account and my income at the time, it seemed impossible to me,” he writes. But this, of course, is an example of ungodly, negative thinking. With her unwavering faith, Victoria wouldn’t let it drop. Soon she convinced Joel and then he, too, started to believe that “God could bring it to pass.” There is no explanation of how they came to own such a house—whether Osteen worked hard to grow his ministry or got rich from his TV show or received an inheritance from his father’s estate. In this story they are standing in for an average middle-class couple who set their sights on a bigger house and believed, despite all the financial evidence, that God would bestow it upon them, like a gift. And he did.
THEOLOGICALLY, THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL has always infuriated many mainstream evangelical pastors. Rick Warren, whose book The Purpose Driven Life outsold Osteen’s, told Time, “This idea that God wants everybody to be wealthy? There is a word for that: baloney. It’s creating a false idol. You don’t measure your self-worth by your net worth. I can show you millions of faithful followers of Christ who live in poverty. Why isn’t everyone in the church a millionaire?” In 2005, a group of African American pastors met to denounce prosperity megapreachers for promoting a Jesus who is more like a “cosmic bellhop,” as one pastor put it, than the engaged Jesus of the civil-rights era who looked after the poor.
More recently, critics have begun to argue that the prosperity gospel, echoed in churches across the country, might have played a part in the economic collapse. In 2008, in the online magazine Religion Dispatches, Jonathan Walton, a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Riverside, warned:
Narratives of how “God blessed me with my first house despite my credit” were common … Sermons declaring “It’s your season of overflow” supplanted messages of economic sobriety and disinterested sacrifice. Yet as folks were testifying about “what God can do,” little attention was paid to a predatory subprime-mortgage industry, relaxed credit standards, or the dangers of using one’s home equity as an ATM.
In 2004, Walton was researching a book about black televangelists. “I would hear consistent testimonies about how ‘once I was renting and now God let me own my own home,’ or ‘I was afraid of the loan officer, but God directed him to ignore my bad credit and blessed me with my first home,’” he says. “This trope was so common in these churches that I just became immune to it. Only later did I connect it to this disaster.”
Demographically, the growth of the prosperity gospel tracks fairly closely to the pattern of foreclosure hot spots. Both spread in two particular kinds of communities—the exurban middle class and the urban poor. Many newer prosperity churches popped up around fringe suburban developments built in the 1990s and 2000s, says Walton. These are precisely the kinds of neighborhoods that have been decimated by foreclosures, according to Eric Halperin, of the Center for Responsible Lending.
Zooming out a bit, Kate Bowler found that most new prosperity-gospel churches were built along the Sun Belt, particularly in California, Florida, and Arizona—all areas that were hard-hit by the mortgage crisis. Bowler, who, like Walton, was researching a book, spent a lot of time attending the “financial empowerment” seminars that are common at prosperity churches. Advisers would pay lip service to “sound financial practices,” she recalls, but overall they would send the opposite message: posters advertising the seminars featured big houses in the background, and the parking spots closest to the church were reserved for luxury cars.
Nationally, the prosperity gospel has spread exponentially among African American and Latino congregations. This is also the other distinct pattern of foreclosures. “Hyper-segregated” urban communities were the worst off, says Halperin. Reliable data on foreclosures by race are not publicly available, but mortgages are tracked by both race and loan type, and subprime loans have tended to correspond to foreclosures. During the boom, roughly 40 percent of all loans going to Latinos nationwide were subprime loans; Latinos and African Americans were 28 percent and 37 percent more likely, respectively, to receive a higher-rate subprime loan than whites.
In June, the Supreme Court ruled that state attorneys general had the authority to sue national banks for predatory lending. Even before that ruling, at least 17 lawsuits accusing various banks of treating racial minorities unfairly were already under way. (Bank of America’s Countrywide division—one of the companies Garay worked for—had earlier agreed to pay $8.4 billion in a multistate settlement.) One theme emerging in these suits is how banks teamed up with pastors to win over new customers for subprime loans.
Beth Jacobson is a star witness for the City of Baltimore’s recent suit against Wells Fargo. Jacobson was a top loan officer in the bank’s subprime division for nine years, closing as much as $55 million worth of loans a year. Like many subprime-loan officers, Jacobson had no bank experience before working for Wells Fargo. The subprime officers were drawn from “an utterly different background” than the professional bankers, she told me. She had been running a small paralegal business; her co-workers had been car salespeople, or had worked in telemarketing. They were prized for their ability to hustle on the ground and “look you in the eye when they shook your hand,” she surmised. As a reward for good performance, the bank would sometimes send a Hummer limo to pick up Jacobson for a celebration, she said. She’d arrive at a bar and find all her co-workers drunk and her boss “doing body shots off a waitress.”
