JEROME, Ariz.—Terry “T” Donahue never became an outlaw biker, although he had his rowdy moments.
He had everything he wanted in the form of “stuff”—everything except the one intangible thing that mattered.
A feeling of wholeness.
“There had always been a kind of lack in my heart. I had all the toys—the home, the motorcycles, the cars—but there was always something missing,” said Donahue, president of the Ascendants Motorcycle Club in Phoenix.
Now older and wiser, and sporting a graying goatee, Donahue admits he has mellowed as he proudly dons the colors of his faith-based motorcycle club.
He wears a black vest covered in patches with his name, rank, and club association, along with a pair of sunglasses perched atop his smoothly shaved head.
Donahue has plenty of stories to tell about his wild and crazy past, but he prefers to keep those a secret.
“Without a doubt, the older you get, the milder you get,” said Donahue, 55, who sees himself closer to the end of the road than the beginning.
“For me, that opened my eyes—mortality. What was I doing? Is this all there is?”
By their admission, the Ascendants are fallen souls.
Nothing—not even money, power, or possessions—could fill Donahue’s spiritual void apart from the faith he acquired through a higher calling seven years ago.
It happened when he and four close biker friends were out doing security for volunteers handing out food to the homeless in downtown Phoenix.
It was a dangerous job, Donahue recalled. There'd been fist fights, stabbings, muggings, and shootings. But the five men were formidable as enforcers working as a team. They managed to keep order and the vital assistance flowing.
“Being able to be of service filled that void,” Donahue told The Epoch Times. “By keeping [people] safe, we found our calling: helping others—keeping law and order, but actually seeing what’s going on and assisting people.”
The group of bikers would become the “First Five” members of the Ascendants MC, founded by Mike “Big Mike” Cameron of Phoenix in 2017. Five is the required number of members to form a motorcycle club.
Cameron said that most of the club’s founding members remain active to this day, “shining by example.”
“We’re a bunch of guys who came from dark places and found the light,” he said.
They are “brothers” in their passion and faith in every sense—risen men with nicknames including Thumper, Scooby, Robo, Tommy Gun, Wizard, Rock, and Brutus.
“We’re out there sharing hope with people that are feeling hopeless,” Cameron said.
The club today boasts about 20 permanent members. Each inductee wears a three-piece black leather vest of “outlaw configuration,” consisting of the club name and a black-and-wine-hued patch depicting a medieval Christian knight wielding a shield and sword.
The black represents the darkness from which the club’s members all came—and wine, the blood of Christ.
The club’s mission is to serve the downtrodden, answering to no other club and no other man except the “man upstairs.”
“I like to call us hope dealers because that’s what we do,” said Jason “Thumper” Kowalski, the club’s chaplain. “These guys are the guys to do it.”
Kowalski said the club gave him the hope and faith he needed to carry on after a 20-year battle with a methamphetamine addiction.
Thankfully, that’s all in the past, he said.
Cameron, 57, has been involved in motorcycle clubs most of his life—“some good, some not so good.”
The not-so-good clubs go by the umbrella title “one-percent.” They include the Hells Angels, Mongols, and Warlocks, and other notorious biker gangs. As society’s modern-day renegades, the one-percent clubs live by their own rules and code of ethics.
Drugs, alcohol, sex, and mayhem simply go with the territory.
Where Our Demons Hide
“In any society, you have good and bad,” Cameron said.“It’s the same thing with motorcycle groups. Each has its bad apples, [although] it seems like the media focuses on the bad stuff. We do toy runs every year with almost every club in town, whether it’s a one-percent or regular club.”
To be accepted into the ranks of the Ascendants is a testament to each member’s faith and good character.
The process begins with a statement of Christian values and a vote whether to accept the applicant as a “hang-around” for three months.
If all goes well, the hang-around may advance to the next level as a “prospect,” a six-month test before full membership is granted.
Cameron describes the Ascendants as a brotherhood much like the cohesive units found in the military.
The bonds among club members run deep and last a lifetime.
“I would lay my life down for any of my brothers,” he said. “I don’t know many motorcycle clubs that would not tell you the same thing.”
