Since Sound of Trumpet, enabled by Google Groups, has
turned these newsgroups into religion forums, I
thought you'd all enjoy this hilarious story by Matt
Taibbi, originally published in _Rolling_Stone_.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20278737/jesu
s_made_me_puke/print
Jesus Made Me Puke
Matt Taibbi Undercover with the Christian Right
MATT TAIBBI
Posted May 01, 2008 12:00 AM
I pulled into the church parking lot a little after
6:00 p.m., at more or less the last possible minute.
The previous half hour or so I'd spent dawdling in my
car outside a Goodwill department store off Route 410
in San Antonio, clinging to some inane sports talk show
piping over my car radio ‹ anything to hold off my
plunge into Religion.
There was an old-fashioned white school bus in front of
the church entrance, with a puddle of heavyset people
milling around its swinging door. Some of these were
carrying blankets and sleeping bags. My heart, already
pounding, skipped a few extra beats. The church
circulars had said nothing about bringing bedding. Why
did I need bedding? What else had I missed?
"Excuse me," I said, walking up to an in-charge-looking
man with a name tag who was standing near the front of
the bus. "I see everyone has blankets. I didn't bring
any. Is this going to be a problem?"
The man was about five feet one and had glassy eyes. He
looked up at me and smiled queerly.
"Name?" he said.
"Collins," I said. "Matthew Collins."
He scanned his clipboard, found my name on the
appropriate sheet of paper, and X-ed me out with a
highlighter. "Don't worry, Matthew," he said, resting
his hand on my shoulder. "A wonderful woman named
Martha is going to take care of you at the ranch. You
just tell her what you need when you get there."
I nodded, glancing at his hand, which was still on my
shoulder. He waved me into the bus.
I had been attending the Cornerstone Church for weeks,
but this was really my first day of school. I had
joined Cornerstone ‹ a megachurch in the Texas Hill
Country ‹ to get a look inside the evangelical mind-set
that gave the country eight years of George W. Bush.
The church's pastor, John Hagee, is one of the most
influential evangelical preachers in the country ‹ not
because his ministry is so very large (although he
claims up to 4.5 million viewers a week for his Sunday
sermons) but because of his near-absolute conquest of a
very trendy niche in the market: Christian Zionism.
The whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align
America with the nation of Israel so as to "hurry God
up" in his efforts to bring about Armageddon. As Hagee
tells it, only after Israel is involved in a final
showdown involving a satanic army (in most
interpretations, a force of Arabs led by Russians) will
Christ reappear. On that happy day, Hagee and his True
Believers will be whisked up to Heaven by God, while
the rest of us nonbelievers are left behind on Earth to
suck eggs and generally suffer various tortures.
So here I was, standing in the church parking lot,
having responded to church advertisements hawking an
"Encounter Weekend" ‹ three solid days of sleep-away
Christian fellowship that would teach me the "joy" of
"knowing the truth" and "being set free." That had
sounded harmless enough, but now that I was here and
surrounded by all of these blanket-bearing people, I
was nervous. When most Americans think of the Christian
right, they think of scenes from television ‹ great
halls full of perfectly groomed people in pale suits
and light-colored dresses, smiling and happy and full
of the Holy Spirit, robotically singing hymns at the
behest of some squeaky-clean pastor with a baritone
voice and impossible hair. We don't get to see the
utterly batshit world they live in, when the cameras
are turned off and their pastors are not afraid of
saying the really dumb stuff, for fear of it turning up
on CNN. In American evangelical Christianity, in other
words, there's a ready-for-prime-time stage act ‹ toned
down and lip-synced to match a set of PG lyrics that
won't scare the advertisers ‹ and then there's the real
party backstage, where the spiritual hair really gets
let down. I was about to go backstage, to personally
take part in the indoctrination process for a major
Southern evangelical church. Waiting to board the bus
for the Encounter Weekend, I had visions of some
charismatic ranch-land Jesus, stoned on beer and the
Caligula director's cut and too drunk late at night to
chase after the minor children, hauling me into a barn
for an in-the-hay shortcut to truth and freedom.
Ridiculous, of course, but I really was afraid, mostly
of my own ignorance and prejudices. I had never been to
something like this before, and I didn't know how to
act. I badly wanted to be invisible.
The bus was nearly full, and mostly quiet. Here and
there a few people sitting together or near each other
huddled and chatted, but I could see right away that a
great many people on the trip had come alone, like me.
They were people of all sorts: younger white men in
neat middle-class haircuts, a matronly Mexican woman
quietly reading a romance novel, a few scattered
weather-beaten black folk in secondhand clothing whom I
immediately pegged as in-recovery addicts, a couple of
ten-alarm soccer moms who would prove the loudest
people on the bus by far, a few quiet older men of
military bearing.
The one obvious conclusion anyone making a demographic
study of the Cornerstone Church population would come
to would be that it's a solidly middle-class crowd.
