Usually the church comes first, then TV. For most of televangelicalism's history, that's how it's worked. But when Vous Church was born last fall, its arrival was documented on an Oxygen reality show called Rich in Faith, and even then, the titular Rich, Pastor Rich Wilkerson Jr., was already almost famous, having officiated the wedding of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, guested on Kourtney and Khloé Take the Hamptons, and attended to the soul, such as it is, of Justin Bieber.

Vous may still be, in Pastor Rich's terms, a "baby church," but when I visited earlier this year, he was filling three services every Sunday. Each was staged to perfection, from the neo-emo praise band to the climactic baptisms in front of a DJ spinning in the courtyard. The Sunday I attended, Rich was preaching about John the Baptist, the "original Christian hipster." First, though, he wanted to talk about Leonardo DiCaprio. Rich loves talking about Leo, because he looks like Leo. Or rather, he insisted, Leo "looks like me." The guests—the term Rich prefers to members—always laugh, because at Vous it's not vanity if it's true.

Vous is short for Rendezvous, a weekly youth service Rich hosted for seven years at his father's megachurch before "planting," as he put it, his own "seed" in the form of Vous Church. It meets in a repurposed middle school in Miami's Wynwood district, a neighborhood of fabulous art galleries and abject poverty. (Ninety-six percent of the kids who attend during the week are below the poverty line.) The church is guarded by a police officer in a cruiser. One guest said he was nervous his first time—he'd heard stories of people being killed for their sneakers in this part of town—"but then you walk through those doors, and it's like you're moving into a different world."

Melissa Lyttle

Pastor Rich was wearing beige ankle-high suede boots, black skinny jeans, and an untucked soft-cotton blue tee beneath a short black jacket. A thin gold chain looped down over his pecs. No pulpit, no cross; just Rich working the stage. He hunched over like he was rapping, bobbing up and down, and then he straightened and spread his long arms, sampling the fundamentalist vernacular from which Vous was born. It was a tonal change—from "yo bro" curling out of a crooked grin to a glottal, shouted utterance of "God" comprising at least two syllables, maybe three: "Gaw-w-d!" Then he dialed it back around to the Rich who keeps it real on television. Other preachers dress up their faith in pop culture; Rich's trick, his talent, his gift, is that for him faith is pop culture.

"He"—Leo—"is the greatest actor of our generation, hands down!" Mmm, murmured the guests. A few years ago, Rich said, he was in L. A., driving with a friend, when he saw Leo. "I said, 'Stop the car.' " His tone was OMG. "I said, 'PULL OVER!' " Rich followed Leo into a bar. "So I walked in there and I got nervous, and I"—he mimed rubbernecking, his mouth and eyes wide—"I walked right past him."

He needed to prepare. "So I'm in the bathroom, trying to pump myself up. Preach to myself a little bit, you know? I look in the mirror. 'Rich. You got this, bro. You got this. This is your moment. This is divine appointment.' "

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He was half joking, but only half. Rich is the son of a preacher who is also the son of a preacher. His father, Rich Wilkerson Sr., is the pastor at Trinity Church, one of the largest megachurches in suburban Miami. Rich worked there until his father's church financed Vous's launch. "When it comes to money," Rich Sr., his face as smooth as his son's, his hair as full of color, tells the camera on Rich in Faith, "he hasn't had to pay the bills." Rich Jr.'s spiritual authority is rooted not in his knowledge of suffering but in his removal from it; he is blessed and unabashed, a charmed man for whom a celebrity sighting represents profundity.

Rich was preaching about John the Baptist, the "original Christian hipster." First, though, he wanted to talk about Leonardo DiCaprio.

But once, at least, he was, if not lost, a little shy. Contemplating Leo, he stayed hidden for fifteen minutes. Then, "as soon as I walk out of the bathroom, I'm telling you, we have, like, a moment. Our eyes connect. Like, locked in. Like, me. And Leo. Like, whoa! Honestly, I feel like the Titanic, the music starts." He sang like Céline Dion: "Whereeeeeeever you arrrrre . . ."

