America Is Becoming Dallas
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Megachurch
13 min read
The article centers on Prestonwood Baptist Church as a quintessential megachurch. Understanding the history, growth patterns, and sociological impact of the megachurch movement in America provides essential context for the article's broader argument about religious-political-commercial fusion.
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Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex
13 min read
The article argues Dallas represents a template for America's future. Understanding the metroplex's explosive growth, suburban sprawl patterns, economic development, and demographic shifts illuminates why the author chose this region as emblematic of broader national trends.
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Prosperity theology
14 min read
The article describes a fusion of Christianity with material abundance, fundraising appeals during services, and the 'infinite American entitlement, blessed by god.' Prosperity theology is the doctrinal framework underlying this religious-commercial synthesis at churches like Prestonwood.
“Dallas, in its not always very comfortable role as broker of money and fashion between Texas and the world beyond, has always been a changeling, gregarious and outward-bound in one chapter of its life, suspicious and rigid, inward and fearful in the next, tugged on one side by the xenophobic impulses of the state and on the other by the lure of the great beyond.”
-From “The Accommodation,” by Jim Schutze.
Going to church in a mall is a particularly American version of utopia. This is the dream that Prestonwood Baptist Church offers. Under the spacious, suburban skies of Plano, Texas, the Prestonwood campus delivers the architecture, amenities, and abundance of parking lots that you might expect from a trip to Dillard’s and the food court. The complex includes a Sports and Fitness Center, a handsome stadium, and a private school, whose Prestonwood Lions have been five-time state football champs.
The main building, with the sloping green metal roof and cream walls of a modern middle school, is flanked by a cross-topped tower and a 30-foot-high Christmas tree. Inside, its soaring atrium frames more than just a 7,000-seat megachurch with tiered seating. There is also a coffee shop, and a huge buffet restaurant and dining hall, and meeting rooms, and a book store, and a Kidz area, and many very tidy restrooms. There is cool air conditioning and clean carpets. There are friendly greeters and family activities. Here, you can find refuge from Satan’s scorching rays. Here, you can grab a chicken sandwich and a cappuccino and park your kids somewhere and yap and shop and relax. Yes, Jesus is here–right inside those double doors. But this is more than a church. This is a lifestyle. If you find yourself beguiled by the lifestyle, there is no telling where you might end up.
In this sense, Prestonwood is part of a much larger project. It is one pillar of a comprehensive vision of how America should live. There are many such visions–but right now, this one is ascendant. It has momentum. It is seizing territory, charging forward, feasting on the plastic fruit of plastic seeds planted by generations past. It is the idea of infinite American entitlement, blessed by god and unrestrained by man or nature. Everything for us, and hell for our enemies. In practice, this vision
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