Cults, Local and Distant (Bible Baptist - Sunday, April 14)

So, went to the Bible Baptist church over near the Steese and Hamilton Acres on Sunday with my dad. The one with the busses and the american flags. The experience was actually such a strong one that I have yet to completely process it. So many different thoughts and emotions about it. It was by far the most evocative, most disturbing so far. By far.

Services were at 11:00 so we went in at 10:55. Usually you can negotiate the lobby and greeters fairly quickly with other folks coming in and avoid anything by way of interactions too intrusive. You can make your way into the worship area/chapel pretty quickly and have a seat. However, we got through the main outside door and into the lobby and the two big sets of double doors leading to relative peace were closed. We were trapped in the lobby with lots of worshipers. Women in loud print rayon dresses, and an assortment of odd shaped men in dark polyester suits. 

We were like rats in a new cage looking for a way out, looking for another door inside to the seating area - all the while collecting a small trail of dark suited men following us with exaggerated smiles, firm handshakes, and a warm steel, 'welcome!'.

We were trapped. We got greeted by the first follower. Tall, dark polyester suit, greased and combed graying hair. Straight out of a mayoral portrait from the early 1970's. We had a terse welcome with him, and he got that we were visiting and from Fairbanks and were kinda stiff. He moved off and passed that knowledge along to another designated greeter. That guy came in for the heavy press.

We're standing in front of two huge bulletin boards with two world maps and literally a hundred or more photos with strings leading to pins all over the globe. The photos are portraits of mission families. So stiff, so forced. Here's Mr. heavy press, a short guy, dark polyester suit, greased graying hair, dandruf on the lapels. He extracts our names and that my dad is retired. I tell him I work at the U, and he guesses 'geophysics', no, I say, IT. I try to keep it on him and keep it light, we really just want to sit down and watch the show. He is the head locksmith on Wainwright. We make painful small talk. Him with a prying intensity, us with an eagerness to ditch this guy.

Finally the doors open (piles more people in similar attire suddenly come downstairs from some sort of gathering they had upstairs). We make our getaway, but he says, 'do me one favor before you go in, please sign my guestbook, I really like to keep track of visitors'. Again, with an imploring tone and unnatural urgency or forcefulness. The book is between the doors and everywhere are these guys with the dark suits watching all of this. So, I sign the guest book but put a phony address and make a mess out of our names in my worst scrawl. I thought about putting Dan's name and address, but I couldn't do that to Dan. We're caught in this weird place of being friendly and familiar, like you are when out and about in Fairbanks, and also on our guard, like you are when you're in the midst of a cutist warren.

Mr. Locksmith catches us one more time as we go in, 'so, Owen and .... Dale....right?'...

The worship room is large, probably seats 300, but it has no relief and is on the lower floor of that big building so it is one big chamber with 8 or 9 foot cielings and at one end an elevated stage across the whole room. The ceiling kicks up there in a weird way. It has that bad old institutional smell, like a funeral home. Bad fake flowers by the light fixtures. Giant custom oak podium with a cross pattern in the face of it. Big screen behind it and grand piano to the right of the stage, regular piano on the left.

Some weird little guy with a tan polyester suit and a microphone begins leading everyone in song. His balding head barely rises over the podium and he's waving his hand emphatically like some kind of orchestra conductor but his conducting isn't having much effect on the arriving congregation. The words are on the screen and he is singing almost maniacally. He's not a good singer but he's got a lot of energy. The seats are filling rapidly and the congregation is singing and it is getting louder as the song continues to take root. He's waving before us like some kind of 19th century minister exhorting the unwashed savages straight out of the jungle to join in humming if not in song.

From somewhere, after several songs, 'page 155 now...Our Lord is Mighty....'...and on and on, a big guy, round head, balding, round body, big belly, in a medium gray polyester suit with a broad dark tie, big round glasses, this big guy is suddenly on stage and chimes in on the songs loud enough to be heard above the sound amplified short conductor on the 'amens, and haleluia's'...

He turns out to be 'pastor'. Everyone calls him 'pastor', not THE pastor, but he IS 'pastor'.

At some point in the beginning of the service he is praying for our servicemembers over seas and then they show the names and pictures of those who've died recently. And then somone stands up with a trumpet....everyone is asked to stand and place their hands over their hearts as they face the American flag, behind the piano on the left, and the guy with the trumpet plays taps. ...

He thanked everyone for being there. He thanked my dad and I by name. "I want to thank Owen and Dale for visiting us today. Nice to see a father and son together on this Sunday in a house of God. And you know it's a house of God because it's filled with God's people. Amen? Amen!

That got my heart going.

Somehow it drifts into todays readings, and the beginnings of a sermom, but mostly drifting around on thoughts that pass through Pastor's mind. He ocassionally comes back to some skeleton of a sermon. The sermon was about Saul, the first king of Israel and how the Israelites, looking around at other kingdoms with their monarchs wanted a real king, and decided they didn't want god as their king any more, and how this was obviously dumb. But interspersed were comments like these...