Back in the car, Rich's friend asked how it was. "Life-changing." What had they talked about? "Nothing."

The guests laughed cautiously. Rich's voice became low and throaty. He whispered from his heart to bring the moral home: "Don't walk on by." He meant Christ. Leo isn't Christ, but the principle is the same: that of an encounter that leaves you transformed, the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you think. "You don't even look the same!" He imitated his guests' confusion: " 'Like, what do you mean, I changed my look?' Yeah." A beat. Get ready. The crooked grin: "You went from a frown—you turned it upside down!"

II. PASTOR RICH DISCOVERS HIS CALLING

"Obedience," said Pastor Rich, gazing upon Biscayne Bay from his penthouse balcony, "is our job." And Pastor Rich obeys; he always has. He strayed once as a teen, resolving to kiss as many girls as he could at a party, but then he met his wife, DawnCheré—the daughter of Louisiana football and Christian royalty—and together they saved themselves for marriage. DawnCheré admitted that for the first year of matrimony, their sex was a "2," but now, she said, it is a "10," which is God's reward for those who trust him. Rich trusts; it's easy. "I'm not," he mused, "the prodigal son."

He came of age televangelically on TBN, the world's largest Christian television network. In high school there was some "cussing," some "sassing," but when he was seventeen, on tour in Australia with Rich Sr., God spoke to him. For most, this is a moment of intensity; Rich doesn't remember what He said. "It wasn't very emotional," he said. He cracked a grin.

Rich Sr. and Rich Jr. Matthew Burke/Oxygen

Rich's most precious inheritance, which he preserves through regular workouts and excellent skin care—both featured on Rich in Faith—is his genes: broad shoulders and lithe frame, the slightly off-center curve of a widow's peak that amplifies the arch of his brow and the tilt of his smile. "My pastor 😍😍," comments one of his 280,000

Instagram followers. "🔥🔥," observes another about one of the hundreds of selfies he posts as part of his ministry. Even critics acknowledge that he is an exceptionally good-looking man. "👎👎👎 causing women to lust," writes @johannabrnl in response to one of his bare-chested Instagrams: Pastor Rich on horseback, wearing a white cowboy hat and skinny jeans, ripped just so across a taut upper thigh.

Superficial, yes, but by design. Every few years, the secular press produces an astonished report of a preacher who embraces pop culture. But this is an old story: Each era of American Christendom gives rise to competitive strains of faith, one that curses the culture, one that coddles it. Sometimes the latter is liberal, but more often it reveals the shallowness of liberalism's aesthetic trappings, the ease with which secular music and fashion and art can be repurposed to serve a religion of control—over sex, over emotion implicitly political. We live in the age of hipster Christianity, a time of multiplying ministries with one-word names, such as Status, Mosaic, Reality, and, most famously, Hillsong, an Australian Pentecostal megachurch whose New York City branch is led by Rich's friend and fellow pastor to the stars Carl Lentz. Most leave untouched fundamentalism's core convictions—opposition to abortion and sex outside of marriage (which is between a man and a woman) and also to false gods (meaning all of them but their own)—but they rebrand the presentation. Rich is only the most mediagenic of what Complex has described as this "new wave of stylish pastors," just as a young Billy Graham was before him and Billy Sunday before him, stripping away the Bible's subtler teachings to draw the masses. Rich is the latest avatar of a tradition common to Christianity and capitalism, the so-called new-and-improved. His new is burnished with vestiges of the artisanal; "vintage," Rich likes to say, meaning that which is artfully rendered to reference an idea of the old. It's like he's sampling from a song he's never actually heard.

