I feel like I’m still detoxing from the in-depth special report I posted yesterday, my account of my experience inside the belly of the beast at Lou Engle’s Gateway House of Prayer.  Apparently, though, there is no limit to the number of delusions Lou Engle has in a given week, because now he’s weighing in on the recent Supreme Court decision of Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, where the court simply held that a Christian group at Hastings College of the Law has to abide by the same nondiscrimination policies as anyone else, as long as they want to accept school funding.  But no, for Lou Engle everything has World of Warcraft-style implications:

A 5-4 Supreme Court decision Monday requiring Christian campus groups on public universities to accept gay students as members and leaders may signal the beginning of religious persecution in the U.S., says prayer leader Lou Engle.

“This is the first time in U.S. history where the Supreme Court has actually ruled that gender rights now trump religious rights, which means this is the beginning of the possible coming harassment and persecution of the church because it’s going to be clear that the true church will take a stand only on the Word of God,” Engle, founder of TheCall prayer movement, said today. “So these campuses will find out who the real Christians are, who is willing to take a stand and risk their status with the school as a club.”

He will take any opportunity, no matter how tenuous, to keep his followers in a constant state of fear, won’t he?  He has to keep up a constant stream of faux-victimization, because if he doesn’t, his followers might accidentally forget that they’re persecuted and go on to live productive lives.  Quelle horreur!

SCOTUS simply said that no, Christian groups are not entitled to a special right to discriminate.  But as I explained in my report yesterday, Lou Engle and his worshippers don’t hold the United States or the US Constitution in high regard, believing as they do that American government should conform to their idea of “God’s government.”

(h/t Steve M.)

Call me Jezebel.

If you were Lou Engle, you would. He would call all of you Jezebel. In fact, he did last Tuesday night in St. Louis at a revival at the Gateway House of Prayer. As Wayne reported on Friday, Lou Engle and the team from TheCall are holding a series of revivals/schools every night from June 19 to July 12, open to the public. Thus, it was as a member of “the public” that I traveled to St. Louis on Tuesday to attend one of these sessions, alongside approximately two hundred of Engle’s faithful followers.

Most of the crowd was under thirty, and the striking thing was that most wouldn’t have looked out of place at Starbucks. They were suburban, to be sure, but there were also more than a few visible tattoos in the room. This is Lou Engle’s “Elijah Generation,” which represents a shift away from the overly coiffed, good-haired fundamentalist men of stereotype as well as reality. Quite frankly, I didn’t feel out of place, physically. However, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally, it was soon made very clear that, though no one in the Gateway House of Prayer made so much as a move to speak to me or welcome me*, they considered me not only to be an enemy, but moreover one of the greatest threats to their well-being. This was disconcerting to experience as an adult, fully removed from the angst-ridden, closeted paranoia of my conservative Christian adolescence, but I’ll come back to that in a moment.

The evening began with a worship team leading the crowd in singing what some might call “songs,” for almost an hour and a half. However, they really weren’t “songs,” but more repetitive kindergarten-level chants. The praise leader would seize on a line like “I love you Jesus” or “Worthy is the lamb,” or a short, equally simple verse, and then lead the group in singing it over and over again, sometimes for more than ten minutes, before going seamlessly into another simple phrase and melody. The overall effect, I noticed, was a sort of hypnosis that fell over the crowd, as the young people in that room showed how serious they were about praising God by swaying, dancing, holding their hands in the air, and the like. Those in the front were the first to stand and sway and raise their hands, and, like a slow wave, the physical expression moved backward through the rows until it reached, and passed behind, me. The congregants would call this “The Holy Spirit,” perhaps, but really, it was just good old fashioned peer pressure. More than anything, the word that kept going through my head was “occult.” They were doing nothing less than going into ceremony, as Lou Engle’s bodyguard/bouncer kept a watchful eye from the front corner of the room, perhaps peering into the crowd for evidence of uninitiated outsiders or insiders not fully toeing the line.

Behave as a member of the tribe, or be discovered. And so I did, until Lou Engle finally stopped rocking back and forth in his seat in the front row and began to speak. I have embedded, in several segments, most of Lou Engle’s talk.** For each, I will summarize, analyze and comment on what was said, and the implications therein. If you’re pressed for time, I’m putting the most significant/egregiously awful quotes in bold print. The summary starts after the jump.

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The nutty group, The Call, run by Lou Engle (who sounds like a professional wrestler) has hatched a plan to win over St. Louis for his angry, bitter version of Jesus:

A Series of Meetings with Lou Engle and TheCall Team will take place at the Gateway House of Prayer. The Prayer House will be pausing its regular prayer room hours June 19-July 12 in order to host a summer internship/school.

The evening sessions will be open to everyone!!(7-10PM). There will be worship, prayer and powerful teaching from Lou Engle, Brian Kim, Michael Brown, Benji Nolot etc.

Is it just me, or do these guys (Brown in tie and Engle appearing constipated) look like patrons of a campy, gay 1970′s mustache bar? On the count of three, Mary, let’s all sing: Y-M-C-A, It’s fun to extract demons at the Y-M-C-A!!”