'You know that guy who ran for.... not McCain...but ...someone Caine?'.... muttering from the audience...'Herman Cain!'...'Well, remember his 9-9-9 plan?  Well I don't know what that was all about exactly but Obama has a 9-9-9 plan too. He want's us all to pay nine dollars and ninety nine cents a gallon for gasoline... You see, he's got an agenda. He wants us all to drive small cars. Doesn't he know that here in Alaska if you drive a small car, you might lose it in your driveway?'

That comment went on for a bit, drifted back to Saul, all the while in a softened southern accent. Then he was talking about how Saul's son was a soldier against the Philistines. ...

'I would just as soon kill everyone in another country before I'd let one of ours die. I know that doesn't sound loving, but it's true. I'm an American. I love America. Amen? Amen!  I love America.....and Israel. But that's another story. ... Yes, I would prefer to kill every single person in another country before I'd let one of our people die. ...But that's not loving, you might say. Well people, Jesus did say to love thine enemy, but he meant your personal enemy - not your NATIONAL enemy. He meant the person across the street...but what about police forces. Yes, I want a strong police force. I want a police force with guns - because I want them to shoot someone before he can get me...so there's enemies and there's enemies. You don't want to shoot your enemy at work, but maybe the enemy who wants to rob your house. That's why you have to understand... '

Through all of this I got a sort of uncomfortable feeling. Mr. Locksmith and some younger (but also greased hair poly-suit) guys were standing back at the main doors. I wondered if maybe Mr. Locksmith had looked us up on the internet and seen that our address wasn't real. When Pastor identified us by name and they had us write down our address, it just felt funny, you know.

The most frightening part of the whole thing - where I got that sick to my stomach feeling like I was a little kid at the daycare place and it was nap time and we were supposed to sleep on the floor in that back room on our mats...and I wasn't asleep. It was some families house down behind where Fred Meyer west is now and at nap time the two daughters used to make us take off our pants and shirts and nap in our underwear - we were like 4 to 7 or so...the dad was some kind of southern white-trash fireman who'd sing drinking songs about naked women and the mom was all makeup and big hair and bad perfume and laugh loudly and spoke in a harsh way...that kind of sick feeling.

That's the feeling I got when the sermon finally wound down to its non-end, and it became time for the culmination of the whole thing. At times, Pastor had gotten really loud and fired up and yelled and so on, but now his voice changed and he started talking about being saved, and if you knew you were saved by Jesus you were supposed to raise your hand, my mind was drifting off at that part and all of a sudden everyone's hand went up and I only then caught up that we were supposed to put our hands up if we knew we were going to heaven. Well, like the entire room's hands shot up all at once and there was a pregnant moment of silence when Pastor took a good look around and there my dad and I sit - out of it - and everyones hands go down. ...and we were all supposed to pray and everyone knew they were sinners...and his mouth was very close to the mic at this point and very intense and ...

'now everyone's head is bowed and their eyes are closed, your sitting there with your head bowed and your eyes closed, everyones head's down and your eyes are closed, your eyes are closed, your head is bowed.... if you didn't raise your hand earlier, if you don't know if you're going to heaven, and you know who you are, and nobody can see this, I'm not going to come over and put my hand on you, or take you into another room, or lead you away, but I want you to ... your head is bowed and your eyes are closed, nobody is going to know, it is just between you and me, everyone's eyes are closed....if you know you have sinned and you know it is you I'm talking to, I just want you to raise your hand and I'll pray for you...no one else will know...'

His voice had this heavy coercive tone. The fake flowers under the light fixtures and the heavy stuffy 1980's funeral parlour air.... there were people moving around the aisles, there was no way I was going to close my eyes but it took serious will power not to just instinctively do as you were told. ... And then we were allowed to open our eyes and if we wanted, we could come forward and recieve his special prayer...and very quickly an eight or nine year old boy, buzz cut in Sunday pants and shirt, walked up the aisle from behind us and sort of fell kneeling on the altar steps with his head in his hands...followed by others, men and women...many emotionally breaking down...

Eventually, short-weird-balding-guy waved us through another hymn and we were released...dad and I dodged through the door that the handicapped and special ed people were going through because Pastor's attention was turned to those going out the other door....out into the muddy parking lot, bright spring sun and light fresh air...

I could only think that at several points during the service, Pastor proudly proclaimed that he'd been doing this for 37 years.

____________


And then, Sunday night I had recorded on the DVR a National Geographic program called 'I escaped a cult'...

http://tvblogs.nationalgeographic.com/tag/i-escaped-a-cult/

A good documentary. Amazing. One segment was about a guy who was a memeber of the FLDS under Warren Jeffs. The other was about a woman and her daughter that were members of the Aggressive Christianity Missionary Training Corps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggressive_Christianity_Missionary_Training_Corps

These guys are really crazy.


And then I couldn't help but realize that they're all the same thing. That voice. That coercive tone. Different points on the same spectrum. Somewhere, someone gets the experience of what it is like to coerce people with the power of the voice; it must be addictive as hell. All over america. A thousand thousand Pastors.