Nashville, Tenn. Just spitting distance from Confederate flag-flying tourist
knickknack shops, hundreds of eager young people have flocked to a Christian-run youth
club to see a Philly band called mewithoutYou.
After the show, the young Christians will hang around to seek wisdom from 29-year-old
Philadelphian Aaron Weiss, the band’s incredibly charismatic lead singer.
The band tours the U.S. most summers in their battered, leaking, sweat-reeking
vegetable oil-fueled 40-foot 1976 MC8 charter bus. There’s no toilet, just a hole that
empties onto the road.
Most trips are interrupted by the need to drain the fat from a nearby fast food
restaurant’s Dumpster. Most nights the band, the crew and the band’s dog sleep in
onboard bunks as the bus travels impossible distances through the night.
I’ve invited myself along after stumbling upon mewithoutYou while reading
Rapture Ready—a long rant by secular Jewish author Daniel Radosh
about mass-marketed Christian culture.
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Halfway through the book, Radosh meets Weiss, a Dumpster-diving, celibate, homeless
young Christian rock singer who takes walking-it-like-you-talk-it to righteous extremes.
I traveled across the Bible Belt with the band for 10 days—starting in Nashville with
stops in Kentucky, rural Illinois, Iowa, Kansas and Texas.
Every show ends with lead singer Weiss out on the sidewalk or parking lot with
acoustic guitar, glowing with sweat, smiling beatifically, surrounded by grinning,
enraptured young people.
I’ve seen hero worship. I’ve seen lust. This is something different.
“Keep your eyes open,” says guitarist Mike Weiss, Aaron’s brother and a dead ringer
for Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees. “It gets weird out here.”
True enough. At a bar in Birmingham, Ala., stunned parents who brought what drummer
Rickie Mazzotta calls their “cookie-cutter Christian kids” to see a nice Christian band,
stare in horror as the puppy-dog-eyed, scruffy, unshaven singer praises Allah.
“In everywhere we look,” sings Aaron, “Allah, Allah.”
Aaron Weiss and his guitarist brother Mike were raised in Upper Darby by Sufi
Muslim parents of Protestant and Jewish descent.
Holy rock ’n’ rollers: Philly’s mewithoutYou features (from left) Greg Jehanian, Rickie Mazzotta, Aaron Weiss and Mike Weiss. (photo by michael persico)
In their teens both Weiss boys became fundamentalist Christians. Later, when they
broke from fundamentalism, they formed a punk band called the Operation, which mutated
into the more experimental mewithoutYou. mewithoutYou got signed to the Tooth and Nail
Christian rock label in 2001.
Through all that, and ever since, Aaron Weiss says he’s been on an intense spiritual
journey, which can be hard work for the rest of the band.
Drummer Rickie Mazzotta, a lapsed Catholic, isn’t even sure he believes in God. Of
Aaron, he says “I just want my friend back.”
By which he means the crazy kid who laughs and jokes and is said to have once thrown a
burning squirrel corpse at a rival band.
“Maybe heaven is being buried underground and being eaten by a maggot and that maggot
turns into a fly and the fly is eaten by something else,” says Mazzotta.
He says he thinks about the possibility there might not be a God almost every day.
“The three questions I get asked most by fans,” he says between sucks on the scented
tobacco-filled water-bong that wobbles precariously on a table in front of the tour bus,
“are: ‘Are you Aaron?,’ ‘What’s Aaron like?’ and ‘Does Aaron really eat out of the
trash?’”
As for the latter, he does. Frequently.
Band members tell of throwing the remains of meals in trashcans only to see them
reappear on the bus hours later, salvaged by Aaron.
Throughout the bus tour, Aaron and I circle each other like suspicious dogs.
photo by steven wells
When we do talk—sitting on a couch at the front of the bus—I feel like I’m trying to
climb a glass wall.
Most of the time I’m politely trying to lead him down the path away from
fundamentalism and into the light of atheism.
Then something weird happens. A plastic water bottle topples off the top of the
microwave and lands in a bowl of plastic cutlery, sending a fork whizzing out of the
bowl and into the couch. It misses my heart by inches.
Nobody on the bus thinks this is odd or ominous.
The next day Aaron makes a proclamation.
