Easter Message

And so to my regular seat for the Britten Sinfonia's Easter weekend St.John Passion.
I'll get the fashion stuff out of the way early: suffice to say the band take their usual liberties with "formal black": Jacquie Shave is wearing her calf length gladiator sandals with layers of net curtain, black lace and rags and a fascinator in her hair the size of a chicken. Miranda Dale's in that gloriously trashed crushed silk ball gown of hers that looks like it spent the afternoon inside a cement mixer and is all the more attractive for it, Claire Finnimore has her stripy clown top on and Julia Doyle (this evening's soprano) is in a period black chiffon and gold under-slip creation that would have driven Mister Darcy crazy.
The boys are all in black like extras from a gangster movie.

So … Bach's dark masterpiece: betrayal, capture, denial, interrogation, condemnation, flagellation, humiliation, crucifixion, death, burial. It's a laugh a minute, this one, but this is Easter, after all. Chocolate eggs and bunnies don't get a look in.

Having spent the weekend re-reading John Eliot Gardiner's "Music in the Castle of Heaven" (the best Bach book ever), and listening to SJPs ranging from enormous, lush, fifties orchestrations, through Britten's stark rendering, via the rise of the period instrument puritanism and culminating in John Butt's glorious reading from last year which placed the Passion in its original liturgical setting (including a downloadable one hour contemporary German sermon for the middle) I wondered just what Jacquie and the gang would do with it. They are notoriously unconventional (one reason I love them so much).

A funny and enlightening pre-concert chat involving countertenor Iestyn Davies and tenor Nicholas Mulroy (this evening's Evangelist) revealed that we were getting a stripped down, Bach-style band with no conductor, led by Jacquie at first violin. Tonally, they had gone through the score and tried various instruments for various parts, resulting in a balance of modern strings, oboes and flutes with period archlute, viola de gamba, harpsichord and that sweet little baroque organ covered in fretwork that the Bach Players use at the Octagon Chapel. The band felt that some parts sounded better on period instruments and some on modern so they balanced it out and the result was indeed gloriously light and transparent, with every note and every part seeming not so much the Britten Sinfonia's SJP but more Bach's own voice rendered as clearly as possible. Plus, of course, founders Jacquie and Nick trained with Britten and Pears so the chamber orchestra genius has rubbed off.

Rather than the usual organ continuo, they decided that Christ would have the organ and strings, the Evangelist the harpsichord and viola de gamba with cellos, "Es ist vollbracht" with just viola de gamba and the tiniest of organ washes; each singer an identifiable set of instruments tailored to their character. It worked beautifully.

Anyhoo … "HERR!" Good God, y'all: has there ever been a scarier opening to a piece than the SJP? No, there has not. The quietly twining sinister serpent lines of the woodwind and strings building dissonance upon dissonance in mysterious darkness until the tension is unbearable and then that glorious first "HERR!" Woah, Nellie! Bach's congregation must have shat themselves, especially as Bach's band were behind and above them.

Nicholas Mulroy's Evangelist was tremendous, quite a feat considering that the BritSinf had just arrived from frantic nights in London's Barbican and in Amsterdam's Concertgebouw. It's a huge part: physically and emotionally draining and at the curtain calls he was visibly trashed.
Matthew Brook was towering as Christ, a full-on Wotan for the bass arias but vulnerable and tearjerkingly real as Christ (yes, we cried); defiant yet resigned with Pilate (Eamonn Dougan - boffo), aware of the horrors to come but unwilling to change the fate his birth had inevitably triggered, the interspersed arias from Iestyn Davies and Julia Doyle only throwing the darkness into relief and intensifying it.

The chorus was genuinely terrifying in its howling mob frenzy, hounding Pilate with: "Kruezige! Kruezige!" baying for crucifixion.
Pilate's own despairing defiance of the mob with "Was ich geschrieben habe, das habe ich geschrieben." his last resistance. He turns aside and lets it happen.

The silences. The horror of Golgotha. Nobody in the packed audience dared breathe. Christ's "Siehe, das ist deine Mutter." utterly heartbreaking. And then the brief, beautiful chorale before the final breath. "Es ist vollbracht!" English doesn't have an "acht" with which to end a word but it is perfect for the silence to follow.

And into that silence Iestyn Davies' gorgeous countertenor sings Bach's lamenting aria "Es ist vollbracht" accompanied by Richard Tunnclife's plangent viola de gamba and there's not a dry eye in the house.

