Endnote No. 2

…The seminal figure is its self-made patriarch, Billy Ray Temple, who, in the fashion of many great late-blooming men of God—e.g., Augustine, Thomas Merton, even Saul of Tarsus—made of his own conversion narrative an evangelical/entrepreneurial calling. Lore has it that, while drinking his way through an extended bout with post-traumatic stress attributed to his purported (though disputed) time as an infantryman in Vietnam, Billy Ray Temple immersed himself in the sad underworld of his provincial hometown’s counterculture public house. There, one fateful night, Temple got the worst of a barroom knife fight, presumably over a woman. (Variously ribald accounts identify the object of these affections as either the aforementioned Virginia [then a teenaged runaway; in some accounts, she was already dating the much older Temple, in others, they had never met before that night]; a prostitute [possibly a trans-female often identified as an associate of Virginia’s in her early adulthood]; or, in an unlikely but persistent apocryphal version, the pair of them.) By all accounts, the altercation nearly killed Temple and left him physically infirm for the rest of his life. These ailments were more than counterbalanced by Temple’s new debt to God Almighty who, he believed, intervened to save him—from his injuries and his waywardness—and, thus, called him to a higher purpose. This higher purpose manifested itself as Temple Ministries™—which began as a small, nondenominational gathering of the shiftless and lost in what amounted to a shed behind the local pharmacy and, eventually (aided by Christian’s shrewd and charismatic use of local AM radio and access cable television outlets), expanded to a regional franchise of small satellite churches anchored around Temple’s preaching and a 5,000-seat arena-style church on the site of the original shed/pharmacy, built with proceeds from the considerable treasure amassed over a decade or more, Amway-style, in the form of hundreds upon thousands of two-dollar tithes. It was this small-time empire that the now-notorious “Sons of Man” ultimately chose to target for reasons that remain somewhat obscured…