“I’m a fundamentalist,” he says, after a week of hearing me rip the holy piss out of
right-wing fundamentalists.
He says he thinks I’m a bad influence on the band. He’s probably right.
I spend one particularly long evening with mewithoutYou—except for Aaron—in a
motel room on the Illinois-Iowa border.
A storm of Biblical proportions has been gathering in the massive skies overhead.
Silent lightning slashes the monstrous, roiling cloud banks. If you ever needed a
reminder of your own pitiful cosmic insignificance, here it is.
So what do the members of this Christian road show and I do? Pray? Meditate?
We drink beer, watch celebrity trash TV, argue about the Sex Pistols and swap
increasingly sordid sex-filled anecdotes.
Aaron Weiss has been known to be very, very naughty. In fact, the whole band
has.
Once, as a prank, another Christian band biblically plagued the mewithoutYou tour bus
with crickets, fish and mice bought from a pet store.
A mewithoutYou acolyte and seminary student named Nikki Kleinberg—then working as cook
and lighting engineer—retaliated by throwing a cup of “menstrual piss” in the face of
the other band’s tour manger.
Then there was the incident when the band doused a dead squirrel with lighter fuel and
tossed it—spewing smoke and sparks—into the disbelieving faces of yet another Christian
band.
Memories are hazy, but it seems pretty certain Aaron was the dead squirrel tosser.
The mewithoutYou band is part of a network of grassroots, radical Christian
churches, missions and “intentional communities” so much part of the warp and weave of
the grooviest and grittiest parts of this city that we hardly even notice them.
It would seem Philadelphia is either home to the most genuinely Christian movement in
America or it’s a festering spiritual slum where Satan’s plan to lure decent, clean-cut
Christian kids into a world of tattoos, piercings, crazy hair, left-wing politics and
foreign-sounding “multicultural” devil music is coming to fruition.
Or maybe it’s that Philadelphia is just overrun by annoyingly self-righteous Christian
hipsters. Depends on your point of view.
In an Irish dive bar in deepest Fishtown a preacher with intense eyes, a
sensible haircut and the mad scraggly beard of an Old Testament prophet is necking
bottled lager and trying to make sense of the fact that Philadelphia is the hub of a
radical, right-on, righteous Christianity a million miles removed from the leading brand
peddled by the gun-gripping, gay-baiting, mega-church-attending Christbots of the
religious right.
At the crowded service I attend most everyone is under 30. Tattoos and groovy haircuts
are prevalent. Grace tells me there are drug addicts here as well as people holding down
well-paid Big Pharma jobs.
Remember the crusty punk kid killed in Philly last year? Grace visits the kid’s
alleged murderers in prison.
Circle of Hope has run out of chairs, and so people have to stand at the back. This is
today’s second meeting (they don’t like the word “service”) and there’s another Circle
of Hope congregation in South Philly doing similarly brisk business.
Circle of Hope has no policy on gay marriage or the right to choose, and there are
people here on both sides of both issues (homos and homophobes, and homophobes who don’t
yet know they’re homos).
But there are also people here who want to chase the moneychangers out of the Temple,
who talk about equality and wealth distribution and the need to fight imperialism.
Anarcho-Christianity is alive and kicking in Philadelphia.
Grace has spent time in prison for protesting the war. He’s also helped shut down
federal buildings and has occupied Sen. Arlen Specter’s office. He’s toured pre-invasion
Baghdad, where he talked to some of the 1.4 million Iraqi Christians.
“I told them the majority of Christians in America supported a war against their
country,” says Grace. “They couldn’t believe it.”
The Circle of Hope meeting here in Fishtown isn’t much of a rock ’n’ roll experience.
Nobody wrestles snakes or speaks in tongues. Grace doesn’t rant or rave or give voice to
the massive anger he says he feels, “especially about the war.”
But you couldn’t spit in this room without hitting a crazy, out-there, commune-living,
sedition-spewing radical troublemaker, out to shake American Christianity out of its
complacent materialist coma.
The tall dude at the sound desk in the leather pants and the crazy
pirate-looking mother in the front row are all members of the officially rootless but
actually Philly-based Psalters—the crusty-punk, multiethnic, radical Christian
equivalent of the anarchist Chumbawamba: part traveling circus, part live-by-example
anti-patriotic slap in the face to the ticky-tacky Christianity peddled by millionaire
preachers obsessed with their congregation’s genitalia.
