America Unzipped by Brian Alexander Page B

he can. But he’d rather miss a favorite program than expose himself to the seduction of the Adult Desires channel.
    Joe Beam is a Christian preacher. He prefers terms like
teacher
or
educator,
but he’s a preacher by training and inclination. Once his ministry was in an actual church, a Church of Christ, a group so conservative it seriously debates the propriety of music accompanying hymns and insists that Christians who join the Methodists or the Baptists, say, aren’t really Christians at all because the Bible is the literal word of God and in the Bible there are no sects and those poor, misguided apostates are going to hell for sure.
    Now, though, Beam runs an outfit based in Franklin, Tennessee, called Family Dynamics, part business, part personal mission, aiming to “build stronger marriages” through “interactive, highly effective faith-based marriage and family seminars.” He spent his Friday night here presenting the first part of his Love, Sex, and Marriage lesson to a group organized by a local United Church of Christ congregation, an evangelical bunch who are not the same as the Church of Christ, though the distinction doesn’t really matter to Joe. He says the same things to any conservative evangelical group who will have him. And last night, when he finished the talk on love, he did what he usually does when he’s on the road. He went back to his room, called his wife, Alice, at home in Tennessee, read a little, went to bed.
    No TV.
    I have come to see Joe because he aims to help his fellow conservative Christians cope with the culture made possible—or capitalized on—by the likes of PHE and because he represents the other side of the contradiction I have been trying to explain to myself, the way we seem to be ever more lusty even while we are supposed to be ever more puritanical. The problem of how to cope with lust has tortured Christians for two thousand years, so I wonder if the estimated hundred million or so mostly conservative evangelical Christians in this country have come to grips with what Joe himself calls our “hypersexual” culture, and what strategy Joe will give them aside from condemning it. After all, if 50 percent of preachers are visiting porn sites, and 20 percent say they have been “addicted” to them, it stands to reason the congregants are struggling to navigate, too. Finally, I hear Joe Beam can make the Bible sexy. That’s something I have to see.
    This morning Joe is taking his time. He hasn’t yet arrived in the large white tentlike structure the hotel has attached to the rear of its building to accommodate a large group. But about two hundred church members have, and they are singing an old-timey hymn.
    There’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus,
    No, not one! No, not one!
    None else could heal all our soul’s diseases,
    No, not one! No, not one!
    Jesus knows all about our struggles,
    He will guide till the day is done;
    There’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus,
    No, not one! No, not one!
    No friend like Him is so high and holy,
    No, not one! No, not one!
    And yet no friend is so meek and lowly,
    No, not one! No, not one!
    Jesus knows all about our struggles,
    He will guide till the day is done.
    And smiling. They are all smiling.
    The song ends and Jeff Wadstrom, a local church poobah, walks up to the elevated platform and stands behind a lectern. He greets us and says he hopes we enjoyed Beam’s talk on love last night. “Now,” he tells us, “the first talk today is going to be about sex.”
    â€œWooo! Woo hooo!”
    Men raise their arms. Wives laugh. Applause, applause. Wadstrom introduces a younger man, a newly married fellow, and asks him to give an invocation. The newlywed bows his head, as do we all, and addresses God, saying, “We are so grateful to be able to talk about something that is so much a part of your plan and that’s the sex.”
    Ahh, yes. The