Perhaps Aaron feels he has the whole world in his hands, fundamentally. Photograph: Steven Wells
Five years ago, as a prank, fellow Christian rockers Anberlin biblically plagued the mewithoutYou tour bus with locusts, fish and mice (bought from a pet shop). Seminary student Nikki - then cook and lighting engineer - retaliated by throwing a cup of piss in their tour manager's face. Other mewithoutYou related inter-Christian band pranks have involved shitting in a pizza box and hurling the flaming corpse of a squirrel from the door of a speeding tour bus.
Two nights ago - rampacked into a Days Inn motel room in a godforsaken truckstop on the flood plagued Iowa/Kansas border, with a storm of biblical proportions assembling in the massive sky above us, the whole damn band and crew (with the exception of Aaron) sat around and drank beer and watched celebrity trash TV. And talked about wanking.
Yesterday I cornered mewithoutYou singer Aaron on the bus and talked to him for two solid hours, in earshot of other band members. Today he enters the bus, grinning like a fool.
"Why are you so happy?" says Mike the merch guy.
"Because I had a religious experience in the parking lot," says Aaron. "I've become a fundamentalist again."
I laugh out loud, nearly choking on a sweetie. I think he's joking. He's sorta not. There then follows a 20-minute conversation where this beautiful, intense and tiring young man expounds the following points.
1) Everything he told me yesterday was grandstanding nonsense that now makes him "sick". 2) He's sat and listened to me abuse, mock and parody Christianity - and heard his bandmates failing to defend it. 3) That (without wishing to be judgmental) there is a culture of naughtiness in the band that has been magnified by my presence.
And somehow, smiling all the while, he turns this into an apology. I am somewhat stunned. I explain that I have an exaggerated version of the British disease - piss-taking. And am amazed I have survived this long on the road without seriously getting on someone's tits.
I'm in a Christian cafe in Lawrence Kansas, so bombed on superb Christian espresso that I'm trying to set up a mirror image tour with satanic punk combo the Quintessentials.
It feels deliciously naughty to leave the portal to their pentagram defaced website open on my computer when I sidle off to the graffiti-free rest rooms.
Around day eight of this tour I am immune to the stench of dog farts and stale sweat and finding it increasingly difficult to tell the days apart.
Every night Aaron peddles Allah to the Bible Belt, singing, in a song yet to be recorded: "In everywhere we look - Allah, Allah..."
Nobody so much as blinks. In Nashville a single let-slip cuss words drew nervous laughter, Allah - nothing. On previous tours anti-war comments have gone down like the proverbial cup of cold sick. At one Cornerstone an angry parent stood up and demanded: "Don't listen to the rock star!"
But now - with all but the most demented Bushbots disillusioned with the idea that the smirking chimp in the White House is a tool of God - liberal Christians are pushing at an open door. But Aaron's stopped pushing. He mocks his previous "anti-corporate, anti-war, anti-hypocritical" stance. "Maybe it's me being the hypocrite," he says.
This is perhaps the problem with those who are both liberals and Christians. Too much cheek-turning, not enough smiting.
Self-described liberal Christian mewithoutYou fan Cooper, interviewed in the street in Lawrence, Kansas, fudges the issue as only a liberal Christian can, bending over backwards to not be horrible about the evil, war-mongering, child-slaughtering, science-denying worshippers of Mammon who have hijacked his religion and turned it into something immoral, disgusting and vile. "No one can serve two masters," said Jesus. "For either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon."
Rickie the short-haired, bearded, lapsed Catholic drummer sticks his head over Cooper's shoulder. How do you feel about short-haired men with beards?
"I like beards," says Cooper. "Short hair, long hair, it doesn't really matter to me same to me. But I definitely like big bushy beards."
I have a big bushy beard. I am in danger of being mistaken for a Christian. It's time for me to go home and shave.
Read Church And Destroy Part 1
Read Church And Destroy Part 2
