Jason and Daniel: where are they now?

(If this is your first time here, read this first.)

In a play, the characters' story stops when the curtain comes down. But history makes bad theater, and the real story never ends. Jason and Daniel are still around. So what are they doing now?

Both boys spent a year in the Smith County jail before being transferred to their current locations. Daniel is incarcerated at the Alfred Hughes Unit near Gatesville, serving five concurrent life sentences and two concurrent twenty-year sentences. He's a model inmate: well-behaved, hard-working, and earnestly repentant of his crimes. He never graduated from high school, so he's been taking classes to get his GED. After his mother's death, a dark cloud had descended over Daniel's life, transforming this once warmhearted young man into a brooding, withdrawn drug addict. But after the arrest, he sobered up. His sister Chisty told me about the first time she visited Daniel in the Smith County jail. When she sat down to talk to him, he asked if she was okay--he was more concerned with how his actions had affected her than with himself. "And that," she said, "was when I knew my baby brother had come back." He's eligible for parole in 2016. I think he'll get it.

Jason is serving out ten concurrent life sentences and three concurrent twenty-year sentences at the Robertson unit near Abilene. He blames his actions on Chantix, an anti-smoking medication he was taking that's been known to cause severe psychological problems. He says he can't even remember setting the fires. But he says he's turned his life around since his arrest, accepting God back into heart and reading the Bible every day. When he gets out, he wants to do something great with his life, like maybe become a minister.

If that sounds like bullshit, it's because it is. According to his lawyer, Jason wasn't even taking Chantix when the fires started. And he's been far from well-behaved: one routine search of his cell at Smith County turned up seizure medication and bootleg alcohol, and guards there intercepted a note in which he told his mother how to sneak contraband into the prison. And he refuses to accept responsibility for his actions. His grandparents tell me that every time they go to visit him now, he asks the same question: "Why would they do this to me?" He thinks he's been unfairly punished. He won't be eligible for parole until 2024, and at the rate he's going, he won't get it.

Draw your own conclusions.

The Story of Midnight Cross

On January 1, 2010, at about 8 AM, Bill Parr, pastor of Little Hope Baptist Church in Canton, TX, got a call from a member. “Brother Bill,” she said, “have you seen the church building? There’s smoke coming from it.” Bill stepped outside just in time to see the flames leap up. Soon, dozens of congregants had gathered outside to watch and pray as the educational wing of the church, built in 1954 by some of those same congregants, was destroyed by flames. At about nine, the firefighters arrived. Then the second call came in.

Faith Church in Athens, twenty-six miles away, was burning.

It was the beginning of a spree that would last for six weeks and claim ten church buildings total. This in a tri-county area with an estimated twelve to thirteen hundred churches. People were scared. They felt violated. At the forefront of their minds was the question: who the hell would do something like this? Skinheads? Satanists? Atheists?

Meet Jason and Daniel.

Jason Robert Bourque, Age 19, and Daniel George McAllister, age 21. Two local boys, baptized at Frist Baptist Church of Ben Wheeler where they met. Not skinheads or Satanists. Not atheists either.

Jason had actually been a devout Christian, one of those kids with two Bibles: one for school and one for home. He quoted from both often. His home Bible was so worn from use he had to hold it together with duct tape. He was a brilliant kid and very articulate, a state champion in high school debate. If you disagreed with him about anything, he would argue you down until he was blue in the face—and win. He had no tolerance for grey areas: things were either black or white, right or wrong. He also came from a broken home: both of his parents were tangled up in drugs, and his wealthy grandparents raised him from age four. Though he was a hyperactive kid, his grandmother Brenda says that after he got saved at Bible camp, he seemed to calm down and focus more in school. Church for him meant safety. Stability.

For Daniel, church meant love. Specifically the love of his mother. Wanda McAllister was a paragon of Christian virtue: despite a debilitating heart condition, she devoted herself wholly to working in the church, working in the nursery and running a donated clothing exchange for the poor, even though her own family was dirt-poor. She was also responsible for homeschooling Daniel, who was severely dyslexic and would likely not have done well at a public school. By all accounts, he never left her side. One woman at First Baptist Ben Wheeler told me of a birthday party for Wanda where, when she was too weak to walk, Daniel carried her outside, sat her down, served her the birthday cake, then carried her back inside when she was done.

