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By Root 411 0

an unending regimen of forced and fake responses—a funny thing started to happen to my head. There is a transformational quality in these external demonstrations of faith and belief. The more you shout out praising the Lord, singing along to those awful acoustic tunes, telling people how blessed you feel, and so on, the more a sort of mechanical Christian skin starts to grow all over your real self. Even if you’re a degenerate Rolling Stone reporter inwardly chuckling and busting on the whole scene—even if you’re intellectually enraged by the ignorance and arrogant prejudice flowing from the mouth of a terminal ambition case like Phil Fortenberry—outwardly you’re swaying to the gospel and singing and praising and acting the part, and those outward ministrations assume a kind of sincerity in themselves. And at the same time, that “inner you” begins to get tired of the whole spectacle and sometimes forgets to protest—in my case checking out into baseball reveries and other daydreams while the outer me did the “work” of singing and praising. At any given moment, which one is the real you?

You may think you know the answer, but by my third day I began to notice how effortlessly my soft-spoken Matt-mannequin was going through his robotic motions of praise, and I was shocked. For a brief, fleeting moment I could see how under different circumstances it would be easy enough to bury your “sinful” self far under the skin of your outer Christian and to just travel through life this way. So long as you go through all the motions, no one will care who you really are underneath. And besides, so long as you are going through all the motions, never breaking the facade, who are you really? It was an incomplete thought, but it was a scary one; it was the very first time I worried that the experience of entering this world might prove to be anything more than an unusually tiring assignment. I feared for my normal.

I had these thoughts on the morning of our third day at the retreat. There was a buzz in the air all through the campus. It was the buzz of a Christmas morning, or a Super Bowl Sunday—something big about to happen. I saw Laurie and Janine at breakfast.

“You excited, honey?” Laurie asked.

“You know it,” I said. “I’m ready for some healing.”

“Oh, me too, sweetie,” she said. “It’s funny, last night I had a little bit of an upset stomach. I didn’t understand what it was, but then my coach was telling me—it was the demons, they don’t want to come out. So they were raising trouble.”

“I see,” I said.

Janine, solemn-faced, nodded, as if to say, It’s true, they were.

After breakfast I ran into Aaron. I’d gathered from a few fleeting conversations with him outside the sessions that he had high hopes for this retreat; I think he had struggled with his temper and his relationships at home and he was really hoping to find something that could exorcise the anger and bitterness inside him. And the more he heard in classes, the more he liked. “It’s so great,” he said. “Some programs and churches, they give you little parts of the Bible, but this is the only one that just gives you the whole thing. It’s just so obvious—why wouldn’t you want this?”

“I totally agree with you,” I’d said.

Now it was the morning of the Deliverance, and Aaron had an expectant look on his face. He looked like a man who had been up late dreaming of some kind of release and who was going to be very disappointed if he did not feel actual demons leaving his body.

“You ready for this?” he asked.

“You bet,” I said.

“Yeah, well, I hope it works,” he said, and walked off.

Finally we gathered in the chapel for the Deliverance. Fortenberry, dressed in his standard western shirt and hiked-up jeans—his jeans might have been a little tighter this morning—sauntered up to the lectern wearing a solemn and dramatic expression. “Someone told me this morning, ‘Phil, you’ve got your game face on,’” he said, and I agreed with him—although I might have had a different read about what kind of game he was preparing for.

“This is fixing to be the biggest spiritual battle that ninety-nine