"The Old Time Religion Experience" by Casey Broadwater

I touch my earpiece and ping Alice to tell her that Fazenbaker is waiting behind The Arena in Loading Zone B with his truck and dozen wicker crates of snow-white doves, a new addition to the show. He’s been waiting half an hour, at least, I tell her, and the doves are wilting fast. If she wants them to wing heavenward at the appropriate moment during the two o’clock Prayer & Healing Meeting, she’s gonna need to haul ass. They fall asleep in the crates or else get panicky and burst out and start shitting everywhere, I say, neither of which would be ideal for the Take That Step™ Altar Call finale. I give her a hard time, but I’m in love with her, so there’s that.

I tell her to get down here, stat, but only because I can't wait to see her. There’s no real rush. The doves are here, alright, but they were dead on arrival. Fazenbaker has been pacing and smacking his head and muttering about carbon monoxide. He kicks one of the crates. The top pops open and a single downy feather puffs up into the air and back down, snoring cartoon style. Then he starts sobbing into his hands. This was it, he says, my job, my whole life, all gone, all four hundred and sixty fucking four of ‘em. I rub his shoulders and tell him to buck up, Chuck, to see this as an opportunity to get out of the less-than-lucrative freelance dove game for good. Maybe, if he shows some initiative, he can prove to the Eldership that he’d be a good fit for the open animal wrangler role here, which isn’t a bad gig, as it comes with danger pay for milking the rattlesnakes at Punkin’ Brown’s Holiness Church of God Evangel Extravaganza. 

Look, I say, if you can somehow rustle up at least a few dozen birds—crows, wrens, robins, whatever, it doesn’t really matter—we can douse them with baby powder so that when they’re released they create a billowing white cloud, just the kind of sign-slash-wonder the audience is expecting. I’m thinking on my feet, only half-serious, but Fazenbaker jumps into his truck, jams it into gear, and lunges off. He’s forgotten to shut the articulated rear steel door, though, and as he pulls away the rest of the crates slide out and crash to the asphalt with a pillowfight plume of feathers. Godspeed, I yell, and hope he remembers to roll down the windows. This damn job.

I ping janitorial and tell Big Rob about the mess on our hands. Big Rob knows what to do. He's got a few biohazard bags left from when we were planning to do all those pigeon sacrifices during Judaica Days, before PETA mercifully shut it down.

As I'm waiting for Big Rob, wasting non-billable minutes, Alice on her e-scooter rounds the rear of The Sanctuary—the little church in the shadow of the arena—and jerks the handlebars near the loading dock, almost biffing into the heap of cracked wicker and molting dead birds. She’s in the creamy white robe getup all the Servants wear, with a nehru collar under her chin-length bob and a black cincture with gold tassels cinched tight above her waist. It’s supposed to be clerical—even though that was never a big part of evangelical culture, except in certain black Baptist pockets of the South—but she looks more like a Sri Lankan bellhop. I’ll admit, though; it does things for me. Unfortunately, Alice is a rare bird these days, a True Believer, which means her downstairs area, let’s say—like Reverend Sunday’s study under the Sanctuary—is Strictly Off-Limits. 

Alice is one of the Servants stationed at the Big Tent Revival Arena, and she oversees a lot of the back-end business: restocking the anointing oil, rehearsing with the audience plants, assigning who gets crutches and who gets wheelchair duty, whatever needs done. Sometimes, when the tech assistant is out, the Eldership even lets her pilot the laser-emitting Shakinah Glory drone, flying it in slow spirals through a cloud of atomized fog juice during Praise & Worship. The crowds flip for that. Alice wishes they could know the real glory of the Lord, she says, and her face is always crushed when she has to scan tickets for The Laying On of Hands or—the big upgrade—The Slain in the Spirit Experience, in which Reverend Sunday blows over patrons with high power blasts from a length of pneumatic tubing snaked up his suit sleeve. But these days, she says, a job’s a job’s a job. 

And maybe she’s right. Maybe I too should appreciate what I have. I once graphed out for her my declining career trajectory—from Late 20th Century Material Culture PhD to part-time adjunct to jobless layabout to lowly “Requisitions Officer” here—but in return I got the humbling lowdown on Alice’s own less-than-ideal situation, which made my present car/condo combo look pretty great: her sloshed mom with the bottle-ache shakes, in and out of rehab they can't afford; their one-bedroom apartment with its scuffed linoleum and haze of contraband unfiltered cigarettes; the assorted nuts that attend her bi-monthly women's Bible study; the incontinent diabetic cat she rescued from the Satanic Panic diorama; and the ex-boyfriend who, out of desperation, stands below her window on the street with a Bluetooth ghetto blaster, Say Anything-style, playing AI-generated Christian Pop crossover songs with titles like “Baby, I Love You In the Manner Described by Paul in 1st Corinthians.” Etcetera. 

