Rolling Stones posted an undercover expose of the Christian Right yesterday, entitled, “Jesus Made Me Puke.” In the article, Matt Taibbi, the author of the piece, recounts his adventure infiltrating a “clandestine” meeting of the religious right. While I have to admit the article made me chuckle at times, it’s point is not to make people laugh as much as it is to expose what Taibbi would argue is the shocking stupidity of Christians and by implication their political agenda. Taibbi states the purpose of his article,
When most Americans think of the Christian right, they think of scenes from television — great halls full of perfectly groomed people in pale suits and light-colored dresses, smiling and happy and full of the Holy Spirit, robotically singing hymns at the behest of some squeaky-clean pastor with a baritone voice and impossible hair. We don’t get to see the utterly batshit world they live in, when the cameras are turned off and their pastors are not afraid of saying the really dumb stuff, for fear of it turning up on CNN. In American evangelical Christianity, in other words, there’s a ready-for-prime-time stage act — toned down and lip-synced to match a set of PG lyrics that won’t scare the advertisers — and then there’s the real party backstage, where the spiritual hair really gets let down. I was about to go backstage, to personally take part in the indoctrination process for a major Southern evangelical church.
What I found disgustingly Ironic about Taibbi’s description of the relgious right is that he himself blantly lies in order to expose their supposed double nature. It’s not as if Taibbi is an undercover police officer trying to put the mofia behind bars or even try to find a lead in a case. Taibbi sole motivation for his dupicity is to mock those he refuses to understand – Christians who act with complete sincerity. Take the following excerpt from the article for instance. Taibbi records that after listening to a speaker he along with the rest of the participants of the weekend retreat seperated into small groups under a group leader.
Once Morgan had us all gathered together, we looked for table space in the cafeteria area of the main building. Ominously, each of the cafeteria tables had a fresh box of Kleenex resting on top of it.
“Well,” Morgan said, “I think what we’re going to do to start is this. I’m going to tell you my story about my wound, and then we’re going to go around in a circle, and each of us is going to just tell his story. Is that OK?”
Everyone nodded. I noted with displeasure that I was seated first after Morgan in clockwise order. Already I was panicking; what kind of wound could a human cipher like myself possibly confess to?
Morgan told his story. Even a perfunctory look at my fellow group members told me that we had people here with some very serious problems, and yet Morgan’s wound was a tale that wouldn’t have even ruined a week of my relatively privileged childhood, much less my whole life — something about being yelled at by his dad while he was out playing with remote-controlled airplanes with his friends as a thirteen-year-old. He hammed up his trauma over the incident in classically lachrymose Iron John-in-touch-with-his-inner-boy fashion (again, there is something very odd about modern Christian men — although fiercely pro-military in their politics and prehistorically macho in their attitudes toward women’s roles, on the level of day-to-day behavior they seem constantly ready to break out weeping like menopausal housewives), but his words were bouncing off a wall of unimpressed silence radiating from the group.
Blank stares. This was a tough crowd. Five minutes into our group acquaintance, we were at a full 9.5 out of 10 on the International Uncomfortable Silence scale.
Morgan turned, glanced again at my name tag and sighed.
“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.
He infiltrates their community, lies to them and then mocks them for trusting him. I’m sure the audience of Rolling Stones is rolling in the aisle. But would it be as funny in a different group with a similar aim. Would it have been as funny if Taibbi had infiltrated an AA meeting, told completely ridiculous stores and then question their sanity for trusting him.
What Taibbi fails to realize is that their are places and situations in our lives where trust must be assumed. What kind of relationship would we have if we had to question our significant others every time they stepped out the room. What kind of life would we have if we doubted everything our Parents said. The relationship expected in the situation Taibbi entered was trust. Taibbi’s response was as juvenile as saying, “losersaywhat” and then laughing when the unsuspecting person says, “what?” For Taibbi going undercover is not enough to understand the Christian community because he lacks the one thing that these people possess – sincerity.
