There were no off-nights for the Lord's weary travelers. Too many souls needed to be saved. As soon as Attorney General John Ashcroft's grandfather pitched a revival tent somewhere along the Eastern Seaboard in the 1920s, scores of folks found their way to him -- eager for salvation, hungry to share the power of the Holy Spirit, hoping that their physical ailments might be healed, looking to cast out the devil from their lives.
Ashcroft's grandfather John -- an Irish immigrant who turned his life over to evangelizing after surviving third-degree burns from a gasoline explosion -- collected believers and wannabe believers wherever he could find them. And Ashcroft's father, J. Robert Ashcroft, was by his side, a schoolboy missing school. After selling their home and other earthly belongings, the family drove from state to state in a 1921 Chevrolet touring car, topped with an oilcloth canopy and "Jesus Is Coming Soon!" signs tacked to the sides.
Flat tires were a constant torment on those rocky and rutted roads. So were the tomatoes and rotten eggs thrown their way, harsh reminders of the ridicule Pentecostals faced for their belief in divine healing and a Holy Spirit that could possess human bodies. But mostly what the attorney general's father remembered -- and shared in oral histories before his death in 1995 -- was the contagious frenzy of the crowds: "Whole churches were turned inside-out, right-side-up. . . . Worship broke out on trolley cars and into streets and homes and wherever people would get together."
Flash-forward 30 years, to the early 1950s, and the nation's future attorney general, John Ashcroft, is crisscrossing the country to watch his father preach. Father and son sit on the front seat of a more reliable Plymouth -- and now the summertime meetings are convened in air-conditioned auditoriums as often as steamy tents. But the same rapture and euphoria grip the congregants as they invite the Holy Spirit into their bodies. People would be "singing in the Spirit, and soprano voices carrying what might be called arias, and all in pitch, and everybody almost intoxicated," Ashcroft's father recalled.
Now Ashcroft, and the country he serves, face a different test of conviction. Six days after hijacked airliners slammed into the Pentagon and World Trade Center towers, the attorney general appeared on CNN's "Larry King Live." He offered the same lengthy rundown of law enforcement efforts that he had given to commentators the day before, when he spent his Sunday on TV news shows instead of in church.
Then came a question at the heart of Ashcroft's nature: Had the terrorist attacks shaken his faith?
"My belief has not been shaken," Ashcroft answered. He had always "invoked the protection and blessing of God" and would continue to do so.
Then this son and grandson of Pentecostal preachers made clear who he thinks will win the struggle. "I believe that America has reopened the window on its own soul, and what it sees is a strong nation," he said. "I'm sorry about this tragedy, but we're going to get through it."
"John believes in the existence of evil, of Satan," says one intimate. "He will work to the point of exhaustion to defeat evil."
This is the mystic, intuitive, right-brain side of Ashcroft -- and it goes a long way toward explaining the tension between this controversial political figure and the rational, logical, left-brain world of Washington, D.C.
He remains very much part of a religious tradition that is as insulated as it is otherworldly. He quotes Scripture off the cuff and doesn't read newspapers or watch TV news, preferring instead to be briefed by trusted aides -- part of the "oral tradition" of his family and faith life, associates say. He lives a pious life, once recalling that he was first attracted to his wife, Janet -- a fellow law student with a degree in math -- because of her "modesty." Later he prohibited "intoxicants" inside the Missouri governor's mansion and queried potential judicial nominees about their marital faithfulness.
So what accounts for the intense political ambitions of this former Missouri governor and U.S. senator, a man raised to save souls for the next life, not indulge in the power offered by this one? The answer can be found within the story of the complex man he adored -- his father, James Robert Ashcroft, whose thirst to get the education he had to forgo as the son of a wandering preacher drew him into the secular world of academia.
Just as the attorney general's intense Pentecostal faith marks him as an oddball in the political establishment, so too did his father's PhD in psychology and commitment to bringing liberal arts education to the Assemblies of God church attract suspicion from fellow Pentecostals. Father and son were rooted in a faith fixed on Heaven, where only God's guidance mattered in everyday life and scant attention was paid to earthly matters such as social justice or politics or education. Yet both men shared an unusual determination to mix the worlds of the faith-centered and the temporal.