The idea of reaching out to churches took off quickly, Jacobson recalls. The branch managers figured pastors had a lot of influence with their parishioners and could give the loan officers credibility and new customers. Jacobson remembers a conference call where sales managers discussed the new strategy. The plan was to send officers to guest-speak at church-sponsored “wealth-building seminars” like the ones Bowler attended, and dazzle the participants with the possibility of a new house. They would tell pastors that for every person who took out a mortgage, $350 would be donated to the church, or to a charity of the parishioner’s choice. “They wouldn’t say, ‘Hey, Mr. Minister. We want to give your people a bunch of subprime loans,” Jacobson told me. “They would say, ‘Your congregants will be homeowners! They will be able to live the American dream!’”
GARAY OFTEN TELLS his life story from the pulpit, as an inspiration to the many immigrants in his church, some legal, some not. He grew up an outsider—a citizen by birth, but living a marginal existence in a diverse, working-class neighborhood in Flushing, Queens. His mother left when he was 8, and he was raised mostly by two older brothers; he spent most of his time on the street. “I ate jars of peanut butter for dinner,” he says. The story of how he became a Christian begins in 1989, when he was 28 years old, and involves a large sum of money. He’d been selling drugs in Miami, then started using, and owed some dealers $30,000 that he didn’t have, and they were going to kill him. He was on his mattress one night, in despair, when a picture of Jesus up on his wall “winked at me.” Soon after, he became a born-again Christian, and he told everyone about it. The dealers, he says, then went away. He doesn’t offer much explanation; he just says, “They were after me. They were going to kill me. And then they just backed off.” He credits Jesus.
Garay tried many churches, but they all felt alien and “dead” to him. “That’s not me, sitting quietly and saying ‘Thank you, God.’” Finally he came upon a Pentecostal prosperity church, much like the one he leads now. The church was full of miracles and real emotion, which drew him in, but it also offered practical benefits. The pastor pointed out Bible passages that referred to finances in specific terms, giving him images of wealth he could almost reach out and touch: “Give, and it shall be given to you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over”—a passage that’s now often read at Garay’s church during tithing time.
“Then it started happening. It started happening!” He enrolled in a community college and began selling roses from buckets in the backseat of his Honda (“no AC, no radio”). In no time, as he tells it, he had worked himself up to roses in plastic straws, laid neatly across the backseat of his Cadillac, with no water sloshing on the white leather. With this story, Garay hopes to convince his followers that God has a bounty for them, but that to get it they have to take the first step of faith. One analogy he likes to use is a box of gifts in heaven; if you never reach up to get it, then it won’t come down to you. It’s a curious mix of active (a step of faith) and passive (“It started happening!”).
In Garay’s testimony, his life proceeds that way: part hard work, part miracle. He applied himself, eventually got married, and had children. One day, for no reason, he quit his job as a social worker counseling addicted juvenile delinquents. “I almost hit him with a frying pan,” Hazael, his wife, jokes. But the very same day, his mother-in-law walked into the house and said the bank was looking for a bilingual loan officer. He had no experience and had never used a computer. Yet he got the job and within a year was earning six figures. How did that happen? How did it all come together so neatly, one door opening the moment another had closed? When I asked him that, he smiled and pointed up at the sky.
Garay is like a father figure to his parishioners; I met a few who had named their children after him or his wife. Parishioners told me stories about his coming with them to their court hearings, showing them how to buy a phone card or find a good school for their children or, for the more entrepreneurial, invest in a small business. Oral Roberts’s seed-faith concept is the source of much suspicion about prosperity churches; pastors, including Garay, ask their parishioners to give 10 percent of their income to the church. But to Garay, seed faith is the church’s central tenet. The tithe, he says, is tangible proof that a believer has taken the first step toward God. It is the spiritual equivalent of spending three years selling flowers door-to-door. He often tells what’s known as Jesus’ parable of the three servants, from Matthew. A lord gives three of his servants money. Two invest the money and double their profit, and a third hides his in the ground. When the master returns, he declares the third “wicked and lazy” and a “worthless slave,” and casts him into the “outer darkness.” “To receive God’s bounty, you cannot hide your head in the sand,” Garay preaches. “You have to take a leap of faith.”
