The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [28]
“…and just felt like God was telling me that I had to come here, and…”
“It just seems like God really wants me to come on this trip,” continued Maria. “Otherwise, I would never have made it.”
“It looks like God is going to give us a rainstorm all the way to Tarpley,” I heard a voice behind me say.
This oddly uniform style of dialogue ringing all around me made me shift in my seat. I felt nervous and unpleasantly certain that I was about to be found out. When Maria asked me why I’d come on the retreat, I bit my lip. When in Rome, I thought.
“Well,” I said, “since the New Year, I’ve just been feeling like God has been telling me that I need to get right spiritually. So here I am.”
I paused, wincing inwardly. An outsider coming into this world will feel sure that the moment he coughs up one of those “God told me to put more English on my tee shot” lines, his dark game will be instantly visible to all and he’ll be made the target of one of those Invasion of the Body Snatchers–style point-and-screech mob scenes. But nothing could be further from the truth. You simply cannot go wrong praising God in this world; overdoing it is literally impossible. I would understand this better by the end of the weekend.
Maria smiled. “I feel the same way. Have you ever been to one of these Encounters?”
“No, I haven’t,” I said.
“Me neither,” she said. “I’m really excited.”
“They’re wonderful,” said the matronly Mexican woman in front of me, turning around. “They really change you forever.”
Clipboard Man now stood up at the front of the bus and made a number of announcements, then asked us to gather together and pray before our departure. “Lord God, we ask you to bless this bus, and to bless this journey, Lord God, so that we might arrive at the ranch safely…”
We all hung our heads and asked God to bless the bus. When we were done, the driver swung the door shut and we moved out onto the highway.
I SLUNK IN MY SEAT, trying to look inconspicuous. My disguise was modeled on other men I’d seen in church—pane glasses and the very gayest blue-and-white-striped Gap polo shirt I’d been able to find that afternoon. Buried on a clearance rack next to the underwear section in a nearby mall, the Gap shirt was one of those irritating throwbacks to the Meatballs/seventies-summer-camp-geek look, but stripped of its sartorial irony it really just screamed Friendless Loser!—so I bought it without hesitation and tried to match it with that sheepish, ashamed-to-have-a-penis look I had seen so many other young men wearing in church. With the glasses and a slouch I hoped I was at least in the ballpark of what I thought I needed to look like, which was a slow-moving hulk of confused, shipwrecked masculinity, flailing for an Answer.
One of the implicit promises of the church is that following its program will restore to you your vigor, confidence, and assertiveness, effecting, among other things, a marked and obvious physical transformation from crippled lost soul to hearty vessel of God. That’s one of the reasons that it’s so important for the pastors to look healthy, lusty, and lustrous—they’re appearing as the “after” photo in the ongoing advertisement for the church wellness cure.
In these southern churches there are few wizened old sages such as one might find among Catholic bishops or Russian startsi. Here your church leader is an athlete, a business dynamo, a champion eater with a bull’s belly, outwardly a tireless heterosexual—and if you want to know what a church beginner is supposed to look like, just make it the opposite of that. Show weakness, financial trouble, frustration with the opposite sex, and if you’re overweight, be so unhealthily, and in a way that you’re ashamed of. The fundamentalist formula is much less a journey from folly to wisdom than it is