Jason was a spoiled rich kid, a little too smart and a little too awkward to fit in. Daniel was a natural introvert, and hardly talked to anyone. They became friends because they were both outsiders. To everyone at First Baptist Ben Wheeler, it seemed that they were just like any other boys. Certainly not the kind of boys who would burn a church down.

But life has a way of throwing curve balls. In 2007, when Daniel was nineteen, Wanda McAllister died of a stroke. Whatever he had believed about the love of a benevolent God died with her. It was about then, too, that, Jason began to doubt the reality of a God who never shows Himself. Then in 2009, the hammer fell for him: his longtime girlfriend, whom he was certain God had told him he would marry, dumped him, and he was rejected from his dream school, UT Austin. He made a 180-degree turn, falling into a deep depression and experimenting with drugs. Around that time, Daniel's father tried to commit suicide by hanging himself. The boys began to hang out more, getting high on whatever was available. They were alone. Adrift.

Then, on New Year's Eve 2009, after being kicked out of UT Tyler, Jason went to a pasture party with some old friends from high school, friends who had managed to move on with their lives. Early the next morning he drove to Little Hope Baptist in Canton, stacked the choir's sheet music under the piano, lit it, then drove to Faith Church in Athens and set another fire. A week and a half later, he met Daniel at a party, told him what he was doing, and invited him to come along, and so it began.

In an area where the church and the community are one, the destruction of a church is symbolic. It’s an act of rebellion. Rebellion against the community, against the Church, against God. The God who said He’d take care of you. The Church that taught you about Him. The community that told you to go to church and believe in God. Jason and Daniel weren’t atheists; they believed with all their hearts and souls. At least, they wanted to. But life makes believing hard. Would I have done what they did? No. But I understand.

Here’s the thing: Jason was the ringleader. He was emotionally unstable and used to things going his way. He lived his life at the extremes: first, he was 100% all-in for God, and when that failed him, he turned on God completely. His rebellion, like everything in his life, was intense and grandiose, but really, it’s the same rebellion that takes place in every human heart that rails at the injustice of a world supposedly governed by a just, loving God. Daniel felt the stirrings of the same rebellion in his heart, but (like most of us) did not act on it. Yet, when Jason came to him and invited him to come along, he was willing.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: as extreme as the church burnings seem, they are only a magnification of the war that rages in every human heart every day, and will until the last human being draws his dying breath. What Jason and Daniel did is not right, but it happened, and it happened for a reason, and if we search deep within our souls, we will all find that we know the reason all too well.

In Christian mythology, the cross represents sacrifice. Just as the ancient Jews offered up burnt sacrifices on an altar to atone for their sins, Christ died on the cross as a final sacrifice for the sins of all mankind. The cross is an altar. But there’s another altar, a place in the darkest corners of the heart, where we go when we lose faith, and there we place everything we once believed in—all our hopes, our dreams, and our wishes—and set it ablaze. That place is where we make an angry, wounded sacrifice to a God who isn’t there, desperately trying to atone for the sin of our unbelief as we berate Him and curse Him and beg Him to please please please come back.

That place is the Midnight Cross.

Arrival in Athens

Day one in East Texas. Left Harlingen at 9:30 AM, intending to be in Dallas by 1:00 and in Athens by 3:00. Instead, I pulled into Athens at 8:30 PM. Long, long day. But the beginning of what I hope will be a productive week.

Eventually I'll edit the first post to lay out the story of the East Texas church arsons a little more clearly. Right now, suffice it to say that my connection to this story is that my Uncle David and Aunt Julie live in Athens, one of the towns in East Texas where three of the churches were torched. Over the course of this next week, I'm going to be staying with them while I traipse around researching the arsons and interviewing members of the community.

