by Matt Taibbi
I grabbed my cell phone and dialed the number. Three rings, then a recorded voice answered:
“Thank you for calling John Hagee Ministries. All of our prayer partners are currently busy. You may have called at a peak period. However, your call will be answered in the order it was received…”
I frowned and started doodling in my notebook. A year and a half ago I watched a British reporter at the Michael Jackson trial draw a picture of a knife plunging into a dog’s head during the cross-examination of Larry King. Since then I can’t stop drawing the same thing. I’m now beginning to wonder if the Brit caught the disease from someone else. Perhaps this goes back thousands of years. After a few minutes I heard a click and a young man’s voice came on the line:
“Hello, John Hagee Ministries,” he said.
“Yeah, hi,” I said. “I’d like to make a prayer request.”
“Sure,” he said. “What are we praying for?”
I paused. When dealing with the kind of people who think Left Behind is really possible and who think Noah really was six hundred years old when the flood came, there is a strong temptation to ham it up, fuck with them a little, offer answers that will at least make them blink once or twice before they swallow them whole. I’ll confess to doing this throughout my stay in Texas, and I don’t feel a need to apologize for it—I live in this country, too, and sometimes I can’t help being angry about how dumb and mean our culture has become, how fast that meanness and dumbness is expanding, and how determined some Jesus-culture merchants are that people like me should not escape it. And so from time to time that anger would come out, in a tall tale or two that would pop out of my mouth in churchgoing company. But hilariously, the joke would mostly end up cutting both ways. I’d say the craziest, stupidest stuff, trying like hell to get a rise out of people, and not only would I not get one, I’d for the most part be completely ignored—smiled and nodded at, and then just waved on through into my seat in the megachurch. Being a wiseass in a groupthink environment is like throwing an egg at a bulldozer.
That’s the way things work in America. You can literally stick a fork into your own eye in public, and so long as your check clears, no one will even bat an eye. There was a lot of this sort of thing in my Texas experience, and it made for a strangely harmonious undertone to my relations with the locals: I kept sticking a fork in my own eye over and over again, and over and over again my new friends would smile like nothing was happening. You can say a lot of very weird shit when you’re a Brother in Christ, so long as you don’t forget to sing along at the right times.
In that regard, the “prayer request” I ended up making was for a fictional ex-wife who I said had run out on me. I told my prayer line counselor that my betrothed had thrown me over for a Jewish ACLU lawyer named Schatz—that she had jumped in his Saab and run away with him to Paris, to take the Bateau-Mouche ride she said I could never give her. I further told my counselor that I didn’t know what “Bateau-Mouche” meant, but I knew it warn’t Christian. When I was finished with my story, there was silence on the line for a moment.
“The car was a Saab?” the counselor said finally, with appropriate contempt.
I smiled, pleased that he was paying attention to the important details. I added that I didn’t like this Schatz fellow at all. That the black curls in his hair looked almost like horns.
“Anyway,” I said. “I just want to pray for her, pray that she finds her way back to me, back to Christ.”
I held my ear away from the phone, expecting a hangup. Instead, the counselor just ate the story whole and plowed ahead with his computerized compassion spiel.
“What’s your name again?” the man said.
“Matt,” I said.
“Let’s go ahead and pray, Matt,” he said.
I bowed my head.
“Father, I ask You,” he said, “with Your words, whoever You put together, no man can separate. Father, I ask You now for Matt and his wife, Lord Father, for her specifically, Lord, I ask You that You would bring her back to the right relationship and the right standing with You, Lord. Father, I pray in the name of Jesus against every attack and assault of the Enemy on their marriage, on their relationship. Father, I just ask You right now to give them freedom, to give them deliverance, Lord God, from all of the attacks of the Enemy.”
I bit my lip. This guy is good, I thought.
“Father, I ask You that as they seek You and put You first, Lord God, I ask You to provide for them the desires of the heart and the needs that they seek. I pray, Lord God, that You will provide them a way that exceeds all that we can imagine, Lord God. Father, I pray that You would let them be bound again by the power of Jesus Christ in the middle of their relationship…”
The middle?
“…and that, Lord God, that You will never again allow them to be in a relationship, Lord God, without putting You first and foremost in their lives, Lord God. Father, I ask that You have mercy on them individually, Lord God, and let both of them come back to their first love, which would be You, Lord God. In Jesus’s name I ask, Lord God, that all of these things be glorified. In Your name we pray.”
“Amen!” I said.
What a performance—totally mechanical, true, but amazing nonetheless.
“Well, alright then,” the man said, and hung up.
“Hey,” I said, “wait!”
But he was gone.
TO BE PERFECTLY HONEST, I knew all about Pastor John Hagee—his Cornerstone Church was one of the reasons I’d come to San Antonio in the first place. Hagee was one of the most influential evangelical preachers in the country—not because his ministry was so very large (although he claimed up to 4.5 million viewers a week for his Sunday sermons), but because of his near-absolute conquest of a very trendy niche in the market: Christian Zionism.
