The May 1 issue of Rolling Stone contains an excerpt from Matt Taibbi's new book, The Great Derangement. In the excerpt, he recounts his experience undercover at a retreat with John Hagee's Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. The bitingly satirical tone of Taibbi's criticism of what he considers a patently crazy belief system could be off-putting for some earnest believers, but Taibbi's description of Hagee's Christianity resonated with my experience as a part-time youth adviser at a liberal Protestant New England church in three surprising ways.1. Ideologically Driven. The minister's I work with tend to get queasy at any language that begins to sound too Scripture driven and prefer to focus their narrative on a demythologized God who serves to soothe individual existential angst and inspire enlightenment values. The idea seems to be that biblical language sounds too preachy, like the fundamentalist Christians from whom they would rather distance themselves. Yet, as Taibbi reports, the theme of Hagee's supposedly Scripture-centered retreat is that each person has a wound, inflicted on them during childhood, which must be identified, confronted, and the healed by the power of Christ. Perhaps contrary to expectation, the spiritual narratives of my youth group and Taibbi's retreat seem to be driven more by pop-psychology than the Bible. Taibbi observes, "[A]s far as I could see most of what we were doing was simple pop-psych self-examination using New Age-y diagnostic tools of the Deepak Chopra school: Identify your problems, face your oppressors, visualize your obstacles. Be your dream job. With a little rhetorical tweaking and much better food, this could easily have been Tony Robbins instructing a bunch of Upper East Side housewives to 'find your wounds' ('My husband hid my Saks card!') at a chic resort in Miami Beach or the Hamptons."2. Authority Conscious. Despite their congregationalist ecclesiology, I am always surprised at the level of individual authority given to the pastors and how it is legitimated at the church I work with. The authority is mostly established on the grounds of personal narrative buttressed by academic credentials, and challenges to this authority are often met with reference to either of these factors, which are taken to be unassailable. Similarly, the authority of the pastor leading Taibbi's retreat is rooted in his personal narrative, but it is buttressed by his healthy physical appearance rather than academic pedigree. Taibbi writes, "One of the implicit promises of the church is that following its program will restore you to your vigor, confidence and assertiveness, effecting, among other things, a marked and obvious physical transformation from crippled lost soul to hearty vessel of God. That's one of the reasons that it's so important for the pastors to look healthy, lusty and lustrous-they're appearing as the after' photo in the ongoing advertisement for the church wellness cure." Given the slight difference in content, it should not be surprising that authority is established on the basis of academic degree, in the case of the existentialist/enlightenment Christianity, and physical heath, in the case of the wound-centered Christianity. The authority of pastors in both cases seems to rest on their possessing the thing their spiritual narrative claims should be sought.3. Individualistic. Perhaps, the most painful moment of satire in Taibbi's piece is his description of the small group sessions that would follow the pastor's sermons in which previous retreatants, called "life coaches," lead first timers in a discussion aimed at identifying and confronting their wounds. What is most instructive about this is the response, or lack thereof, that each story receives. When the life coach tells his wound story, Taibbi says, "[H]is words were bouncing off a wall of unimpressed silence radiating from the group." When it comes time for Taibbi to share he says, "Hello, my name is Matt. My father was an alcoholic circus clown who used to beat me with his oversize shoes." Now, the forced ridiculousness of this story and its making light of the real experiences of pain shared in the group, admittedly, goes too far for anyone who has ever participated in this kind of discussion. Yet, Taibbi gleans an interesting insight from the reactions of his fellow retreatants. He writes, "It was a testament to how dysfunctional the group was that my story flew more or less without comment." Now, thinking about my own experiences with the youth in similar groups in which they are given opportunities to explore their own teenage angst, "dysfunction" doesn't seem to be the right description of what motivates their silence. Rather, I fear that, given the authoritative role of personal narrative, each individual in the group is spending more time thinking about their own situation than really listening to his or her peers. This seems to be evidenced by the fact that the community built in these sessions does not often extend much further than the walls of the church.These three temptations to banal ideology, authoritarianism, and individualism, highlighted in Taibbi's experience and echoed in my own, seem to be common structural features of a Christianity that ought to be resisted. First, Scripture should be placed before ideology, if we are going to avoid self-centered conceptions of God. Second, the corporate experience of the church should stand as a challenge to personal authority--even, and perhaps especially, when rooted in individual experience. Finally, the cultivation of empathetic listening and regard for others should be placed above the need for individual recognition in our efforts to build community. This may all seem obvious, in theory, to any Christian, but Taibbi's engagement with the Christian Right, and mine with the Christian Left, seem to indicate that what is obvious in theory is often far from obvious in practice regardless of political and cultural outlook.