The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [67]
Polite clapping from the crowd.
Hagee frowned slightly. After attending these sessions, I could only say the man is a con man—a very good one, of course, but a con man nonetheless. His job is to deliver Middle American Christians in support of pro-Israeli policies. In Washington, John Hagee is a political operator whose influence stems from a close relationship with AIPAC, the Israeli lobby (which had Hagee give an address last summer) and various AIPAC-connected politicians like John McCain (who would later that year address Hagee’s Christians United for Israel, or CUFI, group). There is talk that Hagee has been supported financially by certain members of the AIPAC board; one former AIPAC employee told me that Hagee had been the recipient of significant donations in the past. All outward appearances, therefore, point to Hagee as a canny operator, a run-of-the-mill kuntry preecher who found a Washington inside-baseball niche (delivering the Christian vote for Israel) and ran with it all the way to close access to Congress and the White House. Indeed, in 2005 and 2006, reports began to surface that Hagee’s CUFI had held a series of “informal meetings” with White House officials about America’s Middle East policy. In order to advance his agenda, Hagee hired a long-standing D.C. political operative named David Brog to lobby his cause on the Hill; Brog is a former chief of staff for Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter, former Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. All of this activity appears designed to further Hagee’s aim of turning CUFI into a Christian AIPAC—which is a fairly strange and ambitious goal for a preacher whose congregation has probably never heard of AIPAC.
In that regard it takes some serious skills to get eighteen thousand Texan fundamentalists cheering, even robotically, for the Star of David. Hagee has those skills, but he can only take things so far. It’s garden-variety domestic despair that keeps the flock coming in, and he can only leave that theme for so long.
So once he was finished with Ahmadinejad, Hagee quickly went back to the other Devil, the domestic Devil—and the crowd buzzed again, for the Devil is very real to these people. They see him everywhere, hovering over everything they love and need: their families, their husbands or wives, their jobs, their bodies.
“He intends to kill you physically!” shouted Hagee. “He intends to destroy your marriage!”
Behind me, the men and women of the congregation whispered their assent:
“Protect me, Lord!”
“Save me, Jesus!”
And he finished the sermon with the usual fire and brimstone, talking about how the Devil can try as hard as he wants, but he knows his is a lost cause, because he was already beaten at Calvary two thousand years ago. The crowd cheered; they never get tired of hearing this happy ending. And then there was music again, and the organ cranked back up, and we all filtered out of the church.
After services I went out for a cup of coffee with Janine and her little girl, who was coloring in a book as we talked.
“What did you think about the the pastor’s message?” I said. “About 2007 being a special year?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean, I got the impression he was saying that something was going to happen in the Middle East, that maybe the Rapture was coming.”
“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t get that. I just thought…you know, I wondered if 2007 would be a special year, too, but that’s because I’m thirty-three this year. Christ was thirty-three when he died on the cross, you know.”
“I know,” I said. “And what did you think about what he said about Ahmadinejad?”
“Who?” she asked.
“Never mind,” I said.
“You know, obviously, I think about the Rapture,” she said, “but not that often. If it happens, it happens. I just try…”
“You’re just trying to be the best Christian you can be right now, while we’re still here,” I offered.
“Exactly,” she said.
OUR CHURCH had a clear hierarchical structure, one that placed Pastor Hagee at the top and then spread out to leaders of the