These are folks who are comfortable eating off paper
plates and drinking out of gallon jugs of Country Time
iced tea over noisy dinners with their kids. They're
people who grew up in houses with back yards and
fences, people with families. This particular journey
to God is not a pastime for the idle rich or the urban
obnoxious.
I sat down next to a frankly obese Hispanic woman who
was carrying what both looked and smelled like a paper
bag full of cheeseburgers.
"Some weather we're having, with this rain," I said.
"Tell me about it!" she said, introducing herself as
Maria. "It truly is an act of God that I even made it
here today." She told a story about having to drive
down from Austin in bad weather. God had helped her
four or five steps along the way. "It just seems like
God really wants me to come on this trip," she said.
"Otherwise, I would never have made it."
"It looks like God is going to give us a rainstorm all
the way to Tarpley," I heard a voice behind me say.
This oddly uniform style of dialogue ringing all around
me made me shift in my seat. I felt nervous and
unpleasantly certain that I was about to be found out.
When Maria asked me why I'd come on the retreat, I bit
my lip. When in Rome, I thought.
"Well," I said, "since the new year, I've just been
feeling like God has been telling me that I need to get
right spiritually. So here I am."
I paused, wincing inwardly. An outsider coming into
this world will feel sure that the moment he coughs up
one of those "God told me to put more English on my tee
shot" lines, his dark game will be instantly visible to
all, and he'll be made the target of one of those
Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style point-and-screech
mob scenes. But nothing could be further from the
truth. You simply cannot go wrong praising God in this
world; overdoing it is literally impossible. I would
understand this better by the end of the weekend.
Maria smiled. "I feel the same way. Have you ever been
to one of these Encounters?"
"No, I haven't," I said.
"Me neither," she said. "I'm really excited."
"They're wonderful," said the matronly Mexican woman in
front of me, turning around. "They really change you
forever."
I slunk in my seat, trying to look inconspicuous. My
disguise was modeled on other men I'd seen in church ‹
pane glasses and the very gayest blue-and-white-striped
Gap polo shirt I'd been able to find that afternoon.
Buried on a clearance rack next to the underwear
section in a nearby mall, the Gap shirt was one of
those irritating throwbacks to the
Meatballs/Seventies-summer-camp-geek look, but stripped
of its sartorial irony, it really just screamed
Friendless Loser! ‹ so I bought it without hesitation
and tried to match it with that sheepish,
ashamed-to-have-a-penis look I had seen so many other
young men wearing in church. With the glasses and a
slouch I hoped I was at least in the ballpark of what I
thought I needed to look like, which was a slow-moving
hulk of confused, shipwrecked masculinity, flailing for
an Answer.
One of the implicit promises of the church is that
following its program will restore to you your vigor,
confidence and assertiveness, effecting, among other
things, a marked and obvious physical transformation
from crippled lost soul to hearty vessel of God. That's
one of the reasons that it's so important for the
pastors to look healthy, lusty and lustrous ‹ they're
appearing as the "after" photo in the ongoing
advertisement for the church wellness cure.
In these Southern churches there are few wizened old
sages such as one might find among Catholic bishops or
Russian startsi. Here your church leader is an athlete,
a business dynamo, a champion eater with a bull's
belly, outwardly a tireless heterosexual ‹ and if you
want to know what a church beginner is supposed to look
like, just make it the opposite of that. Show weakness,
financial trouble, frustration with the opposite sex,
and if you're overweight, be so unhealthily, and in a
way that you're ashamed of. The fundamentalist formula
is much less a journey from folly to wisdom than it is
from weakness to strength. They don't want a
near-complete personality that needs fine-tuning ‹ they
want a human jellyfish, raw clay they can transform
into a vigorous instrument of God.
I was very, very, very good ‹ at everything!" shouted
our hulking ex-paratrooper pastor, Philip Fortenberry,
into the barely visible mouth mike that curled around
his ruddy face. "I was a Green Beret ‹ top of the
class. Six feet four, 225 pounds. A star athlete,
basketball player. Starting outside linebacker on the
varsity football team. . . ."
The crowd cooed as our spiritual leader rattled off his
macho credentials. Our supercowboy pastor was the
perfect foil for the Revenge of the Nerds-style crowd
of fatties, addicts, loners and broken-home survivors
populating the warehouse-size building where we were
all destined to spend the next three days together. In
his introductory speech, Fortenberry did everything but
tape-measure his biceps. His autobiographical tale of
an angry overachieving youth who fell into a young
adulthood of false pride, only to rebound and be reborn
as a turbocharged, Army-trained enemy of Satan ("A
friend of mine once joked that he saw my picture hung
up in a post office in Hell," he quipped), was to serve
as the first chapter of our collective transformation ‹
and to work it had to impress the hell out of us
scraggly wanna-be's.
It did. "I'm going to start tonight by telling y'all
two stories," he began.
