While evangelical Christians might claim there’s only one path to getting on God’s guest list—repent your sins and accept Jesus as your savior—I found an easier way, without the repenting and the accepting and the fear of relapse: I’m a New York Yankee season-ticket holder.
That’s how I discovered Joel Osteen’s “A Night of Hope” would be barnstorming at the Stadium last month, anchored at second base, flanked by a full-throated choir and televised worldwide. As a secular New Yorker whose phone number was long ago discarded by the faithful fold, I have no interest in disparaging those who seek the comforts of Christian Fellowship, but a worm of wonder did crawl into my consciousness when I received an email from the Yankees announcing the event. What kind of Hope could the Osteen crew summon to shower down, or rise up, to section 417? Would he be an evangelical P.T. Barnum? Or is New York so economically bummed that we’ll look for hope wherever it presents itself. Would I need to repent if I were caught sneaking my flask?
I decided I’d pay my $15 and find out why Osteen—the 46-year-old pastor of the Lakewood mega-church in Houston, Texas, who preaches before 40,000 congregants every Sunday in the former home of the NBA’s Rockets, and who helped himself to a $13 million advance for his latest self-help book—decided to hitch the wagons and hit the dusty trail to Yankee Stadium in the first place. His evangelical predecessors have always shared the view that New York City was Gomorrah by the River, founded not by Puritans preaching God but by Dutchmen hocking beaver pelts, unimpressed with Christian obligations of poverty or chastity. An early 20th-century firebrand revivalist named Billy Sunday once quipped: “There is little hope that the Lord will ever save such a hellhole as New York.” Thank God.
A couple hours before Osteen’s event, I made my way down to his press conference in the gray concrete bowels of Yankee Stadium. This “Can the Lord ever save such a hellhole?” might be a good line of questioning, I thought. But the tenor of the Q&A was softball, not hardball, and the televangelist played pepper with questions like, “Isn’t it amazing that you’re here?” and “You got great weather, isn’t it great?”
Not wanting to give him a Perez Hilton sandbagging, I allowed this 15-minute fluffing from the Cotton Candy Press Corp. to pass, until Osteen stood up and glad-handed his way through the crowd, some of whom clasped his mitt while directing a wide-eyed penetration-stare into his soul and blurting, “Have a blessed day.”
Near the exit, I positioned myself in Osteen’s path, and when he stopped in front of me, his dark, tight wavy hair appeared as pristine as sculpture; a layer of makeup tried to conceal the crows feet spanning from his dead-blue eyes, a by-product of what might be the widest, brightest and most maniacal smile that exists in Christendom—the first key to successful evangelism.
I just couldn’t throw the word “hellhole” at such a grinning row of Chiclets—maybe he prayed that I’d refrain from vulgarity—so instead I reverted to “Joel…why Yankee Stadium and why now?”
His smile stretched ever wider across his face and his teeth claimed his countenance. He went on about how the Yankees initially called him, and he didn’t want to do it because it was going to cost too much money. But then when he got some sponsors to kick in, he decided that passing up a chance to preach his Message in front of so many, on this stage, would be crazy, “Especially with what the Yankees represent,”
he added.
There was my opening. “Joel,” I said, “what do the Yankees mean to you?”
His reply: “Well, with the success they’ve had...”
“Joel, they didn’t make the playoffs last year. Why did God take the year off?”
He chuckled, “God has never taken one day off...”
Then his PR team swallowed him up and rushed him away, but not before asking who I was and what I was doing there.
Although brief, my encounter with Osteen was telling. Hesitant to preach at Yankee Stadium because of financial concerns, he revealed a brain that overruled the heart, the essence of American pragmatism. He also gave a clue to why he avoids evangelical barbed wire. The problem of evil, the reason for suffering, the nature of sin, the denial of Heaven to non-believers, that Jason guy from The Bachelor—these enigmas Osteen simply does not answer, drawing stiff rebuke from conservative Christians and those who pretend to be.
Instead, his message is a 1-800 distillation of Christian theology, just to the right of Dr. Phil: God does not make junk. Period.
Osteen adds corollaries to this comfort food. By proclaiming that everybody is fully deserving of a profitable job, fully loaded to succeed, fully capable of a loving relationship regardless of past failures, he sprinkles Christian Miracle-Gro on the agnostic roots of western capitalism.
He’s essentially a life coach, albeit a college dropout with no theological training, whose $70-million-a-year business enjoys tax-exempt status. His “Prayer for Finances” implores all to pray for that promotion, for the Dow, for the bulls and against the bears, for your 401(k) to resurrect like Lazarus, for the rewards that God has in store, in the here and in the now.
