WE BRAKE FOR GOD.

Riders for God
The Story of a Christian
Motorcycle Gang
Rich Remsberg
Afterword by
Colleen McDannell
University of Illinois Press, $34.95, 263 pp.

One summer night a few years ago, as my brother and I were having a couple of beers in a local biker bar, I became uncomfortably aware that a conspicuously enraged patron at a nearby table was demanding our attention. It was easy to accede. He was built like a defensive end, shirtless except for a sweatstained leather vest, intricately tattooed, and evidently hallucinating under the influence of the nearly empty bottle of Jose Cuervo Tequila which an unprincipled bartender had surrendered to him much earlier. "Harleys!" he roared at us several times, as the other customers continued nonchalantly to converse. My brother and I had begun to agree upon a discreet, or even panicked exit when the drunken biker disgorged, among other things, the rest of his thought: "Harleys suck!" he bellowed, and, to our considerable relief, passed out on the laminated tabletop.

He may have been trying to provoke us by denouncing the most revered of all motorcycle brands in a sort of biker's version of epater le bourgeois, but whatever he was doing, it was a memorable thing to encounter his ferocious and baffling conviction. "Harleys?" I thought, but didn't dare say aloud among the mostly hospitable Harley-Davidson devotees with whom we'd been drinking that night. "That guy wanted to pick a fight about Harleys? Who cares?"

Rich Remsberg, a photographer who spent some time with a tribe of Christian bikers in southern Indiana, has amply documented several such confusing encounters in his incandescent and heartening book. He admits at the outset that biker culture and Christianity are equally foreign terrain to him. But ignorance need not be a handicap for a perceptive explorer, and the interviews Remsberg has conducted, no less than the photographs he has taken, are wonderfully ingenuous, allowing these unruly men and women to give sincere and powerful testimony of the stirring of the Spirit in their lives.

The bikers Remsberg came to know and, apparently, to love, belong to the Monroe County chapter of the Unchained Gang and to the Ellettsville House of Prayer, a nondenominational Christian church near Bloomington, Indiana. Larry Mitchell, who is president of the gang, pastor of the church, and a renowned Harley mechanic, eschews conventional doctrinal labels. The House of Prayer is neither fundamentalist, nor full-Gospel, nor Pentecostal, nor Spirit-filled, nor evangelical, nor charismatic, he says. "We're a church out of the Book of Acts."

Pastor Larry's assertion is certainly credible. Whatever the authors of Dominus Iesus might be inclined to say about its ecclesial status, this is clearly a community whose members believe and behave as if they surround Jesus who has recently and perceptibly rescued and forgiven them. The bikers of the Unchained Gang have renounced everything in their pasts--the felonious adventures, the random violence, the drug taking and selling, the sexual depravities--everything but their huge bikes and their outcast status. Retaining the picaresque swagger and aggressive instincts of their outlaw days, they now preach and live the gospel in a manner every bit as unsettling as the predations of the "one percenters," as the most savage Outlaws, Pagans, Bandidos, D.C. Eagles, Hell's Angels, Dead Men, Nomads, or Barons are colloquially called.

"I've never been mediocre about anything in my whole life," says one of the Unchained, a former one percenter who now calls herself Shalom, "and I see that in the other Christian gang members. Everything is extreme it seems like, but the Bible says, 'He'll spew out the lukewarm.' I don't think many of us need to worry too much about that." Shalom certainly doesn't. An alcoholic from the age of twelve, she was the property of a one-percenter gang for a dozen years and spent three years in prison for her role in a homicidal brawl in a rural bar.

Remsberg's documentary images of the white-trash antics at the annual Bean Blossom Boogie biker rally, the demonstrative communal prayer over the bikes, the altar calls, and the emotional outpourings of faith at the House of Prayer all illuminate the ardent accounts given by gang members of the clash to which they have borne witness between divine grace and redneck nihilism. "The only emotions I had was hate and lust," says one Unchained member named Sparky, describing the moment of his salvation. An abandoned, despairing, incontinent heroin addict who in more vigorous days "could cut a guy open with a knife and not have no remorse from it," was inexorably drawn into an altar call. He "started feeling these tears come to my eyes," and prayed, "Lord, I don't know you very good. I know you made your deal, but if you just make me one more deal, Lord, and let these withdrawals let up to where I can keep my coffee in me, where I could just get through the day, Lord, I'd read your book and I'd live for you the rest of my life."

With many (perhaps most) Catholics, I share an instinctive distrust of and distaste for highly emotional religious autobigraphy. I can almost hear a reedy organ in the background as some histrionic preacher narrates Sparky's story in the twangy accent of the southern Midwest. Nevertheless, the combined stories of Sparky, Chico, Nancy, Shalom, Randy, Harley, Modo, and the other Unchained gangsters have been told and tested in roadhouse taverns, at biker rallies, and in whorehouses and prisons. These are men and women in whom Christ has been seized, scourged, murdered, and raised up, and they want the world's attention. Concluding his own confession of faith, Sparky may as well be speaking for the entire gang: "The only reason I want this story out is so that it will glorify God. If it's for any other reason, then you're doing it for the wrong reason. And if it's to glorify God, to let people hear the story of the gospel of hope and peace, that's why I want it out. It's because it's true and it's real and I can't explain it all, and I don't know how it is all done, but it is real. It's not faking. I'm not getting paid for this or getting profit for this in any other way other than I want God to be glorified. That's all I got to say."

A prophylactic sneer won't diminish the power of that story much.

Michael O. Garvey is the author of Finding Fault (Thomas More).