Not exactly a new idea, Christian Zionism in simplest terms describes Christians who believe in supporting, politically or otherwise, the State of Israel. It has risen as a force in international politics primarily because of two factors. The first is a rise in America in belief in dispensationalist Christianity, i.e., End Times prophecies—the belief that Armageddon is coming and that, with it, the True Believers will be whisked up to Heaven by God, while the nonbelievers stay on earth to suck eggs and generally suffer various tortures. The enormous success of the Left Behind books and movies (which depict the earth during Armageddon as a delicious chaos, with airplanes suddenly stripped of their believer pilots, buses flying off highways, blood-soaked atheists realizing their tragic mistake far too late, etc.) helped spread these beliefs, so much so that dispensationalism is now more or less the default doctrine of most Southern Baptists. If you enter a megachurch practically anywhere in America these days, you can expect that much of the congregation will be actively awaiting the end of the world.
But you can’t have Armageddon without certain preconditions, and most important among those is a final battle that the Prophet Ezekiel predicted will take place between a satanic army (in most interpretations, a force of Arabs led by Russia) and God’s chosen people, Israel. Most End Timers believe the key alliance here will be between Russia and Iran and that only following a savage military confrontation between those states and Israel, probably of a catastrophic nuclear nature, will Christ reappear and begin his glorious second reign.
Thus the whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align America with the nation of Israel so as to “hurry God up” in his efforts to bring about this key final showdown. Practically speaking, this manifests itself, mainly, in the form of American evangelical Christians endorsing pro-Israel policies, support that Israel itself has been happy to receive (Benjamin Netanyahu has even appeared at Hagee’s Cornerstone Church) despite the fact that dispensationalist doctrine also envisions the mass conversion of all Jews to Christianity after the final battle, with dire consequences for those who don’t. I wonder exactly how most Israelis would feel about the sudden warmth being shown them by American evangelicals if they knew, for
instance, that people like ardent End Timer Hal Lindsey had predicted the “mother of all Holocausts” for those Jews who refused to convert at the Second Coming.
Anyway, Pastor Hagee, that drawling, white-haired, barrel-organ-voiced Texan with the kindly smile who gives such powerful ministry on TV, is one of America’s chief pitchmen for Christian Zionism. He founded a group called Christians United for Israel (CUFI), whose mission is to rally Christians to Israel’s cause. According to the Washington Post, Hagee has regular access to the White House and has many followers among George Bush’s staff. Remarkably, when CUFI held a conference in Washington this past summer, no less a personage than Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman gave the keynote address. Also participating as speakers were Senators Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum, while George W. Bush and Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert sent recorded greetings.
When I first started reading about Hagee and about the felicitous alliance between the American religious right and the hard-liners in the Israeli government, my first reaction was to applaud it as a brilliantly cynical piece of international politics. Whether it was conceived in the corridors of Mossad headquarters or in some dreary archcapitalist think tank funded by the Smith Richardson Foundation (and I’m guessing it was probably some combination of both), I had no idea, but it was unmistakably an ingenious solution to the problem of how to rally southern conservative Christians a few generations removed from their cross-burning Klan days to the cause of Israel. If it turns out that it was dreamed up by the same guy who figured out how to get laid-off midwestern factory workers to whoop for free-trade Republicanism by plastering the airwaves with French-kissing men, I have to say, that guy deserves some kind of special medal—a Triple Order of Satan, or something like that.
But during the election season, I started to wonder if this kind of thing might eventually backfire on the people who concocted these ideas, if indeed they were dreamed up from on high. As a temporary electoral gambit designed to garner support for Israel, it’s brilliant, but let’s not forget that it doesn’t work unless you get tens of millions of people really believing that the world is about to end. I wonder sometimes if the cynics in Washington think that they can get away with just bending the yokels’ ears once every four years, cashing in on Election Day, and then going back to the grimy you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours money politics that dominates everyday life inside the Beltway.
I think those people forget that after every Election Day, even after they’ve been forgotten by Washington, those yokels are still out there, thinking, waiting, watching. Their minds change. And if their needs are not tended to, they drift away. And if you’ve gotten used to making political decisions based on the Book of Revelation, you can drift pretty far. I wanted to see how far, exactly—I was going to join the church.
TWO
Congressional Interlude I,
or
Inside the Halls of Derangement
TO DIAGNOSE A CANCER, you have to find its source—the organ where the first batches of abnormal cells started breeding and metastasizing. In the body America the most visible symptoms of the national derangement are in the extremities, the huge sections of the population gone far off the farm into distrust and paranoia, the bitter and disgust-ridden electoral contests, the violent rejection of the national media, etc.
Before going to Texas, I went to Washington, D.C., because this is where the disease began. The problem started when our elected leaders started playing a different game from the one the people sent them to play. They corrupted the process, made it sick, and in the end created a new species of government, an organism that functions well to serve its own ends but is nonresponsive to the public need. It’s a heart that beats but doesn’t pump blood.
This is something different from individual instances of corruption, of a few bad apples taking liberties and stealing a little on the side, here and there. What we have in Washington now is a systemic kind of corruption, a corruption of the whole organism of government. And it’s that corruption at the core of the American polity that’s radiated into the rest of the population, sending out ripples of madness and discontent.
