The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [35]
But then, midway through Saturday, Fortenberry and the coaches started to show us glimpses of the program’s end game. The wound, it turned out, was something that was inflicted upon us because of a curse, a curse that perhaps spanned generations in each of our families. Alcoholic parents abused their children, who in turn carried their parents’ curse to their adult lives and became alcoholics themselves—only to have children and continue the pattern again. Now, why was that curse there to begin with? Here was where we could get into religious explanations, see the footprint of Satan, etc. We were unhappy because of earthly troubles from our childhoods, but those troubles were the work of a generational curse, inflicted upon us by devils and demons—probably for unbelief, bad behavior, disobedience, worship of the wrong gods, and so on.
This little bit of semantic gymnastics helped transform all of us at the retreat from being merely fucked-up to being accursed carriers of demons. Having ridden an almost entirely secular program to get our biographies out in the open in a group setting, Fortenberry could now switch his focus to the real meat and potatoes of the weekend—Satan and the devils inside us.
He started off slowly, invoking the godly curses of Genesis—the sweat on Adam’s brow, the pain of Eve’s childbirth, etc.—the punishments for eating of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. “How many of you women out there have had babies?” Fortenberry asked. “Can I see some hands?”
A dozen or so hands were raised.
“Now, did it hurt?” he asked.
Laughter. Of course it hurt.
“Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Why do alcoholics give birth to alcoholics? Why do the fatherless give birth to the fatherless?” He paused. “There are some people out there who will tell you it’s genetics. It’s in our genes, they say. Well, I tell you, it’s not genetics. It’s a generational curse!”
Fortenberry then started in on a rant against science and against scientific explanations for cycles of sin. “Take homosexuals,” he said. “Every single homosexual is a sexual-abuse victim. They are not born. They are created—by pedophiles.”
The crowd swallowed that one whole. One thing about this world; once a preacher says it, it’s true. No one is going to look up anything the preacher says, cross-check his facts, raise an eyebrow at something that might sound a little off. Some weeks later, I would be at a Sunday service in which Pastor John Hagee himself would cite former FBI agent Paul L. Williams in claiming that Al-Qaeda was in possession of nuclear bombs and planning on exploding them in seven American cities in the year 2007. Hagee neglected to mention that Williams originally predicted that those bombs would go off on the precise date of August 6, 2005. When they’re away from the cameras, the preachers feel even less obligated to shackle themselves to facts of any kind. That’s because they know that their audience doesn’t give a shit. So long as you’re telling them what they want to hear, there’s no danger; your crowd will angrily dismiss any alternative explanations anyway as demonic subversion.
A team of twenty of the world’s leading scientists wouldn’t be able to convince so much as one person in this crowd that homosexuals are not created by pedophiles.
But what created the original pedophilia? What brought such foul curses down on the houses of us poor Christians? Fortenberry rattled off a list of reasons. They included: denying the word of God, “sexual sins, especially incest,” the breaking of convenants, bestiality, violence, failing to reconcile with parents or children, dishonoring parents, etc. Then he started talking about even stranger things—like having pictures of dead people in the house, “witchcraft-type stuff,” as he put it.
“You’re either blessed because you’re obedient or cursed because you’re disobedient,” he said.
At this, he told a story about a nephew of his who called him up with a problem one night. This nephew had figured into other stories during the weekend