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

by Matt Taibbi

  “I tell ya, I was one mean ole boy,” he rambled. “But then I found Jesus, and I completely changed. You’ll change, too. You’ll be just like me.” Then he sneezed again.

  I looked around the room. A few couples, a few teens, but lots of loners like me. Single men with bad skin and sad eyes. One very skinny young man with a wavy 1970s hairdo smiled at me. He doesn’t fit here, I thought. A few minutes later, when Larry led us to the changing room, I noticed that same young man; with his shirt off, he looked emaciated, like a concentration camp victim. We each then put on cheap blue polyester ceremonial cloaks and descended a set of wet stairs toward the baptismal pool, which was strategically located just behind the church pulpit in the main chapel. Skinny Man was behind me and tapped my shoulder.

  “Your first time?” he asked.

  A very strange question, when you think about it. I wondered if there had ever in history been an instance of someone having a second go at defiling the baptismal ritual for journalistic purposes.

  “Yah, first time,” I said.

  “Me too,” he said. “How did you come to this decision?”

  “It was either this or The Sopranos,” I offered.

  He nodded. “My mother’s making me do this,” he said, ignoring me. “I’m actually a Catholic.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “She thinks it will help,” he said.

  “With what?”

  He stared meaningfully at me.

  “My…illness,” he said finally. “I’m anemic.”

  “Oh,” I said. So that’s what they call it down here. “What kind of anemia? Iron-deficiency anemia?”

  “I don’t know,” he said mysteriously. “It’s some kind of anemia, though.”

  He smiled affectionately at me. I almost wished I were gay. I would have asked him out. It seemed like a perfect setup: two closeted Texans, finding true love in line for the fundamentalist baptism that won’t quite be enough to save us from Hell.

  “I see,” I said. “Well, I hope this helps.”

  He shrugged. “Me too, I guess,” he said.

  We went down a few more steps. In front of us, in plain view of the whole congregation, little children bathed in spotlights were reciting their line—“My name is X, and I accept Jesus Christ as my personal savior”—before being plunged into the water by Larry, who unpleasantly was also half-clad in a blue cloak. It was bad effect; he looked like a cross between a druid and Klansman. Anyway, the adults ahead of us in line were all practicing their lines in whispers; so was I, and so was Skinny Man. Once he got it straight, he tapped me on the shoulder again.

  “Like I said, this was my mother’s idea. I wonder if that water’s cold.”

  I stepped down into the pool. “Not bad, actually.”

  I splashed the water a little. This whole scene was like something out of a bad porn movie. I wondered about my new friend’s health and felt sad all of a sudden.

  “Well, good luck,” he said finally.

  I nodded, stepped forward into the bright light, took one look back, and waved. Now in the pool, I looked out at the congregation. Several thousand good Christian faces stared back at me. I looked for Janine and Laurie but in the end focused for some reason on an old couple in one of the front rows who were staring impatiently at me with eyes like drills, their denture-filled mouths clamped tightly. They had been smiling when the kids were being baptized.

  Feeling pressured, I looked down; on the lip of the pool I could see, written on what looked like a piece of tape, a script:

  “MY NAME IS_________ AND I ACCEPT JESUS CHRIST AS MY PERSONAL SAVIOR.”

  I shrugged and leaned over to the microphone:

  “Hello,” I said. “My name is Matthew Collins, and I accept—”

  Splash! Larry’s fat virusy hand clasped my forehead and plunged me under the water. Chlorine shot up my nose. I stood up. I was born again. Larry nudged me off to the side. I dried myself, then trudged back to the locker room. Some big fat guy I’d never seen before was also in there getting his street clothes back on. He shook my hand. So did another guy, and another guy. We all changed in silence, and within five minutes I was back on the freeway.

  That was that. I celebrated my spiritual rebirth with an order of the worst fish ’n’ chips of all time at a Hooters off Route 281. A huge-titted brunette waitress approached me and started chatting me up. Hmm, I thought, maybe there really is a God. I stopped fighting with my fish husk for a minute and turned the charm on.

  “So, listen,” I said, grinning. “My name is—”

  “Would you like to buy a Hooters calendar?” she asked, batting her eyelashes at me. “We have a special discount tonight.”

  I sighed. Whether you’re after Heaven or pussy in this country, it’s all the same freaking mechanized car wash. When I waved off the waitress, telling her I didn’t need a calendar, she copped an attitude.

  “No, honestly, I just want to finish my meal,” I said. “You see, I just got baptized.”

  “Okay, whatever, mister,” she snapped. I could hear her orange satin hot pants squeaking as she made her escape. Sawing through the rock-hard wreckage of my last piece of dark-browned fish batter, I thought, At least I’m saved now.

  I WAS ZOOMING through the process. It was strange, the way it worked. I had gone to Phil Fortenberry’s retreat and a few days out of the retreat I had been asked, like everyone else who went, to be a life coach at the next retreat. Then I bumble through the baptismal assembly line and before the water even has time to leak out of my ears I’m being pushed into evangelical instruction. In this organization, when you get called up to the Show, they stick you in the lineup right away. Volume, volume, volume! We had Sunday school classes on street evangelism, and in case you missed those, you had another go-around in your cell meeting.