When people ask Cameron why the Ascendants choose to wear colors reminiscent of outlaw biker clubs, he replies that the answer is simple: The Ascendants are a group of men who have broken the chains of a painful past, acknowledging the darkness within to show others the way out.
Cameron admits that as a passionate biker, he ran with the wrong crowd and went “through hell,” serving 10 years in prison before his faith straightened him out.
“I was a drug addict—you name it, I did it. And I came out the other side alive,” he told The Epoch Times.
God, Family, Club
While other Christian motorcycle clubs sought to recruit him, Cameron said he wanted to start fresh with a club of his own.He did a lot of praying first.
“I don’t do a whole lot without praying. I was torn about what I wanted to do,” Cameron said. “I had to learn how to listen. Some people call it a sixth sense. Some people call it intuition.”
He feels it was divine inspiration.
“I felt like God was telling me, ‘Hey, this is what I want you to do. Go and do it.’ Things just started to fall into place,” he said.
On Oct. 15, the club held its annual meeting and celebration at the Gold King Mine in Jerome, Arizona.
Sitting around a bonfire, club members and supporters shared “testimony” of how the club helped them rise above past traumas and repair character flaws.
“I’m going to try to do it without getting emotional,” said Cameron, a burly man wearing a bandana on his head and whose arms are covered in tattoos.
Then, the circle of testimony began.
“I look around the circle right now and see a vision of the light. But it’s not just the men,” Cameron said, pointing to the women sitting in the group.
“You, you, and you. It’s about all of us. It’s about this family. I want you all to know that I love you.”
Cameron wiped his eyes and said: “Smiley! Tell me what this club has done for you. You’re sporting it on the back of your head.”
Eddie “Smiley” Hernandez, 50, stood up and removed his sunglasses, his shaved head glistening in the afternoon light.
Tattooed above his forehead is the word “Ascendants,” with the club’s knight logo etched in flesh on the back of his head.
“I’m a person that if I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it 100 percent,” Hernandez said of his tattoos.
“This motorcycle club changed my life. It’s not something that I’m going to get away from.”
Hernandez then expressed his profound love of his new life after seven years of homelessness and drug addiction.
Without the club, he said, “I don’t think I'd be in the place I am now—in God.”
Hernandez said he joined the club three years ago, having grown up in a very dark place in Phoenix.
“I came into this world through the drug cartel,” Hernandez told The Epoch Times. “I started dealing drugs, selling drugs since I was 10 years old.
“After all the drugs, I ended up in prison for eight years. When I got out, I got addicted to methamphetamine.”
Nineteen years ago, his sister-in-law, diagnosed with terminal cancer, asked Hernandez to accompany her to a church service, hoping it would end the pain of his addiction.
He granted her dying wish and stopped using drugs that very same day.
“She just asked me to go to church and told me God could change my life,” said Hernandez, who used to ride fast and furious with a “dominant” one-percent motorcycle club in his maverick days.
He declined to mention the club by name but confessed he knew the Hells Angels leader and founding member Ralph “Sonny” Barger, who died on June 29 at age 83.
Hernandez was among the 7,000 invited guests who attended Barger’s funeral in California in September.
“[The] one-percent world respects us because of who we are [as Christians],” Hernandez said. “We go where anybody needs prayer. That’s what we’re here for.”
Steven “Robo” Harmon, 57, one of the First Five, said that the road he chose to travel eventually landed him in prison before his faith intervened.
Before that would happen, “nothing would change [him],” Harmon told The Epoch Times.
“Nothing would change me from that [self-destructive path],” he said.
“Everybody has their issues. We used to be takers. Now we’re givers.”
Like his fellow club members, Harmon discovered compassion for others within himself, and he believes that potential for kindness exists in every person.
Even the most hardcore biker “wants to be loved,” he said. “Everybody has some sort of trauma—some worse than others—the things we miss.”
Cameron can attest to the downward spiral of unresolved trauma and the feeling of peace he gets whenever he’s out on his motorcycle, in the sun and wind, talking with God.
In those moments of perfect solitude, all is well with his soul—and he is free.
