The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture (23 page)

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An altar call is a practice in many evangelical churches in which those who wish to make a new spiritual commitment to Jesus Christ are invited to come forward publicly. It is so named because the supplicants gather at the altar located at the front of the church.

Here is a simplified analysis of one fundamentalist service I attended:

1. Quiet music as you walk in

– Sense of peace

2. Opening song about hope and triumph

– Sense of hope

3. Song about sin and guilt

– Sense of guilt and unworthiness

4. Song about salvation

– Sense of guilt, ending with hope

5. Rousing song by choir about salvation

– Sense of hope

6. Sermon on marriage and relationships

– Sense of guilt and self-doubt

7. Song about commitment before offering plate is passed

– Sense of resolve to give money

8. Rousing song of joy and forgiveness to end the service

– Sense of joy and hope

What an emotional roller coaster. Most of the participants have no idea that the service was carefully designed to get exactly these emotional responses to build a complete religious experience. They just know they feel good when they leave church $100 poorer.

Master vectors tweak and modify the routines to stimulate the congregation toward more involvement and money. They are experts at group dynamics and mass psychology. They adjust the sequence and components, according to the setting and size of the group. Group size and density have a powerful impact on participants’ perceptions and experiences. Just as the emotion and excitement of a football game is enhanced when the stands are full, a full church makes the individual experience far more powerful. Similarly, a prayer meeting in a small room has a more powerful feel than the same small group in a large room.

This process is extremely seductive to many people. Where else can you get an emotional high once a week without drugs? Where else can you find some relief from the guilt you were feeling about something you did? Nothing at work or at home comes close. Sports events may create a
transcendent feeling, but only if your team wins. In church, your team wins every time.

People come to church for the emotional experience that a good vector can produce. They come for reassurance and validation against self-doubt. They come for the feeling of security in belonging to a group that knows the correct path in a bewildering world. They come for the absolution they feel and the endorphin high. The vector must create the proper sequence to produce an emotional experience that is satisfying and brings people back.

To effectively choreograph an entire organization, the super vector must view the church as a whole organism. Vectors teach key participants how to play their part in the religious dance. They train each of the associate ministers and key members of the church, such as choir directors, elders, and deacons. It is similar to conducting a symphony. Most of these players, once well instructed, can play their routines perfectly week after week, to achieve the emotional ends of the service.

Many humans seem to have a deep need for ritual. Creating effective rituals (routines) helps a vector capture and infect new hosts. An organization full of well-trained hosts with well-established viral routines is easily directed and controlled by a minister. Like pushing buttons on a machine, a skilled vector can work an entire organization into exactly the response he wants.

The routines of a religion are like individual genes in a genome.
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Genes can be controlled and manipulated to produce certain proteins. Some genes produce higher-level results. In the genetic world, there are a set of genes called homeobox that were discovered in 1983 by Walter Jakob Gehring and his team at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and Amy Weiner and Thomas Kaufman at Indiana University in Bloomington. Homeobox genes are master genes that instigate a cascade of other genes in a certain sequence to create entire structures. Homeobox genes are involved when an organism creates an arm, a leg or other major structures in the body. Genes for creating arms and legs stay silent most of the time, if not, we all might look like centipedes! In short, a homeobox gene is required to switch on a
series of leg-creating genes. When the task is complete, the homeobox gene switches the process off.

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Definition – Genome: The total DNA present in the nucleus of every cell of an organism. It corresponds to all the organism’s bases: A, T, C and G, our genome is a chain of 3.4 billion pearls.

Religious vectors act like homeobox genes, creating and orchestrating entire organizations, but they can only do this if they have a library of routines and subroutines to work with. To manipulate or develop an entire organization, the vector must have a congregation that already has the routines built in, or he must build them. A vector taking over an established organization can often take advantage of routines that are already present. That is what a Catholic priest does when moving into a new parish. The routines are well established. In starting a new organization, like a mega church, the super vector may take several years to create the routines required to fully manipulate a congregation. He must teach them how to infect others – to grow the arms and legs of the organization.

Once the routines are established, the minister is in position to push all the right buttons; he can manipulate the organization effectively for years if not decades. His control can be so strong that he is essentially in place indefinitely. His ability to evoke powerful emotional routines is so addictive that people can be blinded to potential problems. He lives behind an invisibility cloak. His actions and behavior are obscured by the virus’s ability to blind people. The more skillful the vector, the better he can obscure and manipulate. It is not likely that Jimmy Swaggart, Jimmy Bakker, Ted Haggard, Terry Fox or Richard Roberts,
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or hundreds of pedophile priests and predator ministers made just one mistake and fell from grace. Every religious leader who is smart enough to run a religious organization is smart enough to avoid getting caught. The behavior that finally brought them down was very likely present for decades. In many cases, it has been clearly established that priests and ministers were involved in illicit activity for years and others knew of the behavior yet did nothing. It is easy to hide when no one is looking. The ability to create illusions of righteousness and power covers a multitude of sins in a leader.

Today’s technology and techniques allow god viruses to break free of central control. The Internet, web pages, electronic publishing and the mass
media all enable preachers to operate outside of the bounds of traditional denominational and organizational structures. The evangelical virus has the ability to infect other religions and allows formerly conflicting groups to cooperate; in other words, it takes on a meta function – above, but cooperative with other viruses.