And there’s the dreadlocked, bespectacled Eastern University graduate—a fully trained
circus performer and Christian communalist named Shane Claiborne—who is co-founder of
Simple Way, a “monastic community” on Potter Street. The Tennessee-born Claiborne
doesn’t say Christ was a communist. He does say, “If we really loved our neighbors as we
love ourselves, capitalism would be impossible and Marxism would be unnecessary.”
Claiborne preaches the last-shall-be-first Christianity of 17th-century English sects
like the Levelers and the Diggers who took from the Reformation the message that if we
don’t need priests to assure our salvation, then we sure as hell can do away with
bosses, landlords and princes as well.
“Every couple of hundred years or so,” says Claiborne, “the church gets cluttered and
infected and suffers an identity crisis.”
Don’t mistake Claiborne for a classic liberal. He’s pro-life—including opposition to
the death penalty and war. You might be forgiven for finding his compassion toward gays
a little patronizing.
“I am a recovering redneck,” he says.
Claiborne went to Baghdad at the start of the war, visiting hospitals.
“One woman said to me, ‘Your government is declaring war and asking God’s blessing,
same as my government. What sort of God is this?’ That’s a great question.”
Claiborne, author of Irresistible Revolution—Living As an Ordinary Radical, compares the modern American church to a leper—an image probably
inspired by the 10 weeks he spent working in Calcutta with Mother Teresa (he says he
phoned her and she said, “Just come”).
In 1992 Claiborne was a right-wing Republican Christian working for the Bush-Quayle
campaign. Today he’s evangelical Christianity’s worst nightmare—a Christian who actually
tries to live like Christ.
“The harshest language Jesus used—‘brood of vipers’—was reserved for the religious
elite,” he says. “He told the priesthood that taxpayers and prostitutes would enter
heaven before them.”
Claiborne, along with Scott Krueger of the Psalters, is also part of the leftist Jesus
for President campaign.
“How would Jesus do if he actually ran?” asks Kreuger, outside Circle of Hope. “He’d
do fine until he opened his mouth. Then he’d be in trouble.”
“I think he’d be kicked out of office after a week,” says Claiborne. “But what a week
… ”
To survive Cornerstone you have to endure the nonstop nerve-shredding noise made by a
hundreds of Christian thrash metal bands in “DEVIL MUSIC FOR JESUS” T-shirts performing
all day and every day on scores of stages: “Woof woof woof Jesus is Lord woof woof woof
… ”
Soon you’re pining for a nice clean-cut church youth group meandering though “Kumbaya”
on acoustic guitar and tambourine. Anything—oh God, anything—but this endless, grinding
monoto-metal cacophony.
Claiborne is here at Cornerstone, as are the Psalters. Cornerstone is where right-wing
fundamentalist Christianity meets left-wing Christianity head on—with the Philadelphians
firmly on the side of the angels. Or the demons—again, depending on your point of view.
In the merchandising tent antiwar and “social gospel” Christians sit cheek by jowl
with the old-school hellfire and damnation brigade.
In the aisle where the anti-Darwin T-shirt sellers (“SCIENCE FROM DUMBIES—WRITTEN BY
ACTUAL MONKEYS”) have tables next to the anti-gays and the anti-choicers (“ABORTION IS
MEAN”).
Preach around: mewithoutYou singer Aaron Weiss (center) dispenses wisdom. (photo by steven wells)
I tell the fundamentalists there’s a radical Christian band here at the festival from
Philadelphia whose singer tells rapt crowds of impressionable young people that
fundamentalism is God-demeaning bullshit. I tell them that less than 500 yards from this
very tent members of yet another radical leftist so-called “Christian” Philly band are
saying that patriotism and Christianity are incompatible.
Here, today—on the Fourth of July!
How they can stand for this? Why don’t they light fiery brands and steam out in a
screaming mob and kill the witches?
But my attempt to turn Cornerstone into a radical vs. conservative bloodbath comes to
nothing. Everyone’s too busy turning the other cheek.
