Undercover-Atheist.

Sehr, sehr lustig. Ein Atheist und Autor, Matt Taibbi, geht auf ein Erweckungswochenende der "Megachurch" John Hagees*, eines (in Amerika) bekannten Fernsehpredigers, und berichtet von seinen Erlebnissen. Seine Beschreibung der "Dämonenaustreibung" ist wirklich göttlich. Um Euch den Spaß nicht zu verderben, hier nur ein Ausschnitt aus der Einleitung:

I had been attending the Cornerstone Church for weeks, but this was really my first day of school. I had joined Cornerstone -- a megachurch in the Texas Hill Country -- to get a look inside the evangelical mind-set that gave the country eight years of George W. Bush. The church's pastor, John Hagee, is one of the most influential evangelical preachers in the country -- not because his ministry is so very large (although he claims up to 4.5 million viewers a week for his Sunday sermons) but because of his near-absolute conquest of a very trendy niche in the market: Christian Zionism.

The whole idea behind Christian Zionism is to align America with the nation of Israel so as to "hurry God up" in his efforts to bring about Armageddon. As Hagee tells it, only after Israel is involved in a final showdown involving a satanic army (in most interpretations, a force of Arabs led by Russians) will Christ reappear. On that happy day, Hagee and his True Believers will be whisked up to Heaven by God, while the rest of us nonbelievers are left behind on Earth to suck eggs and generally suffer various tortures.

So here I was, standing in the church parking lot, having responded to church advertisements hawking an "Encounter Weekend" -- three solid days of sleep-away Christian fellowship that would teach me the "joy" of "knowing the truth" and "being set free." That had sounded harmless enough, but now that I was here and surrounded by all of these blanket-bearing people, I was nervous. 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.

Den Rest gibt es hier und ich empfehle Euch wirklich, bis zur Dämonenaustreibung durchzuhalten!

MfG,
JLT

* John Hagee unterstützte u. a. McCains Präsidentschaftskandidatur, bis sich McCain nach einigen anti-katholischen Äußerungen Hagees von ihm distanzierte.