The first was a story from his Army days, about having
to take a training flight in the Pacific Northwest as a
young man and being trapped in the back of the
transport plane when the landing went wrong and the
plane ended up crash-bouncing along the runway. "If
you've ever been in the back of a C-130, you know what
I mean," he said, and I saw nodding heads all through
the audience. The pastor subsequently would not miss a
single chance to drop the name of a piece of military
equipment.
The second story was more personal. It was about being
a little boy in a small Southern town whose father ran
around on his mom with a local barmaid. Dad used to
bring little Junior to play golf with him, keeping his
arm around the barmaid in the golf cart for the entire
eighteen holes; finally Dad left Mom to shack up with
the barmaid in a house down the road. Dad was so busy
with the barmaid that he never came to see Junior's
ballgames. But from time to time he would come back
home to Mom, moving back into Junior's world, turning
his life upside down.
"And every time he came back," the pastor said, waving
his hand up and down and his voice fairly breaking with
tears, "it was like one more bounce along that runway,
bouncing in that C-130, tearing my little boy's world
apart."
The pastor fell silent, still using his hands to
demonstrate that bouncing transport plane of fate, as
he surveyed his hushed audience. Fortenberry then stood
staring at his audience in full pre-weep, his eyes
wrinkling with incipient tears. The grown macho man
unashamedly breaking into boyish tears in public is one
of the weirder features of the post-Promise Keeper
Christian generation, and Fortenberry ‹ himself a
Promise Keeper, incidentally ‹ had it down to a
science. "You never came to my ballgames, Dad," he'd
screech, his face wrinkling like a raisin with grief at
the word "ballgames."
I heard sniffles coming from the audience.
Sensing he had his crowd in an emotionally vulnerable
state, the pastor then plunged into a story about how
his bitterness at his father's abandonment had pushed
him, in high school, to become just about the best
basketball player you could imagine. Young Fortenberry,
we learned, had scored lots and lots of points in high
school and had many great games.
How great were those games? Well, he told us, they were
really great. Some of the stories wandered irrelevantly
into the specific stats of some of those games; he also
punctuated his storytelling with oddly vigorous and
adept pantomimes of jumpers and hook shots. It was a
weird scene, like listening to a married man wax poetic
to a mistress in a roadside motel room. "But after a
while I realized that all those thousands of jump
shots" ‹ here he mimicked a jump shot ‹ "and all those
thousands of moves" ‹ he ducked his head back and
forth, Tim Hardaway-style ‹ "hadn't brought me any
closer to Dad."
The program revolved around a theory that Fortenberry
quickly introduced us to called "the wound." The wound
theory was a piece of schlock biblical Freudianism in
which everyone had one traumatic event from their
childhood that had left a wound. The wound necessarily
had been inflicted by another person, and bitterness
toward that person had corrupted our spirits and
alienated us from God. Here at the retreat we would
identify this wound and learn to confront and forgive
our transgressors, a process that would leave us
cleansed of bitterness and hatred and free to receive
the full benefits of Christ.
In the context of the wound theory, Fortenberry's tale
suddenly made more sense. Being taken on that
eighteen-hole golf trip with the barmaid, and watching
his family ditched by Dad, had been his wound. It was a
wound, Fortenberry explained, because his father's
abandonment had crushed his "normal."
"And I was wounded," he whispered dramatically. "My dad
had ruined my normal!"
The crowd murmured affirmatively, apparently knowing
what it was to have a crushed normal.
After introducing us to the concept of wounds and
normals, Fortenberry told us one last cautionary tale
before sending us to our first group session. It was
about a paratrooper who had done a tandem jump with a
training dummy for some Army exercise or other, only to
have the dummy's chute fail to open. The dummy had
plunged to the ground, crashing through the trees and
landing with a thud in a bush. Fortenberry's Army buddy
had taken advantage of the situation to have a little
joke at the expense of some other exercising soldiers
on the ground who weren't privy to the fact that the
troopers were jumping with dummies. The Army buddy had
cried and wailed in asking where the "body" had fallen,
leaving the soldiers on the ground to think that
someone had just been killed.
The soldiers had felt guilty, Fortenberry explained,
because they'd failed to help what they thought was a
fallen comrade. Why? Because they'd been afraid to look
behind the bush.
"So I'm telling you now, as you go into your groups,"
the pastor explained, "don't be afraid to look behind
the bush."
I wrote in my binder: "LOOK BEHIND THE BUSH." Then I
waited as my name was called out for group study.
The groups were segregated. Men with men, women with
women. Each group was led by a life coach, who was
actually a recent graduate of the program. At the
beginning of the group stage, the coaches were all
called up to the front of the chapel, and Fortenberry
would call out the coach's name first, then the names
of his group members.
My coach's name was Morgan. Morgan was a big man,
ex-military, with curly black hair, a black mustache
and a softening middle. He looked a little like a
post-rehab version of Keith Hernandez ‹ soft-spoken,
deferential, all nose and mustache.
