[THS] The All-White Elephant in the Room

[Peter Webster]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050508K.shtml

The All-White Elephant in the Room
    By Frank Rich
    The New York Times

    Sunday 04 May 2008

    Bored by those endless replays of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? If so, go
directly to YouTube, search for "John Hagee Roman Church Hitler," and be
recharged by a fresh jolt of clerical jive.

    What you'll find is a white televangelist, the Rev. John Hagee, lecturing
in front of an enormous diorama. Wielding a pointer, he pokes at the image
of a woman with Pamela Anderson-sized breasts, her hand raising a golden
chalice. The woman is "the Great Whore," Mr. Hagee explains, and she is
drinking "the blood of the Jewish people." That's because the Great Whore
represents "the Roman Church," which, in his view, has thirsted for Jewish
blood throughout history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust.

    Mr. Hagee is not a fringe kook but the pastor of a Texas megachurch.
On Feb. 27, he stood with John McCain and endorsed him over the religious
conservatives' favorite, Mike Huckabee, who was then still in the race.

    Are we really to believe that neither Mr. McCain nor his camp knew
anything then about Mr. Hagee's views? This particular YouTube video - far
from the only one - was posted on Jan. 1, nearly two months before the
Hagee-McCain press conference. Mr. Hagee appears on multiple religious
networks, including twice daily on the largest, Trinity Broadcasting, which
reaches 75 million homes. Any 12-year-old with a laptop could have vetted
this preacher in 30 seconds, tops.

    Since then, Mr. McCain has been shocked to learn that his clerical ally
has made many other outrageous statements. Mr. Hagee, it's true, did not
blame the American government for concocting AIDS. But he did say that
God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its sins,
particularly a scheduled "homosexual parade there on the Monday that
Katrina came."

    Mr. Hagee didn't make that claim in obscure circumstances, either. He
broadcast it on one of America's most widely heard radio programs, "Fresh
Air" on NPR, back in September 2006. He reaffirmed it in a radio interview
less than two weeks ago. Only after a reporter asked Mr. McCain about this
Katrina homily on April 24 did the candidate brand it as "nonsense" and the
preacher retract it.

    Mr. McCain says he does not endorse any of Mr. Hagee's calumnies, any
more than Barack Obama endorses Mr. Wright's. But those who try to give
Mr. McCain a pass for his embrace of a problematic preacher have a thin
case. It boils down to this: Mr. McCain was not a parishioner for 20 years at
Mr. Hagee's church.

    That defense implies, incorrectly, that Mr. McCain was a passive recipient
of this bigot's endorsement. In fact, by his own account, Mr. McCain sought
out Mr. Hagee, who is perhaps best known for trying to drum up a pre-
emptive "holy war" with Iran. (This preacher's rantings may tell us more
about Mr. McCain's policy views than Mr. Wright's tell us about Mr.
Obama's.) Even after Mr. Hagee's Catholic bashing bubbled up in the
mainstream media, Mr. McCain still did not reject and denounce him, as Mr.
Obama did an unsolicited endorser, Louis Farrakhan, at the urging of Tim
Russert and Hillary Clinton. Mr. McCain instead told George Stephanopoulos
two Sundays ago that while he condemns any "anti-anything" remarks by
Mr. Hagee, he is still "glad to have his endorsement."

    I wonder if Mr. McCain would have given the same answer had Mr.
Stephanopoulos confronted him with the graphic video of the pastor in full
"Great Whore" glory. But Mr. McCain didn't have to fear so rude a
transgression. Mr. Hagee's videos have never had the same circulation on
television as Mr. Wright's. A sonorous white preacher spouting venom just
doesn't have the telegenic zing of a theatrical black man.

    Perhaps that's why virtually no one has rebroadcast the highly relevant
prototype for Mr. Wright's fiery claim that 9/11 was America's chickens
"coming home to roost." That would be the Sept. 13, 2001, televised
exchange between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who blamed the
attacks on America's abortionists, feminists, gays and A.C.L.U. lawyers. (Mr.
Wright blamed the attacks on America's foreign policy.) Had that video re-
emerged in the frenzied cable-news rotation, Mr. McCain might have been
asked to explain why he no longer calls these preachers "agents of
intolerance" and chose to cozy up to Mr. Falwell by speaking at his Liberty
University in 2006.

    None of this is to say that two wacky white preachers make a Wright
right. It is entirely fair for any voter to weigh Mr. Obama's long relationship
with his pastor in assessing his fitness for office. It is also fair to weigh Mr.
Obama's judgment in handling this personal and political crisis as it has
repeatedly boiled over. But whatever that verdict, it is disingenuous to
pretend that there isn't a double standard operating here. If we're to judge
black candidates on their most controversial associates - and how quickly,
sternly and completely they disown them - we must judge white politicians
by the same yardstick.

