mega church controversy -SF opinion

[briannell]

I have never been to a big creepy megachurch. This is my first confession.

I have never been to, say, Lakewood Church in Houston, the biggest glossiest megachurch of all, which just dumped a staggering $75 million to renovate the former stadium for the Houston Rockets and turn it into a massive pulsing swaying arm-raisin' eye-glazed weirdly repressed House o' Jesus.

I have never been to World Changers in Georgia or New Birth Missionary Baptist in Texas or Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa or the Potter's House in Dallas or the Phoenix First Assembly of God, et al., all of which claim well over 15,000 regional followers (some 20,000 or even 30,000) and most of which operate much more like careening multitentacled corporations than humble homes of spiritual connection and love. But, you know, quibbling.

I mention all this because megachurches are the latest phenomenon, the hottest trend in the Christian godfearin' biz, arena-scaled piety polished up and bloated out and aimed like a giant homophobic cannon straight at the gloomy face of a new and improved God, one who apparently truly loves the fact that these tacky sanitized enormo-domes are raking in an average of $5 million a year each, depending on size and girth and magnetism of their glossy preprogrammed pastors and depending on how many CDs and syrupy self-help books and movie production companies and proselytizing Web sites and recording studios and hateful radio brainwashin' programs and malicious teenage abstinence seminars they have to go along with the nearly naked virgin car-wash fund-raisers they offer up to Jesus on warm summer Sundays.

But you really don't need to attend one of these surreal spectacles to realize that most of us should kneel down right now in heartfelt gratitude that we have never been forced to endure, say, the all-paunchy-married-male revue of a Promise Keepers rally, or the bizarre pious cheerleading of a Harvest Crusade in L.A., and hence we have been blessedly devoid of the taint of guys like Greg Laurie, one of the new breed of sleek preening pastors, a strange new mutant species of pastor-CEO-huckster-salesman, who leads the big Harvest chant-alongs and who writes milky best-selling self-help books, books that claim to know something of God but that somehow never mention single-malt scotch or anal sex or Tom Waits or grinning Buddha icons or chocolate ice cream drizzled on a lover's tailbone, slowly, tantalizingly. Greg. Sweetheart. You so don't know God. I'm just sayin'.

These massive churches are, in short, redefining the Christian experience in America, growing faster in the past 20 years than even Wal-Mart has been able to destroy small towns and hope.

They are places like the New Life Church, perhaps the most powerful and frightening of all megachurches, home to the famous and heavily shellacked Pastor Ted Haggard and his 11,000 fiery Left Behind-addled throngs located in the heart of honey-let's-never-go-there Colorado Springs.

Pastor Ted, that is, with his bright red hotline straight to the White House (he and our sanctimonious, war-happy prez speak at least once a week), Pastor Ted who, along with the snarlingly pious James Dobson of the violently militant Focus on the Family sect of frothy true believers, helped terrify the Federal Communications Commission and slam women's rights and galvanize all those mad throngs of confused Christians to vote to keep Dubya in office all these shockingly impeachment-free years. Praise Jesus.

Because make no mistake, these are the churches, these are the pastors who help guide White House policy and contaminate American culture and who wish to curdle your creamy progressive open-hearted independent-minded soul into rancid cheese. These are the churches for whom BushCo tried to codify homophobia in the U.S. Constitution and for whom he appoints countless right-wing misogynist lower-court judges and nominates a neoconservative Supreme Court justice who is so white and so male and so gleamingly, blindingly conservative he might as well be Dick Cheney and Antonin Scalia's immaculate love child.

Maybe the appeal is self-explanatory. Maybe you walk into one of these stadium-sized God-huts and everyone is forcibly blissed out and everyone is just numbly patriotic and everyone is throwing hand-rolled tubes of nickels (most megachurch parishioners have very low median incomes and little more than a high school education, and the vast majority are as white as bleached teeth) into the giant golden donation vats and snatching up freshly published copies of "He Died for Your Crappy Little Sins so Put Down the Porn and Listen Up, Sicko," and the vibe is so amped and the Jesus mania is so potent you'd think it's a Michael Jackson concert circa 1991 and you're Macaulay Culkin and everyone is made of glitter and cocaine and disquieting apprehension.