I'm not alone in this endeavor, it turns out. Two guys from California named Trenton and Theo were out here in March and April shooting a documentary about the arsons, and they have a feature film in the works too. I talked to them this week. They're both really cool guys, and since we're working in different media, they don't see my project as a threat to theirs. While they were here, they conducted 64 (!) interviews and amassed something like 90 hours of raw footage that they're now whittling down in post-production. I can't wait to see what they end up with.

As for me, I'm going to be conducting interviews of my own. I have two set up so far: one tomorrow with Bill Parr, pastor of Little Hope Baptist Church (the first church to burn); and one on Monday morning with Brenda and Bob Steele, grandparents of Jason Bourque, one of the arsonists. Still working on setting things up with some of the other key players--it's hard to find contact information for people around here, especially since I'm not used to finding it. But Trenton and Theo assured me that people around here are very open and willing to talk, so I somehow don't think it'll be that much of a problem.

So what does this mean for you, devoted reader? Well, you can expect a blog post about every interview, that's for sure. Whether or not they come in time with the interviews is another matter, as they may take quite a while to write. But they will happen.

Stay tuned.

Introducing Midnight Cross

I'm not sure yet if I'm going to tell people about this blog. Eventually, perhaps, I'll use it as a means to publicize the play, but for the moment, it's simply a place to put my thoughts. And my first thought is: this is going to be a long, involved, very complicated process.

But first, a little backtracking. Allow me to introduce Midnight Cross.

What is Midnight Cross? It's a play. Also a blog about the play. What's the play about? Two years ago in East Texas, starting on New Year's Eve 2010, two local boys burned down 11 churches in six weeks, with seemingly no thought to what kinds of churches they targeted. This in a tri-county area with an estimated 713 churches.

Read about it here.

People felt scared, naturally. And confused. Why in God's name would anyone do something like that? When the police caught up with the two, their motives became clearer: they were angry at God for not existing.

Saying they didn't believe in God misses the point. No one who grows up in Texas, or in the US for that matter, can completely escape from God. You grow up with this all-pervading image of an omnipotent old man in flowing white robes who parts the clouds to rain down fire or blessings, a micromanager with a vested interest in every aspect of your life, your thoughts, your actions. In Sunday school they tell you you have a God-shaped hole in your heart, that God is all you need. And you know you need something. The older you get, the more you find that you're drowning in a sea of chaos and you need something to hold on to. So they put you on a boat and tell you to wait until the ship comes, and the boat is called Faith and the ship is called God. And one day, oh one glorious day, that ship will come and you'll sail into the sunset singing Jesus Savior Pilot Me Over Life's Tempestuous Sea.

Except the more time you spend on that boat, the more you see that it's a beat-up piece of shit. There are holes everywhere, and while you didn't see the patches before, you sure as hell see them now that they're coming undone. You can plug some of the leaks, but a new one springs up every day, and when you dig a fingernail in to test the wood it comes up black with rot. You're sinking again and pretty soon you'll be right back where you were, adrift. They tell you to just wait a little longer, the ship will come soon, but you've been waiting a damn long time and there's nothing on the horizon and the night's starting to settle in and it's cold and it's dark.

What do you do then? Most people spend the rest of their lives trying to plug the leaks with their fingers, ignoring the ones they can't reach. Others find a different boat. A select few, the mystics, learn to walk on water. But there are some people who just say to hell with it and burn the fucker down.

People like Jason Bourque and Daniel McAllister, the East Texas church arsonists.

So like I said, saying they didn't believe in God is too simple. They both believed, like we all do at some point, that the ship would come. When it didn't, they got angry at God for not being there. That's why I'm writing this play. The story of humanity is the story of what we do when we find ourselves adrift on that sea, and all of us have been at the place where we want to burn it down and cast ourselves back into the ocean. The church burning is incidental. It's only an extreme expression of something that goes on every day in the silent corridors of the human heart.

In a little over a month, I'm going to travel to East Texas to learn what I can about what happened there. It's going to be a hell of a journey. Here's to taking the first step.