I asked Garay why his parishioner Billy Gonzales, who earns barely $25,000 and has no money to fix his car, should donate 10 percent of his income. “Because it gives him a new mentality. It teaches him that money can breed more money, that you can have money in your pocket on Saturday morning even though you got paid Friday night. People who support the church week after week have a dedication. Those who just give $5 or $10 here and there, you’ll hear them have the same problems week after week.” Jackson Lears would add another explanation: tithing is like the moment the gambler lays his money down on the table—it “promises at least a fleeting opportunity to contact a realm where hope is alive,” he writes. Without it, there’s only the dull regularity of $2,000 a month and a dead car.
During the boom years, Apostle Garay, as he is known in church, was brasher than he is now. He spoke in very specific terms during church services, promising that a $100 offering would yield a $10,000 return: “This is not my promise. It is God’s promise, and he will make it happen!” he would say.
While it sounds absurd, this kind of message can have a positive influence, according to Tony Tian-Ren Lin, a researcher at the University of Virginia who has made a close study of Latino prosperity gospel congregations over the years. These churches typically take in people who had “been basically dropped into the world from pretty primitive settings”—small towns in Latin America with no electricity or running water and very little educational opportunity. In their new congregation, their pastor slowly walks them through life in the U.S., both inside and outside of church, until they become more confident. “In Mexico, nobody ever told them they could do anything,” says Lin, who was himself raised in Argentina. He finds the message at prosperity churches to be quintessentially American. “They are taught they can do absolutely anything, and it’s God’s will. They become part of the elect, the chosen. They get swept up in the manifest destiny, this idea that God has lifted Americans above everyone else.”
At Casa del Padre, the celebration of consumer culture is quite visible, along with a sense of boundless opportunity. The people in the church, for instance, tend to have very expensive cell phones—never the free ones that come with a calling plan, nor the sort that can be bought cheaply at a convenience store. “They start wanting what’s considered the best and the most technologically advanced in this country,” Lin says. Garay’s church, it seems to me, teaches them that they deserve these things, so they go about getting them, with few resources and infinite adaptability. Before the crash, one group of young men got a $12,000 loan to start a landscaping company; another man bought a $270,000 house. One of the church’s Bible-study leaders, who’d grown up in a remote village in Mexico with an abusive, alcoholic father, had become a very successful contractor by the height of the boom, managing 30 men on multiple jobs and winning contracts to paint luxury subdivisions in the exurbs.
The tenets of the prosperity gospel, and the practical advice that pastors often give their parishioners, help immigrants learn “not just how to survive but how to thrive; not just live paycheck to paycheck but handle money—manage complicated payrolls, invest in equipment,” Lin told me. Along the way, they become assimilated. “While they’re trying to be closer to God, instead they become American,” he says, from their optimism and entrepreneurialism to the very nature of their dreams.
THESE DAYS, GARAY’S MESSAGE is more subdued than it was at the height of the boom, but not substantially different. In a sermon on Father’s Day, he did not make specific claims of financial returns on investments but instead spoke vaguely about how his congregation’s prospects were “good and going to get better.” After church, I asked Garay about how the gospel was holding up in the recession. It was a hot summer day, and although he had just finished one of his feverish two-hour sermons, he seemed energized rather than drained. “Look,” he said, and rounded his hands as if to indicate a protective shield. “The recession has not hit my church.” He reminded me that when he had asked how many people were out of work, only four people out of about 100 there had raised their hands. But in a church where failure is seen as a kind of sin, it seems credulous at best to expect an honest response to that question. I later met at least one person—Billy Gonzales’s younger brother—who didn’t have a job but hadn’t raised his hand, because he thought he’d “have one lined up soon.”
Garay describes the recession as God’s judgment—for abortion, taking prayer out of school, bikinis on television, “Desperate Housewives, whatever.” But God is also giving us a two-year window to repent, he says. He calculates that we’ve had five years of extreme plenty and now the clock is running out, based on the biblical story of Joseph and the great famine—seven years of plenty followed by seven years of a failed harvest. If we don’t repent, we will experience “misery like we have never known it.” These days, if any parishioners or fellow pastors ask Garay for investment advice, he tells them to wait two years before making a move.
