The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [65]
I even considered that some sort of mass hypnosis was going on, that the repetitious chanting (mixed with some effects that I could see the church leaders clearly were manipulating, like the carefully timed dimming of lights) was some sort of clever way of numbing the brain and heightening suggestibility.
But now I could see that that wasn’t really it at all. It wasn’t the music that numbed you. It was the relentless, self-annihilating message of the church—the constant driving home of the idea that you were nothing, God was everything, and the End was coming—that did the numbing. Even if you weren’t inclined to fight it, it was intellectually exhausting and depressed the senses. You felt freed from the guilty burdens of Self, but once Self was safely in its cage, you were left with nothing but meat and bones as tools for listening and enjoying. You were listening not with your ear but with your cerebellum, your brain stem—with your horseshoe-crab self. And suddenly music that couldn’t have sucked worse a few months back sounds sweet, and inviting, and pretty, like it was written just for you, which incidentally it was.
I had come to church late that morning and so didn’t sit down on the first floor with Laurie and Janine, as I usually did. Instead I went up to the balcony, whipped out my notebook and Bible, and prepared to receive the Wisdom. I sang some songs along with the crowd, and then Pastor Hagee trotted out a young female vocalist to sing a solo tune called “The Cross Said It All.”
Churchgoing Matt purred; from the balcony, the vocalist looked a little like a young Linda Ronstadt (I would later see her up close and be troubled by the size of “her” Adam’s apple). The tune had a stunning chorus:
He ain’t never done me nothing but good…
God used three nails and—two pieces of wood!
I chuckled, wondering if the song’s author had, like Salieri, thanked the Lord for that inspired rhyme. Then I sat down with the crowd and listened as Hagee ascended to the pulpit.
By any standard, Pastor John Hagee is an orator of unusual ability. His physical form is clownish; apart from the central-casting head of white, swept-back preacher hair, he has short, stubby arms and the body of a beach ball. He is one of those perfectly round fat men whose whole body seems like a platform for a straining top suit button that might at any moment shoot out skyward like a champagne cork. But when it talks, this beach ball has tremendous oratorical range, zooming back and forth from wry folksy humor to humility to booming fire-and-brimstone hellfire and back to humor again with effortless ease. When he asks for money, he sounds like he’s asking you the time. John Hagee could, as they say down here in Texas, talk a dog off a meat truck.
Hagee started off slowly. He announced that today was the beginning of a new three-sermon series called “The Edge of Time.” Right on cue, a flurry of helpers appeared out of nowhere to put up a billboard behind Hagee labeled “THE EDGE OF TIME” that contained several huge cartoonish illustrations, including the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and “the woman” of Revelation 12. The illustrations, as illustrations frequently do in fundamentalist Christian media, recalled the covers of Dungeons and Dragons modules. Hagee explained that the sermon series was going to help reveal to us the mysteries of “God’s clock” and unravel the “advanced mathematics” of the Bible, in this way helping us to understand that 2007 was going to be a “special year” in God’s plan. I got the distinct impression that Hagee was hinting that something big was going to happen soon, End Times–wise.
Hagee