David McElroy

I’m not a psychologist, but I think Matt Pitt is probably crazy. Or at least badly disturbed. He’s an independent evangelist in the Birmingham area who developed a huge following over nearly a decade. He’s destroyed his ministry now, and I think the story says a lot about people who latch onto charismatic narcissists.

Pitt is a former drug abuser who turned to God at some point while he was in college. In 2004, he started holding events in his parents’ basement to warn other young people about what he had gone through and turn them to God. In time, the event grew large enough that he had to move to bigger venues, eventually holding weekly meetings at a large area church. He was on top of the world with his ministry that he called The Basement.

Friends of mine who visited his meetings said his “preaching” was shallow, rambling and superficial. He has no serious theological training and those I trust say it’s obvious to them. But impressionable young people loved the flashy shows he put on. His events attracted thousands.

Pitt’s undoing started more than a year ago. He was driving along I-65 south of Birmingham when he began flashing blue lights on his vehicle, forcing other cars to pull out of the way for him. Police in the small town of Calera arrested him for impersonating a police officer. His only defense? A local sheriff had made him an “honorary deputy,” so he claims that made him a real police officer. “Honorary deputy” is a designation given by some sheriffs as a public relations move. It carries just as much legal authority as a child’s plastic badge. It’s merely an ego thing.

When it came time for his misdemeanor trial, Pitt pleaded guilty and got a suspended sentence with probation. He apologized to the court and said he had learned his lesson.

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Every political group attracts a few crackpots, but no group attracts as high a percentage of crackpots as groups with unpopular opinions. Outcasts are drawn to fringe groups — and fringe groups have little enough support that they don’t want to alienate any potential supporters.

I’ve been aware for a long time that libertarian and some conservative groups attract crazy people. Many times, these crazy people are highly intelligent, very weird and often obsessed with something strange. Those folks aren’t generally going to be accepted among the mainstream parties, because those groups have plenty of support and it’s easy to edge the weirdos out. But fringe groups accept the weirdos more readily.

And why not? One of the core libertarian beliefs is that people have the right to be whatever they want to be. If somebody’s life centers around promoting drinking colloidal silver to cure every ailment under the sun — or trying to communicate with aliens or researching conspiracies about how the Bilderbergers rule the world — hey, that’s his business, even if he’s nuts. As long as he agrees with us that other people have the right to believe and act as they choose, he’s welcome in the “liberty tent.”

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Unless some last-second deal emerges, the U.S. government will be shut down until squabbling Democrats and Republicans can reach a budget agreement. The media is filled with stories about how terrible this is. The Boston Globe even had an online headline that read, “US bracing for government shutdown no one wants.”

Are you scared of this terrible thing called a shutdown yet?

I’m ignoring my better judgment to comment on this, simply because almost anything you say about it is used as fodder by partisans of one side or the other as evidence that they’re right. But I’m not “with” either side on this.

I’m certainly not with the Democrats, who want to grow the size of government bigger and bigger and bigger, including funding the ObamaCare monster. But why would I support the Republicans, who are happy to vote for a monstrously huge government that’s almost as big, just as long as ObamaCare is delayed for a bit?

For years, Republicans have shown that they don’t oppose Big Government. They simply oppose making government quite as big as what Democrats want. And they certainly favor ever-increasing funding for the military-industrial complex that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about? (But who can trust Eisenhower? Those five-star generals are notorious peaceniks who don’t want to fund the military. Right?)

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