I buy—for $1—a 1975 copy of the Jesus People USA newspaper. JPUSA are
the most visible remnants of the Jesus freaks who tried to steer American Christianity
toward the path of right-on righteousness back in the ’60s and ’70s. Today they run the
Cornerstone festival and maintain a large commune on the North Side of Chicago. This
old, yellowing copy of their publication seethes with the irreverent anti-iconoclasm of
the counterculture that spawned it. On page eight is the pregnant elephant in the
room—an article and a cartoon describing abortion as murder.
Meanwhile, the Live Offensively stall is selling “I LOVE MY FUTURE HUSBAND” T-shirts.
I ask if they’d sell me one to wear around the festival. No. They won’t.
But that night mewithoutYou’s Mike Weiss, in a wonderfully righteous gesture, wears
the shirt onstage. I doubt if more than a dozen people notice.
The shirt, it turns out, comes in men’s and women’s sizes. The Lord moves in
mysterious and subversive ways.
That same July 4th evening I walk through the site to see the Philly band the
Psalters.
I pass a tent full of clean-cut teenage Christian boys, all crammed onto a stage, all
roaring the national anthem into a single microphone with a passion that borders on the
sexual.
Minutes later I’m among the punked-out, the crusty and the malcontented watching the
Psalters celebrate rootlessness and internationalism, mixing radical Christian
propaganda with multiethnic polyrhythms and neo-Dickensian refugee ragamuffin chic. The
woman next to me wears a full-on Middle Eastern burka, from which protrude long,
electric green dreadlocks.
In one of the seminar tents I come across the anti-Marilyn Manson. Preacher Cleetus
Adrian, 33, is John Cleese tall, shaven headed, tattooed to hell and back, facially
iron-mongered and wearing eye makeup.
“Hell is righteous!” he says, in an old-fashioned hellfire and damnation sermon.
Adrian dresses like a poster child for groovy rebellion but preaches old-time religion
to his moshing, mohawked, lip-ringed punk/metal congregation back in Hurst, Texas.
Next up is Brian “Head” Welch—former guitarist for the metal band Korn and author of
the bestselling how-I-gave-up-crystal-meth-and-discovered-Jesus bio Save Me From
Myself.
After half an hour of mumbled platitudes, rock star cool and mind- numbing waffling
from Welch, an audience member stands up and says: “I’m 42 so I’m not really into heavy
music but I think you are going to lead a revival in our country. I read in my local
paper the other day that 67 percent of evangelicals think Jesus Christ isn’t the only
way to salvation—67 percent! We need a revival in this country and you’re the person
who’s going to lead it! I really believe that you are going to lead a revival among the
youth!”
The rock star is totally unfazed.
“I’m gonna keep on keeping on,” he says. “There ain’t no way they’re gonna stop me
talking about Jesus.”
His lack of self-awareness is startling.
Aaron Weiss takes the stage and spends 10 minutes apologizing for his
presence and warning us he has absolutely nothing of interest to say.
And then he talks for two hours without notes and without repetition, holding the 200
strong crowd spellbound.
He trashes fundamentalism and takes shots at atheism. He finishes by dismissing
everything he said last year, mocking his image as a modern-day Dumpster-diving saint.
“This same fool was onstage last year telling you the answer was to eat out of
Dumpsters, live in communes and be a communitarian anarchist Christian,” he says. “Well,
this is me taking it back.”
He tells the crowd not to turn out for his talk tomorrow but to send Jesus instead and
to tell him to bring duct tape so he can “wrap my stupid head up if I say anything
harmful.”
He’ll do a standing-room-only show with the band later this night—and spend three
hours afterward quietly addressing a huge crowd on the subject of why they shouldn’t be
listening to such a “foolish pile of earth”: “Forget every word I’ve uttered. Not a
single word will do you any good. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. If you’ve come here to
learn something, you’ve come to the wrong the place.”
I think of Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
Brian: “I’m not the Messiah! … Now fuck off!”
Crowd: “But how should we fuck off, Lord?”
“I am a pile of manure,” says Aaron. “And my words are dog food.”
Afterward I stop a young woman leaving the tent. She’s smiling, her eyes gleaming. I
ask if what she’s just heard made any sense.
“It doesn’t need to make sense,” she says.
Steven Wells writes In Extremis, the online-only column
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