A Mission to Educate
It wasn't his father's preaching that left the biggest impression on the future attorney general during those summer trips to far-flung Bible meetings. Instead, Ashcroft talks about the long car rides, when a restless-minded father engaged his bright young son in adult-scale theological discussions. Ashcroft insists that these conversations more than made up for the fact that his dad never attended his baseball or football games growing up in Springfield, Mo.
"What I most cherish about my father is not that he was part of my world, but that he welcomed me into his world," Ashcroft recalls. "My father had a way of suggesting I had a responsibility in the adult world, so I didn't feel like I wanted to rebel on the way into adulthood."
During those car rides, Ashcroft's father also encouraged his son to "get his education squared away" before pursuing anything else. John, who excelled at school and football, attended Yale on a scholarship and then obtained a law degree from the University of Chicago.
"My father had a sense of stewardship, that if you had gifts, you ought to seek to develop them and then deploy them in the highest setting available," Ashcroft says.
But the encouragement to attend an Ivy League school was striking, given the context. By the time John applied to college, J. Robert Ashcroft had established a reputation as one of the half-dozen most important figures in the development of the Assemblies of God, a branch of the Pentecostal movement formed in 1914 and headquartered in Springfield. Pentecostals are fervently emotional in their worship and strongly believe in the limits of human logic and rationality. "Worldly schools provoked suspicion at best, hostility at worst," Duke religion professor Grant Wacker writes in his book "Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture." Pursuing a college degree not only suggested a lack of humility (only the self-important sought such earthly credentials), it also was considered a waste of precious time when the real purpose of life was to save as many souls as possible before Christ's return. If you went to college, you went to Bible school, period.
J. Robert Ashcroft never told his son that his own interest in education began with a personal humiliation. During World War II, he volunteered to become a military chaplain. He avoided being recruited as a soldier because "I didn't want to kill anybody," he recalled. But he felt a deep commitment to his country, and hoped he could exercise his patriotic duty by ministering to American soldiers. Instead, he was turned down -- as were scores of other evangelical preachers -- for lack of education.
That rejection drove Ashcroft out of the revival tent and into academia. He belatedly finished his high school education, took college courses near his home in Chicago, and then completed his undergraduate degree at a state teaching college in Connecticut. In 1948, he moved his wife and three young sons to Missouri to teach at an Assemblies of God Bible college. But he spent summers in Manhattan, where he rented a cold-water fourth-floor flat while he completed a doctorate in psychology at New York University. (Later, he was widely called by the nickname "Dr. A.")
Keenly aware that his Pentecostal forebears were "crude, even vulgar in their language," Dr. A read Shakespeare and Wordsworth and spoke with conscious grandiloquence. The family stretched a modest salary to make ends meet. (Even today the notoriously cheap attorney general knows which fast-food chain is offering a 99-cent burger.) Nevertheless, Ashcroft's father favored pressed suits with three-pointed handkerchiefs poking out of the breast pocket. He counseled his son John on the value of crisp white shirts and "dressing for the job you want, not the job you have."
Inside the councils of the Assemblies of God during the 1950s, J. Robert Ashcroft -- by then the denomination's secretary of education -- lobbied for the establishment of a Christian-oriented liberal arts school for future lawyers, doctors and entrepreneurs who wished to remain faithful but pursue a vocation other than the ministry. Opponents argued that it would drain precious resources from the church's seminary and Bible schools.
To the old guard, Ashcroft and his ideas were suspect. "He was an innovator and innovators attract heat," says Robert H. Spence, president of Evangel University, the Springfield, Mo., college that grew out of J. Robert's efforts. Dr. A also raised eyebrows when he began praying regularly with the local Catholic bishop. Much later, he temporarily fell from the good graces of Assemblies of God authorities (who declined to publish his book on prayer) by joining an interdenominational fellowship group.
