One of the good things about being a Christian is that you’re continually getting owned by events. You try to set up little spiritual-ethical-aesthetic rules of thumb and they work so brilliantly and then they stop working. You say something like, “The aesthetics of Protestant fundamentalist churches are so fundamentally barren, so ruined by America, that nothing good can happen in them,” and then a friend who struggles with addiction turns his life around at one of those places, for a while at least. (Addiction doesn’t always have a happy ending and, in this life, I don’t think we can infer much about the realness of someone’s encounter with God from whether they got a final W over it or not. One of the problems with the narratology of American revivalism is the fact that it sometimes seems to equate these things. I turned to Jesus and I kicked heroin and I never went back and now I am the proud owner of a roofing business and a smokin’ hot wife.) Or you get dragged to some church that takes place in a mall (which seems like the same thing but worse—they didn’t even bother to build a place that looks like a mall, they just sacralized