LEAH DAUGHTRY SLIPPED OFF HER STILETTO-HEEL SHOES at the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn, stepped from a pastor’s chair to the pulpit and shouted, “I am on the rise!” She wore a long black tunic with gold buttons that ran from her high collar almost to the carpet. Her graying hair was shorn tight to her dark brown scalp. She always preaches in bare feet in order to “de-self,” she had told me, and to let God’s spirit and words rush through her unimpeded. “I am on the rise!” she erupted again.
Leah Daughtry at the House of the Lord Church, which is led by her father, the Rev. Herbert
Dancing down front, in an aisle between pews, was a woman in an elaborate dress with a lace corsage whose breast cancer had been eradicated, Daughtry had said, through the prayers of her church sisters: “The eggheads will say her chemotherapy worked, but everyone who uses chemotherapy isn’t cured.” The woman cried out exultantly, her voice barely audible above the surging of an electronic organ and the thrashing of drums and cymbals played by one of Daughtry’s nephews, with another nephew, a 3-year-old, adding his own ecstatic beats with a set of sticks. “I am on the rise to a place of dependence on the Lord!” Daughtry screamed.
African-American, with little copper-rimmed glasses adorning an unlined round face, Daughtry is a part-time preacher and full-time political operative. She serves as chief of staff to Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. In the spring of last year, Dean appointed her chief executive of the party’s convention; though she will now be collaborating with Barack Obama’s team, she is in charge of orchestrating the event next month in Denver — of making sure that everything runs right, that buses have enough slots to park in, that people have enough hotel rooms to sleep in and that the millions watching the convention on TV are captivated and inspired by the four-day-long show. She is a mostly self-effacing manager on an immense scale.
But on many Sundays she is a Pentecostal preacher with her toes naked on the floor and her voice filled with a power that she says is not her own. Straight from the start of her sermon on a Sunday afternoon in June, she looked nearly helpless, beyond self-management, truly overcome by a force coursing through her; she wiped tears from her eyes with a small square of white cloth.
In her positions as Dean’s top aid and the convention’s top official, Daughtry, who is 44 years old, is leading the Democratic Party’s new mission to make religious believers — particularly ardent Christian believers — view the party and its candidates as receptive to, and often impelled by, the dictates of faith. She sparked this crusade, both to transfigure the party’s image as predominantly secular and to take enough votes from the Republicans to win this year’s presidential election, in the aftermath of George W. Bush’s 2004 defeat of John Kerry. And in her vocation as a Pentecostal pastor she stands for faith in an extreme form. There is nothing equivocal about her belief. Hers is a religion not only of divine healing but of talking in tongues.
Behind her as she preached, a simple wooden cross hung on a brick wall in the vaulted and sizable sanctuary of the church, which is headed by her father, Herbert Daughtry. A prison convert who served time in his early 20s for armed robbery and passing bad checks, Herbert Daughtry — whose father founded the church and whose grandfather and great-grandfather were also ministers — became the church’s pastor 50 years ago, and today Leah was delivering the sermon as part of an anniversary celebration. Below the sanctuary, in the fellowship hall, a banner for slavery reparations proclaimed, “They Owe Us.” Fliers recounted Herbert Daughtry’s arrest, a few weeks earlier, as he led marchers protesting the not-guilty verdict in the police killing of Sean Bell, an unarmed black man. His ministry has always combined consuming spirituality with black liberation theology — the theology Jeremiah Wright invoked this spring to defend his controversial sermons — and zealous political activism. Leah holds these forces within her.
Usually she preaches to her own congregation of about 20 in Southwest Washington. Her flock meets in a communal room in the depths of her high-rise condominium, near the exercise room and the garage. They push aside folding tables and set up folding chairs, and all begin to sing and dance, to stagger and sob and “shabach, to cry out loudly to the Lord,” as one congregant described it, and often to be overwhelmed by the Holy Ghost, so that soon the voices are not producing words in any known language. They are, instead, living out a version of a miracle that is rendered in the Book of Acts and that gives Leah’s denomination its name. At the feast of the Pentecost, on the 50th day after Easter, the Holy Ghost took such complete possession of Jesus’s disciples that they spoke, the Bible says, “in other tongues.” Pentecostals in the midst of worship are frequently so possessed that their services are filled with anarchic, alien sounds, with outpourings and prayers comprehensible only to God.
The spirit wasn’t taking quite such hold in the church of Leah’s father on the Sunday of the anniversary; still, the sermon she gave in searing tones stirred the congregation to yell back in affirmation and turn palms to the ceiling in supplication, and the message seemed to seize control of Daughtry herself, to set her trembling. Her subject was the prophet Deborah, who, in Daughtry’s telling of the biblical story, left the ease of the visionary role that came naturally to her and ventured into battle for Israel. “The only way God’s work would get done is if she rose from her comfortable place!” Daughtry pronounced. “God is challenging us to rise! God wants us in that unfamiliar place! Even though I’m not comfortable, I’m going to rise up!” Despite her pastoring, Daughtry is a fiercely private woman. Her sermon alluded to her own unease with the measure of public attention she has received as she spearheads the Democratic effort to woo the religious and win votes in November. Yet the task is not optional. It is, as she sees it, her way of fulfilling a generations-old family covenant with God.
