Ecumenical? With This?

From Ichiban Jim, newly-returned from vacance, comes this treatment of the Megachurch phenomenon.

Admittedly, Amy the Fair has done a lot more on this than I have. Part conflict, part not wanting to get Evangelicals steamed... Because, well, the thought of Evangelicals steamed really scares me.

But on seeing "Who Loves Creepy Megachurches? Stadium crowds, thousands of rabid devotees, all chugging Jesus like Kool-Aid. Should you be afraid?" by Mark Morford in the beloved San Francisco Chronicle, I fell in love.

If I can ever become a tenth as good as Morford in his style and substance, I'll be able to die happy.

Some snips:

[M]egachurches 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.

Give words, son!

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.

Yes, sir! Go on!

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.

Mark Morford's my new hero. Thank ya, Jesus!

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