This is pretty funny -- it reminds me of H. L. Mencken's
adventures among the s****-handlers and speakers
of tongues. I think, though, that the political effect of
these people is beginning to fade, so they may become
more of a curiosity than a threat or nuisance. G. W.
Bush may have used them, but association with them
(e.g. Hagee) is more likely to be a liability for McCain.
On May 6, 11:24 am, Anarcissie <anarcis...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 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 s****ts talk show
> piping over my car radio =8B anything to hold off my
> plunge into Religion.
>
> There was an old-fa****oned 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 =8B a megachurch in the Texas Hill
> Country =8B 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 =8B 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" =8B three solid days of sleep-away
> Christian fellow****p 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 =8B 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 bat**** 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 =8B toned
> down and lip-synced to match a set of PG lyrics that
> won't scare the advertisers =8B 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 ****ft 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 =8B
> pane gl***** and the very gayest blue-and-white-striped
> Gap polo ****rt I'd been able to find that afternoon.
> Buried on a clearance rack next to the underwear
> section in a nearby mall, the Gap ****rt 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! =8B so I bought it without hesitation
> and tried to match it with that sheepish,
> ashamed-to-have-a-***** look I had seen so many other
> young men wearing in church. With the gl***** 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, ****pwrecked 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 im****tant for the
> pastors to look healthy, lusty and lustrous =8B 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 hetero***ual =8B 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 ***,
> 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 =8B they
> want a human jellyfish, raw clay they can transform
> into a vigorous instrument of God.
>
> I was ...
>
> read more =BB
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