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I wrote this book because I love this country and because I love people all over the world. I believe America is to be a light. And I believe God has blessed us beyond any nation ever in human history. But if we're going to experience comfort, security, and freedom, if we are going to enjoy the liberties that we have had in the past, it will only be because we return to the absolutes and not because we force them on others.

Our hope is the Lord. We're going to have to have his wisdom. We either return to God with our whole heart in this country—and that doesn't mean the whole population, but it does mean the general thinking in this country and the thinking of our leadership—or comfort, as we have known it, and security and peace will be a thing of the past.

The Lord says you'll find him when you seek him with your whole heart. And when we know the truth, and we abide in it, and we live in it, it makes us free. Freedom is a reality because of biblical absolute principles. We've got to come back to them or I'm telling you, we don't have a future.

How did you become a follower of Jesus?

I don't have a background conducive to becoming a Christian. I'm actually the product of a forced sexual relationship. My mother, a 40-year-old practical nurse, was raped by the alcoholic son of the elderly man she was caring for. This was 1943. She tried to have an abortion, but the doctor refused, saying it wasn't right. The woman went home, prayed, and said that God told her to have this baby. She said he told her, "The baby will bring joy to the world."

When she gave birth, she named me Joy. But thank God, upon discovering I was a boy, she changed my name to James. I had a tough enough row to hoe without having to be carrying that name around like a boy named Sue.

I had a tough start. She put an ad in the paper and asked for someone to care for me. I was taken into the home of a Baptist pastor and his wife. They cared for me until I was 5. They thought they were going to get to adopt, but my mother never signed the papers for adoption. She took me from them when I was 5 and we literally hitchhiked across Texas. She had no money.

I lived in obscurity and poverty for the next 10 years, moving 17 times. We would live behind somebody's place or in an alley or on the backside of a dump or a dirty river. We had nothing.  It was 10 percent white where I lived. I got beat up everyday. I was always in trouble.

So what was the point of your actual conversion?

My alcoholic father, who had raped my mother, actually came back in our lives when I was a teenager. He became a total hell on earth. It was a very dangerous situation. I stayed with the pastor and his wife for a week to get away.

During that week they really prayed for me in their church. When I came to the service, teenagers gave their witness of how Christ had changed their lives. That night I was touched by God. I've never had a father. But somehow I knew in my heart that if I committed my life to God he would say of me, I am pleased. I wanted so bad for someone to be pleased with me.

I gave him my life. He did change my life as a teenage boy. A few years later, he called me to preach.

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March (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47