There were four other men in our group. Besides myself,
there was José, a huge Mexican with a sheepish
expression and a steam-boiler body; Aaron, a squat and
alert Pennsylvanian with a clean-and-jerker's build;
and Dennis, a somewhat vacant and medicated-looking man
pushing forty with a bald head and stubbly beard.
Dennis looked like a distantly menacing version of
Homer Simpson after electroshock therapy. Seated just a
few feet away from us in our tight circle, he gazed out
at us like he could barely make out our faces.
Once Morgan had us all gathered together, we looked for
table space in the cafeteria area of the main building.
Ominously, each of the cafeteria tables had a fresh box
of Kleenex resting on top of it.
"Well," Morgan said, "I think what we're going to do to
start is this. I'm going to tell you my story about my
wound, and then we're going to go around in a circle,
and each of us is going to just tell his story. Is that
OK?"
Everyone nodded. I noted with displeasure that I was
seated first after Morgan in clockwise order. Already I
was panicking; what kind of wound could a human cipher
like myself possibly confess to?
Morgan told his story. Even a perfunctory look at my
fellow group members told me that we had people here
with some very serious problems, and yet Morgan's wound
was a tale that wouldn't have even ruined a week of my
relatively privileged childhood, much less my whole
life ‹ something about being yelled at by his dad while
he was out playing with remote-controlled airplanes
with his friends as a thirteen-year-old. He hammed up
his trauma over the incident in classically lachrymose
Iron John-in-touch-with-his-inner-boy fashion (again,
there is something very odd about modern Christian men
‹ although fiercely pro-military in their politics and
prehistorically macho in their attitudes toward women's
roles, on the level of day-to-day behavior they seem
constantly ready to break out weeping like menopausal
housewives), but his words were bouncing off a wall of
unimpressed silence radiating from the group.
Blank stares. This was a tough crowd. Five minutes into
our group acquaintance, we were at a full 9.5 out of 10
on the International Uncomfortable Silence scale.
Morgan turned, glanced again at my name tag and sighed.
"Well, uh, OK, then," he said. "Matthew, do you want to
tell your story?"
My heart was pounding. I obviously couldn't use my real
past ‹ not only would it threaten my cover, but I was
somewhat reluctant to expose anything like my real
inner self to this ideologically unsettling process ‹
but neither did I want to be trapped in a story too far
from my own experience. What I settled on eventually
was something that I thought was metaphorically similar
to the truth about myself.
"Hello," I said, taking a deep breath. "My name is
Matt. My father was an alcoholic circus clown who used
to beat me with his oversize shoes."
The group twittered noticeably. Morgan's eyes opened to
tea-saucer size.
I closed my own eyes and kept going, immediately
realizing what a mistake I'd made. There was no way
this story was going to fly. But there was no turning
back.
"He'd be sitting there in his costume, sucking down a
beer and watching television," I heard myself saying.
"And then sometimes, even if I just walked in front of
the TV, he'd pull off one of those big shoes and just,
you know ‹ whap!"
I looked around the table and saw three flatlined,
plainly indifferent psyches plus one mildly unnerved
Morgan staring back at me. I could tell that my coach
and former soldier had been briefly possessed by the
fear that a terrible joke was being played on his
group. But then I actually saw him dismissing the
thought ‹ after all, who would do such a thing? I
managed to tie up my confession with a tale about
turning into a drug addict in my midtwenties ‹ at least
that much was true ‹ and being startled into sobriety
and religion after learning of my estranged clown
father's passing from cirrhosis.
It was a testament to how dysfunctional the group was
that my story flew more or less without comment.
So it began. Our meetings were a prolonged, cyclical
course of group-directed confession and healing that
began on Friday evening and continued almost without
interruption through Sunday afternoon. The basic gist
of our group exercises was this: We were each supposed
to reveal to one another what our great childhood
wounds were, then write a series of essays and letters
on the wound theme, taking time after the writing of
each to read our work aloud. The written assignments
began with an autobiography, then moved on to a letter
written to our "offenders" (i.e., those who had caused
our wounds), then a letter written to Jesus confessing
our failure to forgive our tormentors.
Unfortunately, my one fleeting error of judgment about
my circus-clown dad had left me shackled to a rank
character absurdity for the rest of my stay in Texas. I
soon found myself reading aloud a passage from my
"autobiography" describing a period of my father's life
when he quit clowning to hand out fliers in a Fudgie
the Whale costume outside a Carvel ice cream store:
I laugh about it now, but once he chased me, drunk, in
his Fudgie the Whale costume. He chased me into the
bathroom, laid me across the toilet seat and hit me
with his fins, which underneath were still a man's
hands.
Again no reaction from the group, aside from an
affirming nod from José at the last part ‹ his eyes
said to me, I know what you mean about those fins.
