Rolling Stone

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… I badly wanted to be invisible.
In these Southern churches there are few wizened old sages such as one might find among Catholic bishops or Russian startsi. Here your church leader is an athlete, a business dynamo, a champion eater with a bull’s belly, outwardly a tireless heterosexual — and if you want to know what a church beginner is supposed to look like, just make it the opposite of that. Show weakness, financial trouble, frustration with the opposite sex, and if you’re overweight, be so unhealthily, and in a way that you’re ashamed of. The fundamentalist formula is much less a journey from folly to wisdom than it is from weakness to strength. They don’t want a near-complete personality that needs fine-tuning — they want a human jellyfish, raw clay they can transform into a vigorous instrument of God.

It will make you laugh, it will sicken you, and, most of all, it will definitely annoy you — because it’s the truth.

Contrary to popular belief, you will find no evil in Harry Potter. Real evil is found here, clothed in the garb of religion, masked with the illusion of holiness and preaching a Jesus who died to be your rabbit’s foot and wants you to do what your reverend tells you to do. It revels in power and it delights in the weakness and ignorance of others that allows it to reduce children of the Most High King to idiocy.

Oh ya — it would like your donations too…