The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [39]
The crowd cheered. As the applause tailed, he held his hands up Mussolini-fashion, asking for quiet. The crowd complied. It was quite dramatically done, this whole business, whatever we were working toward. And at that moment, I spotted a younger kid who had been at the retreat all weekend working a sound board for the musical parts zipping behind the crowd to some kind of dimmer panel. He turned a switch and the lights dimmed slightly; though it was morning, the light in the building was unnatural, like the light outside during a partial eclipse.
Throughout the whole weekend, Fortenberry had been setting himself up as an athletic conqueror of demons. His usual shtick was to start off a story acting like he was skeptical of such things (“I was one of those people who thought speaking in tongues was silly”), then talk about how he was sucked in to the amazing truth against his reservations. He described one story about demons in particular.
“If you’re thinking, ‘Maybe I don’t believe all that stuff about demons,’ you just be there tomorrow morning,” he’d said the day before. “I was like that once before myself.” And then he told a story about ministering to some man, and how as soon as he touched him with anointing oil, the man recoiled from him. “He shot across the room and looked back at me with eyes that were not his own,” he said. “And he says to me, ‘I think I have a demon.’ And I said to him, ‘I think you’re right.’”
The crowd laughed. Fortenberry went on.
“I looked at him and I was like, ‘Holy-y-y smoke!’ Anyway, I musta cast about twelve to fifteen demons outta that man.”
At other times the pastor would delve into a strange sort of demonology, explaining the rules of demonic possession. “A Christian has all power over every demon in you,” he explained. “If a demon is in you, it’s because he has a legal right to be there. What you have to do is concentrate on how he got that legal right.”
I assumed that the “legal right” had something to do with having offended God somehow, having committed some iniquity that opened the door for the demon to enter. My Christian friends—both at this retreat and in other places later on in my experience—would talk a great deal about “doors” and “windows,” worrying quite a lot about opening doors for demons and laboring quite intensely to “keep those doors closed” once the demons were gone.
Other times Fortenberry would unintentionally be quite prescient. “You just never know with demons, how close they might be,” he said. “You might be sitting right next to one, and you’d never know he was even there.”
Two old ladies sitting next to me looked my way and winked. I felt a lump in my throat.
Occasionally Fortenberry would cite scripture in explaining his rules about demons, but other times he would seem to just pull stuff out of his ass. In the same way that I was conscious of my own real self becoming fatigued and giving way slightly to the robot Christian on the outside, I could feel that my brain had decided to stop worrying about which of Fortenberry’s pronouncements were utter two-bit traveling-circus horseshit and which ones were just confused theology dreamed up with at least some passing reference to the actual Bible. Once you get past a certain point in this process, it really doesn’t matter. You take it all in like it’s all of equal import, and when he’s done talking, you just sing along to the songs again.
Anyway, we were now at that fateful “tomorrow morning,” and Fortenberry looked like a quarterback about to take the field before a big game. The life coaches assembled around the edges of the chapel, huddling together like insects. For this particular session the men were on one side of the chapel and the women were on the other; mirroring them, the male coaches huddled at the front of the chapel behind Fortenberry on our side, while the female coaches huddled on the other.
The coaches were carrying anointing oil and bundles of small