Saints and Sinners: Walker Railey, Jimmy Swaggart, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Anton LaVey, Will Campbell , Matthew Fox

Preface:

The Masks of Faith

Journalists have never known exactly what to do with religion. On the ladder of professional esteem, religious writing ranks between recipes and obituaries. We who write about what people do have a more difficult time with what they think or believe.

And yet spiritual matters are far more influential in people’s lives than, for instance, politics, the mainstay of the journalist’s craft. This is true even in this supposedly secular age in which we live. Yes, one can look at the evidence of the declining membership of traditional churches, at the loss of any sense of the sacred in public life, and at the corruption of television evangelists who accept MasterCard and Visa and holler the name of Jesus as their 800 numbers roll across the screen. It is easy to see the decay of the religious ideal in America.

That does not mean that religion is dead. We are—as usual in this country—in the middle of religious tumult. The growth of modern fundamentalism is one of the most significant social movements of American history, comparable to the Great Awakenings of our past. The continuing appearance of cults of various kinds testifies to the fact that the American hothouse still seems to be a suitable climate for the rise of freelance prophets and spiritual experimenters. Compared with the moribund, but state-supported, denominations of Europe, the religious life of the United States is continually refreshed by the schisms and improvisations of one new sect after another. Some are overnight fads; others will take hold and become the established congregations of the future. It is confounding to realize that the success of one belief over another has little to do with the apparent craziness of the doctrine.

The Gallup polls, which have been measuring religious trends and church attendance for more than half a century, show a remarkable stability over time. In 1991, 42 percent of Americans regularly attended church, which is almost exactly the same figure as the number of churchgoers in the thirties (41 percent in 1939). More than half of all Americans said they believed in the existence of the Devil (up significantly from 39 percent in 1978). On Easter, 1991, 85 percent of Roman Catholics and 72 percent of Protestants attended services. Nine out of ten Americans prayed every week and said that they have never doubted the existence of God; eight out of ten said they believed in miracles and expected to answer for their sins on Judgment Day.

Compare those figures to the situation in Europe, where in France, for instance, about 12 percent of the population attends church, and in England, as a recent poll in the London Sunday Express discovered, 34 percent of Britons do not even know why Easter is celebrated. In the Western world, religion is an especially American phenomenon. And yet when a journalist unfolds his map of the spiritual terrain of America, he sees a patchwork of mysticism, hypocrisy, hucksterism, and violence, with an occasional dash of sexual perversity. Perhaps this is because religion tends to make the news only when it crosses into some other recognizable category where the journalist feels more at home. Sex crimes of clergy against children accounted for more than a hundred indictments in 1990 alone. A report to the 1991 Presbyterian General Assembly suggested that up to 23 percent of the Christian clergy nationwide has engaged in sexual behavior with parishioners, clients, or employees. My own files are stuffed with stories of blackmailed bishops, ritual murders, church-led real estate scams, apparitions of Jesus or the Virgin Mary, and feverish expressions of the millennium. Certainly in the last few years religious scandals have been a hallmark of our age—but they have been hallmarks of many ages in America. The religious scholar Lonnie Kliever speaks of religion as being the frontier between human creativity and lunacy. The truth of that statement is as apparent in our country as anywhere else in the world.

Thus the tendency of journalists to look upon religion as a marketplace of the weird and the absurd. I confess it is not easy to clear my head of this prejudice. I suppose that early on in my life I felt a need to choose between my allegiance to the worldview of reason, knowledge, and experience, on the one hand, and that of faith, on the other. The two perspectives seemed to cancel each other out. If one looks at life through the prism of faith, as I once did, then one is constantly having to reprogram the messages of reason, knowledge, and experience in order to make them conform to what one believes. And yet the person who commits himself to realism lives in a smaller dimension than someone whose life is animated by strong religious belief.

