The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire

by Matt Taibbi

  That had sounded harmless enough, but now that I was here and surrounded by all of these blanket-bearing people, I was nervous. For a minute I had visions of some charismatic ranchland 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 weatherbeaten black folk in secondhand clothing whom I pegged right away 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 backyards 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. She was frantically looking around in all directions, as though wondering if everyone in the surrounding seats was watching her out of the corner of an eye and waiting for her to open the bag and start eating—which, sadly, they were. I felt sorry for her.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Matt.”

  “Oh, hello!” she said, shaking my hand. “I’m Maria.”

  “Some weather we’re having, with this rain,” I said.

  “Tell me about it!” she said. “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. Meanwhile, the older Mexican woman in front of me was talking to a man on the other side of the bus.

  “…and just felt like God was telling me that I had to come here, and…”

  “It just seems like God really wants me to come on this trip,” continued Maria. “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.”

  Clipboard Man now stood up at the front of the bus and made a number of announcements, then asked us to gather together and pray before our departure. “Lord God, we ask you to bless this bus, and to bless this journey, Lord God, so that we might arrive at the ranch safely…”

  We all hung our heads and asked God to bless the bus. When we were done, the driver swung the door shut and we moved out onto the highway.

  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.

  Trying to be exactly that—the jellyfish, that is—I slumped in my seat and buried my face behind a copy of Tribulation Force, the second book in the Left Behind series. For some time I sat there wondering about the names in the book—half of them are either building terms or elements (Steele, Plank, Barnes, Jetty, Stonagal) or derivatives of southern city names (Hattie Durham). Were these books written in a Home Depot in North Carolina?

  Across the aisle and a few rows back, a man about my age, also wearing glasses and also slumped in his seat, read from a book called They Shall Expel Demons. Maria, meanwhile, quietly munched her cheeseburgers, glancing sideways occasionally, trying not to look self-conscious.

  “I WAS VERY, VERY, VERY GOOD—at everything!” shouted our hulking exparatrooper pastor, Phillip Fortenberry, into the barely visible mouth mic that curled around his ruddy face. “I was a Green Beret—top of the class. Six foot four, two hundred and twenty-five 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-sized building where we were all destined to spend the next three days together.

  Bearing a striking resemblance to ex–Vikings quarterback and notorious ESPN loudmouth Sean Salisbury, Fortenberry had bounded onstage upon our arrival in a plaid western-style shirt and crisp, belt-tightened rancher’s blue jeans hiked up to an uncomfortable height on the strapping hard fat of his middle-aged trunk. He did everything but tape-measure his biceps in his introductory speech. His autobiogra
phical 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) with no fewer than two graduate agronomy degrees from Texas A&M was to serve as the first chapter of our collective transformation—and to work it had to impress the hell out of us scraggly wannabes.

  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.

  Fortenberry told stories well, but he lingered for quite some time on a loving description of the interior of a C-130, which I thought at first was a rhetorical mistake—until I saw both the men and the women glowing with excitement as he recalled the plane’s unusual flush-against-the-fuselage seating arrangement.

  “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 ball games. But from time to time he would come 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, 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 preweep, 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 ball games, Dad…,” he’d screech, his face wrinkling like a raisin with grief at the words “ball games.”

  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.”

  Fortenberry was a goofball, but the whole setup, I quickly realized, was designed to follow the same mythology as army boot camp. You show up out of shape and with bad hair and your shirt untucked and find yourself mesmerized by a drill sergeant with a Euclidian crewcut and a rock-hard stomach who’s older than your dad’s dad but can do ten times as many pushups as you can. The front door to a system that transforms the very flesh on your body.

  It wasn’t just Fortenberry’s Green Beret background that brought home that sensation. Upon arrival at the ranch we’d been asked to dump our bags in a barracks up the road from the main building. There were four dormitories—two each for the men and the women, with separate quarters for the guests and the “life coach” volunteers of each gender. The barracks themselves featured two long rows of bunk beds set against a glistening red floor that almost exactly recalled the set of Full Metal Jacket.

  After dumping our bags we were all quickly herded back into the main building, which had a stage and an ad-hoc place of worship (complete with a dozen or so rows of folding chairs) at one end and a set of cafeteria tables at the other. A nest of life coaches buzzed around the building entrance, flashing beatific smiles, checking lists of names and handing out stick-on name tags to each of the arriving guests. En route to our seats at the “chapel” we Encounterers had also passed a table where another volunteer hawked a strange selection of goods: Snickers bars and other assorted snacks and sodas (flat rate of a buck apiece), copies of that same They Shall Expel Demons book, and small vials of Exodus brand anointing oil.

  “How much for the anointing oil?” I’d asked, smoothing out the MATTHEW COLLINS name tag on my shirt.

  “Six dollars,” answered a fortyish man with a too-happy smile.

  “I’ll take some,” I said, pulling out my wallet.

  He handed it over. “It’s really good anointing oil,” he said. “You can read all about it in Acts.”

  I wondered what separated good anointing oil from bad anointing oil. Then I found myself a folding chair in the “chapel” and opened up the binder full of materials we’d been handed at the building entrance, glancing here and there as Fortenberry went into his speech. The cover of the binder was marked RELATIONSHIP SEQUENCE DIAGRAM and the binder contained a weirdly complex flow chart full of circles and arrows that I gathered offered a kind of road map to spiritual regeneration.

  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.

  Fortenberry went on, wantonly spinning psychological metaphors in his rhetorical wake. “You know our soldiers in Iraq—one of them occasionally gets hit by friendly fire,” he said. “Say you’re one of those soldiers and you get hit in the leg. You look down and you quickly determine that there’s no arterial breach and no broken bone.”

  The crowd murmured again; the phrase “arterial breach” had been a hit. “It’s one of those things where you either keep on going or you lay down and die. So what do you do? You put some gauze on it.”

  Within a few minutes we had wandered into a world where your “gauze” was some temporary psychological solution you applied to your “wound” after your “normal” was disrupted. Fortenberry took this set of metaphors and ran with them straight for the hyperbolic end zone, talking about situations when you might add more gauze, or change your gauze, or find out that your gauze was infected—I couldn’t keep them straight after a while. And I wasn’t alone. Within a day a youngish woman during a question-an
d-answer period raised her hand.

  “Yes?” the pastor said. “You in the front.”

  “I guess my question is,” said the girl, “like when you have a wound, and you put some gauze on it, and then years later you take it off, and it’s sort of half healed—I mean, what is that? Is that like a scar?”

  Fortenberry was absolutely stumped by that question, and I didn’t blame him. In any case, after introducing us to the concept of wounds and normals and gauze, 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.

  “My buddy’s not saved. He made a good joke of it,” Fortenberry explained. Then he quickly turned serious and explained that the soldiers on the ground had felt guilty 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. The male coaches almost to a man had bushy mustaches of the state-trooper/Pontiac-dealer genus.