Like much of Garay’s advice, this recommendation is partly grounded in economic reality, and partly drawn from mystical notions about a biblical calendar. “I’m very real,” he once told me. “If you want to eat at Red Lobster, you better have a Red Lobster paycheck, and enough left over to pay your electric bill. But I’ve also seen miracles of God.” Later, during one of our talks over coffee, his wife echoed the sentiment. “If you can’t afford a house, you shouldn’t buy it,” Hazael said, when I asked whether the prosperity gospel might push people to take irresponsible risks. “But if the Lord is telling you to ‘take that first step and I will provide,’ then you have to believe.”
I asked Garay many times about a connection between the mortgage crisis and the gospel, but he does not really see one. From everything he says about his time as a loan officer, it seems he was involved in the kinds of subprime loans that led to so many foreclosures. He was hired in Countrywide’s emerging-markets division, which meant he was expected to target the growing Latino community in the area. Like Beth Jacobson, he had no previous experience, but was valued for his connections and hustle. He makes astute criticisms of the risky loans but, like many former loan officers, he does so with a curious sense of distance, as if he had been just a cog in the machine. Loans got “too easy,” he says. “Mortgages would be $1,500 a month, and that was all [the loan applicants] made in a month,” he recalls, “but they figured they would rent the basement.” He says sometimes he told people the loans were going to kill them, but they would plead, “Please help me, please. I want a house.” Because he was becoming an increasingly prominent pastor at the time, many people who came to see him assumed he was the president of the bank and could protect them, he recalls.
Garay says as far as he knows no one in his church defaulted. But at a bare minimum, some of his parishioners have run into intense financial difficulties, sometimes defaulting soon after leaving the congregation. The man who’d bought the $270,000 house threw a huge housewarming party and invited everyone from church. He gave a weepy testimony about the house God had given him, passing around the title for all to see. At the time, he was working as a handyman, putting up drywall, painting, roofing, and doing other odd jobs. Within three months he had three families living in the three-bedroom house, and he still could not keep up with the payments. After five months, he went into foreclosure and ducked out of the country. Tony Lin is careful—and of course correct—to say that neither immigrants nor Latinos caused the crash; adherents of every stripe exhibited the same sort of magical thinking about finances, as did millions of nonbelievers. Still, he recalls, “I wasn’t very surprised when the whole subprime-mortgage thing blew up. I’m sure a loan officer never said, ‘God wants you to have a house.’ But you’ve already been taught that. Now here comes the loan officer saying, ‘Sign here, and this house will be yours.’ It feels like a gift from God. It’s the perfect fuel for the crisis.”
The guys who’d started the landscaping company also fared badly. They had a pretty good spring and summer in 2007, their first year of operation, and then business started to fall off. In church they kept giving positive testimonies, bragging about their success. But by October, they’d begun selling off their equipment; eventually they lost the business and had to go into hiding. The most interesting part of the story is the epilogue. One of the partners in the group, whom I’ll call Luis, eventually moved to Richmond, and an acquaintance from Casa del Padre told me that he’d recently run into him there. Luis hadn’t been embittered by the experience; he blamed the disaster on the fact that he’d started working on Sundays instead of going to church. Luis asked the man to come visit with some of the parishioners of his new church, to confirm that he had once been a great success. As they talked, he seemed happy and positive. “He wasn’t angry that things didn’t work out. He wasn’t angry at God. He looked back at those days and thought, ‘I can still have everything. Look what God gave me. That was a time when I had it all.’”
BY MANY MEASURES, Billy Gonzales does not have it all. He lives with his wife and three children in a tiny apartment on the back side of a development at the edge of town, where people hang out on the stoop until all hours. He works 45 minutes away and his car has been broken down for three months, and he does not have any money to fix it. Every day at work he is faced with a vision of what he does not have. He works for a man who just built a $4 million house—one of four the man owns. Gonzales’s job is to make sure every wine glass, garden statue, and book is dusted and in its proper place. Yet when I talked to Gonzales he was like a child hearing the ice-cream truck, or a man newly in love. “I’m crazy! Just crazy,” he said, meaning crazy for the Lord, and giving little jumps out of his chair.
I visited Gonzales one evening after he’d had a long day at work; his brother had given him a ride home. Gonzales has a wide, earnest face that can look like a child’s or, if he is tired, like an old man’s. He sat in his favorite squeaky leather chair with his Bible in one hand and a soccer ball at his feet. The sofas in the tiny living room are actually backseats ripped out of cars, with cushions thrown on them. He got the cushions from a man he once shared a trailer with, and they turned out to be infested with cockroaches. As we talked, the roaches crawled across the floor or on the sofas. Gonzales apologized but did not pay them much attention.
