Don't you think there's an element of condescension in saying the congregants are using religion to escape from or cover up the problems in their own life? Don't some of the members profoundly believe in God and find that religion serves a positive purpose in their lives?
In the introduction, I say that it's a cliché for the snobbish, urbane writer to go hang around the rubes and pick on them for their primitive ideas. On some level, it's kind of a villainous endeavor. But I tried to be aware of that the entire time and not be condescending in the way I treated these particular people. I tried to make them all out to be whole human beings. In these kind of mega-churches, what's really striking is that there's so little that's like a genuine religious communion. They're more like factories, like fast-food franchises, than they are like churches or communities.
You introduced yourself to members of Hagee's church as someone who'd been abused by your alcoholic circus clown father. How do you think they'd feel if they read your book and realized you'd lied?
I think once they found out I was a reporter who worked for Rolling Stone magazine, it didn't really matter what else I said at that point. I'm already a satanic force. The totality with which they despise anyone who is not religious is really kind of shocking. It's one thing that made it a little bit easier to engage in this kind of assignment that I guess on some level is cruel, because they were always talking about divine retribution and people like me being made to suffer various tortures at Armageddon -- some big God coming down from heaven and having all the people in the ACLU boiled alive.
Right. But you also admit that you found yourself in church singing along to songs and not hating it.
That was a terrifying moment for me. I think I had been in the church for three months at that point. And I remember I came in one morning to church and I found myself looking forward to the music. I had some friends in Houston who I told what I was doing, and I said that if they ever get a call from me that I was flipping, they were to come and have an intervention. And that was the first time I actually thought about pulling that alarm lever.
What's seductive about all of it is that you have a sense of community with these people and like anything else, any other group you become a part of, you start to adopt their values and you start enjoying their company. And so you can see how easy it would be to slide into it. As I said before, a lot of the prejudice and political opinions are really secondary to the action of just hanging around like-minded people.
Don't you see any danger in equating Christians with members of the 9/11 Truth Movement? One is a religious faith, while the other doesn't have a coherent set of beliefs and also doesn't seem to have the same amount of aggression that you describe the leaders of Hagee's church having on matters of foreign policy.
Well, there were so many things about them that were alike. One of the things that's really, really interesting, is how both groups sort of violently disbelieve in the humanity of anybody who is outside the group.
You call it the "Crossfire" paradigm.
Right, yeah, exactly. Basically, if you're not a believer in the Truth Movement, you're someone that's part of a conspiracy, an enemy, whose life really isn't worth a whole lot. The religious right and the 9/11 Truthers are the same in that respect. You should see the vitriol, the letters that I get, for even mentioning anything outside the belief system of the 9/11 Truthers. And this is something I'm noticing again in the Obama-Hillary split now. Members of each group have rooting interests and belief systems and they are completely unwilling to concede anything to the other group and they refuse to debate anything in a rational, calm way. It's all about trying to destroy the other side. The Truthers have a religious belief in their conspiracy theories, in the same way that the other side has religious beliefs in their religion. I understand what you're saying, and it's slightly unfair to compare them, but there's a lot that's the same.
You have a very confrontational writing style and refer to people in terms that some might find offensive, calling some people "retards" and labeling their ideas as insane or crazy. Do you think in writing in this way you contribute to and exacerbate this "Crossfire" balkanization?
My only answer there would be I don't do it just to one side or the other ... And I try to have a narrative voice where people see exactly who I am and what kind of person I am. That makes it easier for them to digest the information that they're getting. If they decide that they trust me, they're going to trust the information that they read, and even if they disagree with me, they at least know where I'm coming from, and that's always a positive. The negative of that is that sometimes you do have language that turns people off. But more often than not, when you use some colloquial language and you talk in the way that someone who was just sitting at a bar or at a dinner table would talk, it's much easier to get your message across to people who don't like reading so much.
At the end of the book, which you wrote well before the current juncture in the presidential campaign cycle, you sound a rather optimistic note, describing the candidacies of Ron Paul, John Edwards and even Barack Obama as harbingers of a "path back to reality." Are you still as optimistic?
No. Not at all. When the Obama campaign really started to pick up steam, I thought "this is really going to hurt the book" because it contradicts the book's premise. Obama's campaign was addressing a lot of the things I'm talking about. It was trying to tone down the kind of tribal instinct that we have in our politics and trying to find a certain common speech where we all try to rationally talk about things and where we all consider everybody, even the people on the other side, just as much of a person or as a citizen as we are. And I think there was a real feel-good vibe about that campaign back in November and December. But now the Hillary-Obama fight has turned into exactly the kind of red-blue, tribal warfare that we've been talking about with Republicans and Democrats and the religious right and the Truth movement. It's the same thing all over again. If you listen to both sides of the campaign argue, they argue with the same sort of religious, hardheaded passion that I'm talking about in this book. And to me that's very depressing. Especially because I have to cover this thing and I'm in the middle of it all the time. And also because I've been friendly to Obama in my pieces and now I'm getting the protests of the Hillary people writing to me all the time. It's the exact same thing I went through with the Truthers.
So do you see any way to get back to a "path to reality"?
When this sort of balkanization of our politics becomes so debilitating that it creates even more serious problems than we have now, then I think the problem is going to get fixed -- probably not before then. In the same way that someone asked me, what's the solution to all this corruption in Congress, with the misallocation of funds and this revolving door of campaign contributors getting contracts? And my answer was, none of it is going to stop until the country becomes so broke that we can't afford to be wasting money like that.
About the writer
Vincent Rossmeier is an editorial intern at Salon.
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