The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire

by Matt Taibbi

  During a break in these lessons about curses and demons, a pair of youngish women came and sat at my end of the chapel. One was a heavyset blonde in her late thirties/early forties with a broad smile and a warm, inviting face who looked like she might have been a grand Texas dame in her youth. The other was a thin, somewhat nervous-looking woman in her early thirties with sad eyes and freckles who looked a little like a pale, depressed version of Joan Allen.

  “Hi,” said the blonde. “Can I ask, did you come here by yourself?”

  I smiled. “Yes,” I said.

  “Oh, good,” she said. “So did my friend Janine here. So y’all should get along real good.”

  She indicated the thin girl, who blushed. It was a very forward setup, and I was momentarily embarrassed, but at the same time I was beginning to despair of making any friends at the retreat and was relieved to meet some friendly people. I smiled, recalling Fortenberry’s words: Don’t be afraid to look behind the bush. I shook Janine’s hand, and we all introduced ourselves. The blonde’s name was Laurie.

  Laurie was a piece of work. She had a great sense of humor and was absolutely uninhibited. I would later find out that she was a terribly lonely woman who had recently been the victim of some extremely malicious gossip at the hands of other church members. But at the moment she was a real breath of fresh air to me—a genuinely friendly person reaching out to someone sitting quite conspicuously by himself.

  “We were looking around the room and wondering if there were any men here, and then I saw you and I was like, ‘Look at that one,’” she said, holding up a hand and making the r-r-r-r-r purring-cat-claw gesture.

  “Um,” I said.

  “I said to myself, ‘He looks like Tom Selleck, he does.’”

  I laughed. I couldn’t possibly look less like Tom Selleck.

  “Who’s Tom Selleck?” said Janine.

  We all ended up eating together during meals for the rest of the weekend and became fast friends. Laurie was a joke-a-minute entertainer. In our very first meal together, she told a surprisingly bawdy joke about an elderly couple who strip down naked, getting ready to have sex. Just before they jump into bed, the wife stops her husband. “I should warn you,” she says. “I have acute angina.”

  “Thank God for that,” the husband says. “Because your tits look like hell.”

  At this, Janine covered her ears.

  “I’ve got another one,” said Laurie. “This guy goes to a doctor—”

  “I can’t hear this,” said Janine, standing up. “I promised myself I would be pure.”

  “Oh, honey,” said Laurie.

  “No, I mean it.” And Janine walked away.

  They asked me about my past. I told them a story that was in the ballpark of the truth, that I’d been married to a Thai woman who’d recently left me (actually I still had a Thai girlfriend). Appropriately enough, we’d just finished hearing a sermon from Fortenberry about King Solomon and how he took foreign wives from among the Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, etc. “It’s just like that story about King Solomon,” I said. “He took foreign wives and they led him away from God. It was the same with me.”

  “You were unequally yoked,” said Janine, who was recently divorced and still in obvious distress because of it. “I know how that is.”

  “Wait,” said Laurie. “Which story about King Solomon? I missed that.”

  “Oh, you know, honey,” said Janine. “The one with all them ites.”

  “Oh, right,” said Laurie.

  “My wife was like that,” I said. “I came home one day, and she was wearing a beret and had her bags packed. And she says to me, ‘I want to go to Paris! I want to ride the Bateau-Mouche!’ Like I’d been stopping her.”

  “What’s the b-b-b…,” began Laurie.

  “The Bateau-Mouche,” I said. “It’s some kind of French riverboat. People eat lunch on it and stuff.”

  “And she thought you were tying her down? Keeping her from that?” asked Laurie.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Well, that’s awful. She sounds like a confused person,” Laurie said supportively.

  “That she is,” I said. “But I keep telling her, God still loves her.”

  “The funny thing,” Laurie said, “is that you kind of look French.”

  I nearly spit up my unsweetened iced tea. The curse of John Kerry! The sad thing is, I knew what she meant. Christians have a certain look, and I don’t have it. The more “French” you look, the less Christian you probably are.

  They started talking about the Victory and Deliverance that was coming up the next day. I was still unclear about what this was, although I understood that it had something to do with casting out demons. Laurie, for one, was very excited about the whole thing.

  “I’m really looking forward to it,” she said, slapping one of her ample thighs. “I’m hoping to lose about forty pounds’ worth of demons.”

  “Hey, that’s true,” said a man at our table. “They must weigh something, right?”

  “Well, I hope so,” said Laurie seriously.

  “I think there’s something to that,” I said. “A new fitness program. Dematrim.”

  There was an uncomfortable pause at the table; my joke was not completely appropriate. But Laurie came to my rescue.

  “Dematrim, I like that,” Laurie said coolly. “I could use some.”

  But by that evening, Laurie was a little bit chastened. “You know all them jokes I been making about myself?” she said, looking troubled as she dropped her heaping tray of public-school-style spaghetti on the cafeteria table.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “Well, my life coach tells me that’s bad. She says it’s like a curse. I’m bringing a curse upon myself with all of that self-defecating humor.”

  “I think you mean self-deprecating,” said one of the other men at the table.

