The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [84]
“God just killed them all,” said Cassie with relish. “It says here that he killed five hundred thousand choice men of Jeroboam. They weren’t ordinary men.”
“Choice meaning special,” said Richard, interjecting. “They were like special forces. Like Green Berets.”
The crowd cooed. I heard Laurie say, “Wow.”
“Right,” said Cassie. “They were special, but God just killed them dead. Five hundred thousand of ’em.”
Another man in the crowd raised his hand.
“Yes?” Cassie said.
“It says in my Bible they were ‘chosen’ men,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Well, God chose them all right,” he said. “He chose them to die.”
“That’s right,” said Cassie. “He sure did.”
Jesus, I thought. This is creepy. We went back to Deuteronomy 20 and the rules of warfare. There was a section there about what to do with conquered cities. We read from a section at the end:
15 Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far off from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations.
16 Howbeit of the cities of these peoples, that the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth.
“Again, notice how God kills absolutely everyone,” Cassie said, smiling. “He leaves alive nothing. Everything has to die.”
A hand across the room raised.
“Even the animals?” Laurie said.
“What?” said Cassie.
Laurie gulped. “I mean,” she said, “I can see how you have to kill all the humans, but why do all of the animals have to die? They can’t contaminate—”
“NOTHING THAT BREATHES,” Cassie repeated. “Just look at what it says. Kill everything that breathes.”
“Mmm-hmm!” said someone in the room.
“Amen to that!” said another.
“God means business,” came a third voice.
“But the—” Laurie began.
At this point we devolved into a discussion of Saul’s disobedience in making an offering, how Laurie’s thinking was similar to Saul’s, in the sense that she was deciding for herself how she wanted to worship God. From here we moved on to a discussion of Sennacherib, the cocky Assyrian (read: Arab) king who showed up in Israel in the middle of the book of Kings boasting about how he was going to waste everybody. “He did a lot of talking,” said Cassie, “but he soon found out what this God was about. God destroyed him.”
“Mm-hmm,” said yes-man Richard.
And there was more and more of this, and finally we got to a section of the book of Romans in which the concept of defeating evil with good was discussed. “We have to defeat our enemies with love,” Cassie grumbled. “Now, I know that’s really hard to do sometimes, but…”
“Does that mean that I have to put a picture of Nancy Pelosi up on my wall?” grumbled Reggie, the guitarist.
The room exploded in laughter.
“If that’s what it takes,” laughed Cassie. “Now, I know how hard that is…”
“That would be impossible for me to do,” said one man.
“Don’t know if I could,” said another.
The jokes went on and on. This part I understood by now. This was a sort of Church of America, where the religious and political orthodoxies were inextricable. You could no more protest on behalf of Nancy Pelosi here than you could question the wisdom of God. It was groupthink in the classic sense of the word, with the rants against Pelosi and against Libby’s “enemies” an essentially exactly parallel version of the Two Minutes’ Hate. But I couldn’t find a way to get off on it the same way they did. Like Orwell’s protagonist Winston, I was in trouble because to be a convincing hater you really have to feel it. And when you don’t feel it, you give off a kind of stink. I was stinking pretty hard that night and had to scoot out the door as soon as the meeting broke up, even though Richard tried to engage me in conversation.
“So, Matthew, how are things going?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Gotta run, though.”
“Where are you working these days?” he pressed, squinting at me.
“Um,” I said, “I’ve been tutoring kids…Those Mexicans have trouble with the language—terrible grammar—listen, I’ve really got to go…”
A few days