Matthew Brook storms back in full force for the burial arias with bass and chorus building to a climax of utter, hopeless darkness. There's no resurrection in the SJP: it stops short as any Good Friday piece should. And then, as the bleak despair envelops you those first three notes of "Ruht wohl" stop you dead and you know in an instant that Bach has achieved perfection. The next three notes bring floods of tears but also relief and hope. The woodwind are fantastic, especially the oboes, but then their voice is the perfect complement to the human singers. By the time the chorus reaches "Macht mir den Himmel auf und schließt die Hölle zu." you are wrapped in the warmth of Bach's love as Christ will be when God "opens Heaven for me and shuts the gates of Hell."
It only remains for the final chorale to tie things up, letting the audience breathe again, and then it's curtain call after curtain call.

The singers have been magnificent, the mix of period and modern instruments beautifully balanced and allowing Bach to speak more clearly than on any recorded version I have heard. The sound (in the acoustically perfect hall) far superior to the otherwise gorgeous reverberation of the Cathedral.
A triumph. Hell, I'm an atheist and it tore me to pieces.

Stumbling out into the darkness through revellers drinking and partying their own Easter away you realise the lesson has not been learned. We still arrest, torture and murder people: Guantanamo, waterboarding, extraordinary rendition to states where suspects can be brutally tortured while we look the other way, and to save us Pilate's bloody hands we no longer bother with the trial, simply sending drones to murder for us so that we do not need the guilt-trip of the legal process.
Someone needs to drag the world's "leaders" - most especially those who claim to have God on their side - into a performance of Bach's St.John Passion. If they don't learn from that, then it's all been in vain.

Happy Easter, peeps.


Click for Guardian review of the Barbican gig.

Notes on the Welcome Death of Fred Phelps

"Religion is like a penis. It's fine to have one and it's fine to be proud of it, but please don't whip it out in public and start waving it around ... and PLEASE don't try to shove it down a child's throat."

From "The True Historie of the Church in the American Colonies"

Knock-Knock …

Stained Glass Sunday - Storyboard

Mediæval stained glass wasn't just decorative; it had a purpose to serve. Back then, if you didn't speak Latin you wouldn't know what the hell the service was all about, so the church provided pictures.

Not sure which part of the scriptures this one's supposed to depict, but reading from top to bottom I'd guess something along the lines of:

And the big guy saith "Dude! Check it out, man; I'm sitting here with all these giant red peaches an' shit."
And the lady in the nightie saith "Whatever. I mean you should have seen it! Like, it was THIS big!"
And the man with the bloody sword spake thus: "Endangered species, my ass! I can get at least a dozen designer handbags outta your hide."

If you're in church today, check out the stained glass and see what tales it has to tell.

Stained Glass Sunday

And the Lord saith:
"She was THIS fat!

I mean, what the fuck?

Her profile said 'average' body type.

How is that average?

What is this? America?

I'll never trust an online dating site again as long as I live.

Sheesh!"

WTF Monday

Okay, so I've run out of WTF Monday photos of my own (months of crappy weather have kept my camera indoors), so instead let's start the week with the most tempting offer Jesus has ever had.

WTF Monday - The Great Osberto Parsley

Crazy name; crazy guy …
Well probably not, but what a magnificent monicker he had.
Osberto Parsley's biography is written out in full on a plaque on the side of the column that bears this lovely memorial in Norwich Cathedral.
Fifty years a chorister and choirmaster at the Cathedral; born in the first year of Henry the Eighth's reign, when the place was still a monastic institution, Osberto Parsley sang in the choir through almost the entire Tudor monarchy: Henry VIII, Edward VI, Jane Grey, Mary and Elizabeth, a time of ridiculous religious shenannigans that saw many a composer or singer imprisoned or worse. Ah, monarchy and religion … mass murderers par excellence.

These are the same choir stalls Osberto sang in (and indeed the very same stalls whose wooden walls winced in pain as I murdered the tenor parts in Handel's Messiah and Verdi's Requiem when I was at school).

So let's hear it for the Great Osberto Parsley.
Here's one of the many songs he would have sung (John Browne's Stabat Mater). He'd have also sung all of Thomas Tallis' and William Byrd's music, both in Latin and English as he straddled - and mercifully survived - Mary and Elizabeth's religious schism, but Browne is one of my all time faves so that's what you're getting.

Enjoy! And whenever you hear music as beautiful as this, remember the name of Osberto Parsley.