Rich wasn't really a fan of Kanye West, the man whose brand has made Rich nationally known, when they first met in 2013. "I mean, I liked 'Jesus Walks,' " Rich said. But he was a regular at LeBron James's Miami boutique, Unknwn, which was cofounded by entrepreneur Chris Julian, who attended Rich Sr.'s megachurch. Kanye shopped there too. One Sunday, Julian texted Rich Sr. a "heads-up" that he was bringing Kanye with him that morning. Rich Sr. was suffering from back troubles, so Rich Jr. preached in his place. "There are no coincidences," he told me. God, he believes, puts people where they need to be.

Each era of American Christendom gives rise to competitive strains of faith, one that curses the culture, one that coddles it.

For three Sundays, with Rich Jr. onstage, God put Kanye in the pews. They became "good friends," and then "really good friends." Explaining his decision to have an actor portray "white Jesus" during "Jesus Walks" on his Yeezus tour, Kanye told a radio station, "I had a friend of mine that's a pastor there as we started discussing how we wanted to deliver it. My girl even asked afterwards, 'Hmm, is that weird if Jesus comes onstage?' " Kanye said his pastor told him no. "People play Jesus. You know what's awesome about Christianity is we're allowed to portray God."

When Kanye chose Kim to be his bride in 2013, he asked Pastor Rich to officiate. Six months later, Rich bound them in holy matrimony before a wall of white roses and peonies. The party began in Versailles and proceeded by private jet to Florence for the nuptials. The happy couple wore Givenchy. Kim's gown, designed by her friend Riccardo Tisci, was said to have been given its own five-star hotel room and to be worth $500,000. Lana Del Rey sang at the rehearsal dinner, Andrea Bocelli at the ceremony. Rich wore vestments of white and gold. At Kanye's request, he spoke simply—"about Jesus," Rich told celebrity reporters, "which is who we serve." Then they ate cake. Vanilla and berry, ornamented with real gold, a confection seven feet tall. Cost estimates for the week ran from $5 million to $12 million.

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When Rich published a book in 2015, Sandcastle Kings: Meeting Jesus in a Spiritually Bankrupt World, Kanye designed the jacket, beach-sand beige with a giant gothic

"SK." "The church, throughout history, has always called upon the world's greatest artists," Rich told Rapzilla.com, as though Kanye's two-letter graphic stood in the tradition of Michelangelo.

Why, I asked Pastor Rich, do so many stars—Kanye and the Kardashians, Bieber and Selena, athletes from the NFL and the NBA—cluster around Rich's ministry? "They're my friends," he said. "I don't talk about my friends." No, but he Instagrams them. Do they sense that he is, in advertising parlance, "a creative"? No, he said, art is a word that intimidates him.

Maybe it's that Rich is, like the Apostle Paul, all things to all people—especially

the beautiful ones. Descended from a Pentecostal tradition of "spiritual warfare," educated at a prep school founded by D. James Kennedy—one of the last century's Christian Right chieftains—Rich himself is post–culture war. He could, he allowed, talk the five points of Calvinism (memorizable as an acronym, TULIP, the first letter of which stands for "Total depravity," as in our natural condition). But he'd rather just "do life," awesomed by God.

Later, inside his penthouse—open floor plan, 270 degree views—he fixed his hair and checked his shirt for a photo shoot not because he is vain but because, he said, "fashion is the language of our culture." Fashion is evangelism. "We're on a mission, always," DawnCheré said. She spotted a lick of gelled hair breaking free and raised her hand, then pulled it back. "He never lets me touch his hair."

III. THE LAUNDROMAT MINISTRY

One morning while I was in Miami, Pastor Rich's assistant, Chris Lopez, pulled up to Rich's building in Rich's Jeep. Chris had worked in real estate, and he'd developed a sideline selling and renting homes to Vous members who'd just moved downtown. "It's almost become a ministry itself," he said. He oversees dozens of Vous ministries and hundreds of volunteers, and sometimes he's Rich's driver.

On Rich in Faith, Rich drives an Audi Q7—expensive but not showy—but for his thirty-first birthday, DawnCheré commissioned Miami's Luxuria Bespoke Auto to revitalize and customize the Jeep Wrangler his parents gave him when he turned seventeen. It was entirely matte black, its windows tinted, its giant wheels kicked out from under the chassis. To me, it looked like it had been built for a death squad.

