The megachurch movement is usually thought to have begun in the 1950s. Globally, these large congregations are a significant development in Protestant Christianity. While generally associated with the United States, the phenomenon has spread worldwide. The advent of television in the 1950′s, and the Internet in the 1990′s and 2000′s have been a motivator for mega churches. Megachurch services are often broadcasted.

In the United States, more than half of these large church institutions are non-denominational churches. Those that have ties to a larger body are most often members of the Southern Baptist denomination, which became a separate denomination in 1845 in following a regional split with northern Baptists over the issues of slavery. - [paraphrased; various sources]

 
Most of the megachurches, even those not associated with
Southern Baptists, share its collision of conservative politics,
mainstream American entertainment, the logic of corporate
architecture and the sense of corporate strategy – all of which
reflects the conservative American political psyche in total.

 
“Southern Baptist“;

Since the 1940s, the denomination has moved away from its regional identification. While still based in the US South, it has member churches across the United States.

Until 1979 all Baptists used the word “revival” to refer to the power of the Holy Spirit to transform hearts and change lives. Change began within an individual and spread from one person to another. Revival was a spiritual movement, not a political movement. In 1979, Southern Baptists, fundamentalists began twisting the meaning of the word “revival” and used it to talk about the power of a social movement to change the culture. Today, even the revivalist altar call has become a tool of politics. - [paraphrased; various sources]

 
American Mega Church;
the expression of the aesthetic of corporate America,
military America, disposable America,
expansionist America.

At the gates – a passport check.

We were close to the edge of the road. The church members
drove past without stopping. Parking lot stickers, digital,
register attendance. The technology was a gift from the local
U.S. Air Force base.

The security guard looks at my cds spread across the floor, looks
at my cigarettes in my shirt pocket, winces, then waves us inside.

Some are trapped in the circle.

 
It is impossible to not live surrounded. But some preserve the
circle, and offer religion to corporations, to political syndicates
and hallucinate the circle itself as a “National” value
worth total war.

 
We were at the gates of the preservation of what has become
a strong arm of neo-fascism in politics. The American mega
church is built on political blood. Each daily prayer becomes
a small release: the worth of a drop of national expansion.

 
Most American Christianity now; it’s likeness, is completely
one and the same with the American right-wing. As an image of
a politic in the US, an ideology synonymous with unrestrained
wars of capitalism, American Christianity, a moth, gravitates
to the corporate simulacrum.

 

In a U.S. megachurch there is, equally, a religious and a
political history. In the aesthetics of the megachurch;
and in its programming; and in its particular form of
expansionist Christianity; is the taste of the blood
of foreign bodies murdered to instill safety and global
dominance.

 
In many ways the history is drawn to, and often incorporated
by, Southern Baptists, who themselves are an equal mix
of surreal right wing agendas with apocalyptic and divisive
religious impulses that have shaped conservative thought
since the late 1970s.

 
The American simulacrum has a conservative politic as its
agenda. It is Wal-Mart. It is the decentralized office park.
It is the sport event. It is aluminum and concrete, and
portable, and not even real. A solid building is real,
carved onto space with the intention
of permanence…

…but the megachurch is built on liquid imperialism.

Americans never had a chance to build a solid culture;
now everything is bought;

 
Everything…

is presented as a reflection of our carfefully crafted consumer
and political desires.

 
The megachurch is the SUV, the McMansion, the shopping mall….

…the strategy of new malls built every 5 years with new stores,
the blindness as old malls are abandoned but left in tact…..

…the invasion of Iraq, black sites, drones,

…video games, political blindness, false arrogance.

 
In board rooms where power is turned into decisions and actions,
conservative politics is decorating our reality. The right-wing and
capitalism are expansive together. Both lack a grounding in
aesthetics beyond the American screen of invented pastiche.

 
Instead, there is a non-aesthetic of American conservative politic.
The screen has a non-aesthetic. A capitalist embrace of simulacrum
is production of more veneer. The American Christian megachurch
is faith in corporate architecture.

 

 

 

 

Now, returning home to Tennessee from Brooklyn, six years between, it comes back in front of the sun: the ignorance and hate of American culture’s fascist forms of Christianity. My cab driver had gold teeth; is ready for the vengeance, the war of the soul, the enemies are coming; prepare the soul and his faith was generating money – rewarding his capitalist life. “There are those picked to go to heaven and those picked to go to hell at birth, he said.

 
“Predestination”, I thought.
 
We picked up another passenger who was reading the same book.
 
