Quote:

"There's a world," he preached, pacing across the stage. "I call it the Underworld." The Underworld, he explained, is similar to what he sees when he goes skin diving; only instead of strange fishes, there's strange people. Too many churches, he said, focus on the Overworld. "That's where the nice people are. The successful people. But the Lord said, 'I'm not sending you to the Overworld, I'm sending you to the Underworld.' Where the creatures are. The critters! The people who are out of it. People you see in Colorado Springs, even. You got an underworld of people. The tattoo crowd, the people into drugs, the people into sex. You find 'em . . . in the Underworld."

---

Quote:

"Colorado Springs," Jayson told me, "this particular city, this one city, is a battleground" - he paused - "between good and evil. This is spiritual Gettysburg." Why here? I asked. He thought about it and rephrased his answer. "This place is just a watering hole for Christians. For God's people. Something extra powerful's about to pour out of this city. I hope not to stay in Colorado Springs, because I want to spread what's going on here. I'm a warrior, dude. I'm a warrior for God. Colorado Springs is my training ground."

---

Quote:

And that is why he believes spiritual war requires a virile, worldly counterpart. "I teach a strong ideology of the use of power," he says, "of military might, as a public service." He is for preemptive war, because he believes the Bible's exhortations against sin set for us a preemptive paradigm, and he is for ferocious war, because "the Bible's bloody. There's a lot about blood."

---

Quote:

Sitting across from me in her kitchen, she closed her big brown eyes and shushed herself. "I'm listening," she said quietly.

"To the TV?" I asked. In the next room, Aaron Michael was watching an action movie; the house was filled with the sound of explosions.

"No," said Linda. "To my Spirit." She opened her eyes and explained the process she had undergone to reach her refined state. She called it "spiritual restoration." Anyone can do it, she promised, "even a gay activist." Linda had seen with her own eyes the sex demons that make homosexuals rebel against God, and she said they are gruesome; but she did not name them, for she would not "give demons glory." They are all the same, she said.[3] "It's radicalism."

---

Quote:

One day last August, Commander Tom had been at work, making computer chips, when for no apparent reason he found himself unable to move. When he regained control, the first thing he did was take himself to the doctor for an MRI. But the moment the nurse turned on the machine, his eyeballs felt as if they were popping; his hands clenched into claws. All he could do was whisper, "Turn . . . it . . . off." Electronics seem to exacerbate the condition. "I'm allergic," he said. He believes that years of working with powerful magnets have broken his "polars." His company moved him to a desk job, but the computer made his eyes wobble. He can't talk on a cell phone, and TV causes a meltdown. His company pays him a modest sum for disability. He wouldn't dream of suing. Mostly he reads the Bible, and The Lord of the Rings, over and over. "God keeps saying to me, 'Tom, this is not about you. It's about Me,'" he told me. "There's something going on. And God is just trying to get me ready."

---

Quote:

The life of the gay man, in the evangelical imagination, seems to be an endless succession of orgasms, interrupted only by jocular episodes of male bonhomie. The gay man promises Christian men a guilt-free existence, the garden before Eve. As such, he is not just tempting but temptation embodied; "the Enemy," to whom Linda often refers

---