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

by Matt Taibbi

  I had no idea what she meant by that, but I played along. “Good thinking,” I said. “Let’s see how his two hundred IQ copes with that!”

  “Exactly, sweet baby, exactly.”

  I was starting to get calls like this every day, which was another reason I skipped the Friday class. However, I decided to go to the one the next day. When I arrived, I was shocked to find that Laurie wasn’t there. I slumped in a pew and began taking notes as the pastor, Stephen J. Sorensen—a paunchy, impatient-sounding man with a Rumsfeldian voice who looked like he’d just shot a 98 on the links and was scanning the audience for someone to blame for it—explained the vagaries of membership. I arrived during some kind of sermon in which Sorensen was comparing God to alcoholism:

  “When you take on too much alcohol,” he said, “you as you begin to disappear!”

  He pantomimed a drunk’s stagger down the street, ending in a collapse.

  “It’s the same thing with the Holy Spirit,” he said. “The more drunk you are with the Holy Spirit, the less in control you are. The more God, the less you. The more God, the less you act like yourself.”

  There were about a hundred people in the church; all nodded eagerly.

  I nodded too, but just as I did, I saw a familiar face in a center pew. It was Laurie, shouting and gesturing for me to come and sit near her.

  “Come here, baby!” she said.

  I sighed, gathered my shit, and walked over.

  Laurie mobbed me as soon as I sat down. When I didn’t turn the page of my study binder fast enough, she pointed to the right page and made me turn it faster. If I didn’t read along or make a note at the right time, she’d nudge me, sometimes adding something that she thought the pastor missed. Then, while Sorensen was ranting, she started in on me about signing in.

  “Did you sign in?” she whispered.

  “And so God said that homosexuality is an abomination,” Sorensen droned. “He didn’t say it was not quite right. He said it was an abomination.”

  “Uh, no,” I said.

  “Well, you’ve gotta sign in!” she whispered, more loudly now. “You’re in the tribe of Ephraim! That’s our group, honey, that’s our group!”

  “Right, well, I’ll do it after,” I whispered, eyes still facing forward.

  “But where did you sign in when you came in?” she nudged me.

  “On the ‘no tribe’ sheet,” I said firmly. “I’ll do it in the right place later.”

  Sorensen continued about gays: “And so God doesn’t change his mind when society changes its mind…”

  “But the sign-in sheet…,” Laurie continued.

  Heads started to turn. Meanwhile, Janine showed up and sat down on the other side of Laurie, and soon Laurie was doing the same thing with Janine. Janine and I exchanged glances. Sorensen continued his lecture, and soon Laurie was raising her hand when he mentioned the church elders. Laurie wanted to know how many elders there were. But she totally misunderstood the meeting; there was no place here for questions and answers. This was a we-shut-up-and-listen, they-tell-us-what-we-need-to-know type of deal. But Laurie kept wagging her hand. Sorensen ignored her.

  “Laurie, honey, I don’t think this is really question-and-answer time,” Janine whispered finally. “Just remember your question and ask him later.”

  “I just want to know how many elders there are,” Laurie whispered.

  “Okay, well…”

  We broke for lunch. On our way out of the church, we spotted a couple, Murray and Miriam, whom we’d met at the Encounter Weekend and eaten with there. We all decided to go to the nearby cheap-ass Chinese buffet. There were five of us, and Laurie kept wanting all of us to go in her car. We eventually settled on two cars, but it took a while; Laurie and Miriam disagreed pointlessly about the travel issue, then glared at each other in the parking lot. I smelled a needlessly megacomplicated experience coming.

  When we got to the restaurant, I wanted to sit next to Janine, who I thought was a very nice, very sad young woman—I liked her enough, in fact, that I made it a point to stay away from her, not wanting to infect her with my evil journalistic tentacles. But when we got to the round table, Laurie maneuvered in such a way that there was no way for me to sit near Janine; she plopped right between us. We prayed, thanked the Lord for the food, then started eating.

