The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [30]
The pastor fell silent, still using his hands to demonstrate that bouncing transport plane of fate, as he surveyed his hushed audience. Fortenberry then stood staring at his audience in full preweep, his eyes wrinkling with incipient tears. The grown macho man unashamedly breaking into boyish tears in public is one of the weirder features of the post–Promise Keeper Christian generation, and Fortenberry—himself a Promise Keeper, incidentally—had it down to a science.
“You never came to my ball games, Dad…,” he’d screech, his face wrinkling like a raisin with grief at the words “ball games.”
I heard sniffles coming from the audience.
Sensing he had his crowd in an emotionally vulnerable state, the pastor then plunged into a story about how his bitterness at his father’s abandonment had pushed him, in high school, to become just about the best basketball player you could imagine. Young Fortenberry, we learned, had scored lots and lots of points in high school and had many great games. How great were those games? Well, he told us, they were really great. Some of the stories wandered irrelevantly into the specific stats of some of those games; he also punctuated his storytelling with oddly vigorous and adept pantomimes of jumpers and hook shots. It was a weird scene, like listening to a married man wax poetic to a mistress in a roadside motel room.
“But after a while I realized that all those thousands of jump shots”—here he mimicked a jump shot—“and all those thousands of moves”—he ducked his head back and forth Tim Hardaway style—“hadn’t brought me any closer to Dad.”
Fortenberry was a goofball, but the whole setup, I quickly realized, was designed to follow the same mythology as army boot camp. You show up out of shape and with bad hair and your shirt untucked and find yourself mesmerized by a drill sergeant with a Euclidian crewcut and a rock-hard stomach who’s older than your dad’s dad but can do ten times as many pushups as you can. The front door to a system that transforms the very flesh on your body.
It wasn’t just Fortenberry’s Green Beret background that brought home that sensation. Upon arrival at the ranch we’d been asked to dump our bags in a barracks up the road from the main building. There were four dormitories—two each for the men and the women, with separate quarters for the guests and the “life coach” volunteers of each gender. The barracks themselves featured two long rows of bunk beds set against a glistening red floor that almost exactly recalled the set of Full Metal Jacket.
After dumping our bags we were all quickly herded back into the main building, which had a stage and an ad-hoc place of worship (complete with a dozen or so rows of folding chairs) at one end and a set of cafeteria tables at the other. A nest of life coaches buzzed around the building entrance, flashing beatific smiles, checking lists of names and handing out stick-on name tags to each of the arriving guests. En route to our seats at the “chapel” we Encounterers had also passed a table where another volunteer hawked a strange selection of goods: Snickers bars and other assorted snacks and sodas (flat rate of a buck apiece), copies of that same They Shall Expel Demons book, and small vials of Exodus brand anointing oil.
“How much for the anointing oil?” I’d asked, smoothing out the MATTHEW COLLINS name tag on my shirt.
“Six dollars,” answered a fortyish man with a too-happy smile.
“I’ll take some,” I said, pulling out my wallet.
He handed it over. “It’s really good anointing oil,” he said. “You can read all about it in Acts.”
I wondered what separated good anointing oil from bad anointing oil. Then I found myself a folding chair in the “chapel” and opened up the binder full of materials we’d been handed at the building entrance, glancing here and there as Fortenberry went into his speech. The cover of the binder was marked RELATIONSHIP SEQUENCE DIAGRAM and the binder contained a weirdly complex flow chart full of circles and arrows that I gathered offered a kind of road map to spiritual