Is this the appeal? The narcotic of delirious crowds? The intoxicating caught-up-in-it-ness? The drug of mass self-righteousness, sterilized and homogenized for easy suppository-like karmic insertion?

Or is it the Jesus-as-megastar thing, with the pastor as the ultimate cover band and his flock a teeming mass of fans who don't really understand the lyrics and get the message almost completely wrong and yet who are, you just know, good and honest people just trying to find their way in a lost and debauched and war-torn land? I saw AC/DC and Iron Maiden on a double bill in Spokane in 1983 and just about saw God. Is that the same thing? No?

Of course, people want to belong. People are desperate to connect to something, anything, bigger than themselves, something that professes to have answers to questions they don't even know how to ask. Especially now, especially when the country's identity is imploding and moral codes are deliciously evolving and we are no longer the gleaming righteous superpower we always thought we were and instead are much more the fat self-righteous playground thug no one likes.

And yes, well do I know that many of these creepy megachurches do fine social work indeed (mostly as, it must be said, an afterthought); many engage in worthwhile charities and community renovations and outreach programs and they help a surprisingly large number of confused and deeply lost white American souls to discover some sort of sense of place in this bitch-slapped Bush-stabbed world. I know it's true.

But this doesn't seem to be the real reason megachurches are flourishing, the real reason for their frightening and viral upsurge. It is more than the power of technology, more than newfound Christian marketing savvy, more than just how so many Christians apparently love to conflate going to church with, say, a Cowboys football game.

I think it's actually something far more interesting, and hopeful, and maybe even enchanting. Here it is: Maybe these megachurches are not, in fact, a sign that the United States is coagulating like a tumor to the Right, but, in fact, they indicate the exact opposite.

Maybe megachurches are, in short, an anxious and massively quivering reaction to a hot divine upsurge, one they can't quite comprehend and which makes their eyeballs shudder and their loins burn; their existence is irrefutable proof that something divinely radical is afoot, a massive sea change, a karmic mutiny, with the churches acting merely as a sleek and desperate defense. You think?

In other words, maybe these delirious throngs of blind believers are merely a trembling shield masquerading as a sleek salvation, vainly attempting to protect themselves from the onslaught of, oh I don't know, divine self-definition? An orgasm of radical sticky nontheistic cosmic beauty? A goddess with a bright red tongue and a wry knowing grin and an appetite for destruction? Let us pray.


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Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes a tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.


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[SonomaCat]

Morford goes a bit over the top on nearly every column he writes (he's the Chronicle extreme leftist columnist, which is balanced out by a couple conservatives and moderates). He has some good points hidden in some of his columns, but quite often he just ends up mocking people as opposed to making any real points, and then he loses my interest.

[hokeyfine]

these types of churches are both good and bad. the bad part is that some campaign from the pulpit. the good is that the church is houston is at least a positive message, and not one of "your going to hell not matter what". I don't mind the joel osteen's. the ultra conservative churches are for the people who don't want to think or try to understand. they want to be told what to do, how to vote, who to associate with, right and wrong, etc. just like talk radio, they want rush to tell them everything and hold it to be gospel.

['93HonoluluCat]

Morford goes a bit over the top on nearly every column he writes (he's the Chronicle extreme leftist columnist, which is balanced out by a couple conservatives and moderates). He has some good points hidden in some of his columns, but quite often he just ends up mocking people as opposed to making any real points, and then he loses my interest.

I would agree with your assessment of Morford, but in this article's instance, I tend to agree with Morford's point.

Mega-churches aren't necessarily good ones (but there are some really good mega-churches out there--Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in CA, for instance). Many of these mega-churches get caught up in becoming bigger and bigger, and lose sight of what should really be the mission of the church: reaching out to the unsaved and lost. In most cases, I think the money these churches bring in is better spent on those causes, rather than renovating a stadium so they can have a larger church.

I'm writing this stream-of-consciousness style, and not sure if this is going to make any sense when the rest of BN reads it. As such, be kind when pointing your flame throwers my way, please.

[gtapp]

Can you say "Colosseum"

Hey Nelly, can you make your posts any longer????????????????????

[briannell]

Gary -

just posted the article to be polite, I can just post web addresses from here on.

-rebecca