  Miriam and Laurie, both heavyset and both older blond women, one conspicuously married and one conspicuously widowed, sat opposite each other, feverishly spooning mounds of shitty Chinese food into their mouths. I sensed some kind of preternatural antagonism between the two and immediately grew nervous.

  “The thing about Luther,” opined Miriam, “is that what he did back then is different. I’m just saying, modern-day Lutheranism is almost indistinguishable from Catholicism.”

  “Hmm, right,” said Murray, her heavyset, affable, yes-man husband.

  “In what way?” said Laurie.

  “Well, Lutheranism is different than your basic liturgical faith…”

  “Aturdical?” said Laurie. “What’s that?”

  “Liturgical. In a liturgical faith,” said Miriam, “you’d have this whole schedule planned out. They’d do a sermon on January first, and then the next January first you’d do the very same sermon.”

  “Oh, well, we don’t do that in our church,” said Laurie. “In our church…”

  Miriam was a quietly triumphant mom who’d laudably made it to a comfortable place in life with a good husband after rougher times in her youth—she told me she’d lived off food stamps in a ratty house with seven people in it when she was younger. She was happy with who she was, and seemed pleased to give her opinions on things and not to care one way or another what anyone else thought about them. And every time she offered one of those confident opinions, it upset Laurie for some reason.

  We started talking about the morning’s lessons. One of the things Sorensen had cautioned us about was people who come into the church claiming to be prophets and claiming to know the true Word of God. Sorensen said that all such comers to Cornerstone were traditionally told that they would be allowed to preach, so long as they went to “see Steve”—i.e., him—first. “Nobody ever comes,” Sorensen said contemptuously. Apparently no itinerant false prophet would be fool enough to try his wares under the withering eye of Pastor Sorensen.

  I picked at my food with my chopsticks. In the pointy-headed northeastern America of my experience there were no legends of wandering prophets, no dinner-table discussions about personal salvation. But in the rest of the country you had this weird dichotomy, an advanced industrial economy confidently riding the superconductor and the microchip into the space age while most of its population hurtled backward away from the Enlightenment, living out a Canterbury Tales–type quest for revelation in a culture dominated by superstition and mystery.

  I had wondered during the lesson just exactly how often strangers showed up in San Antonio megachurches claiming to be prophets. The group at the Chinese-food place now educated me. While the false-prophet thing did occasionally happen, the bigger problem, they said, was that there were people in Bible-study/cell meetings who would sometimes show up, claiming to “have a word.” “People will come and they’ll start saying, ‘I’ve got a word’ and such,” Miriam said. “It happens.”

  “Course it’s different when somebody comes and says, ‘God talked to me the other day and said such and such,’” said Murray. “That’s different, that’s okay.”

  “It’s just different when someone comes in and starts talking about how they’ve got a word,” added Miriam. “People’ll always have a word.”

  At this we entered a danger area when Miriam and Murray mentioned that they were planning on being cell leaders in this church. We congratulated them, in response to which Miriam wondered if she and Murray might not have some of the same problems they’d had as cell leaders in their last church, when certain people talked out of turn and were forever claiming to “have a word,” which I guess meant claiming
to have some kind of revelation from God. To be honest I didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about, and it kind of freaked me out.

  “I mean, some people have problems,” she said.

  “Well, everyone has problems,” said Janine, who always tried to offer a generous opinion about people.

  “No, I don’t mean ordinary everyday problems,” Miriam said. “I mean submissiveness problems. Authority problems. And right away”—here she looked at Murray and rolled her eyes—“I know who we’re going to have problems with.”

  Clearly she was talking about some third party I didn’t know. Janine and Laurie instantly hushed her up.

  “Shhhh!” said Janine.

  “Don’t say it!” said Laurie. “Curse! Curse!”

  “I’m just saying,” said Miriam, shaking her head, “that there are certain people…”

  “Don’t!” said Janine. “Don’t say it out loud! It’ll come true!”