Many times in my career I have witnessed the transforming power of faith. I have seen it in prisons and ghettos as well as in boardrooms and chambers of power. I have often found myself admiring people who held views I strongly disagreed with—for instance, the Black Muslims, who believe that I am a devil because of my race but who have generated the moral power to bring order and dignity to prison life. Where addiction rules or where social values have collapsed, it is usually only those rare persons of faith who can survive and sometimes even transform their seemingly hopeless environments; I am thinking in particular about a foster mother I met once in the South Bronx, a Jehovah’s Witness, who managed to overcome her own drug addiction and to save a number of abandoned or orphaned children. My wife and I spent a summer in Pennsylvania writing about Amish and Mennonite dairy farmers, and we were powerfully affected by the beauty of their simple ways, even though the intellectual confinement of that existence was as oppressive, in its way, as life in a totalitarian society. When I covered the waning days of the civil rights movement, I was moved again and again by stories of people whose faith in God led them to place their own lives in jeopardy. I have seen how faith enlarges a person, allowing him to transcend his circumstances and his own flawed nature. With all the advances of technology and psychology, there are some transformations that only faith can accomplish. I look upon such believers with a mixture of envy and pity. They live in a world that has meaning, which is comforting even if that meaning is delusory.

I sought to better understand why people believe what they believe. It was a question that only vaguely interested me a few years ago. I had the idea that one either was born into faith or else stumbled into it at a vulnerable moment, and that one might as well worship one thing as another. It didn’t occur to me that the content of belief mattered, or that a person’s faith might be a complex metaphor for the life he lived. Nor did it seem vitally important in my own life.

For most of that life, I realized, I had leaned on my father’s faith. He was devout and comfortable with his beliefs, and I must have supposed that one day I would be as well—I was like him in so many other ways. He had been a religious leader on a small scale, as a Sunday school teacher; but for me, of course, he was Belief itself, the personification of Christianity. At some point during my turning away from the church and the traditions I had grown up with, I had made a mental date with my father’s religion. It was hard to imagine myself as a grown man without some firm conviction about the purpose of existence. I had expected that by the time I had children myself, I would have worked out my quarrels with religion and settled into some secure understanding about my place in the plan, and that I would be able to pass that sense of security—if not my actual beliefs—along to my children, as my father had done for me. But this expected rendezvous with faith never happened. Gradually I began to wonder if this was a failing on my part—or was it integrity?—that held me apart from religion. In any case, I still found some solace, even as a grown man, that my father was a believer.

Then, a few years ago, my father discovered that he had cancer. He faced it bravely, as I expected. The morning of his operation, after he had been given his injection and his hold on consciousness was beginning to fade, perhaps forever, he lay in his hospital bed and stared out at the whitish-blue winter sky. I believe in God, he said thickly. I believe within the limits of all rational understanding. But at the end it’s not enough. His eyelids bobbed, and in a moment the orderly came and wheeled him away. Of course, my thoughts were on his operation and whether he would recover. I pushed aside those doubts that he had expressed. I had wanted then to reassure him, as he would have done for me, but I had only sat there feeling inadequate and awfully afraid. It was later, after he recovered and I could allow myself to think of something other than the possibility of his death, that I realized how angry I was at him, how betrayed I felt at his being nothing but a poor doubter like myself. If I couldn’t rely on his faith any longer, then where could I turn?

He had done me a favor, I suppose, by showing me his doubt. But now I had the task of finding my own creed, even if that was atheism or some still unsettled form of agnosticism. I thought that by writing about people with various kinds of beliefs, I might find something worth believing, some anchor to secure the spiritual restlessness that was my constant shadow. Perhaps only a journalist, who lives so much of his life vicariously, would think this way. I imagined that I could test the value of a person’s belief by seeing it manifested in his or her life. After all, this was what had put me off religion in the first place, seeing people believe one way and live another. Religion didn’t have much value, in my opinion, unless it was transformative; otherwise it was lip service or a pointless guilt trip.