DawnCheré at Vous. Melissa Lyttle

DawnCheré favors white. Her white baby grand is in one corner of the penthouse, and her wedding dress hangs as an ornament on the other side, near a white chair covered by a white fur throw and her minimalist desk—with views of sunny white condo high-rises—on which stand two white candles and a sculpture in white of the head of a gazelle. That morning, she was wearing a tight white tee and strappy

silver sandals with heels. As a preacher's wife, she's part of his presentation. To Rich's performance of Christ-driven intensity, she brings gentle mockery and the gaze of a woman in love, teasing his vanity and telling an interviewer that he's not just the "hot pastor," as celebrity sites dub him, "he's hot every day."

That morning, Vous was having its monthly volunteer event, "I Love My City," at a men's homeless shelter, but the homeless men were nowhere to be seen. Their absence was practical—Vous needed room for the 150 or so volunteers who came from downtown condos or drove in from the suburbs—but it was also spiritual.

It felt more "authentic" to be in a shelter, said a Vous volunteer, and at the same time—surrounded by hipsters—"safe."

The day's "heart"—as in "a heart for the city"—would take three forms. One group was going to bring diapers and clothing to a women's shelter. The next was going to hold a pizza party, with karaoke, for a small number of homeless men. With great fanfare, about a half dozen wary-looking men—who knows where they'd been—were ushered into the room, each seated at a table and surrounded by Vous volunteers eager to "relate." The third group would conduct what they call the Laundromat ministry. What this entailed wasn't clear. Chris, who had been designated my handler, did not want me to find out. He didn't explain why. So I decided I'd follow Rich and DawnCheré. But they had lunch plans, and I wasn't invited. And since the only homeless man I could get close to said he didn't know who these people were or why they wouldn't leave him alone, Laundromat ministry it was. The group's leader, Tiago Magro, a bearded artist wearing a black-and-white leopard-print tunic, gave me the address.

Melissa Lyttle

Chris called when I was minutes away. "This was not the agreement," he said. Chris's idea of "the agreement"—evidently so obvious for a personage of Rich's stature that it didn't need to be stated—seemed to be that I was not to wander beyond Chris's supervision. "Do not enter the Laundromat," he told me. Again: "Do not enter the Laundromat. Wait outside. I'll be there in a minute."

I entered the Laundromat. Inside, the volunteers were spreading the gospel with quarters. The Laundromat ministry, it turned out, revolved around the assumption that people who use Laundromats would appreciate strangers offering them quarters, at which point the Vous volunteers could begin evangelizing. But everybody in the Laundromat had their own quarters and they mostly spoke Spanish, which the Vous volunteers mostly did not. There were alarmed looks when the volunteers tried to grab the customers' clothes; they wanted to help fold.

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Finally, they found two takers—a pair of women who lived in a homeless shelter. Tiago and several large men surrounded them, praying loudly. The older woman

began to cry. (Later, she told me she'd planned to go to a different Laundromat but had found herself wandering to this one—evidence, she said, of divine intervention.)

One of the evangelists, satisfied, broke off and drifted outside. His name was Brandon, and he looked like a better-tanned version of Pastor Rich, wearing a black baseball hat that read "Almighty" in white cursive script. He was a DJ, he said, and a traveler,

but mostly, he explained, a follower of Christ. He leaned on his car, a gray Mercedes E550 convertible with a cross made of straw hanging from the rearview mirror. "Nice car," I said. Brandon stepped back and admired it. "I am so blessed, man," he said. "God gave me a Mercedes."

