The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [10]
“The car was a Saab?” the counselor said finally, with appropriate contempt.
I smiled, pleased that he was paying attention to the important details. I added that I didn’t like this Schatz fellow at all. That the black curls in his hair looked almost like horns.
“Anyway,” I said. “I just want to pray for her, pray that she finds her way back to me, back to Christ.”
I held my ear away from the phone, expecting a hangup. Instead, the counselor just ate the story whole and plowed ahead with his computerized compassion spiel.
“What’s your name again?” the man said.
“Matt,” I said.
“Let’s go ahead and pray, Matt,” he said.
I bowed my head.
“Father, I ask You,” he said, “with Your words, whoever You put together, no man can separate. Father, I ask You now for Matt and his wife, Lord Father, for her specifically, Lord, I ask You that You would bring her back to the right relationship and the right standing with You, Lord. Father, I pray in the name of Jesus against every attack and assault of the Enemy on their marriage, on their relationship. Father, I just ask You right now to give them freedom, to give them deliverance, Lord God, from all of the attacks of the Enemy.”
I bit my lip. This guy is good, I thought.
“Father, I ask You that as they seek You and put You first, Lord God, I ask You to provide for them the desires of the heart and the needs that they seek. I pray, Lord God, that You will provide them a way that exceeds all that we can imagine, Lord God. Father, I pray that You would let them be bound again by the power of Jesus Christ in the middle of their relationship…”
The middle?
“…and that, Lord God, that You will never again allow them to be in a relationship, Lord God, without putting You first and foremost in their lives, Lord God. Father, I ask that You have mercy on them individually, Lord God, and let both of them come back to their first love, which would be You, Lord God. In Jesus’s name I ask, Lord God, that all of these things be glorified. In Your name we pray.”
“Amen!” I said.
What a performance—totally mechanical, true, but amazing nonetheless.
“Well, alright then,” the man said, and hung up.
“Hey,” I said, “wait!”
But he was gone.
TO BE PERFECTLY HONEST, I knew all about Pastor John Hagee—his Cornerstone Church was one of the reasons I’d come to San Antonio in the first place. Hagee was one of the most influential evangelical preachers in the country—not because his ministry was so very large (although he claimed up to 4.5 million viewers a week for his Sunday sermons), but because of his near-absolute conquest of a very trendy niche in the market: Christian Zionism.
Not exactly a new idea, Christian Zionism in simplest terms describes Christians who believe in supporting, politically or otherwise, the State of Israel. It has risen as a force in international politics primarily because of two factors. The first is a rise in America in belief in dispensationalist Christianity, i.e., End Times prophecies—the belief that Armageddon is coming and that, with it, the True Believers will be whisked up to Heaven by God, while the nonbelievers stay on earth to suck eggs and generally suffer various tortures. The enormous success of the Left Behind books and movies (which depict the earth during Armageddon as a delicious chaos, with airplanes suddenly stripped of their believer pilots, buses flying off highways, blood-soaked atheists realizing their tragic mistake far too late, etc.) helped spread these beliefs, so much so that dispensationalism is now more or less the default doctrine of most Southern Baptists. If you enter a megachurch practically anywhere in America these days, you can expect that much of the congregation will be actively awaiting the end of the world.
But you can’t have Armageddon without certain preconditions, and most important among those is a final battle that the Prophet Ezekiel predicted will take place between a satanic army (in most interpretations, a force of Arabs led by Russia) and God’s chosen people, Israel.