After each of these grueling exercises we would have
lengthy, fifteen-to-twenty-minute sessions singing
unbearably atonal Christian hymns. Then we would have
teaching/Bible-study sessions led by Fortenberry on the
theme of the moment (e.g., "Admit the Truth About Our
Wounds") that lasted an hour or so. Then, after
Fortenberry would waste at least half the session
giving us the Marlboro Man highlights of his
professional résumé ("I was the manager of the
second-largest ranch in America, 825,000 acres. . . .")
and bragging about his physical prowess ("If someone
was to slug me, I could whip just about anyone here"),
we would go back to the group session and confess some
more. Then we would sing some more, receive more of
Fortenberry's hairy lessons, and then the cycle would
start all over again. There were almost no breaks or
interruptions; it was a physically exhausting schedule
of confession, catharsis, bad music and relentless,
muscular instruction. The Saturday program began at
7:45 a.m. and did not end until ten at night; we went
around the confess-sing-learn cycle five full times in
one day.
We were about a third of the way through the process
when I began to wonder what the hell was going on.
Fortenberry's blowhard-on-crack-act/wound gobbledygook
were all suspiciously secular in tone and approach. I
had been hearing whispers throughout the first day or
so to the effect that there was some kind of incredible
supernatural religious ceremony that was going to take
place at the end of the retreat ("Tighten your saddle,
he's fixin' ta buck" was how "cowboy" Fortenberry put
it), when we would experience "Victory and
Deliverance." But as far as I could see, in the early
going, most of what we were doing was simple pop-psych
self-examination using New Age-y diagnostic tools of
the Deepak Chopra school: Identify your problems, face
your oppressors, visualize your obstacles. Be your
dream job. With a little rhetorical tweaking and much
better food, this could easily have been Tony Robbins
instructing a bunch of Upper East Side housewives to
"find your wounds" ("My husband hid my Saks card!") at
a chic resort in Miami Beach or the Hamptons.
True, I could see some other angles to what was going
on as well. Virtually all of the participants of the
Encounter identified either one or both of their
parents as their "offender," and much of what
Fortenberry was talking about in his instructional
sessions was how to replace the godless atmosphere of
abuse or neglect that the offenders had provided us
with God and the church. He was taking broken people
and giving them a road map to a new set of parents, a
new family ‹ your basic cultist bait-and-switch formula
for cutting old emotional ties and redirecting that
psychic energy toward the desired new destination. That
connection would become more overt later in the
weekend, but early on, this ur-father propaganda was
the only thing I could see that separated Encounter
Weekend from the typical self-help dreck of the secular
world.
But then, midway through Saturday, Fortenberry and the
coaches started to show us glimpses of the program's
end game. The wound, it turned out, was something that
was inflicted upon us because of a curse, a curse that
perhaps spanned generations in each of our families.
Alcoholic parents abused their children, who in turn
carried their parents' curse to their adult lives and
became alcoholics themselves ‹ only to have children
and continue the pattern again. Now, why was that curse
there to begin with? Here was where we could get into
religious explanations, see the footprint of Satan,
etc. We were unhappy because of earthly troubles from
our childhoods, but those troubles were the work of a
generational curse, inflicted upon us by devils and
demons ‹ probably for unbelief, bad behavior,
disobedience, worship of the wrong gods and so on.
This little bit of semantic gymnastics helped transform
all of us at the retreat from being merely fucked up to
being accursed carriers of demons. Having ridden an
almost entirely secular program to get our biographies
out in the open in a group setting, Fortenberry could
now switch his focus to the real meat and potatoes of
the weekend: Satan and the devils inside us.
He started off slowly, invoking the godly curses of
Genesis ‹ the sweat on Adam's brow, the pain of Eve's
childbirth, etc. ‹ the punishments for eating of the
tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. "How many of
you women out there have had babies?" Fortenberry
asked. "Can I see some hands?"
A dozen or so hands raised.
"Now, did it hurt?" he asked.
Laughter. Of course it hurt.
"Let me ask you a question," he said. "Why do
alcoholics give birth to alcoholics? Why do the
fatherless give birth to the fatherless?" He paused.
"There are some people out there who will tell you it's
genetics. It's in our genes, they say. Well, I tell
you, it's not genetics. It's a generational curse!"
Fortenberry then started in on a rant against science
and against scientific explanations for cycles of sin.
"Take homosexuals," he said. "Every single homosexual
is a sexual-abuse victim. They are not born. They are
created ‹ by pedophiles."
The crowd swallowed that one whole. One thing about
this world: Once a preacher says it, it's true. No one
is going to look up anything the preacher says,
cross-check his facts, raise an eyebrow at something
that might sound a little off. Some weeks later, I
would be at a Sunday service in which Pastor John Hagee
himself would assert that the Bible predicts that Jesus
Christ is going to return to Earth bearing a "rod of
iron" to discipline the ACLU. It goes without saying
that the ACLU was not mentioned in the passage in
Ezekiel he was citing ‹ but the audience ate it up
anyway. When they're away from the cameras, the
preachers feel even less obligated to shackle
themselves to facts of any kind. That's because they
know that their audience doesn't give a shit. So long
as you're telling them what they want to hear, there's
no danger; your crowd will angrily dismiss any
alternative explanations anyway as demonic subversion.