IV. STAGING IT

Pastor Rich likes to paraphrase the eighteenth-century revivalist John Wesley: "Preaching is simply this: Light yourself on fire and people will come from everywhere to watch you burn." And Rich is a talented preacher. He can coo and growl and seduce even better than his father and probably his father's father, who preached at backwoods tent revivals. Secular folk sometimes accuse evangelicalism of theatricality, as if that were a departure from the faith, but the traditions from which Rich descends have always embraced spectacle, from those of the eighteenth century's Jonathan Edwards, who spoke of "sinners in the hands of an angry God," to those of Aimee Semple McPherson, who sometimes hit the stage of her early-twentieth-century megachurch on a motorcycle; Charlie Chaplin, an atheist, attended her services just for the show. Yet McPherson, like Edwards, was conservative in her doctrine. So is the Assemblies of God, the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world and the one under which Trinity—and thus, in a sense, Vous—preaches. The denomination is simultaneously rigid and almost fantastically flexible, literalist in its interpretation of Scripture yet ecstatically open to the possibility of an interventionist God.

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Rich is also heir to the spiritual legacy of his father's even more famous cousin, David Wilkerson, who in 1962 published one of the most celebrated fundamentalist memoirs of all time: The Cross and the Switchblade, about ministering to gangs and addicts in New York City. In book, movie, and comic-book form, The Cross and the Switchblade helped restore to the evangelical church some of the missionary vigor, some of the fierceness, that it had lost as a result of postwar suburbanization. But Rich is equally indebted to Norman Vincent Peale, the midcentury apostle of Christian business success whose best seller, The Power of Positive Thinking, has been in print since 1952, grafting onto American evangelicalism an ethos of salesmanship that verges on smarm.

I counted no more than a dozen books in his penthouse, and even Rich Sr. described his son's Sandcastle Kings as "simplistic." But whether by study or by osmosis, he has distilled the messages of both David Wilkerson and Peale, along with those of—among countless others—Bruce Barton (cofounder of advertising giant BBDO and author of the original Christian/business best seller The Man Nobody Knows); Laurie Beth Jones, author of the bluntly titled business inspirational Jesus, CEO; and Dennis Bakke, former CEO of energy behemoth AES and author of Joy at Work: A Revolutionary Approach to Fun on the Job. (Hint: It's Jesus.) Rich remains relentlessly upbeat even as he appropriates a hip-hop culture suffused with suffering and pleasure alike. It's a theology of gentrification: the gritty city as a site for "authenticity" made over to house a gospel with little mention of the cross, an urban ministry of spotless cool. He has crossed the secular divide his forebears could not. He has been to the mountain, and there he did sing "Awesome God" while hoverboarding in a conga line with Justin Bieber. You can see it on YouTube.

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The scene is not without theological meaning. The meaning is: fun. Fun is at the heart of Pastor Rich's message. It's the next stage of the prosperity gospel, which holds that God wants "health and wealth" for his believers. Rich Jr. was born into this blessing. Others might have taken it for granted, but Rich did not. What, he wondered, did God want us to do with our prosperity? Help the poor? Sure—Rich does that one Saturday morning every month. Covered. What else could you do with money and boyish good looks? You could have fun. Fun as a calling, fun as a demonstration of grace, fun as a

way of living what Joel Osteen, another celebrity-pastor son of a celebrity pastor (though not nearly as handsome as Rich), calls "your best life now." Fun is what God wants for us. Pastor Rich will show you.

When I explained that my visit to Vous's three services was more about the church's guests than it was about Rich himself, Rich smiled and tilted his head quizzically. I said I'd just wander around and talk with the crowd. Chris looked pained. Rich was concerned. "I don't really know who these people are," he said. He meant he didn't know what they'd say. No problem, though. They'd already lined up Vous insiders for me to interview. "Bro," Rich said, "let's just stage it, all right?"

There was no cynicism in his tone. Staging it is what Rich does. Staging it is his gospel. Consider the hair, the kicks, the teeth, that smile. Rich's followers bask in his glamour and become ever so slightly more glamorous themselves. So it has always been in the church, the pastor as holy man setting himself on fire, catching the light and turning it toward his congregation. Rich's revelation is that for the souls he wants to reach, the light, in America now, emanates not from the Son but from the stars.