  “Oh, goodness, yes,” she said. “Self-defecating would be something else, wouldn’t it, sweetie pie? Anyway, they say it’s bad.”

  “That’s really a shame,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, it’s true. And I don’t want any more curses.”

  “Me either,” I said.

  HERE I HAVE a confession to make. It’s not something that’s easy to explain, but here goes. After two days of nearly constant religious instruction, songs, worship, and praise—two days that for me meant an unending regimen of forced and fake responses—a funny thing started to happen to my head. There is a transformational quality in these external demonstrations of faith and belief. The more you shout out praising the Lord, singing along to those awful acoustic tunes, telling people how blessed you feel, and so on, the more a sort of mechanical Christian skin starts to grow all over your real self. Even if you’re a degenerate Rolling Stone reporter inwardly chuckling and busting on the whole scene—even if you’re intellectually enraged by the ignorance and arrogant prejudice flowing from the mouth of a terminal ambition case like Phil Fortenberry—outwardly you’re swaying to the gospel and singing and praising and acting the part, and those outward ministrations assume a kind of sincerity in themselves. And at the same time, that “inner you” begins to get tired of the whole spectacle and sometimes forgets to protest—in my case checking out into baseball reveries and other daydreams while the outer me did the “work” of singing and praising. At any given moment, which one is the real you?

  You may think you know the answer, but by my third day I began to notice how effortlessly my soft-spoken Matt-mannequin was going through his robotic motions of praise, and I was shocked. For a brief, fleeting moment I could see how under different circumstances it would be easy enough to bury your “sinful” self far under the skin of your outer Christian and to just travel through life this way. So long as you go through all the motions, no one will care who you really are underneath. And besides, so long as you are going through all the motions, never breaking the facade, who are you really? It was an incomplete thought,
but it was a scary one; it was the very first time I worried that the experience of entering this world might prove to be anything more than an unusually tiring assignment. I feared for my normal.

  I had these thoughts on the morning of our third day at the retreat. There was a buzz in the air all through the campus. It was the buzz of a Christmas morning, or a Super Bowl Sunday—something big about to happen. I saw Laurie and Janine at breakfast.

  “You excited, honey?” Laurie asked.

  “You know it,” I said. “I’m ready for some healing.”

  “Oh, me too, sweetie,” she said. “It’s funny, last night I had a little bit of an upset stomach. I didn’t understand what it was, but then my coach was telling me—it was the demons, they don’t want to come out. So they were raising trouble.”

  “I see,” I said.

  Janine, solemn-faced, nodded, as if to say, It’s true, they were.

  After breakfast I ran into Aaron. I’d gathered from a few fleeting conversations with him outside the sessions that he had high hopes for this retreat; I think he had struggled with his temper and his relationships at home and he was really hoping to find something that could exorcise the anger and bitterness inside him. And the more he heard in classes, the more he liked. “It’s so great,” he said. “Some programs and churches, they give you little parts of the Bible, but this is the only one that just gives you the whole thing. It’s just so obvious—why wouldn’t you want this?”

  “I totally agree with you,” I’d said.

  Now it was the morning of the Deliverance, and Aaron had an expectant look on his face. He looked like a man who had been up late dreaming of some kind of release and who was going to be very disappointed if he did not feel actual demons leaving his body.

  “You ready for this?” he asked.

  “You bet,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, I hope it works,” he said, and walked off.

  Finally we gathered in the chapel for the Deliverance. Fortenberry, dressed in his standard western shirt and hiked-up jeans—his jeans might have been a little tighter this morning—sauntered up to the lectern wearing a solemn and dramatic expression. “Someone told me this morning, ‘Phil, you’ve got your game face on,’” he said, and I agreed with him—although I might have had a different read about what kind of game he was preparing for.

  “This is fixing to be the biggest spiritual battle that ninety-nine percent of you will ever face,” he said. “But let me tell you something. It’s already been won. It was won two thousand years ago.”

  The crowd cheered. As the applause tailed, he held his hands up Mussolini-fashion, asking for quiet. The crowd complied. It was quite dramatically done, this whole business, whatever we were working toward. And at that moment, I spotted a younger kid who had been at the retreat all weekend working a sound board for the musical parts zipping behind the crowd to some kind of dimmer panel. He turned a switch and the lights dimmed slightly; though it was morning, the light in the building was unnatural, like the light outside during a partial eclipse.

  Throughout the whole weekend, Fortenberry had been setting himself up as an athletic conqueror of demons. His usual shtick was to start off a story acting like he was skeptical of such things (“I was one of those people who thought speaking in tongues was silly”), then talk about how he was sucked in to the amazing truth against his reservations. He described one story about demons in particular.

  “If you’re thinking, ‘Maybe I don’t believe all that stuff about demons,’ you just be there tomorrow morning,” he’d said the day before. “I was like that once before myself.” And then he told a story about ministering to some man, and how as soon as he touched him with anointing oil, the man recoiled from him. “He shot across the room and looked back at me with eyes that were not his own,” he said. “And he says to me, ‘I think I have a demon.’ And I said to him, ‘I think you’re right.’”

