Michel Houellebecq: Many Americans probably don't know that a Pentecostal movement exists in France. I became aware of it when I was living in Paris near the Porte de Montreuil, at that time a poor neighborhood with a lot of recent immigrants. Drawn by posters, I went to several meetings, some led by an American televangelist on tour. Probably 90 percent of the attendees were black. The memories I have of this are strange—I almost doubt having lived these moments. The people danced, sang at the top of their lungs, and sometimes spoke in tongues. I never had the feeling I was witnessing a collective delirium, or that I was in the midst of a cult. The sign of peace, reduced in Catholic Masses to a brief, irritated, and icy shake of the hand, gave way here to interminable warm hugs and kisses. And at the end of the celebration, we would share bountiful meals.
“If these people are saved,” Nietzsche more or less said (with cruelty, but rightly), “they ought to look like it!” I understood from this moment that the Catholic Church had much to gain by moving closer to the ambience of Pentecostal celebrations.
Especially because this is perfectly possible. It has even been tried, with success, by the communities affiliated with the charismatic renewal. I spent a week in the midst of one of them—at that time called the “Communauté du Lion de Juda et de l'Agneau Immolé”—and there I found exactly the same effusiveness, the same warmth. And it was almost entirely a group of white people—I say that in order to establish that whenever we are dealing with affairs of the heart (and religion is such an affair, indeed of the highest degree), race is not pertinent.
A scene of the same sort can be found in the magnificent final pages of Emmanuel Carrère's book The Kingdom, located this time in Jean Vanier's L'Arche community. I am talking about the moment when Carrère comes face-to-face with dancing Élodie, the girl with Down syndrome, and catches a glimpse of the Kingdom.
While I very much liked these charismatic celebrations, there remained in me a certain uneasiness, which I fully understood only later, thanks to Douglas Kennedy's very good book, In God's Country, which relates his study of revivalist Christianity in the Bible Belt. In reading the book, you sometimes get the impression that this renewal can only involve people with a past in alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution, or homelessness—that it does not address itself to people who are integrated into society in a normal way, having spent their childhood in a reasonably loving family. As a matter of fact, the L'Arche community has as its essential vocation the care of the mentally handicapped; and I would probably not have stayed with the Communauté du Lion de Juda if at the time I had not been the victim of a severe depression, in part tied to joblessness.
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