V. THE SECOND SERVICE

The history of the church, when it works, when it moves souls, is that of "the word made strange," as the theologian John Milbank puts it. Not so much the old made new—that's just marketing—as the cliché turned inside out so that it's familiar and unknown at the same time, like a song that compels you to draw closer even though you've heard it countless times before.

Vous doesn't do strange. The second Sunday service I visited, at noon, was the same as the first. Same DiCaprio, same winks, same pauses as Pastor Rich considered, for the second time that day, what he was going to say next, as if he were waiting on God. Epiphany on demand.

Melissa Lyttle

Contrast that idea with Kanye's. His music is infused with contradictions: of lust, politics, and fury, transcendence and grief, twining and unraveling and knotting from the worldly politics—the social gospel—of "Jesus Walks" to the profane mysticism of "I Am a God." The latter includes among its samples a Bollywood song about twins separated at birth. The song is in Hindi, though, so most listeners wouldn't know that—just as they wouldn't consider Jesus and Yeezus within a pantheon of gods, "our cosa nostra," according to Kanye—unless they sought out the song's underpinnings. There's a gnostic strain within his music, meanings within meanings revealed, for those who seek, through illusion and allusion.

Such convolutions are outside the obsessively curated circle of Christianity and preapproved cool preached by Rich. To him Scripture is a script; he need only

read the lines with style. Being saved, for Rich, is as much of a given as the Florida

sunshine. The sun doesn't happen; it just is. Same as Pastor Rich's life. Nothing, he insists, has ever really happened to him at all. "If I had to preach from experience," he told me on the balcony, the sunset behind him and DawnCheré, in pink and gold, murmuring her approval, "I'd have nothing."

VI. THE INNOCENTS

At the third service, I left the crowd with their hands in the air and their glistening eyes locked on Rich as he bent his knees and tilted his head and rocked out one more time, with the same gestures, the same joy-filled smile, feelin' it, just so, for the third time that day.

Outside I found Brandon, the man with the Mercedes from the Laundromat the day before. "Yo, what's up?!" he said, pulling my hand in and up and wrapping his arm around me full bro-hug.

Brandon told me that the night, for him, had been all about children. He said he'd been rolling through the neighborhood in the Mercedes—which, it turned out, wasn't his at all but simply a loaner from a rich man who admired Brandon's freelance ministry—thinking about how sad it was that none of the locals got to see how awesome Vous is. Then he came upon a group of little boys. Jesus gave him a Word: Invite them. So Brandon leaned out of the car. "I was like, 'There's candy!' " He didn't want me to get the wrong idea. "For the kids," he clarified.

"You told the parents?" I asked.

Pastor Rich studies up on the Good Book. Melissa Lyttle

"I saw one of the moms. Two of them had to go back, but the other four . . ." He gestured around the courtyard. They were here somewhere. He smiled, a big Leo smile like Rich's, but different, too—utterly unassuming. Brandon seemed guileless; an innocent, unconcerned with "stranger danger." He had just returned from abroad, he said, a trip of holy wandering financed by whoever was inclined to give Brandon money.

He didn't ask; he simply befriended and received, an odd, happy, beautiful man who liked talking about Jesus. If I'd asked, I think he would have given me every penny

in his pocket.

Rich speaks often of "having a heart for the city," a city transformed by God. When I'd asked him what his city of God would look like, though, he'd been stumped. "I don't even know!" he'd said, grinning. But that was exactly what Brandon wanted to tell me about, the what-could-be of a city that took Christ's teachings seriously. He dropped his voice low and leaned in close. "This is what Miami would look like: No debt. No poverty. People wouldn't be so worried about their neighbor. There would be less stress. More happiness. The workload would go way down. And things would actually get done. That's the crazy thing!"

Baptisms at Vous. Melissa Lyttle

The kids, he said, naturally grasped this vision. But the little boys were "in a time of worship," so they couldn't leave Vous's nursery. Then Chris found us. He did not look happy. "Are you heading into the service?" he asked. Inside, Rich was running through his third incarnation of Leo.