A team of twenty of the world's leading scientists
wouldn't be able to convince so much as one person in
this crowd that homosexuals are not created by
pedophiles.
Fortenberry told a story about a nephew of his who
called him up one night. "Both of his kids had fallen
on the ground in respiratory distress, half-conscious,
writhing around, gasping for air," Fortenberry said.
"And I said to my nephew, I said, 'It isn't something
they've done. It's something you've done.' "
The crowd murmured in assent.
"I told my nephew to look around the house,"
Fortenberry continued. "I said, 'Do you have a copy of
Harry Potter?' And he said yes. And I said, 'That's
your problem.' So I told him to go get that copy of
that book, tear it in half and throw it out the window.
So he does it, and guess what? Both of those kids stood
up completely recovered, just like that."
He snapped his fingers, indicating the speed with which
the kids had jumped up in recovery. The crowd cooed and
applauded. I frowned, wondering for a minute what life
must be like for a person mortally afraid of toothless
commercial fairy tales. It struck me that Phil
Fortenberry's nephew was probably more afraid of Harry
Potter than Macbeth, which to me said a lot about this
religion and about America in general.
Here I have a confession to make. It's not something
that's easy to explain, but here goes. After two days
of nearly constant religious instruction, songs,
worship and praise ‹ two days that for me meant an
unending regimen of forced and fake responses ‹ a funny
thing started to happen to my head. There is a
transformational quality in these external
demonstrations of faith and belief. The more you shout
out praising the Lord, singing along to those awful
acoustic tunes, telling people how blessed you feel and
so on, the more a sort of mechanical Christian skin
starts to grow all over your real self. Even if you're
a degenerate Rolling Stone reporter inwardly chuckling
and busting on the whole scene ‹ even if you're
intellectually enraged by the ignorance and arrogant
prejudice flowing from the mouth of a terminal-ambition
case like Phil Fortenberry ‹ outwardly you're swaying
to the gospel and singing and praising and acting the
part, and those outward ministrations assume a kind of
sincerity in themselves. And at the same time, that
"inner you" begins to get tired of the whole spectacle
and sometimes forgets to protest ‹ in my case checking
out into baseball reveries and other daydreams while
the outer me did the "work" of singing and praising. At
any given moment, which one is the real you?
You may think you know the answer, but by my third day
I began to notice how effortlessly my soft-spoken
Matt-mannequin was going through his robotic motions of
praise, and I was shocked. For a brief, fleeting moment
I could see how under different circumstances it would
be easy enough to bury your "sinful" self far under the
skin of your outer Christian and to just travel through
life this way. So long as you go through all the
motions, no one will care who you really are
underneath. And besides, so long as you are going
through all the motions, never breaking the facade, who
are you really? It was an incomplete thought, but it
was a scary one; it was the very first time I worried
that the experience of entering this world might prove
to be anything more than an unusually tiring
assignment. I feared for my normal.
On the final morning of the weekend, we gathered in the
chapel for the Deliverance. Fortenberry, dressed in his
standard Western shirt and hiked-up jeans, sauntered up
to the lectern wearing a solemn and dramatic
expression. "This is fixing to be the biggest spiritual
battle that ninety-nine percent of you will ever face,"
he said. "But let me tell you something. It's already
been won. It was won 2,000 years ago."
The crowd cheered. As the applause tailed, he held his
hands up Mussolini-fashion, asking for quiet. The crowd
complied. It was quite dramatically done, this whole
business, whatever we were working toward. And at that
moment, I spotted a younger kid who had been at the
retreat all weekend working a soundboard for the
musical parts zipping behind the crowd to some kind of
dimmer panel. He turned a switch and the lights dimmed
slightly; though it was morning, the light in the
building suddenly turned unnatural, like the light
during a partial eclipse.
Throughout the whole weekend, Fortenberry had been
setting himself up as an athletic conqueror of demons.
Now, on the final morning, he looked like a quarterback
about to take the field before a big game. The life
coaches assembled around the edges of the chapel,
carrying anointing oil and bundles of small paper bags.
Fortenberry began to issue instructions. He told us
that under no circumstances should we pray during the
Deliverance.
"When the word of God is in your mouth," he said, "the
demons can't come out of your body. You have to keep a
path clear for the demon to come up through your
throat. So under no circumstances pray to God. You
can't have God in your mouth. You can cough, you might
even want to vomit, but don't pray."
The crowd nodded along solemnly. Fortenberry then
explained that he was going to read from an extremely
long list of demons and cast them out individually. As
he did so, we were supposed to breathe out, keep our
mouths open and let the demons out.
And he began.