As a genre, then, this book presents itself as a travel adventure, in which the protagonist enters foreign territory in order to discover something valuable about himself; the only distinction here is that the traveler is moving through regions of belief rather than culture. For me, however, the experience of writing this book has called into question the whole notion of a spiritual journey, as it is popularly called. If there is such a journey, then it is taken on rails. Imagine religious belief as a subway system in which there are many possible stops. Aboveground, people go about their business, perhaps unaware of the intricate commotion going on in the world below their feet. But should a person be drawn into this world, he will probably enter through a station in his neighborhood. He discovers that he is on a line. Let us say it is my line—that is, mainline Protestant, which runs from fundamentalism to atheism with many intervening stops. If he looks at a map of the system, he will see the Jewish line, the Catholic, the Moslem, to name a few of the multiple possibilities, but they all pass through neighborhoods he is unlikely to visit except out of curiosity. As in other intricate systems, however, the lines intersect and parallel each other in various places. For instance, a number of different lines converge at the New Age station (formerly transcendentalism). The point of this analogy is that given who we are, we are constrained, if not actually destined, to arrive at the conclusions we eventually reach. That’s not to say that a person cannot transfer from one faith to another, by taking another train, or that free will and intellectual striving and the lessons of experience and sudden mystical encounters have no effect. They do. But in the universe of possible beliefs, what one chooses to believe (or disbelieve) reflects the life one has led.

Not long after I began this quest I had dinner with the controversial British scientist Rupert Sheldrake, who is the originator of the intriguing theory of morphogenic fields, which supposes that there is a sort of species memory for all organic creation. Like me, Sheldrake is an ex-Methodist who had wandered away from his childhood faith to see if he could find some more acceptable system of belief. Unlike me, Sheldrake had found it. Over our meal we chatted about this proposed book, in which I would attach myself to various believers in order to try on their faiths and see what, if anything, fit me. Sheldrake’s comment, ruthlessly appropriate, was What a very Methodist thing to do.

My object then was to be able to reconcile the two worldviews I mentioned earlier. I might be willing to accept the possibility of faith in my life, but not at the expense of reason, knowledge, and experience. I would look at the phenomenon of belief with the same cold eye I would bring to any other story. Was there any faith that could survive such scrutiny? Because the people profiled in this book are not merely believers but religious leaders, they leave themselves open to having someone like me explore their lives to see how their faith operates on a day-to-day level. As a practical matter, this made them more interesting to me and therefore easier to write about. Looking past their homilies to see whether the values they preach have any relevance to the lives they lead was a way of bringing them down to earth.

I have to admit that part of what was powering this quest was my need to strip away masks and find the hidden truth. Of course, masks have always been a feature of religion. In primitive societies, which are useful mirrors of our own, masks are frequently associated with shamans and religious ceremonies. When a Zuni puts on a mask of a kachina spirit, he is thought to be transformed into the kachina itself. Similarly, among the Onondaga tribe of the Iroquois, there was a False Face Society, a shamanistic group that put on masks in order to acquire the power of the deities the masks were supposed to represent. They used these masks in their healing ceremonies. Each of the people whose lives are described in this book is a mask-wearer; indeed, one of the fascinating motifs I discovered is how much artifice goes into constructing the public personas of our religious leaders. The more recognizable the mask is to our subconscious—that is, the purer the archetype—the more power the mask-wearer will have. Which mask they choose to hold up is a result of the life they have led.

Walker Railey, the first of those religious leaders profiled in this book, in 1986 wrote an insightful article on Halloween trick-or-treaters in his church newspaper:

In just a few short years, those same little people will grow up into big people. They will so mature in age and mind that they will no longer wear costumes on Halloween. Unfortunately, though, many of them will still be wearing masks. Instead of plastic masks that hide the face, they will wear emotional masks that hide the heart. They will learn to smile in public, even when they truly want to cry. They will develop a way of looking interested, even though they are bored to death.… Some folks are so good at wearing masks they never reveal their true identities to anyone—not their boss, not their spouse, not their children, not even themselves.

