Cults, Sects, And The Weirdly Credulous - Oddball Religion, The Real America

Sir Anthony Pickering, OBE, knighted by Queen Elizabeth, descendant from both Tudor and Bourbon royalty, was having a beer with an Okie - Randall Pumper, oil rigger, millennialist, and good Christian. 

Pickering was an ethno-geographer who fancied himself as a latter day Alexis de Tocqueville, and thought that the great man's work needed updating.  America in the first quarter of the 21st century had not changed much since the Frenchman's visit.  It was still a rambunctious, unschooled, and ambitious place - Tocqueville had indeed captured the American spirit - but the ways in which it had changed and how it had morphed from a simple rangeland of settlers, elk and antelope to a side show of impossible exaggeration were Pickering's interests, and in mufti, trained to lose his lock-jaw Queen's English accent and to lope and stroll like a Texan, he headed off to America. 

While he admired Tocqueville for his insights into the American experience, Pickering's real hero was Sir Richard Burton, explorer extraordinaire, linguist, ethnographer, fearless traveler, and brilliant writer.  Burton had entered the sacred walls of the Kabbah in Mecca, passing for an Afghan pilgrim and risking beheading as an infidel trespasser in Allah's most sacred shrine, had traipsed through the African rainforest on his way to discovering the source of the Nile and much more. 

Pickering, like Burton, had a facility with language, and not only did he speak many foreign tongues, but had mastered the varied accents within them.  He could pass for a Colombian, a Cuban, an Argentinian, and a Peruvian.  No glottal stops, swallowed r's, and disappeared s's  were beyond him.  His African language mastery - sing-song tonal in Hausa and Ibo, clipped Swahili native, or bubbly Bambara - was admirable. 

 

So, when it came to America - given that country's rich cultural and linguistic diversity - he had to pick and choose.  He quickly dismissed the idea of New England but considered Mid-Atlantic, not quite North or South, but a particular amalgam of both with hint of Gullah, Tidewater, and Appalachia. 

The real America - the piney woods, cracker, tobacco-chewing, bass boat America - might be the right place to establish his bona fides, give him accent plus cultural baggage.  It was a pass, a union card to the bottom tiers of the socio-economic scale.  Whether talking to rednecks, backwoods hillbillies, Texas bull-riders, or Mississippi Delta overseers, he would have automatic entry.  Which was Lesson One - there is no shame in broken, idiomatic, untutored, scrabbly English.  It's the hi-falutin' variety that excludes one from the mainstream, brands one as elitist, patrician pansy and sop.

'Have you taken Jesus Christ as your personal savior?', Pickering was asked on a hardscrabble patch of scrub in West Texas.  

'Why, yes', replied the Englishman, 'and praise the Lord'

'Praise be to Him on High', seconded the Texan, embracing Pickering in a warm embrace, escorting him to his truck festooned with statues, figurines, glossies, and animated photographs of Jesus.  'I take him with me wherever I go', he said, dusting off a portrait or Christ, bloody and dripping, crucified but still handsome and beckoning. 

 

Now, Pickering had already been to a hundred megachurches, spoken with and knelt down with preachers, evangelists, and pastors, been in every patched up, ramshackle country church, and urban store-fronts of every possible denomination - an amazing collection of religious subdivisions, The Seventh Church of the Redeemer, the American Methodist Reformed Congregation of Christ, the Aberdeen Baptist Church of the Resurrection, and many more.  Each had its own twist on the Second Coming, salvation, redemption, and the End of Days; but they all had one thing in common - ecstasy. 

No churchgoer in the South except in the Anglican high Episcopalian residue could ever in a million years keep his seat once the preacher tucked into his Bible and came out with the very body and blood of Jesus.   After processionals, hymns, and prayers; and as the pastor walked to the podium, old, well-worn leather Bible in his hand, serene but proud, the congregation fidgeted and squirmed, all but invested in the Lord and waiting for his word.  

Whether the pastor began slowly in a measured arpeggio, or thrusted his arms to the rafters and bellowed, 'Jesus, I am here', the congregation stood and in unison shouted, 'Praise the Lord', or 'Amen, brother'; and when the pastor warmed to his mission, and turned furious and possessed, women and men burst out of their pews into the aisles, crawling on their hands and knees, weeping, crying out, beseeching for succor and salvation. 