 

In the American south the deaths of America are exaggerated and placed in the dead center of the sun. The American south projects the right-wing’s psyche and amplifies its temperature: the south has been turned into a land of dead over-consuming ignorant xenophobes who kill, restrict, burn culture, demand homogenization and segregate those who live a lifestyle unapproved by their fascist-evangelical corporate-overlords-of disinformation.

The mutation of Christianity into a political machine was incubated in the south in the 1980s. I watched its expansion. My mom is a genius and instilled the idea of critical thought in me in spite of our small town of evangelical Christians who judged us daily, who viewed critical thought (culture) as evil, spewed hate, lived lives on auto-pilot, and remained in numb suburban glaze never knowing culture or life beyond a reality distorted by the marriage of corporate power, conservative ideology and hi-jacked religious thought. The idea of community or family is voided by cult-like devotion to these twisted ideas of Christianity, twisted ideas of “proper lifestyle”.

There are great people here but the south pushes most away. There are islands of consciousness, here. There are islands of consciousness resisting flattening across America, and we are left without pillows while the teeth of corporate America dream heavy. On the edge of the forest is death; a pastiche system – ugly, rusted, organic, technocratic’. There are a few of us here in the minor. We watch this system eat reality and we are collectively amazed the majority allows this oppression. We are looking and writing or protesting or sharing reports of this systems destructive maze while the masters of re-arranged public relations are spinning the rest of Americans like tortured happy rats in plutonium rain, oblivious to our new cancer. Outside, I am watching traffic move along. Driving to buy, drooling to shop, self-centered and de-educated. How will the world wake up?

We have to continuously write, talk about and confront a 1984-like erosion of our world. We have to be like storytellers who kept myths alive. We have to protect multiplicity and the idea conformity is the world’s evil. We cannot forget universalism is fascism. We have to produce constant reminders, broadcasts that create intangible tribes, that remind the world most churches in America are spewing hate indoctrinated not by religion but by a hi-jacked religion trained to turn us into corporate drones. We log onto electricity to feel the consensus. We know the paradox and read better knowing the elements, the atmosphere, extended space of a mutating reality out of control.

Out here in devastated flood lands, the chemical American south, we see the text of politics. As the collusion of Christianity and corporate rule have succeeded in removing literature from schools, one state at a time, these institutions have replaced culture with new books that spread the idea of official American aggression, ego worship, life as consumer, hatred of the Other and insistence on the fascist notion of the universal. Our symptom is less and less of the population is real. Violence. Thought violence. Erasure.

We grow and die and live inside fences dusted with chemicals. Someone is dropping chains, franchises, from the sky and onto landscaping. I’m kissing my girlfriend under the second brightest moon of the year. Tomorrow, a full moon, or tomorrow night. She is a rose in a field of strip malls, health industry outlets, chemical plants, car lots, redneck bars and funeral homes. She is back-lit by the flood lights of a subdivision built around a nondenominational mega-church. The land is segregated from adjacent residential and commercial zones by accidental barricades: an interstate and other structural fragments. An enclosed system; power and space. No windows in the church. No light. No glass. Camera systems. Secured front lobby. Administrative offices.

I am watching the ethos of politically infused Christian hatred: watching a daughter – my girlfriend – thrown into bankruptcy by an ex-husband, struggling to raise two kids and absorb the constant pains of her auto-immune illness, who is told by her family they would help, they could help, if she just “deserved it” and would “do right by God”. She has long been ignored and left to die by most of her family. The only way out: attend a church she deeply opposes.

Her family’s morals are an extension of religious corrosion and their judgements are the confusion of the mind of a cult and an allegory of American foreign policy. Her situation makes me want to either cry or dismantle her family’s faulty logic and leave them with words that will burn their brains alive.

What now for our zone? Doubled workers, but hands still bleed, too slow and deadened.

As the political reality in the world continues to dissolve into fascism,  poverty,  death and ecological disasters,  the artists who became professionals over the past decade,  drinking from the new corporate investors and giving them empty mindless art will be written into history as complicit.

We will see that these artists are frozen in place by the seriousness of the economic investment in their work and they will be incapable of addressing the horrors of reality.

The word ‘precious’ describes one aspect of the lack of emotion & the lack of a relationship to political reality in most art. Artists are too guarded; too professional.

It is extremely important now,  for example,  for artists to approach shows as extensions of work always already in process in daily reality.  To treat a gallery show as just another day is an escape from the slow dead time frame of standard shows that are typically controlled expensive long lasting epics.  Escape the corporate push for long precious shows that dictate the lives and progress of artists.

In all ways,  in all of our gestures as artists,  we have to escape professionalism.

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“You better know, know you’re alive” – Tricky; live version of Hollow

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