The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [27]
There was an old-fashioned white school bus in front of the church entrance, with a puddle of heavyset people milling around its swinging door. Some of these were carrying blankets and sleeping bags. My heart, already pounding, skipped a few extra beats.
The church circulars had said nothing about bringing bedding. Why did I need bedding? What else had I missed?
“Excuse me,” I said, walking up to an in-charge-looking man with a name tag who was standing near the front of the bus. “I see everyone has blankets. I didn’t bring any. Is this going to be a problem?”
The man was about five foot one and had glassy eyes. He looked up at me and smiled queerly.
“Name?” he said.
“Collins,” I said. “Matthew Collins.”
He scanned his clipboard, found my name on the appropriate sheet of paper, and x-ed me out with a highlighter. “Don’t worry, Matthew,” he said, resting his hand on my shoulder. “A wonderful woman named Martha is going to take care of you at the ranch. You just tell her what you need when you get there.”
I nodded, glancing at his hand, which was still on my shoulder. He waved me into the bus.
I had been attending the church for weeks, but this was really my first day of school. No more fleeting conversations in the church alcove. No more furtive handshakes during the “greet your neighbor” portions of Sunday services. I had signed up for three solid days of sleepaway Christian fellowship in the Texas Hill Country, responding to a series of church advertisements hawking an “Encounter Weekend” whose program was described with an ominous vagueness. The church Web site indicated that those who went away on the Encounters would learn the “joy” of “knowing the truth” and “being set free.”
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