That certainly turned out to be an accurate description of Railey, but it also describes the situation of many people who try to hide human frailty behind the mask of holiness and spiritual certitude. Their faith is a portrayal of the life they would lead if they were something other than the all-too-human people they actually are.

Finally, a word about the title. When I began this book, the religious categories of saints and sinners seemed like an obvious way of looking at these figures on their own terms. I had become interested in the apparent paradox of people—like Walker Railey and Jimmy Swaggart—who struggled to be good but became victims of their own drive for perfection. Considering their fates, one could argue that the desire to be saintly is perilous, perhaps evil, perhaps even a form of mental illness. They tried to purge what they called the demons inside them; they tried to purify themselves and become as hallowed and sanctified as the masks they wore. Instead, their demons, their repressed needs, their disowned selves, whatever one might call them, took control. My own view is that these internal rebellions demonstrate the resistance of the human soul to being simplified and pigeonholed. I know that, by talking about the soul, I’m falling into the use of religious language, but that is the language we are speaking when we use such terms as good and evil, saints and sinners. The soul is the stage upon which this pageant is played out. In the real world, as we call the existential day-to-day, these words have no meaning. But in the masquerade of religious belief, words are symbols and symbols are power. One doesn’t have to believe in the soul to acknowledge the meaningfulness of the drama.

I saw as well in the lives of Madalyn O’Hair and Anton LaVey a certain purity that one might otherwise ascribe to religious ascetics. Indeed, in spiritual terms they are heroes of their type, because they have chosen to embody the two most frightening manifestations of the religious urge, doubt and evil. They live in the chambers of despair. Those who condemn them should also consider the moral courage required to explore the dark, uncertain territories of the human spirit that we name atheism and Satanism. To my way of thinking, there is a certain saintliness involved in carrying so much hatred directed at them from people who are unwilling to accept these archetypal aspects of themselves. It is exactly this bewildering, perverse, and paradoxical mixture of the saint in the sinner and the sinner in the saint that I find so compelling and revelatory of the mysteriousness of the human predicament.

One can object that I have not included a real saint in this collection, someone like Mother Teresa (who, in fact, rejected my request to write about her). I am willing to believe that such a creature exists, although the testimony of saints is almost always obsessive on the subject of their own fallen natures. Also, as a journalist once again, I confess that perfection doesn’t interest me. If I found a transcended personality who had achieved inner peace, I’m sure I wouldn’t know what to do with him or her. Will Campbell and Matthew Fox come closer to our idea of saintly personalities, but neither will ever be canonized. That’s because each has a hold on his humanity, what we might also call his flawed and sinful nature. What is truly saintly about them is the extent to which they resist the call to sainthood. Behind their masks, they remain themselves.

I discovered that each of these persons’ beliefs was a metaphor for his or her life. Even Madalyn O’Hair, who claims to be free of religion, is waging a vendetta against God, and in that sense her life is a spiritual struggle as well as a symbolic continuation of her fight against her father. Look also at Railey’s attempt to make the church his substitute family; at Swaggart’s flight into perversion to escape his longing for his mother; at LaVey’s embrace of the stigmatized, lonely child he had been; at Campbell’s loathing for all institutions; at Fox’s war with his father’s Augustinian beliefs: it is easy to see the Oedipal drama that is being played out in these leaders’ lives. For each of them, the individual mask of belief is a mythic way of expressing their emotional needs and their craving for love and acceptance.

It is no wonder that I would not find among these leaders a system of belief that I could accept. I have lived a different life. On the way to this discovery, however, I went on my own spiritual journey. My object was not just to see the sights but to change—to enlarge—myself. This is the chronicle of my search for faith.