She's so over him—her ex—she told me earlier in the summer, and since then we’ve had our share of flirty, touch-and-go near-romance. To avoid going home, we sometimes talk after work for hours over cold coffee at the Holy Grounds in The Sanctuary’s foyer, and just last week we got served a paycheck-docking Penance for playfully splashing each other with water from the Baby-Be-Born-Again Baptismal Dunking Tank, which doesn’t offend Alice’s keen sense of blasphemy only because she recognizes, with a teasable indignance, that The Experience has wildly conflated the Catholic and Protestant conceptions of the rite.

These kinds of mixups are rampant, and some even intentional, owing to a general awareness by the Eldership and shareholders that the throngs of seekers will eat this stuff up regardless, with nary a second thought for historical accuracy or theological import. Call it a cynical playfulness on the part of the Elders, who are—to a one—ruddy blowhards in confusingly ornate suits, who come from sales and marketing and only have imagination enough to pander with the extreme and the outsized and the obvious. Are we educating here, or satirizing? Could we be more even-handed in our portrayals? Could we, with a little effort, rise above that other religiously themed theme park on the eastern seaboard—Holy Land U.S.A.—which similarly trades only in the sensational? Don’t even get me started on Cali-phate, in Santa Barbara.

Sure, I’m bitter. I’d love a stab at The Uppercase Truth, at real verisimilitude vis-à-vis the material particulars of evangelical culture from roughly 1948 to the millennium. But part of my job is to not give a lonesome shit and order whatever Disneyfied megachurch kitsch the Elders, in their dollarsign deliriums, dream up. Even when I do send meticulously sourced reference photos to Mr. Chen—the crazed AI-CAD prompter at our supply factory in Malaysia—he goes wild anyway, 3D printing offering buckets that look like upside down Uncle Sam hats and putting anime eyes on Jesus and the disciples in the enormous faux-marble sculpture of The Last Supper recently installed in the atrium of the food court. Chen has artistic ambitions, I suspect, and is trying to turn The Experience into his own personal exhibition space. I spend half of my time trying to wrangle him closer to reality, but my boss, Todd—an almost-Elder who'd crucify himself to get the ordination nod—has either a soft-spot or a hard-on for Chen's "attention to fun." 

But anyway, Alice. Sweet Alice, looking sour, standing before me with one foot on the ground, one foot on the grippy-taped deck of her scooter. You rang? she says. I gesture grandly at the dove disaster, gamey in the humid Virginia heat, and she laughs, putting the gold-embroidered hem of her sleeve over her mouth and summoning once again the woozy desire that’s been welling up within me all summer.  Come Thou Fount, indeed.

I tell Alice that Big Rob has the bird situation well in meaty hand and suggest—taking a big swing here—that since we have an hour before Prayer & Healing, and neither of us have taken lunch, how about we sneak into Reverend Sunday’s and pilfer some of that potluck supper he never eats anyway? I’ve often spotted one of the senior Servants returning to the cafe dish pit with Sunday’s Ten Commandments-shaped tray—custom ordered by yours truly—still fully loaded. And he never shows up until 1:30 anyway, with those big dumb genetically engineered dogs of his. Alice says she does perversely enjoy the soggy green beans, with the little bits of ham, but come on, the good Reverend’s green room? The holy of holies? Das ist verboten. 

She has a point, and it’s been intimated in training seminars and regular employee communiques that dire consequences await those who infringe on the privacy of the park’s public face and founder, but I’d like to explore the basement again, even if I'm not entirely serious about breaking into Sunday’s study. I’m just intoxicated with the thought of sharing some light danger with Alice in the dark.  Come on, I say, don’t you want to see the big man’s pastoral pied-à-terre? Where he does all his deep thinking? Under that furrowed brow of his? Behind those phenomenally out of control eyebrows? She laughs again and so I grab her by the tassels and lead her inside the foyer of The Sanctuary and down the stairs. 

It’s an eerie space, outside of time: a single long hallway—the as-above-so-below mirror of the church’s center aisle overhead—with wood veneer walls, musty green carpeting, and dimmed, irregularly spaced panel lights that would certainly flicker and hum if they hadn’t been replaced years ago with perma-LEDs. The Experience’s administrative headquarters used to be down here, in what were once Sunday School classes lining either side, but now the rooms are dark and mostly empty, save for some stacked chairs and scattered pieces of disused office equipment.  At the far end of the hall is the ominous red door to Sunday’s study, flanked by fake potted ficuses and a few historical photos—the building’s consecration, successive portraits of former pastors, a boy standing at the altar with his arms raised and hot tears on his cheeks.

