Jesus Made Me Puke : Rolling Stone
The program revolved around a theory that Fortenberry quickly introduced us to called "the wound." The wound theory was a piece of schlock biblical Freudianism in which everyone had one traumatic event from their childhood that had left a wound. The wound necessarily had been inflicted by another person, and bitterness toward that person had corrupted our spirits and alienated us from God. Here at the retreat we would identify this wound and learn to confront and forgive our transgressors, a process that would leave us cleansed of bitterness and hatred and free to receive the full benefits of Christ.
In the context of the wound theory, Fortenberry's tale suddenly made more sense. Being taken on that eighteen-hole golf trip with the barmaid, and watching his family ditched by Dad, had been his wound. It was a wound, Fortenberry explained, because his father's abandonment had crushed his "normal."
"And I was wounded," he whispered dramatically. "My dad had ruined my normal!"
The crowd murmured affirmatively, apparently knowing what it was to have a crushed normal.
After introducing us to the concept of wounds and normals, Fortenberry told us one last cautionary tale before sending us to our first group session. It was about a paratrooper who had done a tandem jump with a training dummy for some Army exercise or other, only to have the dummy's chute fail to open. The dummy had plunged to the ground, crashing through the trees and landing with a thud in a bush. Fortenberry's Army buddy had taken advantage of the situation to have a little joke at the expense of some other exercising soldiers on the ground who weren't privy to the fact that the troopers were jumping with dummies. The Army buddy had cried and wailed in asking where the "body" had fallen, leaving the soldiers on the ground to think that someone had just been killed.
The soldiers had felt guilty, Fortenberry explained, because they'd failed to help what they thought was a fallen comrade. Why? Because they'd been afraid to look behind the bush.
"So I'm telling you now, as you go into your groups," the pastor explained, "don't be afraid to look behind the bush."
I wrote in my binder: "LOOK BEHIND THE BUSH." Then I waited as my name was called out for group study.
"LOOK BEHIND THE BUSH", indeed! This article is a MUST READ by Matt Taibbi of RollingStone.com, who went undercover into the church (cult) of televangelist and McBush supporter, John Hagee to write this report on Christian Zionism, America's very own religious fundamentalists.
It really hits home to me because I live among the caricatures of humanity that he describes in vivid detail every day. At the risk of sounding elitist, were I live you have poor white trash, alcoholics and drug addicts, Blacks, Mexicans, inbreds, and then the church (which consists of many of the afore mentioned and all of the rest). Here in their midst, if you do not sing the praises of "My Personal Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ" publicly and forever, you are as nothing.
They insist upon your complete and total dependence on the group (the Church) and insist that this is what makes you Independent and Free. "Think and do only as we tell you. And this shall make you FREE!"
Businesses actually market themselves as "Christian Believers" on TV commercials and in the press! If you have any trouble at all understanding the reason for the title of this blog, "Surviving Christianity", YOU MUST READ THIS ARTICLE. Matt's tale is one long nightmare to me.
I kinda' wish I'd been there for that! And THAT is saying something, as I spend the bulk of MY time trying to think of ways to live here without coming into direct contact with the indigenous peoples. Because I have lived all that Matt describes on a daily basis. It really does make me want to puke sometimes!"Well, uh, OK, then," he said. "Matthew, do you want to tell your story?"
My heart was pounding. I obviously couldn't use my real past — not only would it threaten my cover, but I was somewhat reluctant to expose anything like my real inner self to this ideologically unsettling process — but neither did I want to be trapped in a story too far from my own experience. What I settled on eventually was something that I thought was metaphorically similar to the truth about myself.
"Hello," I said, taking a deep breath. "My name is Matt. My father was an alcoholic circus clown who used to beat me with his oversize shoes."
The group twittered noticeably. Morgan's eyes opened to tea-saucer size.
I closed my own eyes and kept going, immediately realizing what a mistake I'd made. There was no way this story was going to fly. But
there was no turning back.
"He'd be sitting there in his costume, sucking down a beer and watching television," I heard myself saying. "And then sometimes, even if I just walked in front of the TV, he'd pull off one of those big shoes and just, you know — whap!"
I looked around the table and saw three flatlined, plainly indifferent psyches plus one mildly unnerved Morgan staring back at me. I could tell that my coach and former soldier had been briefly possessed by the fear that a terrible joke was being played on his group. But then I actually saw him dismissing the thought — after all, who would do such a thing? I managed to tie up my confession with a tale about turning into a drug addict in my midtwenties — at least that much was true — and being startled into sobriety and religion after learning of my estranged clown father's passing from cirrhosis.
It was a testament to how dysfunctional the group was that my story flew more or less without comment.
I know, it's a lousy way to live. It's what causes me to question my own belief in Buddhist Socialism. If I can't see them in any other way than that, how can I expect them to see me in any other way than they do. The social partition of class distinction, being taught by wrote in (at the very least) all public and private southern parochial schools.
I have to regularly remind myself that intolerance of intolerance is still intolerance.
True, I could see some other angles to what was going on as well. Virtually all of the participants of the Encounter identified either one or both of their parents as their "offender," and much of what Fortenberry was talking about in his instructional sessions was how to replace the godless atmosphere of abuse or neglect that the offenders had provided us with God and the church. He was taking broken people and giving them a road map to a new set of parents, a new family — your basic cultist bait-and-switch formula for cutting old emotional ties and redirecting that psychic energy toward the desired new destination. That connection would become more overt later in the weekend, but early on, this ur-father propaganda was the only thing I could see that separated Encounter Weekend from the typical self-help dreck of the secular world.This article is Truth and Hilarity in one of the most grotesque dances of reality that one could imagine. There is plenty more that I'd like to site, for truth if not for the humor. But in the interest of brevity, I will conclude with this final passage.
By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to "be rational" or "set aside your religion" about such things as the Iraq War or other policy matters. Once you've made a journey like this — once you've gone this far — you are beyond suggestible. It's not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that's the issue. It's that once you've gotten to this place, you've left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you're thinking with muscles, not neurons.
Read the article here.
