| IF YOU WANT a headline to attract people who are not very interested in Christianity, it would be hard to beat Rolling Stone’s account of an exorcism: “Jesus made me puke”.
Beneath the headline, this was a first-class piece of religious reporting. Matt Taibbi had joined one of the bigger Texan churches to find out how the religious Right functions in the United States, and went off on a three-day “encounter weekend” with them.
The most obvious thing about the piece is that he finds his fellow pilgrims contemptible, and expects his readers to do so. Be that as it may, the leaders of the movement also do. How are they contemptible? Let me count the ways. They are poor, stupid, and, worst of all, often fat.
When preparing for his weekend, Taibbi goes to great trouble to blend in: “I slunk in my seat, trying to look inconspicuous. My disguise was modelled 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 [which] 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.”
The contrast that drives the movement, he says, is that the leaders are very different. “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.”
The story exposes one of the ugliest perversions of Christianity I have ever come across. Soon enough, the victims move from being contemptible to pitiable. For the first two days, they are encouraged to talk about their childhoods, and to marinate their wounds in resentment and self-pity. There is no silence or serious reflection mentioned.
The leader, Pastor Fortenberry, may well be the most boastful man on God’s green earth (“a friend of mine said he had seen my picture on a post office wall in hell”). At the end of the second day, he teaches that the problems, the “wounds”, that everyone has been talking about all weekend, are the work of demons, and all are to be exorcised.
At the climactic service, attendants stand ready around the room with sick bags, into which people can expel their demons. Soon enough: “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!”
It’s difficult to imagine that sort of thing going on at an Alpha course, even in the diocese of Carlisle.
THE Daily Mail had the story of Michael Cartwright, a taxi driver from Darlington, who spotted the face of Jesus in the foil wrapping around the top of a cider bottle in the pub. Since this is England, a friend photographed it with his mobile phone, and then the barmaid threw it away. “One of Mr Cartwright’s friends took a photograph. It was only the following morning that he realised how clear the image was. But by then it was too late to retrieve the bottle.
“I’m not sure what message Jesus was sending and maybe now we’ll never know,” said Mr Cartwright to the paper. Keeping the bottle would, of course, have made everything clear.
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