Read Online America Unzipped by Brian Alexander - Free Book Online Page A

against his cheek and shoves it away, leaving him grinning and glancing sidelong at her.
    Joe begins the sex portion of his seminars with this flurry of apologetics to inoculate himself against the charge of being lascivious. He believes he is tiptoeing along a fragile divide. He wants to tell us hot sex is God’s will, but this hasn’t exactly been the impression left by his fellow fundamentalists.
    Former House of Representatives Majority Leader Tom Delay summed up the feeling of many fundamentalists when he declared that Christians in the United States were being assaulted by “our government, by the media, and throughout popular culture…For the last forty years, the anti-Christian Left in America has waged a sustained attack against faith in God, traditional moral norms, the rule of law, and the traditional marriage-based family.”
    James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, one of the most powerful religious right lobbying groups in America, once told a conservative crowd that he wanted to turn America into the old
Andy Griffith Show.
“I want to go back to the days of Mayberry, with Sheriff Taylor and Opie and all of those good folks,” he said.
    So Dobson and many others have made sex a potent political issue. You wouldn’t see Andy Taylor as the wise, kind Jesus figure shepherding his Mayberry flock of oddballs while advocating perversion. But perversion is everywhere in America. So Dobson has declared a “Great Civil War of Values,” and you better pick sides because things aren’t going so well for the good guys. “The traditionalists are being mauled,” Dobson has said.
    â€œUnfortunately, there are predators around your house that want to gain access to your sons and daughters. They will, if given an opportunity, twist, warp, and molest them. Indeed, they are tinkering with your locks today and seeking to break open the windows. Focus on the Family also stands ready to assist with the
defense
of your family. This is why our motto reads ‘nurturing and defending families worldwide.’ We care about both the inside and the outside of your home. All we need is your invitation to help. Let’s work together to save the next generation.
    â€œI’ll leave you with this request for your financial participation…”
    I mention Dobson because Joe has been a regular guest on Dobson’s radio program, and I’m trying to reconcile the man I see now with the Dobson rhetoric of war and the scary image of Ron Jeremy sneaking around the outside of my house. Joe Beam just doesn’t seem like a cultural warrior. He has a personal philosophy that sounds pretty live-and-let-live. “I am quite convinced that when Jesus said, ‘Love God and you love yourself,’ and ‘Love your fellow man as you love yourself,’ on these two hang all. They might be the only two questions on judgment day. ‘Did you love me? Did you love people?’ Well, come on in.’” His AA meeting, he likes to say, is the best church he ever goes to. In fact, he wants no part of the politics of sex. He won’t climb onto some red state barricade. He has his beliefs and they generally track Dobson’s, but for Joe, sex is a personal issue, not a political one.
    Â 
    J oe Beam never imagined he would someday become a fundamentalist sex guru. Nothing about his life gave him even a hint. He was born in southern Alabama and raised in Augusta, Georgia. He attended Bible college, married Alice, had two daughters, and for fifteen years preached the gospel to Church of Christ congregations, a neat and tidy life blessed by God.
    But when you walk a well-worn path, hardly having to think about what it is you are doing or where you are going, a serpent can trip you up. That’s what happened to Joe when he was thirty-four and began to ask questions. Is God kind and good? And if he is, how can it be that his grace and mercy are bestowed only on Church