The Osteen Path out of the recession is to claim victory, not victimhood; to perform the ordinary, and God will then perform the extraordinary; spread the seeds of hope, and they will come back to you. He makes no reference as to whether God is hiring, but he will advocate any doctrine that will make people happy—the second most important element if you want your evangelism to succeed, and one reason why Yankee Stadium for the first time this year was filled to capacity.
After the press conference, I drifted around the Stadium concourses, mobbed with believers wearing off-the-rack floral pattern dresses, khakis and polo shirts, their watches and bracelets twinkling like stars in the late rays of April sun. The aroma of musk and perfume stalked me. A gregarious middle-aged “pastor” named Jerry, who preaches near the World Trade Center and dresses like a street cart vendor, patted little girls on the head while selling umbrellas, the “fruits” of which go to hungry children in Nairobi. I then bumped into Javier, a thirty-something event planner who was listening to one of Osteen’s messages on his iPod. I ask him how he first got turned on to Joel.
“Channel flipping,” he explained. “I was channel flipping and I heard something from him that I hadn’t heard before.”
What was that?
“Everything that’s happening to you, whether you’ve been fired, or outsourced or downsized, or things aren’t going well with your life, is all God’s Plan. Put your faith in him and you will be rewarded, here on earth.”
I remind Javier that Lincoln once said the harder he worked, the luckier he got.
“No,” he politely replied, “luck is empty. Luck only occurs when you’ve given up. You have to work for God’s grace, he won’t knock on your door, but he will open doors if you do the right thing.”
Javier is clearly out-Godding me, so I excuse myself to go get a beer, at which point it dawns on me that the New York Yankees have a message, too: They hope to lead our way out of the recession by spending our way out of it, the Bronx version of inspirational theology. That they plunk down $161 million for CC Sabathia inspires me to shell out $9 for a cheeseburger; their $82 million payday for A.J. Burnett inspires a reciprocal payment of $9 for a Classic PBR—although this law of reciprocity was somewhat thwarted Saturday night, as I was prevented from shelling out anything for alcohol of any kind. No, tonight it’s all about Christian fellowship, and Christian fellows don’t drink for a simple reason: it leads to sin, or “falling away”—just like using the Lord’s name in vain, locking a lover in the trunk of a Honda, drunk sexting, etc. This was something I was reminded of when I asked Carlos, a stadium employee working the elevator, whether he preferred to work Yankee games or Nights of Hope.
“That’s easy,” he said. “Nights like tonight are a breeze.”
“Really?” I replied. “Why?”
“No drunks.”
No drunks indeed. But this Night of Hope had its own version of hyper-emotional types: criers. They were crying in the field level seats, there was crying in the bathrooms, and as Osteen’s main sermon was drawing to a close, there was crying on stage, and it went like this:
9:45: Joel, arm in arm with his wife Victoria, announces: “We love you guys” and begins to cry—the third most important aspect to evangelical success.
9:46: I too begin to cry, perhaps moved by the waves of inspiration raining down on the crowd—but more likely the $10.50 I paid for a slice of pizza and a soda.
9:48: Joel cries again. He apologizes for the blubbering demonstration, saying he “Only had 15 seconds until I left the stage and I couldn’t stop from crying.”
9:51: Joel cries a third time, wipes his eyes with both hands, saying, “We wish we could take you all to dinner tonight, but it’d make us broke.”
As the Osteens walk off the field, the choir burst into song, the band kicks in and I wait a few minutes until I’m certain an encore is not in His Plan. Leaving the stadium, I’m swept along by a faithful throng that carries me to the hellhole that is the downtown D train, which is stuffed with Christian Fellow straphangers, all smiling and light-headed from their latest Osteen absorption. A woman describes to her boyfriend how she hopes she can make a lateral move at her company; he replies that her current boss is “the enemy”—an Osteen-ism—who is keeping her down, preventing her from moving forward and making the kind of money she deserves, the kind of money God wants her to make.
Then, a few believers begin singing, “I Am Friends with God,” joined by a few more believers, and then more, until the car vibrated with harmony. At each stop, as believers stepped out into the landscape of the City, like seeds of hope dispersing into the air, into the cracks of decaying and neglected sidewalks, destined to either germinate in a spiritual spring or to grow as assets on the vine of materialism, they extended the brand of Joel Osteen, whose business model is no more illusory than a Wall Street bubble created by charlatans bundling false hopes and selling them like snake oil—except it’s the college dropout with the winning smile, not the bankers, who remains standing.
Don in Texas