At first, the whole scene was pure comedy. Fortenberry
was standing up at the front of the chapel, reading off
a list, and the room was loudly chirping crickets back
at him.
"In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of incest!
In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of sexual
abuse! In the name of Jesus. . . ."
After a few minutes, there was a little twittering here
and there. Nothing serious. I was beginning to think
the Deliverance was going to be a bust.
But then it started. Wails and cries from the audience.
To my left, a young black man started writhing around
in his seat. In front of me and to my right, another
young black man with Coke-bottle glasses and a shock of
nerdly jheri curl ‹ a dead ringer for a young Wayne
Williams ‹ started wailing and clutching his head.
"In the name of Jesus," continued Fortenberry, "I cast
out the demon of astrology!"
Coughing and spitting noises. Behind me, a bald white
man started to wheeze and gurgle, like he was about to
puke. Fortenberry, still reading from his list, pointed
at the man. On cue, a pair of life coaches raced over
to him and began to minister. One dabbed his forehead
with oil and fiercely clutched his cranium; the other
held a paper bag in front of his mouth.
"In the name of Jesus Christ," said Fortenberry, more
loudly now, "I cast out the demon of lust!"
And the man began power-puking into his paper baggie. I
couldn't see if any actual vomitus came out, but he
made real hurling and retching noises.
Now the women began to pipe in. On the women's side of
the chapel the noises began, and it is not hard to
explain what these noises sounded like. If you've ever
watched The Houston 560 or any other gangbang porn
movie, that's what it sounded like, only the sounds
were far more intense.
It was not difficult to figure out where the energy was
coming from on that side of the room. Some of the
husbands glanced nervously over in the direction of
their wives.
"In the name of Jesus Christ, I cast out the demon of
cancer!" said Fortenberry.
"Oooh! Unnh! Unnnnnh!" wailed a woman in the front row.
"Bleeech!" puked the bald man behind me.
Within about a minute after that, the whole chapel
erupted in pandemonium. About half the men and
three-fourths of the women were writhing around and
either play-puking or screaming. Not wanting to be a
bad sport, I raised my hand for one of the life coaches
to see.
"Need . . . a . . . bag," I said as he came over.
He handed me a bag.
"In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of
handwriting analysis!" shouted Fortenberry.
Handwriting analysis? I jammed the bag over my mouth
and started coughing, then went into a very real
convulsion of disbelief as I listened to this
astounding list, half-laughing and half-retching.
"In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, I cast out the
demon of the intellect!" Fortenberry continued. "In the
name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of anal fissures!"
Cough, cough!
The minutes raced by. Wayne Williams was now fully
prostrate, held up only by a trio of coaches, each of
whom took part of his writhing body and propped it up.
Another bald man in the front of the chapel was now
freaking out in Linda Blair fashion, roaring and making
horrific demon noises.
"Rum-balakasha-oom!" shouted Fortenberry in tongues,
waving a hand in front of Linda Blair Man.
"Cooom-balakasha-froom! In the name of Jesus Christ, I
cast out the demon of philosophy!"
Philosophy?
It was obvious that virtually everyone in the crowd was
playacting to some degree or another. I was reminded of
the Tolstoy story "The Kreutzer Sonata," when the male
narrator described marriage as being like the
bearded-lady tent in a French circus he'd seen. You pay
a few francs to go in, and when you come out, and the
carnival barker shouts at you, "Was that not the most
amazing thing you've ever seen, monsieur?" ‹ well,
you're too ashamed to admit that you've been had, and
so you nod your head and agree: Oui, monsieur, it was
really something! That's how people come to say
marriage is a blessing, and that's how you can get
fifty-odd high school graduates puking demons into
three-cent paper bags for a Deliverance.
The whole thing ‹ the demonic expulsions, the trading
of miraculous wives' tales, the crazy End Times
theology based on dire predictions that come and go
uneventfully once a year or so ‹ it's all a con that is
done with the consent of the conned. Which is what
gives it strength. If everybody agrees to believe, it
is real.
The hooting and howling went on seemingly forever. It
was nearly an hour and a half before Fortenberry was
done. He had cast out the demons of every ailment,
crime, domestic problem and intellectual discipline on
the face of the Earth. He cast out horoscopes, false
gods, witches, intellectual pride, nearsightedness,
everything, it seemed to me, except maybe E. coli and
John Updike novels. At least four of the men and about
six of the women writhed and screamed and fussed
themselves into sheer physical exhaustion, collapsing
in chairs by the time it was over. Several of the
coaches actually had to bring Wayne Williams and the
other young black man behind the chapel to subdue their
demons. By then most of us men were just sitting there
mute, looking around absent-mindedly, waiting for it to
end. I was sitting there, clutching my demon vomit bag
‹ perhaps the single greatest souvenir of my
journalistic career ‹ when I made the mistake of
closing my mouth. A coach rushed over to me.
"Matthew!" he snapped. "Keep your mouth open! Let the
demons out!"