  When I showed up to mine that week—I was visiting a new cell group, one recommended by Janine, at yet another antiseptic one-story white-people house on the north side of town—I discovered a sloe-eyed balding man named Joe in his late forties or early fifties coaching a smallish group of what looked like Texan versions of yuppies to overcome their fears of evangelism. Joe was a telemarketer, or at least that’s what he said. His expertise was the cold call, and he wanted all of us to stop pussyfooting and start throwing our irons in the spiritual fire. Gathered in a circle on the freshly vacuumed cream-colored wall-to-wall carpet of his lifeless den, he challenged us in his droopy, Miss Othmar voice:

  “What,” he said, “is the biggest obstacle to your evangelism? What are you afraid of and what are you concerned with and what is keeping you from…”*7

  “I feel like I don’t know what to say,” drawled a woman across the room. “I walk up to ’em and my mind just draws a blank.”

  “Okay,” Joe said. “Draws a blank. Let me write that down.”

  “Not having the answers to questions that they ask,” said a man to her right.

  “Okay,” Joe said. “Answers to questions.”

  “Rejection,” piped in a third voice.

  “Hostility?” I ventured.

  “Hostility!” said Joe, writing dutifully on his notepad. “Okay.”

  A few more hands raised. A spiffily dressed black fellow, obviously a business professional, worried aloud about company policies against such conversations. Another man confessed that he could never quite find the right “segue” into the conversation. More and more people told their reasons why they couldn’t spread the Word—until Joe finally broke it up:

  “Okay,” he said, “those are excellent, all of them, and of course they have to be excellent, because they are your personal concerns. But they are each one something that has Satan’s grip on us because of—what’s my favorite word about what Satan does?”

  “He deceives!” the group called out.

  “That’s right, he deceives!” Joe said. “He deceives you that you’re going to be attacked, he deceives us that the time’s not right, he deceives you that maybe the boss is listeni
ng and there’s a rule against it, he deceives you that there’s some kind of fear or anxiety that comes over us.”

  I wrote down in my notebook

  SATAN DECEIVES!

  with “Satan” triple-underlined in junior-high-scribble style. Janine looked over at me. I held up the notebook and gave her a thumbs-up. She smiled nervously and looked back at Joe. It occurred to me that she couldn’t read my writing at that distance. Maybe she thought I’d written something else, like I HAVE AN ERECTION!!! Rattled, I slammed down the notebook and looked back at the group leader.

  Meanwhile, Joe had turned on his giant-screen television and popped in a DVD. Next thing I knew, I was looking at the preposterous face of former television sitcom star Kirk Cameron. I slumped in my chair. The church had been steadily force-feeding us lessons from a video evangelism series called The Way of the Master, starring the aforementioned Cameron and another like-minded Christian lunatic, a demented Sonny Bono clone with a Fuller-brush mustache and a British accent name Ray Comfort.

  The series is a sort of Beavis and Butt-head–style PG-rated love story in which the two earnest, constrictively dressed Christians go out into the world and regale happy pedestrians with threats of Hell until they lumber away from the cameras looking confused and miserable. It’s a solid program, and what really makes it fly is the performance of Cameron, the former Growing Pains star who’s joined Hal Linden, Stephen Baldwin, and Mel Gibson as onetime Hollywood luminaries who shorted out in the limelight, disappeared from view for a time, and resurfaced years later wearing reenergized, meaner-than-Hitler evangelical personas. You just haven’t seen Christian evangelism until you’ve seen video of curly-headed overgrown child actor Cameron sliding up to some well-dressed, too-polite Los Angeles homosexual, grinning at him with that maddening, fosh-Muppet face of his, and saying, “By your own admission you’re a lying, thieving, murdering adulterer who’s doomed to go to Hell!”

  The Way of the Master exposes American Christian fundamentalism at its most idiotic and infuriating. The entire gazillion-part lesson series is geared toward teaching Christian charges a single trick. According to the Bible, we find out, everyone is going to Hell. You see, we have these things called the Ten Commandments, and if you violate any of the Ten Commandments, God sends you downstairs for the big burn. These Ten Commandments prohibit, among other things, adultery and murder.

  But I haven’t committed adultery, you protest—but that’s where you’ll be wrong, because it’s written right there in Jimmy Carter’s favorite passage, Matthew 5:28, “But I tell you that everyone who gazes at a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart.”

  Okay, fine, but I’m not a murderer, you say. Wrong again! It’s right there in first epistle of John, chapter 3, verse 15: “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer.” If you’ve ever hated, and everybody hates somebody, then you have murdered.

  Therefore, everybody is a murderer and everybody is an adulterer and everybody is going to Hell, unless they get saved. It’s perfect, a completely seamless formula.