WTF Monday - Best Nativity Ever

A Hidden Jewel

How Brontë is that?

Lynn's been over here on the correct side of the country for Christmas with her parents and yesterday I stole her away for a meandering drive out to the coast.
On our way, we swung by Hemblington; a tiny hamlet-ette only a couple of miles from my house, as one of Lynn's ancestors hails from there.

The hamlet is still there; a cluster of modern houses snuggled around a few mediæval thatched cottages, but the place had been emparked in the eighteenth century so the original village has long disappeared, demolished by the rapacious landowner who evicted the entire population, replaced them with far more profitable sheep and built his manor house by the church, which now stands over a mile from the modern hamlet.
While there are myriad mediæval halls and merchants' houses littering the local countryside, many dating back pre-twelfth century in part, I know of no complete working class house from before around 1400 anywhere around here.
Here in east Norfolk, we're on glacial chalk and there is no natural, workable building stone (hence the round flint towers of Saxon times before the Normans floated Caen stone over here on barges to build the Castle and Cathedral) and most folk lived in one room hovels built around a very basic timber frame. These frames were infilled with wattle and daub (wattle being the young growth from pollarded willows woven into basketwork panels); the local daub being of clunch (chalk rubble), mixed with clay mud, dung and urine, and "puddled" (trodden into a squish) before being thrown onto the wattles. The outside was weatherproofed with slaked lime and the roofs were thatched. They needed rebuilding every generation so none have survived (other than the timber frames with later brick infill).

All Saints Church took some finding, as it's cut off from the hamlet, but after a dead end and a muddy track we eventually found it, way out in the middle of nowhere and to my unalloyed delight discovered it is a virtually unspoiled, ninth/tenth century Saxon round towered flint church … a rarity indeed, even in Norfolk where we have more of them than the rest of the world combined.
I thought I knew all the Saxon churches around here, so finding this one so close to home was a wonderful surprise.
Anyhoo … looking at the photo above (and ignoring the madwoman): the tower is ninth or tenth century, as is the greater part of the nave. The only surviving Saxon windows are the bell-frame windows at the top of the tower. After the Norman conquest, when the church was already old, the new French landowner added a chancel (the bit on the right) in the twelfth century Early English style (the first, simple, gothic style windows you can see there). A later Plantagenet landowner replaced the Saxon windows in the nave using the lovely Decorated Gothic style (thirteenth century), and much later, the landowner who emparked the village added the knapped flint crosses to the porch and replaced the thatched roof with pantiles.

Inside, however, was another revelation. Hoo boy!

The Victorians - those criminal desecrators of all things tasteful - systematically whitewashed over every mediæval wall painting in every church in the country during their dreadful reign of cultural terror in the nineteenth century. Too primitive; too rude; too humorous for the Calvinistic Taliban.
In the last three decades, a renaissance has been under way and - very gradually - those original glories of gothic period church wall paintings have been painstakingly uncovered in a few remote churches.
 Here in Hemblington is the finest I have ever seen: Saint Christopher carrying the Christ child, surrounded by other Bible stories.
When this was painted, Mass was a Latin only service and the "mystery" of the Church was maintained by keeping the population completely ignorant of what the Bible was about (no English language version was available until hundreds of years afterwards). So to educate the peasantry, stories from Scripture were painted on the walls; our great religious cultural history wilfully destroyed by the ignorant Victorians.
This example is - judging by the style of contemporary illuminated manuscripts - probably original to the church and therefore may even be as early as the ninth or tenth century.
Wow!

Here's the thirteenth century font, repainted in its original colours. I've fallen in love with this little church and will be back in better weather to take more photos for you.

I'll leave you with Lynn, delighted to be sitting (and shivering) in the very pews her ancestor would have known all too well.
Toodle pip from Very Olde England!

Getting Lighter Already

So … The End of the World didn't happen (again).
What we did get, however, was a winter solstice, which in itself is reason enough to misuse the word party as a verb this week, without having to use the excuse that a couple of thousand years ago an underaged girl was being forced to bring an unwanted baby into an uncaring world (plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose).

