no one. At chapel, we were sometimes shown religious agitprop videos, the worst of which featured a handsome dark-haired man bidding his young son farewell in a futuristic white chamber, and then, as violins swelled in the background, walking down an endless hall to be executed—martyred for his Christian faith. I cried, because—please—I wasn’t heartless! Afterward we all sang a song called “I Pledge Allegiance to the Lamb.”
In middle school, I became aware of my ambivalence—just distant enough to be troubled by the fact that I felt distant. I started to feel twinges of guilt at the end of every church service, when the pastor would call for people to come forward and accept Jesus: what if this feeling of uncertainty meant that I needed to avow Him again and again? I didn’t want to be a bad person, and I especially didn’t want to spend eternity in hell. I’d been taught that my relationship with God would decay if I wasn’t careful. I wasn’t predestined, I wasn’t chosen: if I wanted God’s forgiveness, I had to work. I started getting agoraphobic in the Worship Center on Sundays. Thinking about these intimate matters in such a crowded public place felt indecent. I took breaks from services, sometimes curling up on the couches in the corridor outside where mothers shushed their infants, or walking up to the highest balcony to pass the time reading the psychedelic book of Revelation in the blissfully unsupervised pews.
One Sunday, I told my parents I needed a sweater from the car. I walked out across the big, echoing atrium with the keys jangling from my hand and our pastor’s voice ringing through the empty space. In the parking lot, the asphalt festered, softening; the sun burned out my eyes. I got into the passenger seat of our powder-blue Suburban and put the key in the ignition. The Christian radio station was playing—89.3 KSBJ, with its slogan “God listens.” I mashed the Seek button, hitting country, alt-rock, the Spanish stations, and then something I had never heard before. It was the Box, Houston’s hip-hop radio station, playing what they always played on Sundays—chopped and screwed.
* * *
—
Houston, like its megachurches, is unfathomably sprawling. Even from an airplane it’s impossible to clock the whole city at once. It’s low and flat, just a few dozen feet above sea level, and its endless freeways—the two huge concentric loops of 610 and Beltway 8, and the four highways that intersect at the center, slicing the circle into eighths—trace nineteenth-century market routes, forming the shape of a wagon wheel around downtown. The Greater Houston Area covers ten thousand square miles—that’s as big as New Jersey—and contains six million people. The city is less than an hour from the Gulf Coast, with the alien-civilization oil refineries of Port Arthur and the ghost piers that rise out of Galveston’s dirty water, and there’s a certain irradiated spirit to everything, a big-money lawlessness that bleaches in the heat.
The weather in Houston is frequently scorching, and as with much of Texas, an undercurrent of proud, ambitious independence thrums through the air. As a result, there isn’t much of a true public sphere in Houston. Even the thriving arts scene, alternately gala-esque or grungy, is mostly known to itself. Our ideas of the collective are limited by what our minds can see and handle: this is part of the reason Houstonians gravitate to megachurches, which provide the impression of living in a normal-size town. By some metrics, Houston is the most diverse city in America. It’s also a deeply segregated one, with a long history of its wealthy white population quietly exploiting minorities in order to shore up the city’s vaunted quality of life. For decades, Houston’s government placed its garbage dumps in black neighborhoods, many of which bordered downtown. The city is currently expanding at a dizzying pace—an estimated thirty thousand new houses are built every year. But the interchange between its many populations is acknowledged mostly in matters of unspoken structure. There are no zoning laws, which means that strip clubs sit next to churches, gleaming skyscrapers next to gap-toothed convenience stores. The freeways are, in effect, the only truly public space in the city—the only arena where people come out of their enclaves to be next to one another, sitting in the prodigious traffic, riding the spokes of Houston’s big wheel.
At the same time that I was making salvation bracelets on the floor of Bible class, a universe was coming into