Walker Railey’s Demon

WIFE OF ANTI-RACIST CLERIC IS ATTACKED, I read in the New York Times as I flew home from Los Angeles a few days after Easter. Margaret Railey, the thirty-eight-year-old wife of the Reverend Walker L. Railey of Dallas, was beaten, choked, and left for dead on the floor of their garage. Her husband found her unconscious body when he returned from studying at the library shortly after midnight on April 22, 1987. The police had no leads in the case. Dr. Railey, who is white, has been an outspoken critic of racial prejudice in this city, said the Times. According to the executive minister in Railey’s church, Gordon D. Casad, Railey had received a series of threatening letters in the preceding weeks and had preached the Easter sermon wearing a bulletproof vest.

It took a moment for the realization to sink in that this bizarre episode had taken place in my very own church, First United Methodist on the corner of Ross and Harwood in downtown Dallas. This was the church I grew up in and angrily ran away from and retreated to on several guilty occasions. What I always had hated about my church was its instinctive fear of confronting society. But here was a minister who had spoken out against racial injustices and inequality in a city where such things are rarely said aloud. Here was a man threatened with death in that same sanctuary. And here was a man whose wife was strangled into what the doctors called a persistent vegetative state, for no other obvious reason than that someone wanted to punish Walker Railey for preaching love, tolerance, and truth.

Was this Dallas? I asked myself. Dallas is profoundly racist, but it is also subtle and complex. The open savagery of the Railey tragedy seemed oddly wrong in a city that cares little about justice but is deeply preoccupied with appearances. From the very beginning of the Railey story there was this vague but haunting discordance.

And yet I was willing to believe that perhaps Dallas had returned to the racial violence of the fifties. Apparently Dallas worried about that too, and for the next week the city was on its knees in prayer services and editorial self-reproach. It was a moment when people of various faiths and races stopped to pray for Walker and Peggy Railey and their two young children, Ryan and Megan. Fight on, Railey family, cried the Reverend Daryll Coleman of the Kirkwood CME Temple Church in a rare gathering of the races at Thanks-Giving Square. Fight on, soldiers of righteousness and truth. Thank God for today. The Baptists issued a statement that the fact that a minister’s clear stand against racial injustice and bigotry would jeopardize his life is an indicting commentary on our society. Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman of Temple Emanu-El concluded that the Railey family had been singled out because of his almost prophetic stance in regard to injustice in any form.

As Peggy lay in intensive care, hundreds of visitors came day after day to Presbyterian Hospital to pay homage to a woman few people knew well. The traffic was so great that volunteers from the church came to assist. Peggy’s condition, at first critical, settled into an awful stasis. She was neither dead nor alive—it was as if she were waiting for some momentous resolution before she could either die or be released back into life. And as for her husband, his tragedy seemed unbearable. He had been the shining star of Methodism, as some called him, a comet of belief and commitment in a dark season of spiritual despair. He had awakened the slumbering old church and infused it with his electric vitality. Now he was crushed by some unknown force too vast and heartless to be fended off by faith alone.

On the Sunday after the attack, the congregation of First Church returned to their sanctuary in a state of shock. There was an obvious show of security police, which added to the air of continuing menace. From the pulpit, Dr. Casad read a message from Railey, who remained in the hospital to be near his wife. I do not know why senseless violence continues to pervade society, nor do I understand why the events of this past week took place, Railey’s message said. You have proven to me and all of Dallas that our church is a family.… I have been reminded once again that the breath of life is fragile but the fabric of life is eternal.

As gruesome as this episode was, I felt hope and pride in a city that was painfully examining itself—even though I had long since fled Dallas in dismay—and in a church that was nobly living its doctrine. It seemed to me that the attack on Peggy Railey might become another critical adjustment in the city’s consciousness, just as the Kennedy assassination had been. Perhaps it was the special destiny of the citizens of Dallas to grow through tragedy and to know, as few others do, their own capacity for evil.

These were my thoughts until nine days after the attack, when Railey locked himself in his hospital suite and ingested three bottles of tranquilizers and antidepressants. He left a lengthy suicide note, explaining that there was a demon inside his soul and that he was tired of trying to be good. He called himself the lowest of the low. By the time police broke down the door the following morning, Railey, too, had fallen into a coma.