 

So, when Tony Pickering saw the Texas beater pickup, all festooned and tricked out with Jesus paraphernalia, he was not surprised; but when he heard the backstory, the history and legacy and living legend of The Church Ascendant And Magnificent, he knew that he had found an unreported niche in America's multi-varied religious community. 

The Church was - or should be, the Englishman thought - at the very epicenter of the American experience.  It was millennialist - Armageddon was around the corner, about to happen any day now - and to prepare congregants had deep underground bomb shelters built to protect against the nuclear holocaust sure to come, provisioned to serve the faithful and their offspring for decades until it was safe to emerge and repopulate the world. 

Armed guards were everywhere - at the gates to the church compound, along the stairway to the church, on running boards of armored Suburbans and Escalades, and above all at the entrance to 'the caves', the familiar name given to the underground, lead-lined, deep-cover shelters that, like gopher warrens, lay under a thousand acres of rangeland.

When the enemy missiles were armed and ready, waiting for the signal to fire, thousands of unfaithful, heathens, Jesus naysayers would scramble for purchase on Church lands and would try to clamber down into the shelters - unless they were stopped, and Church militias were armed and ready to be sure they didn't. 

It would not be mass murder - for nuclear Armageddon would take care of that - it was more a defense of The New Jerusalem, the last redoubt of Jesus' faithful, subscribers to the vision of the Reverend Brightly Placer, prophetess of the last days, seer, imam, priestess, and empress of an empire.

 

Every building on the church grounds was painted with 'holy' colors - dark pink, magenta, and violet were considered to be the most deified, endowed with mystical power of receipt and welcome.  Flags and banners with images of Jesus whipped and snapped in the brisk prairie wind from every rooftop. 

'Beware of false prophets', Placer intoned to the thousand or more faithful who crowed the church for worship. 'They are everywhere, around every corner, behind every door, insidious, dangerous, vile interlopers who want to steal our legacy.  They are the enemy and must be destroyed!'. 

At that the congregation stood as one, shook their arms in unity and defiance.  'Praise the Lord. '

The Church had moved to West Texas from California because Placer had a revelation - the state, den of putrefying iniquity, godless sinkhole of buggery and unbelief, home to prurient, godless devils - would soon be hived off from the mainland and drift out to sea to founder, sink, and doom every last one of its iniquitous residents. 

Now, Pickering had thought he had seen everything during his odyssey across America. The Church Ascendant and Magnificent was the nadir, the apogee, the point of no return, and most importantly the omphalos of American culture - wildly, ecstatically religious, armed to the teeth, credulous and hysterically ignorant, and as militantly self-righteous as any cultural group could possibly be. 

Yet in the few decades of its existence, it had produced offshoots even more unhinged, wild, inchoate mini-congregations of even fiercer intent and belief - mini-asylums, wards for the completely demented, institutions of unimaginable craziness.  

Their Jesus no longer resembled the compassionate, salvational Lord of organized religion, but was this weird AI zodiac of shards and bits, fragments of insanity.  'God is Good' said the sign above the door to one church, but inside its foul, dark, and demented chamber, there seemed to be no God at all, just a black-hooded priest and devilish-looking altar boys chanting a godforsaken hymn. 

'I have hit bottom', said Pickering, 'and it is time for me to go home'. 

His book was a hit in Europe, a continent which had never 'gotten' America and was constantly befuddled by its excesses and cultural circus; but the American public was non-plussed.  The few bits and pieces cut and pasted for television were no news at all.  Part of the very zeitgeist or ethos that Pickering described was the very reason for such a ho-hum reaction - Americans take everything for granted, no craziness is beyond belief, anything and everything is possible. 

There are nooks and crannies of full nutcase, weirdo sects and assemblies everywhere you look. Thanks to our Revolution and good-bye to the old ways of Europe, we have encouraged an anything goes way of life, a live and let live Wild West show.  Wacko Millennialist underground apocalyptical cults?  Sure, why not?