On the subject of the End of the World ™, that gayest of 'manly' world leaders, President Vladiboy Putin gave us some unintended mirth this week (I don't know who else noticed so I'll tell it anyway).
In an attempt to appear intelligent (never a good sign in a Russian leader) he officially pronounced that the earth has an expected life span of around seven billion years (s'true, folks … the Bible tells us that the sun will eventually run out of hydrogen and will have to start burning helium, which will force it to expand to a red giant phase and burn the earth to a crisp - as well as making the sun's voice go comically falsetto) and that as we have already had four-and-a-half billion years of that, we can expect the end of the world in around four-and-a-half billion years from now.
Good to see they still teach arithmetic in Russia.

Back to solstice celebrations …
As you can see from the photo, the crowds of Christmas shoppers in Norwich are a little like the crowds of Christmas shoppers in London, in that they don't exist this year.
This year, the poor have nothing left to give; if the rich want us to spend our way out of their recession they're out of luck; this year they'll have to lift their fat asses up off their yachts,  haul some of their offshore billions back here and spend it themselves … or we're even more fucked than we are now.

Anyhoo … the solstice has been and gone, so now we start the long haul toward that distant spring. This was City Hall at four o'clock in the afternoon, the day before the world was due to end (again). One day soon, we can look forward to a four o'clock where we don't keep bumping into things and can actually see where we're going … and the tacky, never-ending rainbow light show on the front of City Hall will be switched off.
In the meantime, enjoy your festive week; celebrate the turning of the seasons with the rest of us mercifully godless heathens.
And make the most of it … thanks to Putin's arithmetical inadequacy, the world will end two billion years earlier than he expects. Eek!

Yay

Yay us!
Click on this link and scroll down to see why I'm so pleased with Norwich (again).

WTF Monday - Mess-iah

εδακρυσεν ο ιησους

Ah, religious differences … where would we be without the 70,000 or so officially recognised churches within the Christian faith alone? They do love to bicker.
And that's just the officially recognised churches. There are a myriad of cults to add in to Christianity's glorious tapestry, and each and every one fervently believes that they - and only they - hold the TRUTH (always in upper case) and that everyone else is headed for hell in a handcart.

Lovely people …

Here are a small group whose way of life would make Jesus weep. They live out Robyn's way and the thing that tickled me most was the names …

Go on - read it. You know you want to.

John, Chapter 11, Verse 35 …

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16347418

What Remains

After yesterday's peek through the window of what has become known as St.Mary's Chapel in Cockley Cley, let's check out some more of it.

Meandering through the woods away from the reconstructed Anglo-Saxon village, the more adventurous wanderer might come across this sight.
Is it an old barn? Let's take a look.

That ain't no barn. And that door and window are pre-Norman, so we're looking at a Saxon church here. Cockley Cley already has a big late Saxon church only a few minutes across the fields, and that was probably built when this small church could no longer cope with the growing population.

 It was still in use between 1000 and 1100, as this Saxo-Norman doorway tells us, though by the time of the Reformation it had fallen into disuse and became derelict until squatters started living in it. People were still living there in 1952, with no water, drains or electricity.

Mercifully, someone realised what was hidden underneath all the decay and it has been slowly recovering since then, though it still has a temporary roof as the people who call themselves Christians these days prefer to waste their time and money on tax fraud, tawdry TV shows, pædophilia or bitching about one another's culty little cliques and so a few grand for some timber and thatch to protect one of the first places in Northern Europe to hear the word of Jesus is not a priority.

 Below the floor of the main body of the church are the remains of an earlier church and below those the remains of a Roman temple. The early Christians usually re-used old pagan sites as a derelict building is cheaper to repair and use than building something from scratch, and these were places where people had been coming to worship for centuries, so there was a ready made congregation ripe for conversion. Saint Fursey and his followers would have preached here because there was already an old ruined temple on the site which would act as a focus to draw people and as a shelter to live in.

The stone jambs to the opening are later, tenth or eleventh century additions to both shore up and decorate the old walls. The original building was all flint.

 This is the Roman lead coffin I was telling you about yesterday, dating from 350AD and sitting on some Roman floor tiles found locally.

 The sign over the wooden box in the apse explains that four feet below that spot were found the bones of the brother of Saint Fursey who lived and preached here and died on pilgrimage in 650AD (check him out if you have a copy of Bede's "Historia Ecclesiastica" (yes, of course I do; you know better than to ask) - he's in book III, chapter IXX.

The people who first heard about Jesus in this little space in a woodland clearing would have been aghast at what horrors their religion unleashed upon the world in the ensuing centuries. Fortunately this tiny chapel really does retain a sense of the innocence and hope of the early church and it's nice to pop in there from time to time to step back into a simpler world. I don't feel the message of Jesus in any modern church but I do in here.