"I'm in-and-out," I said, "talking to Brandon. . . ."

"I love Brandon," Chris said, looking at me. Then: "Um, they texted me you were trying to get to kids?"

Chris wanted me to return to my seat; I tried to edge him away with my shoulder, turning back to Brandon's vision.

"If I had to preach from experience," he told me on the balcony, the sunset behind him and DawnCheré, in pink and gold, murmuring her approval, "I'd have nothing."

I've been reporting on American religion for years. I've been to megachurches and tiny chapels and compounds and covens and strange temples. I've met believers who say Christ was a cowboy and believers who think Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy" was divine revelation; strippers who consider their nakedness a testimony and soldiers who etched Scripture onto their rifles. I have seen the silly and the sublime. And what always make me marvel are the layers of stories beneath even the glossiest surface, followers who bring to their faith depths averred by even the most callow leaders. Maybe that's so at Vous, too. But never before Vous had I encountered a church that seemed so completely empty.

Instead of going back into the church to once again hear Rich preach about Leo, I wanted to listen, for a moment at least, to the one soul I'd met at Vous who spoke of the gospel as something more than style and good feeling. "Everybody is taken care of," Brandon was saying, rocking back and forth as he exulted in the promises of his god. "Everybody sees through all the junk. Your IQ. Your credit score. Your net worth. That's what the Kingdom of God is! You see through all that."

Pastor Rich captures the baptism action. Melissa Lyttle

Then the service let out, and the kids were released. Brandon took me to meet them: four little boys, ranging in age from maybe five to eight, zigzagging across the darkened courtyard and balance-beaming the edges of some planters. "Whoa, guys!" said Brandon, delighted. He stopped one of the bigger boys, wearing a Batman shirt, and asked him to tell me what he'd learned about Jesus. I crouched down to listen. The boy opened his mouth—

"Uh-uh!" Chris sliced himself between the child and us. "Not really cool," he said. He was right. It wasn't. "We can't let you talk to these kids," he said. "We don't even know who they are." He seemed to want me to stop talking to Brandon, too. Brandon was off-message. He was talking about poverty in the city and the children who live there. He was not talking about fun. Chris escorted me away. I don't know how the boys got home.

Later, I waited by Brandon's Mercedes in the parking lot. The congregation eased out of the gates in their cars to head back downtown or out to the suburbs. I waited a long time, but Brandon didn't emerge. My guess—and I can't confirm this, I'm really just going on faith here—is that Chris or someone else in the inner circle, the Vous Crew, was doing damage control: preventing Vous's one true holy fool from fucking up their message. My words, of course. Their words, the ones they'd given me in answer to every question—be amazing and dream big and have fun, intoned like amens, so good, so good—are cleaner than that; shiny, like a mirror in which only the pretty can be seen.

VII. THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE

The last time I saw Rich and Chris was at an annual awards ceremony held by Fortune International Group, a luxury real estate agency. Rich was to give a motivational talk on success, absent the God. (He has read the business self-help best seller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, he told me, nineteen times.)

Rich's presence had been arranged by one of Fortune's vice-presidents, a Catholic who enjoyed attending Rich's Protestant church because, he said, "The way I think about it is, the religions are all brokers. We're all selling the same thing: the guy upstairs."

One attendee, an affluent twenty-two-year-old friend of the vice-president's who was also a devout Catholic, had gone to one of Vous's services yesterday, and it had made a powerful impression. "Did you hear the part about Leo?" he asked. "That was great. A lot of Bible verses to me are confusing, but through the story of Leo, now I understand the Bible!"

I tried to talk to Rich. Chris seemed to be angling himself between us. But in this setting—networking, suits, men and women with amazing hair—Pastor Rich didn't need Chris's help to ignore me. He set his Leo grin on high beam, looked over my head at the beautiful people who sell penthouses like the one he lives in, and smiled upon the city he loves.