by Matt Taibbi
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. Morgan had originally come on the Encounter Weekend at the behest of his wife, who apparently was a coach long before he was.
There were four other men in our group. Besides myself, there was Jose, 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 a 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. I was worried about him from the start.
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 okay?”
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. I was so nervous that I could barely listen, but from what I could make out, he was not doing so well with the group. 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.
“Anyway,” he said, “that’s my story. Does anyone have any questions?”
Blank stares. This was a tough crowd. To buy time, I asked, “Did you ever talk to your dad about that incident?”
He said he hadn’t, then said something about never really making up with his father. 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, okay, 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 oversized 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?
This one fleeting error of judgment would leave me shackled to a rank character absurdity for the rest of my stay in Texas. Less than twenty-four hours later I would find 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 Jose at the last part—his eyes said to me, I know what you mean about those fins.
Anyway, on that first day I eventually tied 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. Our group completely lacked chemistry. No one person in it had a natural affinity for any of the others.
Jose, the big Mexican, was a sensitive guy with a temper problem and a history of drug use who was trying to make his marriage work after a rough childhood that involved some pretty serious parental neglect. Joe, the white suburban son of a badgering, emotionally unavailable mother—he’d put the dishes away in one place, and Mom would tell him that he was supposed to put them somewhere else—was struggling himself with being emotionally unavailable in his relationships.
Dennis claimed that he had recently been made aware of recovered memories of some truly horrific childhood experiences. He spoke to us through a whisper, through a haze of psychiatric meds, and when he was finished with the group work drifted right back to his deeply concerned-looking wife, who was with her own group somewhere else in the building.
I got the strong sense that Dennis was panic shopping for psychological miracle cures and that this had not been his first stop. He looked like a man who had already reconciled himself to suicide and was here only as a last favor to someone, probably his wife. Everyone in the group seemed afraid of him.
There was no bringing us together. An ethnic barrier separated Jose from the group; I was a fraud; Aaron didn’t really have serious problems and was really too “normal” for the rest; and Dennis was painfully adrift from all humanity, not just us. The group’s dysfunctionality was hammered home at the end of our first meeting.
When each person had finished telling his tale, Morgan tried to ask a few perfunctory questions (“So when your father called you names, Matt, how did that make you feel?”) and then move on to the next person.
But some of us—Jose and me in particular, at first—tried to get into a little more detail, to show that we were at least listening. For instance, when Dennis told his story, we each asked him about his hospitalization, what kind of therapy he’d been in, what medications he was on. Our coach, meanwhile, seemed to be staring ahead with his eyes glazed over even through Dennis’s Dickensian tragedy.
But when Dennis finished and Aaron casually mentioned that he had come to Texas to hunt, Morgan snapped awake.
“Really?” he said. “You hunt?”
“Yes.”
“Wow, I love hunting,” Morgan said. “What’d you get?”
Aaron shrugged. “Well, I got a coupla black bucks. A ram—”
Morgan nearly jumped out his chair. “Really? A ram? Where did you get a ram?”
They went on like this for a while. Meanwhile, Dennis, minutes removed from his terrible c
onfession, looked directly down at his lap, picking at a scar on his arm. Aaron glanced sideways at him nervously.
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 to one another. 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, and so on.
After each of these grueling exercises we would first 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., “Admitting the Truth About Our Wounds”) that lasted an hour or more. Then, after Fortenberry would waste at least half the session giving us the Marlboro Man highlights of his professional résumé (“I was the manager of the second largest ranch in America, eight hundred and twenty-five thousand 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. The retreat’s Relationship Sequence Diagram redemption strategy and 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 Agey 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!”) in a commune 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 were 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 cite former FBI agent Paul L. Williams in claiming that Al-Qaeda was in possession of nuclear bombs and planning on exploding them in seven American cities in the year 2007. Hagee neglected to mention that Williams originally predicted that those bombs would go off on the precise date of August 6, 2005. 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.
But what created the original pedophilia? What brought such foul curses down on the houses of us poor Christians? Fortenberry rattled off a list of reasons. They included: denying the word of God, “sexual sins, especially incest,” the breaking of convenants, bestiality, violence, failing to reconcile with parents or children, dishonoring parents, etc. Then he started talking about even stranger things—like having pictures of dead people in the house, “witchcraft-type stuff,” as he put it.
“You’re either blessed because you’re obedient or cursed because you’re disobedient,” he said.
At this, he told a story about a nephew of his who called him up with a problem one night. This nephew had figured into other stories during the weekend—like Fortenberry himself, he was supposedly a physically imposing guy, “three hundred pounds, easy,” and a bold preacher of the word of God.
“He’s something,” the pastor said. “He went to an antiwar rally in Washington, D.C., once and asked them antiwar protesters”—the words fell out of his mouth like dead snails—“he asked them, ‘Hey, can anyone speak here?’ And they said yes, and he got up with a megaphone and started tellin’ them about the gospel.”
This story elicited raucous
applause. I could feel the crowd’s collective blood rising at the mere mention of antiwar protesters. Weirdly, I actually forgot for a moment that I was one and had probably been at that Washington protest.
Anyway, this same nephew had called up Fortenberry one night and told him that he was having trouble with his kids. Apparently they had had some problems with disobedience, and Fortenberry’s nephew had been wondering what it was his kids had done to separate themselves from God. But he hadn’t taken the step of calling big Phil Fortenberry for help until one terrible day when things took a dramatic turn for the worse.
“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 of Macbeth, which to me said a lot about this religion and about America in general.