Although First Church is not even the largest Methodist church in Dallas, it has the reputation of being the mother church of Methodism. Eight men who stood in the pulpit before Railey went on to become bishops; indeed, Railey’s own election to the episcopacy was regarded as a certainty, perhaps as early as 1988, when he would have become one of the youngest bishops in the history of Methodism. Even his appointment as senior pastor of First Church in 1980 at the age of thirty-three was an astonishment, according to the eminent Methodist theologian and historian Albert Outler. He leapfrogged over two dozen of his elders who thought they were his equal.

For ten years First Church had been losing members, as had many downtown churches all across the country, as had Methodism itself. But from the day of his very first sermon, when Railey stood in the pulpit and dramatically blew into the microphone, he seemed to breathe new life into the moribund church. Membership quickly increased, as did the budget, which more than doubled over the seven years of Railey’s leadership. He was a vigorous, outspoken advocate of certain social issues endorsed by the yuppie element who had begun to make up the new, younger core of the congregation. He opposed capital punishment, supported equal rights for women and minorities, declared his ambivalence on the subject of abortion, and defended the rights of homosexuals. He preached an open letter to President Reagan calling for increased efforts at arms control. All of these stands, in the context of Dallas, seemed rather brave, although it is also true that other Methodist ministers in town had preached similar sermons, and Railey’s right-thinking social liberalism was pretty much what Methodism had come to. As for the antiracism that was the supposed motive for the attack on his family, that reputation was based almost entirely on a single innocuous sermon Railey delivered on Martin Luther King’s birthday, in which he made the statement that there is more racial tension and polarization in Dallas, Texas, than many fine, upstanding citizens are willing to admit. One could scarcely call him a crusader.

Personal behavior—that is to say, morality and ethics—seldom rated a mention in Railey’s church. He often inveighed against the disparity of great wealth and great deprivation that characterized the city, but he himself had grown comfortable with his $100,000 annual salary, his luxurious Lake Highlands home, and the many perks, favors, loans, and subsidies that come from being a high-steeple preacher in a wealthy Protestant congregation. For a young man who had grown up in the little western Kentucky farming community of Owensboro, the son of a sheet-metal worker, it had been quite a climb. To a certain extent, he was an existential man, observed Dallas city councilman Craig Holcomb, who was one of those drawn to Railey’s ministry. He worked very hard and created who Walker Railey was going to be.

Because of the importance of First Church within the denomination, many of the congregation were ordained ministers who were either retired or working in other areas of the ministry. Among this group Railey was a highly divisive figure. Indeed, they were still wrangling over the Railey legacy when I returned to First Church to survey the chaos. I’ve heard Harry Emerson Fosdick, Ralph Sockman, Ernest Fremont Tittle, and Norman Vincent Peale, a Railey confidant and former pastor told me, and I still feel that Walker Railey was the greatest pulpiteer I ever heard. The Reverend Howard Grimes, who taught Christian education at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins Theological Seminary for thirty-three years, claimed that Railey was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, Protestant preachers in the latter half of the twentieth century. He had become God for a lot of people, and maybe me. The younger preachers in the congregation—Railey’s contemporaries—tended to look at him with less awe and more than a little resentment. His popularity at First Church was such for many people that they lost all sense that he had any imperfection, the Reverend Spurgeon Dunnam III told me bitterly. He and Railey had jostled for power in the corporation that is buried inside the denomination. Dunnam, the editor of the United Methodist Reporter, was himself sometimes mentioned as a potential bishop, and he recognized in Railey a tireless competitor: The politics of the church are so subtle that only the most astute and discerning could understand what was going on. Walker was very analytical and perceptive; he took to that process very early. It became clear to me his primary agenda was to be elected to the episcopacy as soon as possible. He campaigned for it by accepting speaking engagements here, there, and everywhere. He seemed incapable of saying no to serving additional outside responsibilities. His ambition was so completely unchecked.

