An excerpt from

Jesus Made Me Puke: Matt Taibbi Undercover with the Christian Right

... Here I have a confession to make. It's not something that's easy to explain, but here goes. After two days of nearly constant religious instruction, songs, worship and praise — two days that for me meant an unending regimen of forced and fake responses — a funny thing started to happen to my head. There is a transformational quality in these external demonstrations of faith and belief. The more you shout out praising the Lord, singing along to those awful acoustic tunes, telling people how blessed you feel and so on, the more a sort of mechanical Christian skin starts to grow all over your real self. Even if you're a degenerate Rolling Stone reporter inwardly chuckling and busting on the whole scene — even if you're intellectually enraged by the ignorance and arrogant prejudice flowing from the mouth of a terminal-ambition case like Phil Fortenberry — outwardly you're swaying to the gospel and singing and praising and acting the part, and those outward ministrations assume a kind of sincerity in themselves. And at the same time, that "inner you" begins to get tired of the whole spectacle and sometimes forgets to protest — in my case checking out into baseball reveries and other daydreams while the outer me did the "work" of singing and praising. At any given moment, which one is the real you?

You may think you know the answer, but 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? It was an incomplete thought, but it was a scary one; it was the very first time I worried that the experience of entering this world might prove to be anything more than an unusually tiring assignment. I feared for my normal.

-----

So, this group psychology/ hysteria/ conformity thing - does it vacuum, as well?

It reminds me of a couple of things - Nazism, with its rousing rallies and an entire nation coming under the charismatic thrall of one man. Religion, in general (because this is religion, after all).

And it makes me think, we're all doomed after all. It's only a matter of time before one incredibly charismatic man leads the entire human race into oblivion. How? Where? What? I don't know, I'd be lying if I said I did; but man is, for better or for worse, a social animal, and we're all going to follow him like lemmings leaping into the abyss of extinction.

I only hope I won't be around when it happens. It would be unpleasant. Well, it probably would be quite pleasant at the time, but dying from an inherent tendency to happily participate in groupthink is not really how I want to die.