He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday school, except perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.
The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.
Sinclair Lewis in Elmer Gantry
If fear of eternal damnation is the only thing keeping you from being a crappy person, you're already a crappy person.
Anonymous
As a boy I hoped to avoid Sundays with one pair of grandparents. Sundays meant I would be doomed to go with them to church.
Theirs was an-old line protestant congregation. They met in a somber brick-pile of a building and were led by a monotonic old fellow who believed that length was a cardinal virtue in sermons. The pews were hard. The boredom was agony.
The experience did produce in me a formative effect: Churchgoers appeared to allow themselves distance between preachment and practice. I resolved that adulthood would let me nod to preachment but adopt a practice of spending Sunday mornings elsewhere.
Later experience moderated this view. But memories of being put off by church do recur nowadays, as celebrity preachers tell me I must vote their way or head straight for perdition.
They make a crowd over at the right-wing end of things. Their styles are diverse, and I remain at sixes and sevens about them. Would a desert island be better with a coiffed smoothie or a fire-and-brimstone pulpit-pounder? Rum choice, as the British might say.
Meanwhile, they often display like views of certain matters: In the pursuit of secular political clout, there are few limits on rendering unto Caesar. In the pursuit of contributions, modesty is not virtue. In a church edifice -- well, size does matter.
Billy Graham's renegade son Franklin is a particularly enterprising one of the bunch. He gets himself heard above the clamor, if only by dint of sheer brass. (He has been known to say that people with views unlike his are shaking their fists at God.)
And he has managed his own reconciliation of that Biblical business about God and mammon. A while back he simultaneously collected tidy, full-time salaries from two large non-profit organizations. Queried on how be could be full-time on two jobs at once, he dropped the second salary. Later, he quietly picked it up again. Quite the multi-tasker, he.
Life has long taught that the secular world has no corner on ambition or greed; no monopoly on climbers or con artists. Still it is a dismal thing to glimpse, in self-styled pastors, the profile of a classic movie villain who justified victimizing others: "If God did not want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep."
For someone who has reconsidered his high-horse opinion of church, another prospect also is gloomy. Mingled among the grifters are those who do actually believe in a message of fear and damnation. Hearing them, one would not guess that the term evangelism comes from a root word meaning good news.
As a boy I had not yet learned about the history of conversion at the point of a sword. But I did wonder about the quality of conversion under threat. Might temptation still flourish when no one was looking? Examples came to mind. Sneaking cigarettes behind the garage. Dumping the broccoli when mom left the room.
Of course sub rosa sin takes adult form if the preachers themselves go astray. Pleasures of the flesh have been notable over the years, when now and then one of them was caught exercising a very personal definition of the laying on of hands.
Avarice does not qualify, as it is practiced openly.
A friend of mine likes word play to emphasize points. When something has been going on for a long time, he says it has lasted "since memory runneth not to the contrary." That sounds about right for celebrity preachers. In this country we've had them since Cotton Mather's folks were hanging witches.
They do seem to flourish in cycles. (And nowadays make a much better living.) Especially when they latch onto politicians, and vice-versa, the fat gets in the fire, to wit: The past few years, when supposed moral exemplars have supported a fellow who would steal pennies off a dead man's eyes.
In exploiting their sway of the moment, the smoothies and pulpit-pounders are using not only their followers but the rest of us, too. Like bothersome neighbors, they may be within their rights to behave badly, but we can nonetheless wish they wouldn't. And if they push their behavior as a norm for our own, they go too far.
Thus, when I count my blessings, I include the fact that there is no prospect of my being on a desert island.