  “Shh!” Laurie hushed.

  “Yes, that’s true, it is a curse if you say it,” mumbled Murray agreeably, munching his food. Soy sauce stuck to his mustache.

  I leaned back in my chair. What the fuck was going on?

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “She can’t say something out loud because that might be a curse?”

  “That’s right, honey,” said Laurie.

  “You see, Matthew,” said Janine, leaning over, “the Devil can’t hear your thoughts. He can only hear what you say out loud.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “Of course. I forgot.”

  “Thing is, there’s a fine line between saying a curse and telling the truth,” Miriam said. “I don’t see how we can talk about a problem that might happen if we can’t talk about a problem.”

  “She’s got a point there,” I said.

  “Well, let me tell you how we do it in our group, honey,” Laurie said to Miriam archly. “We don’t do it that way at all.”

  A nasty discussion ensued, with Laurie challenging Miriam about her apparent unwillingness to let others speak and to leave her old group behind. Now, Miriam had given no indication that she was living in the past or planning on remaking her old group routine in the new church or anything like that—she was just telling a story about the way things had been in her old church. But Laurie wouldn’t leave it be.

  “You’ve got to leave all that behind, honey,” she said. “You’ve got to let go. I have to say, if you’re going to be a cell leader, I’m concerned that you’re bringing this negative attitude to it.”

  “I am not,” snapped Miriam.

  “This is good tea,” I whispered to Janine.

  “Yes, it is,” she whispered back.

  “I’m just saying, you can’t be bringing that negativity into your group,” said Laurie. “Now, let me tell you how it’s done in our group…”

  Eventually Miriam got up in a huff and walked away for a moment, and the table fell silent. Laurie, still pounding a mound of battered crab legs—her fourth plate—was in an advanced state of anxiety. You could almost see the waves of fright emanating from her. She needed desperately to engage somebody about something, but there was no place for her to put all of her energy. The table was deathly silent for a moment except for the sounds of purposeful, joyless munching. I smiled at Laurie, then listened as Murray suddenly mentioned something about not being able to eat any cake, because they only had chocolate cake and he didn’t like chocolate.

  “Well,” I said, “there’s flan up there, if you like that.”

  Laurie exploded in laughter.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Flan!” she chuckled. “Oh, you’re cute, honey, you really are. ‘Flan.’ It’s pronounced flaaahn, sweet thing.”

  I was pronouncing it “flan,” like “fan”—correctly, it seemed to me.

  “Actually, no,” I said. “It’s flan, like fan.”

  “Oh, sweet baby, I don’t mean to step on your toes,” she said, “but you’re wrong. It’s flaaaaahhhn,” she said, giving me a long hoity-toity a, like the a in “wand.” “It’s from the Spanish.”

  I bit my lip.

  “Actually, it’s not Spanish, it’s—never mind,” I said. “You’re right.”

  I jabbed violently at a piece of phony kung pao chicken.

  “You’re not offended, are you, honey?” Laurie said.

  “No,” I whispered. “I’m fine.”

  Actually, I wasn’t fine. I sat there for a moment in silence, trying desperately to get a grip on myself. I was losing control of my cover.

  The rest of the lunch followed a similar pattern. There were several more disagreements over minor doctrinal questions. I had begun to understand that the whole business of being this kind of Christian is mainly wrapped up in a tireless study of various dos and don’ts—how to get through the day and interact with other human beings without slipping and inviting a demon into one’s home or one’s abdomen. That meant you had to know everything there is to know about all of the don’ts; with idol worship, for instance, you had to spend lots of time discussing with your Christian friends what constituted idol worship and how to avoid it. A great many conversations will therefore be held in situations like this about the relative permissibility of things like crucifixes and portraits of the dead and plastic Virgin Mary statues. At this lunch, Murray opined that the Catholics were obviously idol worshippers because of their worship of the Virgin. Laurie chimed in that the rosary, too, was a kind of idol worship. A range of idol candidates was then discussed in succession.

