For The Love of God: Hot Times At Saddleback

Would Jesus speak publicly about his addiction to midget porn?

This plaintive question finds new urgency in Prophet of Purpose: The Life of Rick Warren, a fully authorized biography of the famous Southern Californian pastor, published this month by Doubleday Religion, a division of Random House.

Without exception, reviews in the secular and evangelical press have emphasized Warren’s sincere, if controversial, “authenticity,” his generous, if widely self-publicized, donations to charity, and his passionate, if unconvincing, portrayal of dismay upon learning that gay men and lesbians took exception to his equating homosexuality with incest.

Without exception, reviews in the secular and evangelical press have, however, failed to address the startling degree of self-confidence betrayed in Warren’s casual acceptance of “prophet” as an accurate and appropriate description of who he is and what he does, and the startling degree of self-confidence betrayed in Warren’s casual acceptance of “national religious leader” as an accurate and appropriate description of who he is and what he does despite his and his wife’s eagerness to tell the world that she struggles with a decades-long addiction to what would seem unspeakably filthy pornography.

Evidence that “prophet” is perhaps an inexact job title for Warren is offered in an abridged excerpt of Prophet of Purpose, “Rick and Kay Warren’s Painful, Gradual Love Story,” published in the current online edition of Christianity Today, an evangelical publication that once might have been arguably described as intellectual and as having a passing familiarity with irony.

In this excerpt, Warren’s wife Kay admits that when Warren proposed to her on their second date after they’d consumed an enormous ice cream sundae called a “pig’s trough,” her immediate thought was, “Okay, God, I don’t love him. I’m in love with his best friend. What in the world do I say to this guy who has asked me to marry him?”

According to Kay, God told her to say “yes” to a marriage proposal from a man whom she emphatically didn’t love.

And after a honeymoon which both Kay and Warren without irony describe as “disastrous,” Kay makes a point of telling Warren that she’d been sexually molested when she was three-years old, “suggesting that it was no big deal,” and admits that while a teenager she found a “neighbor’s stash of pornography and quickly became addicted to it…The ‘good girl’ part of me loved God passionately and wanted my life to count for something. The ‘bad girl’ part of me didn’t know how to break the cycle.”

If we’re to believe that Warren and Kay have a somewhat vested interest in the relevance and veracity of Judeo-Christian scripture, we have a difficult time making sense of Prophet Warren’s glaring inability to foresee Kay’s porn addiction when we contrast this failure with the explicit admonitions in Deuteronomy and throughout the New Testament that demonstrably inaccurate, slipshod, or “false” prophets ought be immediately stoned to death. (“You must purge the evil from amongst you,” sayeth, for example, Deuteronomy 13:5.)

If we’re to believe that Warren and Kay are somewhat sentient adult human beings in possession of the functional common sense reasonably expected from people who haven’t been pronounced clinically dead, we have a hard time understanding Kay’s admitting to a honeymoon-destroying and marriage-crippling addiction to pornography in such a way as to invite and incite her readers’ most phantasmagorically lurid and depraved imaginings of the precise type and content of the pornography she finds so incessantly enticing.

Leaving us to our own (worst) devices, Kay’s coy ellipsis practically gets down on its sweaty, slippery, glistening hands and knees and sinks its well-oiled talons into our hairy muscular thighs that are speckled with shiny flecks of bodily fluids and begs us, please, please, to let our imaginations run absolutely 100% apeshit screaming, barking, jizz-spurting wild with all sorts of colorful imaginings of the sights, smells, sensations, and hardware that drive this preacher’s wife right out of her gourd with gutter-wallowing desire.

Is this, I ask, something of which Jesus would approve?

Since when was “Blessed are those who invite believers to fantasize about ineffably perverse sexual behavior” amended to the Beatitudes?

While these questions may go unanswered, we can and do know precisely when a crushingly naive and dangerously unselfconscious brand of triumphalist evangelicalism was elevated to the mainstream of American Protestantism:

It was on January 20, 2009, when Rick Warren, at the invitation of President Obama, delivered the Inauguration Day Invocation.