  The crowd laughed. Fortenberry went on.

  “I looked at him and I was like, ‘Holy-y-y smoke!’ Anyway, I musta cast about twelve to fifteen demons outta that man.”

  At other times the pastor would delve into a strange sort of demonology, explaining the rules of demonic possession. “A Christian has all power over every demon in you,” he explained. “If a demon is in you, it’s because he has a legal right to be there. What you have to do is concentrate on how he got that legal right.”

  I assumed that the “legal right” had something to do with having offended God somehow, having committed some iniquity that opened the door for the demon to enter. My Christian friends—both at this retreat and in other places later on in my experience—would talk a great deal about “doors” and “windows,” worrying quite a lot about opening doors for demons and laboring quite intensely to “keep those doors closed” once the demons were gone.

  Other times Fortenberry would unintentionally be quite prescient. “You just never know with demons, how close they might be,” he said. “You might be sitting right next to one, and you’d never know he was even there.”

  Two old ladies sitting next to me looked my way and winked. I felt a lump in my throat.

  Occasionally Fortenberry would cite scripture in explaining his rules about demons, but other times he would seem to just pull stuff out of his ass. In the same way that I was conscious of my own real self becoming fatigued and giving way slightly to the robot Christian on the outside, I could feel that my brain had decided to stop worrying about which of Fortenberry’s pronouncements were utter two-bit traveling-circus horseshit and which ones were just confused theology dreamed up with at least some passing reference to the actual Bible. Once you get past a certain point in this process, it really doesn’t matter. You take it all in like it’s all of equal import, and when he’s done talking, you just sing along to the songs again.

  Anyway, we were now at that fateful “tomorrow morning,” and Fortenberry looked like a quarterback about to take the field before a big game. The life coaches assembled around the edges of the chapel, huddling together like insects. For this particular session the men were on one side of the chapel and the women were on the other; mirroring them, the male coaches huddled at the front of the chapel behind Fortenberry on our side, while the female coaches huddled on the other.

  The coaches were carrying anointing oil and bundles of small paper bags.

  Fortenberry began to issue instructions. He told us that under no circumstances should we pray during the Deliverance.

  “When the word of God is in your mouth,” he said, “the demons can’t come out of your body. You have to keep a path clear for the demon to come up through your throat. So under no circumstances pray to God. You can’t have God in your mouth. You can cough, you might even want to vomit, but don’t pray.”

  The crowd nodded along solemnly. Fortenberry then explained that he was going to read from an extremely long list of demons and cast them out individually. As he did so, we were supposed to breathe out, keep our mouths open, and let the demons out.

  And he began.

  At first, the whole scene was pure comedy. Fortenberry was standing up at the front of the chapel, reading off a list, and the room was loudly chirping crickets back at him.

  “In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of incest! In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of sexual abuse! In the name of Jesus…”

  After a few minutes, there was a little twittering here and there. Nothing serious. I was beginning to think the Deliverance was going to be a bust.

  But then it started. Wails and cries from the audience. To my left, a young black man started writhing around in his seat. In front of me and to my right, another young black man with Coke-bottle glasses and a shock of nerdly Jheri curl—a dead ringer for a young Wayne Williams—started wailing and clutching his head.

  “In the name of Jesus,” continued Fortenberry, “I cast out the demon of astrology!”

  Coughing and spitting noises. Behind me, a bald white man started to wheeze and
gurgle, like he was about to puke. Fortenberry, still reading from his list, pointed at the man. On cue, a pair of life coaches raced over to him and began to minister. One dabbed his forehead with oil and fiercely clutched his cranium; the other held a paper bag in front of his mouth.

  “In the name of Jesus Christ,” said Fortenberry, more loudly now, “I cast out the demon of lust!”

  And the man began power-puking into his paper baggie. I couldn’t see if any actual vomitus came out, but he made real hurling and retching noises.

  Now the women began to pipe in. On the women’s side of the chapel the noises began, and it is not hard to explain what these noises sounded like. If you’ve ever watched the Houston 560 or any other gang-bang porn movie, that’s what it sounded like, only the sounds were far more intense. It was not difficult to figure out where the energy was coming from on that side of the room. Some of the husbands glanced nervously over in the direction of their wives.

  “In the name of Jesus Christ, I cast out the demon of cancer!” said Fortenberry.

  “Oooh! Unnh! Unnnnnh!” wailed a woman in the front row.

  “Bleeech!” puked the bald man behind me.

  Within about a minute after that, the whole chapel erupted in pandemonium. About half the men and three-fourths of the women were writhing around and either play-puking or screaming. Not wanting to be a bad sport, I raised my hand for one of the life coaches to see.

  “Need…a…bag,” I said as he came over.

  He handed me a bag.

  “In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of handwriting analysis!” shouted Fortenberry.

  Handwriting analysis? I jammed the bag over my mouth and started coughing, then went into a very real convulsion of disbelief as I listened to this astounding list, half laughing and half retching.

  “In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, I cast out the demon of the intellect!” Fortenberry continued. “In the name of Jesus, I cast out the demon of anal fissures!”

  Cough, cough!