He told me he feels pity for his employer. He assumes the man must have been close to God at one point, or at least his family must have been, “because the rich are closer to God.” But now the man has lost his way. He laughs when Gonzales talks to him about Jesus, and he wastes his money, buying $500 birdhouses and hiring Gonzales to clean them.
Gonzales was once lost too. He came from a big family in Guatemala so poor “that the poor people would call us poor.” For a while after he came to the U.S., he sent money home, but then like many of his friends he lost the rhythm of work. Instead, he was snorting cocaine and getting drunk four nights a week. “I hated Americans. I hated them,” he said, and I had trouble believing him, given his now-innocent, open demeanor. He says that back then, he spent most of his days fantasizing about killing his brother-in-law, whom he hated for no reason he can remember. His conversion came two years ago, in the form of a sudden vision like Garay’s. One night, in a drugged-out haze, he saw a polished, shimmery stone. He later realized it was a jewel, one of the many treasures in God’s vast storehouse, destined for him. Eventually he made his way to Garay, whom he now calls his father.
When I mentioned Gonzales to Garay, the pastor praised him as a model congregant. Indeed, by any standard Gonzales is an admirable man. He is 24, married, works hard, and limits his extracurricular activities to Bible study and soccer. It took me a few visits to realize that two of the three small children in the house are not his. He married a woman with two sons and takes care of them. They call him Papa and he reads to them at night and speaks to them gently, exactly the way he speaks to his own baby son. He has every reason to be frustrated with his circumstances, but I never once saw him express anything but delight. The gospel obviously grounds Gonzales in a very concrete way. But I can also see how, one day, it might send him floating into the air.
“I want to buy a house,” he confessed to me one evening this summer. It turned out his lease was almost up, and he needed to move in the fall. “Not a small one but a really huge one, a nice one. With six bedrooms and a kitchen and living room. I know, it’s crazy! But nothing is impossible! God, you saved my life,” he said, no longer speaking to me. “You saved my life, and now you will give me a gift. Now I’m crazy!” Last I heard, he and Garay were house-hunting together.
A year or so after the crash, there are signs of a new sobriety—higher savings rates, for example, and a reduction in conspicuous spending. But it’s hard to imagine Americans reverting to frugality the way, say, the Japanese did during the “lost decade” after their economy crashed. If by stereotype the Japanese are savers, then Americans are consumers, and ever hopeful. Already, countless “entrepreneurs” are finding a silver lining in the mortgage crisis, buying up foreclosed lots—often sight unseen, based on Web listings alone—in desolate parts of Cleveland and Phoenix and other places where abandoned houses can sometimes be had for a few thousand dollars or less. The buyers pay these bargain-basement prices eagerly, in the belief that the houses must be great deals, when they are just as likely to be overtaken by mold, or have every one of their doors and windows missing and the roof caving in. In America there is always a next play, another opportunity, an “unearned blessing” that can make up for a lifetime of disappointment.
It is not all that surprising that the prosperity gospel persists despite its obvious failure to pay off. Much of popular religion these days is characterized by a vast gap between aspirations and reality. Few of Sarah Palin’s religious compatriots were shocked by her messy family life, because they’ve grown used to the paradoxes; some of the most socially conservative evangelical churches also have extremely high rates of teenage pregnancies, out-of-wedlock births, and divorce. As Garay likes to say, “What you have is nothing compared to what you will have.” The unpleasant reality—an inadequate paycheck, a pregnant daughter, a recession—is invisible. It’s your ability to see beyond such things, your willing blindness to even the most hopeless-seeming circumstances, that makes you a certain kind of modern Christian, and a 21st-century American.
There is the kind of hope that President Obama talks about, and that Clinton did before him—steady, uplifting, assured. And there is Garay’s kind of hope, which perhaps for many people better reflects the reality of their lives. Garay’s is a faith that, for all its seeming confidence, hints at desperation, at circumstances gone so far wrong that they can only be made right by a sudden, unexpected jackpot.
Once, I asked Garay how you would know for certain if God had told you to buy a house, and he answered like a roulette dealer. “Ten Christians will say that God told them to buy a house. In nine of the cases, it will go bad. The 10th one is the real Christian.” And the other nine? “For them, there’s always another house.”
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/did-christianity-cause-the-crash/7764/
Copyright © 2011 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
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