"Jesus Made Me Puke"

I was sent a link today to a story from Matt Taibbi from the May issue of Rolling Stone. He writes for their website as well as a column called “Road Rage” in their magazine. He is in the process of writing a book called “The Great Derangement”. For research he went undercover to a four-day, Christian Encounter Weekend. You can see where this is leading.

I read the article for a couple of reasons. I enjoy reading good writers and I was very interested to see how Matt would describe his experience. Plus, having Rolling Stone send a staff member undercover to a Christian Retreat sounds like an updated version of Almost Famous, one of my favorite movies.

The article is long, well written and really painful. I’m not suggesting anyone go read it (but I’ll provide a link to those who would like). This isn’t an endorsement. But there is one part of his story it that I wanted to comment on:

… by my third day I began to notice how effortlessly my soft-spoken Matt-mannequin was going through his robotic motions of praise, and I was shocked. For a brief, fleeting moment I could see how under different circumstances it would be easy enough to bury your "sinful" self far under the skin of your outer Christian and to just travel through life this way. So long as you go through all the motions, no one will care who you really are underneath. And besides, so long as you are going through all the motions, never breaking the facade, who are you really?

If what we are presenting in Christianity is a religion that allows us to stuff our junk then no wonder our attempts of bringing God to the masses isn’t working. Here at a weekend encounter that is presented as a way to help the participants deal with their sin, it instead came across as a theatrical way to mask a person’s pain and shut off their brain.

Matt’s article is titled, “Jesus Made Me Puke” and it refers to the séance part of the seminar when the participants were given paper bags to vomit their demons into. Matt faked his spiritual regurgitation just like he did every other part of the weekend. But if somebody is really puking, I bet it is Jesus as he sees how he is being represented by his so-called friends.

If Matt had actually spent a weekend away with Him, he would have written a whole different article.