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Swaggart was caught with a prostitute; Bakker had both sexual and financial problems; Haggard admitted to seeing a male prostitute; Fox used church money to fund his overtly political radio show and Roberts fathered a child by his brother’s wife – sounds like a story from the Bible.

A meta virus overcomes former barriers to propagation. “Praise services” in a Nazarene church are remarkably similar to those of a Baptist, non-denominational church, and even some of the more evangelical Catholics. The songs are even the same! The virus has successfully reduced or eliminated denominationalism. That is why the likes of James Dobson can appeal equally well to a wide range of religious groups even though he is a Nazarene.

The meta virus also allows Baptists, Nazarenes and even some Catholics to carry this new mutation. Groups who started wars or persecuted one another just two or three hundred years ago are now joined through the evangelical infection.

Cursory examination of the theology preached in these various churches shows that they are saying remarkably similar things. Where huge theological differences once existed between Assembly of God, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists, they have melted away in these less denominationally focused evangelical churches. A plurality of mega churches are Baptist, but many of the rest are non-denominational with loose affiliations.
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The mega churches within the Baptist denomination hold huge influence in the Southern Baptist Convention. It is a virus within a virus. The meta virus strongly influences the older Baptist virus.

Denominational mega churches (Baptist, Nazarene, Pentecostal, Assembly of God, etc.) may have more in common with other mega churches than they have with their own denomination, showing that the virus is a new and independent strain, unlike the denominational ones of old. That is not to say there are no differences, but they are downplayed in the interest of the new evangelical god virus.

To put it in genetic terms, the virus has shed many obsolete genes, keeping only those that turn off the critical areas of the brain. None of the old cultural material is necessary today. Most hymnbooks have been discarded and replaced by music that sounds remarkably like pop tunes. The trappings of traditional authority are deemphasized, especially in evangelical churches. Even the viral buildings are extremely simple and cheap compared to traditional church structures of only a few decades ago. Mega churches are often built out of steel with a much different feel than the stone and brick buildings of the past. They are built for mobility. When the congregation gets too large, a new and bigger building is built. Some mega churches have moved as much as three times in 20 years, so no need for elaborate trappings.

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Until his exposure in 2007, Ted Haggard was the president of the main association, the National Association of Evangelicals.

Further, doctrinal issues have been reduced to a minimum but are strongly held. It is a virus designed for the highly mobile and urban. It has paired doctrine down to a few critical items. No longer are long lists of beliefs required to enter the church. This allows for much easier infection of larger numbers of people. Confession in front of the congregation and acceptance of Jesus as a personal savior god is the primary requirement. Many require some kind of water baptism. No longer are the infected required to memorize and say creeds or profess belief in long-held doctrines like the virgin birth, or biblical inerrancy. While these may be unspoken beliefs, they are no longer required for conversion or salvation. Once converted, the newly infected soon learn that there are more beliefs than they were told. Things like original sin, creationism in some form, the trinity, opposition to abortion, the need to proselytize and much more. The evangelical approach is, “Get them in the door with a simple confession, then teach the real beliefs of the god virus.”

Evangelically infected people are just as blind to reason, maybe even more so, than those infected by the viruses of a century earlier. The evangelical virus effectively creates a bubble from which the infected person views the world. This viral bubble excludes all contradictory information and opens evangelicals to amazing ideas – like the imminent end of the world, that Alaska will be the refuge for those fleeing Armageddon, the United States’ special place in history as god’s chosen people, the right of Christianity to dominate the world and subjugate all other religions, that the world is only 6,000 years old, that Noah floated his boat with dinosaurs aboard and that hundreds of graves opened up in Jerusalem when Jesus was crucified and
dead people walked around (with no one apparently noticing, except the writer of Matthew).
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The operative word in the evangelical virus is “personal,” not savior. The great achievement of this new evangelism is the breaking away from communal forms to the more individualistic. Evangelicals engineer emotional and biochemical experiences that open individuals to infection independent of the culture, village or community of origin. This gives the virus unprecedented mobility. As we have seen, the focus on the personal experience means the tools of music, sermons, Bible study, etc., create elation, guilt and fear without reference to a given community. This is very different from the Episcopalians or Catholics, who depend on long-established rituals, creeds and physical motions to create trance like states that make people feel good about their infection and part of a god virus community.

The double message of the evangelical virus is, “God is love but has no tolerance for the uninfected or the moderate.” Compromise is not a virtue. The focus is on the differences between those infected by the evangelical virus and those who are not. It is clear from most evangelical sermons that evangelicals are convinced of their righteousness and special place in god’s plan. At the same time, there are certain social and political beliefs required for inclusion in the group, like opposition to gay marriage or biblical inerrancy. The evangelical virus is driving hard for viral purity. Those who disagree or exert aspects of the older viruses are suppressed or eliminated as impure.

The Baptists’ purge of their theological schools in the 1990s and subsequent consolidation of power in the Southern Baptist Convention in 2001 are examples of the new virus’ power to infect and purify. Where the evangelical virus has taken hold, there is no room for moderates. Nineteen churches were purged from the convention in 2006, including the second oldest Baptist church west of the Mississippi, Little Bonne Femme Baptist Church in Columbia, where the Missouri Baptist Convention was founded.
They were accused of being too moderate and having connections with groups that were too liberal.
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