The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [100]
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 listening 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