The Sanctuary, now something of a museum piece, was, at one point, a real church, built in the mid 1950s. It reached its zenith of about 500 attendees during the pre-Y2K revivals, and finally shuttered in the chaos of the late 2020s. It's the one authentic building in the park, and rumor has it that Sunday—a showman known for making real money from spiritual simulacra—keeps the place comparatively pure out of some sentimental obligation, even occasionally performing “living reenactments” of services there with a more tempered version of his usual flourish. 

The one other time I came down into the basement, it was with my historian’s urge to snoop for lost artifacts from the bygone days, and lo and behold, after a furtive search I found—pushed against the wall on the top shelf of a supply closet—a magnetic tape on a 3” metal reel with “Flo’s Funeral” written in shaky blue ballpoint on a peeling label. It took me quite some time to track down a working player, and alone in the requisitions workshop I listened enraptured with every detail: the tape hiss, a distorted piano, mic’ed too hot, the warbly voices of the congregants singing a wistful hymn about the assurances of heaven, and then a eulogy, delivered in a preacherly cadence, attesting to Flo’s good works, her faithful service to her family and community, and her skill and sensitivity as the church’s organist. Soon after the eulogist asked those in the pews to reach out their hands in a benedictory prayer towards Flo’s grieving husband and son, the audio cut out with a thunk like a slamming car door and abruptly switched to the first chorus of T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong (Get It On),” clearly recorded off the radio as a DJ came in during the fadeout to read an ad for a local car dealership before the tape spun loose. The reverse side was blank. 

I start to tell Alice about this find as we creep down the corridor, mostly to calm my own nerves, but midway through she holds up a hand and shushes with the other, like listen. Then I hear it too, a quiet rhythmic thumping from the direction of Sunday’s study, interspersed with mousy syncopated moans and what we both begin to recognize as the same satisfied grunt Sunday does when he bears down at the end of a particularly juicy Bible passage, the kind of appreciatory mmm you make after a bite of decadent gâteau. Alice and I gawk at each other in amused horror, but then Sunday’s dogs start baying too and we dodge instinctively into the doorway of the nearest classroom before peeking our heads back out around the frame to resume listening, our grotesque curiosity and stifled laughter giving way to a thrumming, anticipatory silence.

I'm behind Alice and she's leaning forward a little, her bottom in that robe positioned just so, and I can't tell if it's intentional at first but she starts subtly grinding against me and lordy, the sound of gross old Sunday approaching his crisis is the only thing staving mine off. Still, moved by the spirit, I cautiously put my hands on Alice’s hips, seeking confirmation—while repeating what the hell am I doing? in my head like a rapid-fire mantra—and she presses into me harder, looks over her shoulder, and breathlessly whispers for me to pull up her robe. I rest it on the small of her back and reach my fingers under the band of her underwear, but just then, Sunday, entering the light at the end of la petite mort’s tunnel, lets out a death rattle of release and shouts, Father, forgive me!

At this, Alice stiffens for a moment freighted with uncertainty, then sprints heavy-footed down the hallway and up the stairs, her robe flapping behind her. I’m frozen—solid—and during the minute it takes the ice in my veins to thaw, I start to hear the chain lock on Sunday’s door slide open and the handle rattle. He bursts out with a who’s there, oxford untucked, his usually slicked-back pompadour now dancing in tongues of yellow-white flame atop his round red face, like a just-struck match. Before he can see me I stumble back into the classroom, looking wildly for any place to hide and settling for a whiteboard on wheels, knowing full well my legs are still visible should he stomp in after me. 

Through the gap between the whiteboard and its frame I see Sunday wheeze, double over, and put one hand against the wall to steady himself. He makes a shooing motion toward his study and tells whoever it is to stay in there, woman. The dogs are yapping, louder now that the door is open, and I’m beginning to register them as a threat. But Sunday sighs, pushes himself upright and limps back, slamming the door behind him.

I remove my shoes to sneak out as quickly as I can, hoping to catch Alice, to talk this through, reassure her, whatever I can do to let her know I understand what she's feeling, how complicated it can be, all of this. Thinking she probably headed for her scooter, I run gingerly barefoot to the loading dock, where I find Big Rob with an empty biohazard bag and Alice on her knees, watching as hundreds of doves flash and flutter and spiral up over The Sanctuary into the cloudless sky.

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