The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [42]
We were called back to chapel, and this time the drill was speaking in tongues. We were asked to come up to the front of the chapel and let a life coach anoint us with oil, hold our heads, and speak to us in tongues. Fortenberry instructed us to “just let it out. Just let it out and it’ll come out.”
He didn’t come right out and say, Just act like you’re speaking in tongues. But it was damned close. Once again, Fortenberry greased the process by telling us a story about how he’d once been at a service where folks were speaking in tongues, and he was skeptical, but it had just flown right out of him—and now it just shoots right out of him, almost on command.
I went to the front. One of the coaches grabbed me by the shoulder and sploshed a big puddle of oil on my forehead. Then he began to speak in tongues:
“Gam-bakakasha. Hoo-raaa-balalakasha…Come on, Matthew, let it out.”
American Christians who speak in tongues basically all try to sound like extras from the underworld set of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. If you want to pull it off and sound like a natural, just imagine you’re holding a rubber replica of Harrison Ford’s heart in your hands: Umm-harakashaka! Loo-pa-wanneee-rakakakasha, Meester Jones!
But I didn’t think of this at the time and just went another route.
“Let it out, Matthew,” the coach repeated, clutching my forehead. “Just open your mouth.”
I shrugged and rattled off the lyrics to the song “What Is Autumn?” by the Russian rock band DDT:
What is autumn? It’s the sky
The crying sky below your feet.
Flying about in puddles are the birds and clouds.
Autumn I’ve not been with you for so long!
It’s actually a beautiful song, but with my eyes rolled back in my head and recited in Russian it sounded demonic enough.
“Hmm, very good,” my coach said. “Good job, Matthew.”
I kept going, on to the next verse. “What is autumn? It’s a stone…”
“Okay, that’s good,” the coach said, annoyed, moving to the next guy.
“Uh,” said the next man, a small, bent, elderly fellow who had come here with his much larger, bottle-blond wife.
“Let it out!” the coach barked.
“Phhhhh-shhhhaka…?” the old man pleaded.
“Let it out!”
“Ra-ka-ka-shhhhh…Pork-manka!”
“It’s important that you practice,” said Pastor Fortenberry. “It sounds silly, but when you’re at home, when you have a little time, just try to let it out. You’ll get used to it, and soon you’ll be speaking in tongues like nobody’s business!”
He then pronounced us baptized in the Holy Spirit and fully qualified now to cast out demons.
He held up his hands in triumph.
“Hallelujah!” he shouted.
The crowd jumped up, and we all threw up our hands.
“Hallelujah!”
He called out Hallelujah! again. We repeated after him. And we repeated after him again.
Arms in the air. Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
I felt a twinge of recognition from somewhere as I threw my arms up over and over again.
We had graduated.
AT THE END of the weekend we were gathered in the chapel one last time. We were told that they were going to play a very important recording for us.
The recording, it turned out, was the Voice of God. A female life coach cranked up the volume, and a Don Pardo–style radio voice, only lower a few octaves and with a tone of terrible otherwordly conviction, boomed out over a CD player:
“My child,” it began. Then it continued:
You may not know me
But I know everything about you.
I know when you sit down and when you rise up.
I am familiar with all of your ways.
Even the very hairs on your head are numbered…
Christians are fond of repeating this biblical maxim (Matthew 10:29) about God knowing the number of hairs on our heads. In the crowd now there was