For four decades the most prominent churchman in town was the white-haired, white-suited eminence W. A. Criswell. His church, First Baptist, is a kind of Vatican inside downtown Dallas, occupying block after block of precious real estate. The pews of First Baptist are filled with the city’s power brokers and by the conservative Southern Baptist hierarchy. Evangelist Billy Graham has been a longtime member of this congregation. When presidents came to town, they would call on Criswell. And of course, whenever there was news that required a comment from a religious authority, the press turned to the elder statesman at First Baptist.

Within a few years after Railey came to town, however, he began to rival even Criswell’s great eminence. Railey became president of the Dallas Council of Churches. He served on the national board of United Methodist Global Ministries. In the press, Railey became a liberal counterweight to Criswell’s fundamentalist, socially conservative views. Railey’s greatest honor was being selected to preach the Protestant Hour sermons on a nationwide Christian radio network. Already his name was widely mentioned among Methodists who marked this gracious young pastor not just for the bishop’s chair but for something more—for greatness, in whatever form that might assume.

Railey’s professional model was that titan of the Protestant pulpit Harry Emerson Fosdick, the first of the modernist preachers, who railed against fundamentalism and pioneered the practice of pastoral counseling. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., built the magnificent Riverside Church in New York near Columbia University so that Fosdick could have a national forum for his progressive views. With a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other, Fosdick brought the weight of the church to bear upon the affairs of the world. For twenty years his voice was a familiar sound to Americans everywhere through his popular radio program, National Vespers. Fosdick’s gospel was broad and urbane and forgiving. Even a little backwoods community such as Owensboro, Kentucky, locked as it was in spiritual isolation, could hear a different message than the hard-shell fundamentalism of the country church. For countless Americans, Fosdick was a liberating force who bridged the secular world and the divine with his intelligence, wit, and moral passion.

For the past seven years, Railey had been working on a comprehensive Fosdick biography. Each summer First Church paid for his research trips to New York and Scotland. Naturally, many of Fosdick’s preaching tricks showed up in Railey’s own sermons—such as his habit of saying Someone out there needs to hear this or I know there’s someone here today whose life is hanging by a thread. His staff called them Walkerisms because they added to the impression people often had that he was speaking directly to them. In fact these locutions were straight out of Fosdick. Later, some of the more knowing preachers in the congregation would wonder if Railey’s real ambition was to succeed William Sloane Coffin, who was about to step down from the Riverside pulpit. That seemed too great a step for any Dallas preacher, however talented; but then no one had ever taken a full measure of Railey’s ambition.

The extraordinary pressures of his job already were evident in Railey’s personality. Several times he told Gordon Casad that the congregation at First Church could never forgive even a single bad sermon, so he slaved over his lessons, polished his delivery, choreographed his gestures, until each one was a characteristic Railey gem. Once, in the receiving line after the eleven o’clock service, an admiring seminary student asked what it took to preach a sermon like the one he had just heard, and Railey answered candidly, About thirty-five hours.

In a church with a congregation of nearly six thousand members and a $2 million budget, a pastor spends a considerable amount of time visiting hospitals, preaching at funerals, counseling troubled youngsters, running administrative meetings, setting budget goals—it’s a demanding occupation. Railey had a staff of sixty-five people to assist him, but just keeping them appeased was a full-time job. He insisted on knowing the name of every member of his congregation, even the tots in the nursery. He made a specific point of sending handwritten birthday greetings, and more than once he appeared at a high school play just to see a young member perform.

He had, it seemed, adopted the entire congregation as his family. The church came to represent the idealized loving family Railey had never known as the child of alcoholic and often neglectful parents. The soft-eyed choir director, John Yarrington, became the older brother I never had. Howard Grimes was a real father to me. It was typical of Railey to seek out family