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clapped and whistled and chanted, “Hoo-ah! Hoo-ah!”
    â€œThat’s all. A mere trifle,” Plowright said, getting laughter and more applause.
    â€œWilling to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings full of civilians,” he went on. Not funny now. Starting to preach it. “One million two hundred thousand willing to strap dynamite around their waists and get on a bus, a city bus, in the holy city of Jerusalem, in the land of the Bible, a city bus, filled with women going to the market, with children going to their lessons, a city bus, right in the middle of the day and ignite that dynamite, there in the holy city of Jerusalem.
    â€œThere are those who will tell you, it’s just one percent, so why worry.
    â€œThere are those who will tell you that they are mostly over there, that we have our Homeland Security and we have our high alerts and we have the greatest military in the world... Hallelujah . . . .”

    And the choir—the Angels they’re called; Gwen used to sing with them—more dimly lit than the pastor so that you could forget they were there, now said, “Hallelujah,” behind him in their heavenly voices, and their voices, though soft, were carried on the speakers throughout the Cathedral of the Third Millennium, and their voices came from all around and filled the room. If you were up among the clouds, weightless, those voices would waft you even higher.
    But Plowright didn’t need his Angels for emphasis. The congregation hoo-ahed, they clapped, they hollered, “Hallelujah.”
    â€œAnd we’re taking the fight to the enemy. Hallelujah.”
    â€œHallelujah,” the Angels sang while the congregation roared, six thousand voices or more, in praise of the crusade to defend us all.
    â€œBut . . . , ” Plowright said, calling a halt to the noise, “but they are not just over there. Oh no. Oh no.
    â€œWe find that once again, that they are here. That they are among us. There’s the one billion two hundred million—then there’s that one percent—one million, two hundred thousand, and out of that more than a million—there is one, there is one, right here!
    â€œOne crazed jihadist, Ahmad Nazami, who pretended to be some sort of refugee, who pretended to accept America’s hospitality, America’s amazingly generous hospitality, who took advantage of that hospitality to pick up a gun and murder a man because that man dared to disagree with his mad version of religion.
    â€œHow many more were on his list?
    â€œHow many were on Ahmad Nazami’s list? Who was next?”
    â€œWell, I too disagree with his religion,” Pastor Plowright said. “Does that mean I’m next on his jihad hit list?”
    â€œYou disagree with his religion,” he said to us.
    And we agreed. “Jesus,” many of us cried. “We belong to Jesus.”
    â€œWe have the Bible right here. It’s the word of God. I have read this book from cover to cover many times. So have many of you, so if I missed something here, feel free to correct me. But as I recall, nowhere does Jesus say, ‘Oh, by the way, although I am the Son of God, I didn’t get my gospel right.

    â€œâ€˜So wait awhile, six hundred years or so, and then an illiterate Arab is going to come out of the desert to do a rewrite .’ An Arab, by the way, who married a woman old enough to be his mother, married her for her money.
    â€œThen he married at least fifteen other women.
    â€œOne of those marriages was to a six-year-old girl, and it was consummated when she was nine years old. Nine years.
    â€œDo you think that God would send a child molester—we are speaking of a major-league pedophile—to come and redo the scriptures? What kind of religion worships a pedophile?
    â€œMohammed is a prophet that only the ACLU could love.”
    Laughter, applause, and amens!
    â€œLet me tell you what Jesus did say. He