Sha-la-la-la-Push-Push …

 Hey! It's Easter Monday, and time to check if my Jesus bread has risen …

Y'all know how much I love Natalie Dee.
Well, now I've got another reason to love her. As a postscript to Friday's post and comments-fest comes this morning's Natalie cartoon.
Ah, there's hope for America yet …

And as it's Easter Monday and He is RIZ, here to celebrate with us is the tackiest and most tenuous Easter-themed song from Glam's own Mott The Hoople: "Roll Away The Stone."
Any band with a guitar player called Ariel Bender gets my vote.
Dig the bad miming and the fabulous backing singers unashamedly crooning "Sha-la-la-la-Push-Push."



The seventies … Dontcha just love 'em?

Sometimes Friday Is Just Friday

Hey! It's Good Friday!
It's getting on for two thousand years since they nailed a man to a cross and left him to die for quoting Bill and Ted and telling folk to "Be excellent to one another."
So …
What have we learned in those two thousand years?

Wow! We must have learned a lot because here we are living in a caring, sharing society free from greed and poverty, from war and hatred, hypocrisy, bigotry, rape, murder, exploitation and fear. No big corporations steal money from the taxpayer and rape the environment; no political parties endorse race hate, misogyny, homophobia, self-serving greed and lust for power; no Christian has ever shown intolerance toward others, let alone persecute them for any reason whatsoever; no rich man has ever said "Bugger rendering unto Cæsar that which is Cæsar's! I didn't get all this money by paying taxes. Taxes are for the poor to pay.";  no people have been kept in fear and ignorance by corrupt governments unduly influenced by corporate greed …
Thank you Jesus for teaching us.

Our wonderful society is built on compassion; on equality of opportunity regardless of circumstances of birth, race, social status or sexual orientation, with free education and free healthcare for all. There is no fear because there is no ignorance. There are no guns or any other weapons because we have learned the futility of violence and live in peace and happiness with all the peoples of the world.

Since the death of Jesus no one person has ever put themselves above another.
Nobody has ever been murdered for their beliefs.
There have been no wars.
There has been no injustice.
There has been only love and compassion.

We have truly learned.

Er …

Ah … Er … I Can Explain …

This one's for Shan, so she can point and snicker at me.
I was flicking through my Daily Comics widget yesterday and spat coffee into my keyboard when this came up.

Hee hee! That's me booking my place in the hot basement. Hey ho.

No post as such today; I'm heading into the city for breakfast and some retail therapy.

Yesterday's Japanese phrase for you to learn was:
"酔っぱらっただけならまでしも、彼はとんでもないばかをやらかしたんだ。"

"Yopparatta dakenara madeshimo, Karewa tondemo nai baka wo yarakashitanda."

We've all been there; it means:
"Not only did he get drunk, he also made a complete fool of himself."
The operative word there being "ばか" (baka) or stupid; an essential part of any visit to Japan, the phrase "baka gaijin" (stupid foreigner) will follow you around like a bad perfume.

Our final visit of the week to the wonderful Pizzicato Five and the incomparably stylish Nomiya Maki features one of the most fabulous dresses I've ever seen.
Totally awesome!
All girls should dress like this. Mmmmmmmmm …

And let's all do the hand-wavy thing in the chorus! Yay!

Enjoy your weekends!

εδακρυσεν ο ιησους

εδακρυσεν ο ιησους

"Edakysen ho Iésous", the original Greek text of John:11:35 … "Jesus wept."

Jesus wept for the death of Lazarus, out of compassion for his grieving family, but today is Good Friday and today day we meditate on Jesus' own death, and what has become of that compassion.

Good Friday.

The one day of the year when even this lost soul heads off to church to mourn the torture and murder of a blameless man.
This year, however, I am staying home, reading John's account of that awful day and listening to Bach's dark masterpiece the St.John Passion together with my favourite Stabat Maters.

I do not want to sit among hypocrites and mourn Jesus.
I do not want to be surrounded by what Christianity has become.

Good Friday.
There's nothing good about it. It is the worst of days.
It commemorates the day when a man who had taught nothing but compassion, forgiveness and unconditional love was beaten, flogged, humiliated and nailed to some wooden cross pieces where he took six agonising hours to die.