Dr. A and his allies eventually prevailed and founded Evangel in 1955, but only after the school was put under strict fundraising guidelines that left the institution struggling financially. Evangel opened its doors with 93 freshmen studying in Army barracks that once housed a military hospital, and received accreditation as a liberal arts college 10 years later. The student body has since grown to nearly 1,500 undergraduates with an alumni list that includes Chief of Naval Operations Vernon Clark, Republican congressman Todd Tiahrt of Kansas, and Phil Stanton, co-founder of the Blue Man Group performance ensemble.
But Evangel retains its fundamentalist Christian nature. The Bible is taught as the literal word of God, and evolution as a theory. Students are required to take 16 credit hours of Bible study and agree to a conduct code of modest dress, no dancing, no drinking and no premarital sex. There are "modesty panels" covering desk fronts so teachers won't be distracted by youthful legs.
Despite his PhD in the study of the human mind, Dr. A remained a devout Pentecostal. "There are spiritual things that are important in one's existence which aren't necessarily attained through academic inquiry," says the attorney general. "My dad would say there are things that come by revelation and insight and by attitude as well as by academics."
Powerful Prayers
Every morning, J. Robert Ashcroft would pull his three boys out of bed for prayer. Bob, the eldest, John, the middle child, and Wesley, the youngest, would wander sleepy-eyed down to the living room, and snuggle inside the kneeling posture of their father, as the warm timbre of his voice filled the room: "Turn our eyes from the temporal, the physical, the menial, and turn us toward the eternal, the spiritual and the noble"
To young John, the sound of his father's prayer "was a magisterial wake-up call." As he recalled in his autobiographical 1998 book, "Lessons From a Father to His Son": "My father prayed as if his family's life and vitality were even then being debated on high as he bowed low."
The attorney general was first baptized in the Holy Spirit, which is evidenced by speaking in tongues, as an 11-year-old at the Shrine Mosque in Springfield, an experience he describes as "energizing, in the sense of what I would call restorative energy -- restoring the relationship to God. I wouldn't say that's the only time in my life I felt that need, but that was certainly a very public time."
Unlike his father, John enjoyed a typical boyhood of public schools and sports and playing pranks with his older brother. Athletics, in particular, provided a bridge to outsiders who, as his brother Bob recalled, sometimes taunted this family of "holy rollers." During his freshman year at Yale -- "where the first thing my classmates learned about me was that I didn't dance, smoke or drink" -- John found acceptance through his performance on the football field.
Music, too, was central to Ashcroft's boyhood. Dr. A played piano, trombone and cornet. John learned to play the piano and for years performed gospel ballads in churches and on campuses alongside his singing partner, a Democratic judge. Later he joined the Singing Senators foursome on Capitol Hill. Today the attorney general writes his own music and has recorded his songs on CD.
Within the confines of his faith, Dr. A encouraged his three sons to be freethinkers. "At first I thought they were spoiled, then I realized that he was allowing them to make their own choices -- and suffer the consequences," recalls Norma Champion, a Missouri state legislator who baby-sat for the Ashcrofts. "The boys felt very free to express themselves. He encouraged them to think what they wanted."
Sunday Service
The auditorium of Central Assembly Church in downtown Springfield is huge -- six aisles with staircases sweeping into a balcony, and pews for 2,900 souls. There are lots of walkers and hearing aids, but also a sizable number of youths. Nearly everyone pouring down the aisles is white.
On the Sundays that he stays in Washington, the attorney general attends an evangelical church service convened in one of the Union Station movie theaters -- with a rock band, a 31-year-old pastor who wears khakis and uses words such as "multi-tasking," and an ethnically mixed congregation.
But Springfield's Central Assembly is his real home, as it was for his father. (Before Sept. 11, he regularly went back on weekends.) Last fall, during a menacing ice storm and in the midst of his failed Senate reelection campaign, Ashcroft and his wife, Janet, were the only ones to dutifully turn out for the 8:15 a.m. Sunday service. On the Fourth of July, he stood at the pulpit and sang a song he wrote after being inspired by the sight of an eagle soaring through the Ozarks sky.
On a steamy Sunday morning in July, a robed choir of about a hundred singers files into place onstage and breaks into a lovely a cappella piece that would be at home in any church service.
