In an excerpt from his forthcoming book The Great Derangement, Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi infiltrates a weekend retreat for pastor John Hagee's Cornerstone Church in Texas. It's the one that helped propel George W. Bush to his second term, the home of Christian Zionism, which advocates unity between Jews and Christians in the name of bringing about the apocalypse and subsequent rapture. Being a good stunt journalist, Taibbi makes up a fake name, dons the effete polo and glasses of a Gump-meets-Christopher Guest movie character and goes about the weekend-long ritual of freeing himself of demons and letting Gah-uhd into his his life.

At first, it's all fun 'n' games, like when he has to reveal his "wound," the childhood experience that made him turn away from God. He makes up a tale about his father, a circus clown, who used to beat him with his oversized shoe—save for that brief period when he gave up clowning and went to work as a Carvel Ice Cream mascot.

I laugh about it now, but once he chased me, drunk, in his Fudgie the Whale costume. He chased me into the bathroom, laid me across the toilet seat and hit me with his fins, which underneath were still a man's hands.

The megachurchies don't doubt the ruse for a full second.

It wouldn't be a magazine story without a moment of self-doubt, tons of introspection, and a healthy flirtation with genuine non-magazine writer human emotion. This comes to Taibbi in the form of power puking into a three-cent paper bag, moved to his holy hurl by the sin of handwriting analysis and anal fissures.

But was it enough to make him want to vote Republican in 2008?