Some of my Christian friends believe that three days later he rose from the dead, then ascended to Heaven and will come again.
I used to believe that, but nowadays I don't.
After what we put him through, do you really think he would be happy to see a bunch of self-righteous and hypocritical bigots waving crosses at him?
His crucifixion is surely the last thing he would want to be reminded of.

Good Friday forces me to contemplate Jesus' life and teaching, the human condition and what Christianity has become.
Good Friday seems to me to be the day that Christians forgot everything Jesus taught them and learned to hate.

They started early, at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD.
The Emperor Constantine had become a convert and convened a meeting of church leaders to thrash out which particular version of events would satisfy the majority of the population of the Roman Empire and therefore keep him in power.
They threw out Gospels by Mary Magdalen (because she was a woman; women played a great part in the early church shortly after Jesus' death but the patriarchal bishops wanted the show all to themselves, so women were excluded), Peter, Judas, Paul, Thomas, Philip and many others, keeping only the Gospels we know and that suited their political purpose. They so thoroughly destroyed all copies of the rejected accounts - accounts written by Jesus' own friends and followers and of immeasurable historical and religious importance - that we only know of them from a single copy discovered in an Egyptian archeological dig in 1945.
They also set out to destroy anyone who did not agree with their particular version of the "truth", a nasty habit today's Christians still enthusiastically embrace.

First up, they set out to completely destroy paganism, the traditional way of worship in the Greek and Roman world.
How did they go about it?
Did they follow Christ's teachings and persuade by example, loving their enemies and forgiving them?

No.
Let's take Hypatia of Alexandria as an example.
She was a mathematician and teacher of Aristotlean and Platonic philosophy at the Platonist School in Alexandria around 400AD.
Bishop Cyril didn't like her. She was an uppity pagan woman in a position of power and even taught more enlightened Christians in her classes.

Here is Socrates Scholasticus, a Christian writer at the time:
She was "… hurried away by a fierce and bigoted zeal, whose ringleader was a reader named Peter, waylaid her returning home, and dragging her from her carriage, they took her to the church called Caesareum, where they completely stripped her, and then murdered her by scraping her skin off with tiles and bits of shell. After tearing her body in pieces, they took her mangled limbs to a place called Cinaron, and there burnt them."

Christians? Following Jesus' example? …
Read the passage again.
Bishop Cyril, who set off this disgusting event and published a fake letter from Hypatia shortly after her brutal murder, claiming she attacked Christianity was made a Saint for his sins.

Let's skip forward to the Inquisition.
Here we have the official policy of the Christian Church for hundreds of years: torture and burn alive anybody who publicly disagrees with us.

They did this in the name of Jesus. For Christ's sake.

Okay, so they've calmed down a little now but they're still hating.
The so-called Christian Church is split into thousands of fragments, each and every one of them claiming exclusive right to the TRUTH; each and every one of them bitchily claiming they are RIGHT and all others are WRONG (and they do it loudly, too, hence the upper case).
They may not go in for torture and murder quite so much these days, but they still vilify and persecute those who they are frightened of: Jews, Muslims, Atheists and just about anyone else who doesn't bow down before their superior knowledge, before their own particular twisted version of the TRUTH.

In a particularly ludicrous (and grimly hilarious) twist, these so-called Christian Churches spend a great deal of time and money sending missionaries to other so-called Christian Churches to tell them the error of their ways and to try to SAVE them by forcing their own TRUTH upon the UNBELIEVERS.
We in England are flooded with US Evangelical missionaries, standing on street corners, shouting and waving pamphlets, telling us how WRONG we are. They even send missionaries to the Vatican! Sheesh! I mean, do they really expect Ratzinger to say "Oops! We were wrong these past two-thousand years; what we should really be doing is giving all our money to some mall-like church in the Mid-West"?

They are all hypocrites. All they really want is power over others.

Jesus' suffering should have brought about an end to suffering.
Instead it taught Christians to hate, and they gave themselves license and free rein to cause suffering wherever they went.
In his name.
And they are still doing it.

Today - Good Friday - above all other days, Christians should look at Jesus' own humble life and meditate on his teachings:
Compassion.
Forgiveness.
Unconditional love of others.

Stop pointing and shouting at other people and look at yourselves.
You claim to be followers of Christ.
This weekend, share something you covet with a stranger; go and worship in another denomination's church (HORRORS!); forgive the people you disagree with.
Be compassionate.

If you cannot bring yourself to do even that, you cannot truthfully call yourself a Christian.
And Jesus will have died in vain.