Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon People

Nothing Personal
Randy pols and sheepish veeps
Did Lucianne have a fling with LBJ? Gore on young girls: "I have no firsthand knowledge." Plus: Jennifer Aniston's mom tells all ... again.
By Amy Reiter
[01/12/00]

Column
"Punch" Bradley, "Judy" Gore and the injustice being done John Rocker
How about those Titans? Duchess Hillary sheds crocodile tears; McCain's creepy; Monica acquires rueful thoughtfulness; and you just can't beat that androgynous Hayley Mills in "The Parent Trap."
By Camille Paglia
[01/12/00]

Nothing Personal
Ally McSqueal?
Nell and Cage: Crack team. Is she experienced? Bonnie Raitt spills all. Plus: The King and I -- Carter and Presley, together again.
By Amy Reiter
[01/11/00]

Brilliant Careers
Lucinda Williams
With her gorgeously "flawed" voice, the genre-bending singer has exquisitely mapped out the South -- as well as her own heart.
By Elizabeth Bukowski
[01/11/00]

People Feature
A Blackwellian nightmare
On the 40th anniversary of the worst-dressed list, a writer recalls the acerbic designer -- and a beauty magazine assignment that went terribly wrong.
By Martha Barnette
[01/11/00]

Complete archives for People

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

It came to Expoland, just a few miles from my home in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, a place that usually hosts county fairs, livestock auctions, Mennonite quilting shows, doughnut fries and barbecue fund-raisers in a building that is, essentially, a huge white-painted warehouse with exposed steel beams, a stage at one end and an invisible but incessantly droning heating system. Forty to 50 people were scattered among the 300 available seats when I sat down in the back.

The Rapture, to be totally clear at the outset, is the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, a time at the end of history when true believers' spirits will be "exalted to a knowledge of divine things." This may sound like a good thing, Jesus being about love and hope and forgiveness in the four Gospels (which I happen to have read several times myself), but evidently, it is not.

In fact, I learned that I have been entirely wrong about this Jesus guy all these years. Jesus was no wishy-washy hippie, not the little limp-wristed tender boy you see in pictures. He was tough. He did not like lots of different kinds of people, especially homosexuals. The Second Coming, according to the seminar literature, will coincide with horrible tortures, pestilence and plagues visited upon "perverts, reprobates, pagans" and those who have not accepted the Christian Lord as their personal savior.

The speaker for the night was an evangelist named Tony "the Tiger" Mavrakos, a self-proclaimed bodybuilder and Seventh-Day Adventist reverend from Glendale, Md. The official title of the sermon was "Can Gays and Lesbians Go to Heaven?" and this, even in the pamphlet, was rhetorical, because obviously, according to Mavrakos and his skinny, mustachioed introducer Tom Sharply and the Northwest Evangelical Institute, they couldn't.

Mavrakos came in late; things didn't get started until almost 45 minutes after the announced time of 7:15 p.m. He was bespectacled and bearded, plump and bulky and sweating, wearing stiff-looking khakis and loafers. The devil had made Mavrakos' teenage daughter get into a car accident back in Maryland, totaling one of his two cars and the back end of somebody else's car. His daughter and the woman whose car she hit were OK, though, he said into the stage microphone, breathing hard from the hurry.

Many in the congregation audibly praised God for this. Mavrakos thanked them: "Amen, praise God." But the car -- man, the car was a goner, he said; that damn devil. "The Tiger" wiped his brow and hiked up his belt buckle in an x-treme way that actually separated his testicles on either side of the pant seam (a habit that at first was comical and later wince-inducing), and implied that he had a hard time making a living because he didn't have his own church. No church is ready for Mavrakos. So his church is on the Internet, where he gives cyber-sermons and takes prayer requests via e-mail.

Mavrakos sticks to the letter of the Bible, and most churches nowadays in America, he says, are afraid of hurting people's feelings, or upsetting some liberal, politically correct agenda. In fact, the "liberal agenda" has polluted churches, ruined them. Moral relativism is turning us away from biblical truths. "The church," Mavrakos yelled, "was supposed to go out into the world. The world wasn't supposed to come into the church!"

He then launched into a tirade about Jerry Falwell's recent "caving in" to pressure from "perverts" when he allowed openly gay Christians into his church in Lynchburg, Va. (luckily, also near my home). Anyway, the point seemed to be that, because he refused the liberalism of contemporary mainstream Christianity (and yes, he seemed to be calling Falwell a liberal), a totaled car was a big deal -- the devil at work, trying to stop Tony from preaching the Truth by giving him a good one right in the insurance premium -- because Mavrakos wasn't made of money like some of these hotshots on TV. He struggled for his God.

The devil had also made the beltway "extra crazy" tonight, "full of idiots," and Mavrakos told us that sometimes he had to pull over to the side of the road and ask God to help him calm down when driving around Washington. It made sense that people were crazy, though, since these were the End Times and the devil was everywhere. "But that didn't make that old devil any easier to take. Oh no." Mavrakos looked like he wanted to kick over the huge podium -- and he could have done it -- but he wasn't going to let the devil win. Not tonight. Because he had a vital message.

After another 10 minutes or so of seemingly riffing on whatever came into his mind while people in the audience began to fidget, Mavrakos got to the vital message. He asked if anyone had ever heard of Matthew Shepard. About half of us raised our hands. He smiled sarcastically, sighed. A few people near me in the back -- three women in business suits and a couple in sweat pants, the man wearing a black, No. 3 NASCAR hat -- shook their heads and sighed, clearly disgruntled by the thought of Matthew Shepard.

Mavrakos said that another man in Little Rock, Ark., was attacked by a band of homosexuals and murdered and sodomized the very same week that Shepard was murdered in Laramie, Wyo. "Why didn't you hear about that?" he asked. He looked around, checking our faces, extending the pause. "Because the information you get in this country," he yelled, "is skewed toward the left, toward an agenda that loves homos and sinners and sick, sick perverts and hates God-loving Christians! The media in this country is all owned by a few big corporations. Did you know that? That every bit of information you get from the mainstream media is controlled by only a few people. Do you think these people love God? Do you?!"

He had a point, I thought, about media ownership.

"Do you know what it is when a few corporations control everything?" Tony said. "I'll tell you what it is: The big C."

Ah, I thought: Corporate consolidation? Complete commodification? Capitalism?

Next page | The big C