Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi goes undercover at a retreat for the Flock of Mad Pastor John Hagee and writes one of the best pieces I’ve ever seen on The March of the Theocrats, from his new book: The Great Derangement.
Aside from needing to disclose a “childhood wound” and only coming up with a professional clown father who beat him with a pair of oversized clown shoes — Matt exposes not only the fake world of perfectly-coiffed Pastors filling the readily accepting heads of the faithful, but his own quasi-conversion to Stepford Religion that happened, by accident.
Before anyone gets bent over that last paragraph, let me just say I am religious. Spiritual might be the better word. Whatever. I believe in God, have always believed in God since being a little kid and try very hard to live up to a higher sense of morality and conscience. (The operative word being try, of course. ) Would say I’ve been pretty successful at it, too, though prone to doubts about others’ motives as well as my own, and a tendency to over-think. Oh, and the fleeting moments of self-righteous bitchery where my mouth or fingers simply overtake my head and heart — instant Hell, just add anger. I’ve always had a thing for the underdog. Think the exact phrase once used on me was “you have a drive to punish the unjust and guilty.” In the case of modern theocracy, I’d say the drive is more to punish the cruel and false. But, you get the gist.
But there is a huge difference between being innately spiritual or religious, sometimes failing, and wearing your faith as a cloak to cover a multitude of sins and evil. Underneath the venom-spewing Hagee’s Sunday garb beats a heart more than willing to stretch the truth, to demonize entire groups of people (conflating Ezekiel with a promise that Jesus is going to return to give -specifically – the ACLU a smackdown, for instance). There also lies a whole lot of avarice in his leadership of the Texas mega-church he calls home.
He and all those tv pastors with their costly suits, their helmet hairdos, their easy twisting of Biblical passages with whatever current cultural trend they despise. The hatred they espouse with easy, winning smiles, bellowing in booming baritone, their ire drenched in a creamy, sunny message that’s two-parts secular feel-goodism and one part Armageddon is a heady brew. And the “faithful” eat it all up, with a spoon — going out to preach the teachings of Jesus-as-Dominatrix: that of which we do not approve we must KILL.
The theocrats are ruining this country and they’re killing the image of Jesus. So, they get no quarter, really. Their God is allegedly my God, too — only theirs is on steroids and in a really lousy, vengeful mood.
What’s fascinating to me about this excerpt from Matt’s book, “The Great Derangement,” is the following passage:
“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.”
Religion as cloak. Religion as subversive means to an ill end. Religion all dressed-up in fake finery with hatred at its core is the work of the Devil. And yet, as Matt discovered, it’s not without appeal. Which makes me all the more certain it is from the Devil. The appeal, I suspect, lies in our very human, very wonderful need to belong, to be accepted within a group larger than our individual selves, and to believe in something with more power than our frail human bodies ever can muster.
It’s wonderful because it’s an extension of connectedness, a natural desire to care for, be with, and understand our shared condition. But when it’s perverted and used against us, when that innate need is used to create an army of darkness, it becomes something evil.
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, a sacred Hindu text from 7th or 8th century BC, describes demons as being “very cruel, who always insult, injure and harm other people” and are “hard-hearted.” They are those who “delight in the grief of others,” often causing it themselves. “Any tendency in us to see others punished, put behind bars, bung up with chains or sent to the gaol; any tendency in us to see the subjugation of others, our vindictive attitude, the attitude of reaping vengeance, whatever be the reason behind it, whatever be the justification behind it, is the demon – or Asura – working within us.”
“If you can be happy when others are made unhappy,” it explains, “you are a demon.“
Time and time again in this country it is these same people who support the continued war in Iraq and more death. It is certain sects of “religious” that espouse killing gay people, using guns whenever desired for whatever purpose. These faithful people are the largest and loudest proponents of hatred, division, us versus them and are openly scornful of pacifism, delighting in violence against others with whom they disagree. And they are not striped by other forms of Christianity – just a select few groups.
I think that explains quite well where Hagee and his faithful fall. Don’t you?
If the above excerpt was the best in terms of insight, this part was the hands-down winner in humor. Describing the final “big show” of the weekend retreat, Matt is inspired:
“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.”
Well, c’mon. Everyone loves Updike.
