Peter Manseau

Recently, a controversial megachurch minister Eddie Long was crowned a Davidic king “on behalf of the Jewish people”; but he’s far from the first non-Jew to make use of a so-called rabbi to bolster his spiritual authority.

“There are some among you,” the pope wrote, “who conceive of and desire a Church in America different from that which is in the rest of the world.” Apparently unconcerned that on this side of the ocean the word might have a more positive ring than he intended, he used the name by which this heresy had become known in Europe: Americanism.

Throughout his 32-minute set, Mangum returned more than once to the sad fate of the teenage diarist, and in doing so he created a moment that seemed at once a communal high point of the movement and a peculiarly ominous sing-along, Kumbaya mashed up with catastrophe.