    When Rudy Giuliani, still a viable candidate, successfully courted Pat
Robertson for an endorsement last year, few replayed Mr. Robertson's
greatest past insanities. Among them is his best-selling 1991 tome, "The
New World Order," which peddled some of the same old dark conspiracy
theories about "European bankers" (who just happened to be named
Warburg, Schiff and Rothschild) that Mr. Farrakhan has trafficked in. Nor
was Mr. Giuliani ever seriously pressed to explain why his cronies on the
payroll at Giuliani Partners included a priest barred from the ministry by his
Long Island diocese in 2002 following allegations of sexual abuse. Much as
Mr. Wright officiated at the Obamas' wedding, so this priest officiated at
(one of) Mr. Giuliani's. Did you even hear about it?

    There is not just a double standard for black and white politicians at play
in too much of the news media and political establishment, but there is also
a glaring double standard for our political parties. The Clintons and Mr.
Obama are always held accountable for their racial stands, as they should
be, but the elephant in the room of our politics is rarely acknowledged: In
the 21st century, the so-called party of Lincoln does not have a single
African-American among its collective 247 senators and representatives in
Washington. Yes, there are appointees like Clarence Thomas and Condi
Rice, but, as we learned during the Mark Foley scandal, even gay men may
hold more G.O.P. positions of power than blacks.

    A near half-century after the civil rights acts of the 1960s, this is quite an
achievement. Yet the holier-than-thou politicians and pundits on the right
passing shrill moral judgment over every Democratic racial skirmish are
almost never asked to confront or even acknowledge the racial dysfunction
in their own house. In our mainstream political culture, this de facto
apartheid is simply accepted as an intractable given, unworthy of notice,
and just too embarrassing to mention aloud in polite Beltway company.
Those who dare are instantly accused of "political correctness" or "reverse
racism."

    An all-white Congressional delegation doesn't happen by accident. It's
the legacy of race cards that have been dealt since the birth of the
Southern strategy in the Nixon era. No one knows this better than Mr.
McCain, whose own adopted daughter of color was the subject of a vicious
smear in his party's South Carolina primary of 2000.

    This year Mr. McCain has called for a respectful (i.e., non-race-baiting)
campaign and has gone so far as to criticize (ineffectually) North Carolina's
Republican Party for running a Wright-demonizing ad in that state's current
primary. Mr. McCain has been posing (awkwardly) with black people in his
tour of "forgotten" America. Speaking of Katrina in New Orleans, he
promised that "never again" would a federal recovery effort be botched on
so grand a scale.

    This is all surely sincere, and a big improvement over Mitt Romney's
dreams of his father marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Up
to a point. Here, too, there's a double standard. Mr. McCain is graded on a
curve because the G.O.P. bar is set so low. But at a time when the latest
Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll shows that President Bush is an even
greater drag on his popularity than Mr. Wright is on Mr. Obama's, Mr.
McCain's New Orleans visit is more about the self-interested politics of
distancing himself from Mr. Bush than the recalibration of policy.

    Mr. McCain took his party's stingier line on Katrina aid and twice opposed
an independent commission to investigate the failed government response.
Asked on his tour what should happen to the Ninth Ward now, he called for
"a conversation" about whether anyone should "rebuild it, tear it down, you
know, whatever it is." Whatever, whenever, never mind.

    For all this primary season's obsession with the single (and declining)
demographic of white working-class men in Rust Belt states, America is
changing rapidly across all racial, generational and ethnic lines. The Census
Bureau announced last week that half the country's population growth since
2000 is due to Hispanics, another group understandably alienated from the
G.O.P.

    Anyone who does the math knows that America is on track to become a
white-minority nation in three to four decades. Yet if there's any coherent
message to be gleaned from the hypocrisy whipped up by Hurricane
Jeremiah, it's that this nation's perennially promised candid conversation on
race has yet to begin.

  -------

http://www.alternet.org/rights/84043/?page=entire

An Atheist Goes Undercover to Join the Flock of Mad Pastor John Hagee

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted May 5, 2008.

In this excerpt from his new book, Matt Taibbi shares his experiences at a
Hagee's boot camp for new converts.
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"The Great Derangement" by Matt Taibbi (Spiegel and Grau, 2008).

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The following is an excerpt from Matt Taibbi's new book, The Great
Derangement" (Spiegel and Grau, 2008).

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 Jos, 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
mid-twenties -- 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 Jos 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 resume ("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.