Today's lesson is all about the corruption of the religious class

So Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! is a nice album even if the title is a little twee. But one of the things I like about Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds besides what I gushed about on Hipster's blog is their ability to communicate exclamation marks through music, so it's not so twee as all that. It's loud and lacking the cutesy prettiness of the last Bad Seeds album that had tinkly little tracks like 'Breathless' and 'Messiah Ward', but that's okay. It has its own, louder, prettiness. Especially the second track, which is still my favourite song.

Something I like to think about from time to time when I'm stuck on public transport without a book is old-time itinerant preachers and charismatics, who'd go around selling their particular version of God in barns and street corners and speaker's corners and whatnot, building up or failing to build up a following. Especially this guy, mostly because I can hardly wrap my head around the idea of German glossolalia. Can you imagine?

Since watching Jesus Camp I haven't been able to believe modern North American charismatic or pentecostal denominations have a relationship with the divine - that their religion isn't just a travesty that serves the lay people as a socially acceptable excuse to hate gays, gainfully employed women, and scientists, and serves the preachers as a way to make enough money to buy crystal meth for their favourite manwhores whilst maintaining a large family in the style to which they've become accustomed. At the time I found the movie annoying and unedifying, but what made the price of admission worth it was seeing those children educated in the art of faking glossolalia. Exactly the sort of thing that's going to make the rest of the world think they're loony, and make them feel a strong sense of community with each other. Seeing the camp director slipping in and out of glossolalia whilst pumping everybody up was pretty amazing.

I want to think that glossolalia is an actual spontaneous phenomenon - not literally that one starts spouting off in the tongue of angels, but that one manages to have an experience of such mysticism, such abandonment of the self . . . As it stands for me the Quaker way is best: shutting up for a solid hour and only speaking (with words) when you feel moved to - second last meeting I went to, one of the speakers recited from one of Leonard Cohen's more cheerful songs - maybe that's as angel-talky as it gets these days.

Anyways, I still like to imagine that my culture used to support real honest-to-goodness mystics and angel-talk and all the other fancypants pentecostal stuff in the past, when there was less money to be made off it and people didn't know enough about the wider world to be quite so scared shitless by it - that maybe there was a time when North American mystic religion was actually about religion, and not paranoia. I like to imagine it but I doubt it. A lot.

The point I was getting at is that Nick Cave and Tom Waits are two people I think would have made fantastic itinerant preachers or charismatics back in the day. If I had seen them proselytizing back in, say, 1850, and had been raised over the preceding 29 years, I probably would have joined their cults. It's a strange thought but I'm pretty sure that's what would have happened.