"Oh, right!" I said. I straightened up and opened my
mouth in the shape of a letter O.
Meanwhile, Fortenberry was tiring.
"I cast out . . . uh . . . In the name of Jesus, I cast
out the demon of pornography. I cast out, in the name
of Jesus, the demon of disconnect."
Fortenberry shook his head as though trying to revive
himself. He had been at this for a long time. His
stamina really was astounding, a testament to his
military training.
Afterward, a frightening thought shot through my head.
It occurred to me that over the past decades, any
number of our prominent political leaders (from Jimmy
Carter to Chuck Colson to W himself) had boasted
publicly of their born-again experiences, broadcasting
to Middle America an understanding of their personal
relationships with God. But whereas once these
conversions were humble things ‹ Billy Graham
whispering and putting his hand on W's shoulder in
Kennebunkport, or even (in the case of Tom DeLay) a
flash of recognition while watching a televangelist
program ‹ the modern version might very easily be this
completely batshit holy-vomitus/demon-exorcism deal.
The thought that any politician could claim this kind
of experience and not be immediately disqualified from
public service seemed utterly terrifying.
We were called back to chapel, and this time the drill
was speaking in tongues. We were asked to come up to
the front of the chapel and let a life coach anoint us
with oil, hold our heads and speak to us in tongues.
Fortenberry instructed us to "just let it out. Just let
it out and it'll come out."
He didn't come right out and say, "Just act like you're
speaking in tongues." But it was damned close. Once
again, Fortenberry greased the process by telling us a
story about how he'd once been at a service where folks
were speaking in tongues, and he was skeptical, but it
had just flown right out of him ‹ and now it just
shoots right out of him, almost on command.
I went to the front. One of the coaches grabbed me by
the shoulder and sploshed a big puddle of oil on my
forehead. Then he began to speak in tongues:
"Gam-bakakasha. Hoo-raaa-balalakasha. . . . Come on,
Matthew, let it out."
American Christians who speak in tongues basically all
try to sound like extras from the underworld set of
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. If you want to
pull it off and sound like a natural, just imagine
you're holding a rubber replica of Harrison Ford's
heart in your hands: Umm-harakashaka!
Loo-pa-wanneee-rakakakasha, Meester Jones!
But I didn't think of this at the time and just went
another route.
"Let it out, Matthew," the coach repeated, clutching my
forehead. "Just open your mouth."
I shrugged and rattled off the lyrics to the song "What
is Autumn?" by the Russian rock band DDT:
What is autumn? It's the sky The crying sky below your
feet. Flying about in puddles are the birds and clouds.
Autumn I've not been with you for so long!
It's actually a beautiful song, but with my eyes rolled
back in my head and recited in Russian it sounded
demonic enough.
"Hmm, very good," my coach said. "Good job, Matthew."
I kept going, on to the next verse. "What is autumn?
It's a stone. . . ."
"OK, that's good," the coach said, annoyed, moving on
to the next guy.
"It's important that you practice," said Pastor
Fortenberry. "It sounds silly, but when you're at home,
when you have a little time, just try to let it out.
You'll get used to it, and soon you'll be speaking in
tongues like nobody's business!"
He then pronounced us baptized in the Holy Spirit and
fully qualified now to cast out demons.
He held up his hands in triumph.
"Hallelujah!" he shouted.
The crowd jumped up, and we all threw up our hands.
"Hallelujah!"
He called out Hallelujah! again. We repeated after him.
And we repeated after him again. Arms in the air.
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
I felt a twinge of recognition from somewhere as I
threw my arms up over and over again.
We had graduated.
By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the
mere suggestion that Christians of this type should
learn to "be rational" or "set aside your religion"
about such things as the Iraq War or other policy
matters. Once you've made a journey like this ‹ once
you've gone this far ‹ you are beyond suggestible. It's
not merely the informational indoctrination, the
constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and
Muslims and pacifists, etc., that's the issue. It's
that once you've gotten to this place, you've left
behind the mental process that a person would need to
form an independent opinion about such things. You make
this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of
beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of
like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them,
you're thinking with muscles, not neurons.
By the end of that weekend, Phil Fortenberry could have
told us that John Kerry was a demon with clawed feet,
and not one person would have so much as blinked.
Because none of that politics stuff matters anyway,
once you've gotten this far. All that matters is being
full of the Lord and empty of demons. And since
everything that is not of God is demonic, asking these
people to be objective about anything else is just
absurd. There is no "anything else." All alternative
points of view are nonstarters. There is this "our
thing," a sort of Cosa Nostra of the soul, and then
there are the fires of Hell. And that's all.
Adapted from the forthcoming book "The Great
Derangement" by Matt Taibbi. Copyright © 2008 by Matt
Taibbi. Published by Spiegel & Grau, a division of
Random House Inc. Reprinted with permission. Names of
Encounter Weekend participants have been changed to
protect their privacy.
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