The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [53]
Laurie, Miriam, and Murray all reached for the cookies and started to unwrap them. Janine gathered hers in and tried to hide it under her plate. I caught sight of the waiter glancing miserably at the empty center of the table and was suddenly annoyed.
“Fortune cookies,” I snapped, “are a curse.”
The three cookie eaters instantly dropped their cookies.
“Oh, I know,” said Laurie. “That’s why I don’t believe in them.”
“But you’re eating it,” said Janine.
“Oh, well, I guess I am,” Laurie said.
“They’re witchcraft!” I said. “Just like horoscopes.”
Everyone hung their heads. Murray sighed.
“I guess you’re right,” he said. “They are just like horoscopes.”
“Yeah,” said Miriam. “They’re about tellin’ the future. That’s not right.”
Everyone glumly tossed their cookies back into the center of the table. I kept mine, however, sliding it into my overcoat pocket. Quietly, we went out of the place, leaving a 10 percent tip. The waiter glared.
WE WENT BACK TO CHURCH for the tail end of our membership orientation. The whole tone of Pastor Sorensen’s presentation shifted from a morning of religious banalities into an afternoon of political paranoia, dire warnings to the flock about what might happen to all of us should the forces of secular humanism seize control of America. This was sort of typical of the church, sticking your political content at the end of your meat-and-potatoes personal revelation stuff. Much of what he talked about concerned the church structure, specifically the “Government of Twelve” cell-group network, a hierarchy of “tribes” under which various individual Bible-study groups would meet. The groups were led by cell leaders, who were usually a married couple with a home big enough to accommodate large meetings.
According to Sorensen, one primary reason for creating the cell network was to preserve the church in case…well, in case something happened to the church.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Sorensen said. “If Hillary Clinton should ever become president, God forbid…”
The crowd hissed and booed. Sorensen raised his hands.
“If, God forbid, something like that were ever to happen, one of the first things they’d try to do is tax the churches. You can count on that,” he said.
The crowd gasped at the audacity of the suggestion. I found it ironic that by singling out Hillary specifically, Sorensen had just done the one thing that made the church no longer deserve tax-free status. But he wasn’t finished:
“But another thing we have to worry about is that, if there were ever to be a terrorist attack here in America,” he said, “this church is one of the first places they’d attack. Because they know that Pastor Hagee is one of their biggest enemies.”
Jesus Christ, I thought, inwardly groaning. Laurie elbowed me and nodded gravely; I nodded back, then made sure to clap.
It went on like that for a while. The whole sermon was one unending fusillade against the perils of self and of the outside world. The only proper course of action, he continually hammered home, was to submit oneself entirely to the church—everything else was deadly and Hell-inducing.
“How many of you have subverted your natures for Christ?” he asked.
Hands flew up.
“That’s good. We all have natures and we all have to forcibly subdue them…”
He went on, asking the crowd what it thought of fanatics. “My definition of a fanatic is someone who loves Jesus a little more than I do,” he said, to laughter. “I used to laugh at those people who would fall on the ground praising. But actually they get it. They’re the ones who get it.” He sighed. “After all, when we compare ourselves to God, who are we?”
The crowd mumbled in a monotone: “NOBODY.”
“Can I get an Amen?”
“AMEN!”
At the end of the sermon Sorensen indoctrinated the new members into the world of speaking in tongues, asking all who had