The nonresponsive government may have sent the people scurrying toward magical or conspiratorial explanations for their betrayal, but when I went to Washington—in the fall of 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina—what I found was a much less exotic, but frankly harder to accept, explanation for why things are falling apart. The best cover our corrupt politicians have for their behavior is the very banality of their crimes; to quote Tolstoy, their corruption is “most ordinary and therefore most horrible.” To be robbed and betrayed by a fiendish underground conspiracy, or by the earthly agents of Satan, is at least a romantic sort of plight—it suggests at least a grand Hollywood-ready confrontation between good and evil—but to be coldly ripped off over and over again by a bunch of bloodless, second-rate schmoes, schmoes you chose, you elected, is not something anyone will take much pleasure in bragging about.
That’s why people will think up all sorts of crazy things to explain what’s wrong, long before they get around to the actual truth. But it’s the simple, unvarnished reality right out in the open that’s most frightening.
IT’S 2005, and although no one knows it yet, the beginning of the last Republican Congress of the Bush era, the death spasm of the Contract with America team that had been running the country’s lawmaking body for a dozen years. A fall afternoon and I’m entering the Congress, the House, to be exact. On the third-floor corridor snaking around the House gallery a line of tourists waits to squeeze through a metal detector. Lots of families, suckers from the middle of nowhere, here to take a gander at that whole Democracy thing.
A big-assed foursome is at the head of the line. Dad is balding, paunchy, a cop’s caterpillar mustache, dense curly black arm hair, wearing a Faded Glory Duo-Stripe polo shirt—I’m guessing a size 9XL, red colored, untucked all around, the Olaf the Tentmaker look. I know the exact brand of shirt because I saw it on sale for seven bucks in a Wal-Mart in Houston a few weeks back and almost bought it, just because it was seven bucks. Mom has messy dirty-blond hair, eyes like a tarantula’s, too close together, obstetric hips, and a voice that could break glass. She’s wearing a T-shirt that says “ITHACA IS GORGES,” but I don’t think either of them is from New York State. Two little boys, both pretty young, blank eyes, neither old enough nor guilty enough yet to be villains in the American drama.
Dad leans over to one of the kids:
“Remember what I said,” he says. “They can arrest you if you make a joke right up here.”
“Is that really true?” the older boy says.
“It sure is, son,” Dad says, tapping Junior on the back, speaking with what appears to be pride. They’ve got great security in this country of ours, really on top of everything. The kid nods, then they all move into the gallery together.
A FEW MINUTES LATER I’m asleep on the other side of the gallery, in the press section. With all the traveling I do, my naps are great black oceans weighing millions of tons; my dreams have no plots and no people, just darkness and wriggling shapes. I love sleeping and do it as much as possible, especially in Congress. I’m awakened, however, by the sound of a falling gavel.
“The chair recognizes the gentleman from Tennessee!”
It’s Thursday, October 6, 2005. As is almost always the case, the press section is completely empty. Most of the media sentenced to cover Congress do so from one of Washington’s great oases of I-don’t-give-a-fuck, the press lounge behind and above me, a lifeless little cave with an oldish Coke machine, three clean toilets, and a lot of milling middle-aged reporter types moving slowly if at all, grazing on paper press releases and the endless drone of C-SPAN on the monitors. In the vast congressional zoo the press lounge is one of the very lamest attractions, the equivalent of a three-goat petting run. And the goats almost never come out from behind their rock, into the actual gallery where they might be seen. They stay in
their cave, because most of the time, there’s just not a lot for a goat to see in the House gallery.
“Madam Speaker,” yawns a voice from below, “I yield myself as much time as I may consume…”
The voice belongs to John J. Duncan, Jr., better known as Jimmy Duncan, Republican of Tennessee. Duncan is a conservative’s conservative—he was one of the few Republicans to vote against the Iraq war, using the roughly hundred-year-old excuse that it required of us Americans too much involvement in foreign affairs. A classic isolationist and one of many members who occupy an essentially hereditary congressional seat, Duncan assumed his office after the death in 1988 of his father, John Duncan, Sr., who had been elected to office twelve consecutive times. Three hundred years from now, the city of Knoxville’s congressman will be a Duncan opposed to the extension of foreign aid to Pluto.
This particular Duncan is easy to spot because he has Newt Gingrich’s shock-white Leslie Nielsen haircut. He’s also one of many southern congressmen whose glowing white orthodonture is visible from a hundred yards off. From my cozy seat up in the gallery I watch now as these superior teeth begin pleading their case to the Speaker,*1 who at the moment is not Dennis Hastert but the momlike Illinois Republican Judy Biggert.
One of the great populist myths about Congress is that our elected leaders are lazy bums who do very little work for their money. This is not the case; the vast majority of congressmen and-women actually work surprisingly long hours and have very little free time. One of my earliest experiences in Congress involved following behind Vermont’s Bernie Sanders on the way to a committee hearing; when I made a joke about the committee adjourning early to let the members make their tee times, Sanders went ballistic on me. “No way. These guys work hard,” he snapped. And as I later saw, he’s absolutely right; most members are here late into every weekday evening.