  After a while you begin to realize that there is no such thing as traveling through life quickly in this world. With demons lurking in even the most harmless-seeming transactions, every outing ends up getting bogged down in these anxious procedural discussions. It can get pretty bleak.

  Finally the check came. We calculated that each person owed exactly ten dollars, not including the tip. The couple Miriam and Murray gave exactly twenty-one dollars. Laurie kept trying to say that the tip had been added to the bill automatically, even though, as an examining Janine pointed out, there was clearly no tip indicated on the bill. Minutes passed…meanwhile, the small bespectacled Chinese waiter, who was about to get stiffed on his tip, quietly dropped five fortune cookies on the table.

  Laurie, Miriam, and Murray all reached for the cookies and started to unwrap them. Janine gathered hers in and tried to hide it under her plate. I caught sight of the waiter glancing miserably at the empty center of the table and was suddenly annoyed.

  “Fortune cookies,” I snapped, “are a curse.”

  The three cookie eaters instantly dropped their cookies.

  “Oh, I know,” said Laurie. “That’s why I don’t believe in them.”

  “But you’re eating it,” said Janine.

  “Oh, well, I guess I am,” Laurie said.

  “They’re witchcraft!” I said. “Just like horoscopes.”

  Everyone hung their heads. Murray sighed.

  “I guess you’re right,” he said. “They are just like horoscopes.”

  “Yeah,” said Miriam. “They’re about tellin’ the future. That’s not right.”

  Everyone glumly tossed their cookies back into the center of the table. I kept mine, however, sliding it into my overcoat pocket. Quietly, we went out of the place, leaving a 10 percent tip. The waiter glared.

  WE WENT BACK TO CHURCH for the tail end of our membership orientation. The whole tone of Pastor Sorensen’s presentation shifted from a morning of religious banalities into an afternoon of political paranoia, dire warnings to the flock about what might happen to all of us should the forces of secular humanism seize control of America. This was sort of typical of the church, sticking your political content at the end of your meat-and-potatoes personal revelation stuff. Much of what he talked about concerned the church structure, specifically the “Government of Twelve” cell-group network, a hierarchy of “tribes” under which various individual Bible-study groups would meet. The groups were led by cell leade
rs, who were usually a married couple with a home big enough to accommodate large meetings.

  According to Sorensen, one primary reason for creating the cell network was to preserve the church in case…well, in case something happened to the church.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Sorensen said. “If Hillary Clinton should ever become president, God forbid…”

  The crowd hissed and booed. Sorensen raised his hands.

  “If, God forbid, something like that were ever to happen, one of the first things they’d try to do is tax the churches. You can count on that,” he said.

  The crowd gasped at the audacity of the suggestion. I found it ironic that by singling out Hillary specifically, Sorensen had just done the one thing that made the church no longer deserve tax-free status. But he wasn’t finished:

  “But another thing we have to worry about is that, if there were ever to be a terrorist attack here in America,” he said, “this church is one of the first places they’d attack. Because they know that Pastor Hagee is one of their biggest enemies.”

  Jesus Christ, I thought, inwardly groaning. Laurie elbowed me and nodded gravely; I nodded back, then made sure to clap.

  It went on like that for a while. The whole sermon was one unending fusillade against the perils of self and of the outside world. The only proper course of action, he continually hammered home, was to submit oneself entirely to the church—everything else was deadly and Hell-inducing.

  “How many of you have subverted your natures for Christ?” he asked.

  Hands flew up.

  “That’s good. We all have natures and we all have to forcibly subdue them…”

  He went on, asking the crowd what it thought of fanatics. “My definition of a fanatic is someone who loves Jesus a little more than I do,” he said, to laughter. “I used to laugh at those people who would fall on the ground praising. But actually they get it. They’re the ones who get it.” He sighed. “After all, when we compare ourselves to God, who are we?”

  The crowd mumbled in a monotone: “NOBODY.”

  “Can I get an Amen?”

  “AMEN!”