But then the mood shifts as the instruments start up, the music builds, and a smiling pastor dives into the congregation, exhorting members to "let the Spirit in." The singing remains in unison, but as the emotional tenor rises, individuals close their eyes and sway, reaching heavenward and speak aloud in enraptured tones. The voice of an elderly woman in a tapered red suit, standing in a back pew, sounds desperate and wavering. "Ooooo!" she cries. "Ahhhh! Praise God. Thank you, Jesus!"
In the center of the huge congregation a man's voice erupts in a foreign-sounding language, a haunting exclamation that hangs in the air before ending in an English exhortation that the members "worship with pure hearts." The pastor nods and picks up on the theme: "We live in a soiled world. . . . We ask you, Lord, to touch us and make our hearts pure."
As if on cue, the music picks up again. This time a woman's voice breaks out of the congregation, loudly calling in a lyrical cadence:
"I have answered from a stillness from within!
Behold!!
I will speak to you from that stillness!"
The pastor thanks her, but she continues:
"There you shall be free.
There you shall be made whole."
In pentecostalism, this outburst is known as a prophetic voice and is said to be the Holy Spirit speaking to the congregation through the person of a believer. "I've heard J. Robert Ashcroft on numerous occasions give a prophetic word," says the Rev. George O. Wood, general secretary of the Assemblies of God. "It is for the purpose of encouraging, strengthening the believer -- of speaking to some individual need within a congregation."
There is much debate among nonbelievers about the physiological or psychological forces behind tongue-speaking, in which congregants utter languages they have not learned, just as Christ's disciples did in the New Testament. Within the evangelical family, these raw emotional displays have lent Pentecostals the status of the embarrassing cousins. For believers, tongues are evidence that a person has been baptized in the Holy Spirit.
But members of the Assemblies of God hold a view that separates them from other Pentecostals: If you are possessed by the Holy Spirit, you remain conscious, and you can control yourself, Wood says. Speaking in tongues is accepted, but screaming, writhing on the floor, or shaking and laughing uncontrollably -- fixtures of the old Pentecostal services and still some today -- are not permitted in Assemblies churches. "As a pastor, I've had to shut some people down," Wood says.
In other words, the church that Dr. A sought to modernize was in itself a modernizing influence on the Pentecostal movement that the attorney general's uneducated grandfather helped build.
Giving Testimony
It is early in September -- before the catastrophic eents of Sept. 11 overwhelmed the Justice Department -- and Attorney General Ashcroft sits stiffly in his Washington office. In Springfield, Pentecostals are effusive in describing their faith experiences. In interview tapes, his father waxes eloquent about his own spiritual experiences. Ashcroft, by contrast, is tightly wound, a fox looking for the trap, a fervently faithful man operating in a hostile secular world.
As the discussion unfolds on more comfortable subjects -- his father's emphasis on education, his own experience as a football player at Yale – he leans back and starts twisting his feet until they come out of his loafers. (He is, of course, wearing a crisp white shirt, as Dr. A advised.) Soon the shoes are off, sitting on the floor, with the attorney general's stockinged feet settled on top.
Then the subject turns back toward faith -- and the critics who worry about his ability to be an impartial chief law officer for the nation. The feet slip back into the loafers. Ashcroft stiffens and leans forward.
"I believe that every person who welcomes God into his or her life, every Christian who has asked, is filled with the spirit of God, and the manifestations of the feeling of God's spirit are described in the Scripture in a variety of ways," he says. "Certainly the kind of things my father has described -- utterances that are unintelligible, or the speaking in Tongues -- those are part of my culture and experience. . . . Those are an appropriate way for the Spirit of God to be reflected in a person's life."
He quickly turns the conversation to another point, one that, in retrospect, seems almost prophetic: "I have to say here: Some people want to indicate that -- because I'm identified as a person of belief -- that I would impose my beliefs. [But] it's against my religion to impose my religion. God doesn't impose Himself on people -- God respects freedom so much, and choice so much, that He allows us to choose against Him. . . . It's at their peril and He wishes they wouldn't. . . . But God has such respect for freedom that He allows people to even make choices that result in perishing."
© 2001 The Washington Post Company