New Year's Partiers, Preachers Clash in 'Sin City'

LAS VEGAS (Dec. 31) -- The blonde pulled up her shirt to expose her breasts, the male couple French-kissed with reckless abandon and the gang of friends from the University of Vermont posed for pictures holding up yard-long drinks and brandishing obscene hand gestures. All standard fare for New Year's Eve here, to be sure.

Yet these revelers did so both with great amusement and plenty of spite, reactions to a far more incongruous sight for the wildest party Sin City throws each year: A row in the middle of Las Vegas Strip of about 30 evangelical preachers waving gigantic placards warning of eternal damnation for the "porno freaks," "baby killers," astrologers, Mormons, Muslims, gays and "so-called Christians" in their midst.

"What are these people doing here?" groused Danny Weiner, 22, of East Orange, N.J., half of the gay pair making out ostentatiously in front of the pious brigade. "This is Vegas. It's not where they belong tonight."

Actually, though, this holiday is the Super Bowl of open-air religious proselytizers. Every year, a loosely affiliated group of itinerant preachers flocks to Vegas for New Year's Eve and then travels to Pasadena, Calif., for the Rose Bowl Parade to recite Scripture and bellow through bullhorns about the approaching apocalypse. The two regularly scheduled events are the year's largest public gatherings in America within one 24-hour period and within such a close proximity of one another.

"This is an event we try to take advantage of because it's an opportunity to end and begin the new year saving souls," said preacher Ruben Israel of Los Angeles, who wore a yellow sandwich board that asked, "Are you born again?"

"If anyone gives me a day, I can give them about 2 million people to preach to," said Israel. "This is definitely street-preacher-friendly."

Friendly is not a word most would use for the reception the posse of proselytizers received standing shoulder-to-shoulder outside the Mirage Hotel-Casino in a swarm of hundreds of thousands of partiers. The preachers took turns on the bullhorns, with a typical message coming from a fellow named Jeremy from New Mexico who shouted: "You're on the road to hell right now. Hell is a place of fire and brimstone. Must you all go to hell before you understand that God is not playing around?"

The message is confrontational, admitted preacher Petar Keselievic, who traveled here from Oslo, Norway and described himself as the Scandinavian nation's first street preacher. That harsh edge, he said, is necessary to shake people out of their wicked slumbers.

"We confront sin openly and it may not be nice to hear," said Keselievic, 39, who became a born-again Christian 14 years ago after years of indulging in porn and drugs, including steroids when he was a competitive bodybuilder. "We tell people that fornication is wrong, drunkenness is wrong, gambling is wrong, sodomy is wrong, we give them the whole list and we tell them the consequences of this."

The group began picketing and preaching at about 6:30 p.m. as partiers assembled on the Strip, choosing a spot next to a barricade where dozens of Las Vegas police officers observed the crowd. With an hour remaining until the New Year, Israel said he'd already seen the cops haul off three people who menaced the preachers.

"We've been told tonight that if it were not for the police, they would punch us, beat us and stab us," said Israel, who has a painting business in California. "We've been beat up more times than I can remember."

While many revelers shouted angry epithets or took photos of themselves in mocking poses before the preachers, some engaged in serious debate. Joshua Burgess, 23, of Tel Aviv spent more than a half hour arguing with preacher Mark Czikalla of Anaheim about "intelligent design," a belief held by some religious people that evolution comes from God's direction over a few thousand years and not from random mutation and natural selection over millions of years.

"If there was an intelligent creator or intelligent design, he didn't do a very good job because life on Earth is very precarious, there's a very, very slim margin of error for life to exist," said Burgess, an atheist who is working on a Masters degree in Middle East studies at Hebrew University. "You can look at the human eye, you can look at mitochondria. That's the result of billions of years of Darwinian evolution."

Czikalla had a comeback: "Let's just say you're right. Let me ask you this: How did evolution start?" Burgess seemed stumped and changed the subject.

Still, serious intellectual discussion was hardly the focus of the event. The preachers welcomed photos, even ones that were lewd or obscene, in the hope that someone might see the images one day and take the religious message to heart. And the reaction of the crowd, however unpleasant, proved that people were moved.

"We don't expect for a big revival where people will drop to their knees and find God right away," Israel said. "But if they were dead to the message, they would just go by."

Peter Reinhardt, 30, of Seattle, said he was outraged because, he believed, the preachers have misunderstood or twisted the word of God.

"You can't let these people just say this stuff because it's harmful, people kill themselves over the guilt that they feel over doing normal things like masturbating or having sex," Reinhardt said. "Wars are fought over this stuff. One set of people decides what God wants and tells everyone else. You can't reason with them, but you can show them that you think they're full of it."

Indeed, just as Reinhardt was finishing his remarks, the bullhorn began blaring again with the simple, plaintive declaration: "Repent or you're going to hell!"

It was enough to get Reinhardt to chug the rest of his beer, hand the container to his girlfriend and stomp over to the man with the bullhorn.

"If I'm going to hell," he shouted at the top of his lungs, "I'll see every one of you clowns there."