Faith and Loving in Las Vegas
A Savage Journey to the Heart of American Fundamentalism
We were somewhere around the Armagosa Valley on a highway south of Area 51 when the delusion began to take hold. I remember saying something like, “I’m getting sleepy… maybe you should drive.”
And suddenly, there was a terrible cacophony all around us. Where once the glow of the Las Vegas Strip suffused the distant night sky with its amber-gold hues, it was now darkened by a swarm of apocalyptic bats, their wings flapping wildly as they circled above our heads, screeching, and dive bombing the car.
“Holy Jesus!” I shouted! “What are these infernal animals?” My heart pounded against my chest like a bent beater on a hand mixer set to high speed. One minute a glowing vision of excess and indulgence danced on the distant horizon like an aberration hovering seductively over her living lover; the next minute we were enveloped by a black hail storm of demonic raptors.
“What are you yelling about? Is everything okay? The kids are asleep!” Her voice groggy from being wakened suddenly nevertheless took the form of a strong steady whisper. Then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, the bats vanished into the darkness, their only trace a lingering sense of foreboding.
My wife adjusted herself back to a fully upright position and threw the pillow she’d been using on the floor behind her seat. Despite the chaos that had just moments ago been all around us, she was calm. She stared straight ahead for a minute gaining her lucidity with a look of grim determination.
“We’re almost there,” I said. My heart was still thumping violently as I glanced over at her.
“Please keep your eyes on the road and stop trying to kill us,” she said flatly, pulling her hair into a pony tail. She then pulled some lip balm from her bag and begin to apply it like she was about to arrive at her destination.
I scanned the night sky for the bats, or whatever the hellish creatures were. It was as if the seven seals of the Apocalypse had been opened right before my eyes and she just slept through it all.
I could now feel the ominous intensity of her stare on my face but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the sky in front of us to look at her. “Did you doze?”
I shook my head. Suddenly, I wanted to argue with her. I wanted to protest against the madness of it all, but something in her gaze silenced me—a primal instinct that reminded me not to argue with her, no matter how irrational it all seemed.
“Maybe it was a sign, a sign that we’re on the right path,” I said and glanced in her direction. It was now her who was staring out into the night, scanning the sky for something she had yet to experience.
With a looming sense of trepidation, I let the glittering lights of Las Vegas draw us like a bug lite out of the darkness toward our unwitting demise. There was no turning back now, no retreat from the work that lay ahead. Despite what to me had seemed like the fourth trumpet of Revelation being blown, the kids slept on peacefully in the back seats of the van, visions of sugarplums no doubt dancing in their heads.
My wife, sitting beside me, remained calm, her eyes fixed ahead with a steely determination that mimicked my own fanaticism. I was, after all, a man of God, a pastor ordained by the laying on of hands. Our family had been sent out with the fervent prayers of the faithful. For years, I had been mentored in the ministry and had served with unwavering devotion, preaching the unadulterated truths of the King James Bible to all whom I could force to listen.
Now we had been commissioned to go out into the world on our own. We were missionaries, church planters on a mission to reach people in the heart of the fastest growing city in the nation. We just didn’t know it was the beginning of a pilgrimage, a savage journey, if you will, right into the very heart of our fundamentalism.