  Christians are immensely proud of this neat little trick. They love the way that, no matter how you twist and turn things, you’re going to Hell. It’s just the coolest thing. And they love watching videos of people like Cameron sneaking up on unsuspecting godless pedestrians in the doomed Sodomite capitals of American culture and asking them if they’ve ever lusted after anyone or hated somebody. Why yes, they answer, of course I have, not suspecting that friendly little Kirk Cameron is about to drop the mother of all surprises on their stupid unbelieving heads—well, then, if you’ve hated, you’re a MURDERER and you’re GOING TO HELL! Now how do you feel, unbeliever? Think you might change your mind now?

  Amazingly, the trick works absolutely every time in the videos. Christians coo over this like junior high boys who swear by some karate move one of them learned from a tenth-grader who’s got a green belt—you know, if a guy tries to punch you here, you can just grab his wrist like this and then flip him like that and then hit him with a back round kick before he lands. Cool! Awesome! They then spend the next three years waiting for a chance to use the move at recess until eventually puberty kicks in and they forget about it completely and start focusing on getting girls. Eighth-grade boys, in other words, grow out of this sort of thing, but Christians can stay impressed by this crap until they’re gray and walking with canes.

  Anyway, during the showing of the video I was seated closest of all to the TV, which faded for a moment and then faded back in with the image of a trickling, tree-lined stream. A twangy, cheery acoustic guitar soundtrack chimed in as the camera panned down to the mustachioed co-host Ray Comfort standing in a friendly pose by the rushing water.

  “Alright!” he said. “I’m going to lead Kirk through these four stepping stones across the sca-a-a-ry waters of personal evangelism! That is, sharing his faith with a non-Christian. Kirk, what are you doing hiding behind that bush?”

  Camera pans over to Cameron, who is crouching ludicrously behind a bush on the other side of the river.

  “I’m a-scared!” he shouted. “I’ve never done this before, I’m nervous!”

  The room erupted in laughter. On-screen, Comfort smiled.

  “Folks,” he went on, “most of us are scared when it comes to personal evangelism! If you’re hiding behind a bush or in a cave of inferiority, let me tell you a secret. I had an inferiority complex before I was a Christian. I was called Beet-Root Face in school!”

  Beet-Root Face? I was about to laugh, but Janine looked over at me and I quickly straightened back up.

  “I would go red at the drop of a hat,” Comfort said. “But when you’re a Christian, you’ve been commissioned to take a gospel of everlasting life to a world that’s in a shadow of death! I mean, the issue is so important, we can’t afford to hide behind a bush! Kirk, save us! Come out from behind that bush! Remember, I can do all things in Christ, who strengthens me!”

  “I can do all things in Christ, who strengthens me!” shouted Cameron.

  “Come on, what are you scared of? What’s your fear?”

  “Well, I’m just kind of a shy person,” Cameron repeats.

  “So am I,” Comfort reiterated. “But remember, I can do all things in Christ, who strengthens me!”

  On and on it went. Eventually, as one might predict, Cameron manages to cross the “scary waters of personal evangelism.” He achieves this by jumping on the “four stepping stones,” represented by the acronym

  W

  D

  J

  D

  which is easily enough remembered by the phrase “What did Jesus do?” But in fact WDJD stands for:

  Would you consider yourself a good person?

  Do you think you have kept the Ten Commandments?

  Judgment. If God were to judge you by the Ten Commandments, do you think you would be innocent or guilty?

  Destiny. Do you think you would go to Heaven or Hell?

  It was an easy formula to remember, a simple concept and an even simpler pitch. When the show was over, we went around the room and discussed some possible methods for beginning witnessing conversations. There was much talk about the opportunities afforded by encounters with the likes of bank tellers and store cashiers. One woman even talked about calling a plumber and cornering him once he was under the sink. “I just don’t want him to think that I…,” she began, and looked up at us; too late, we were thinking it. Anyway, the collective loneliness of the group was striking—almost no one had good ideas for how to meet people. It was even suggested that we use chance telemarketing calls as an opportunity to try to convert the telemarketers.

  Later on in the meeting we broke down into pairs—boys with boys and girls with girls, of course, so there was no risk of hanky-panky—and practiced witnessing to each other. Joe for some reason chose me, the new guy, as his partner. I guess he wanted to get to know me. But after nearly an hour of Kirk Cameron on top of many months of relentless indoc
trination, I was increasingly impatient with the entire scene. I was not about to allow anyone to flip me and hit me with a back round kick, at least not with this silly nonsense. So in the “training session” with Joe, I decided to take my mask off, just for a few minutes.

  He got himself into character by rocking back and forth in his chair, then finally extended his hand.

  “Well, hello, there,” he said. “My name’s Joe.”

  “Matt,” I said.

  “Matt, let me ask you something,” he said. “Would you consider yourself a good person?”

  “That’s not for me to say,” I said unhelpfully.

  His smile waned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that it’s not my job to decide whether I’m a good or a bad person,” I said. “It’s my job to try to be good. Whether or not I succeed is a matter for someone else to determine. After all, if I could answer that question myself, the act of asking it would be meaningless.”

  He stared at me, then looked at his WDJD card. There was nothing on there about this answer. He looked back at me suspiciously.