the top five

In my conversations with non-evangelical friends, I’ve been asked repeatedly about “the most outrageously weird or bizarre thing” I have experienced in my five months with the conservative evangelicals. So I figure that the outrageously weird and bizarre habits of the conservative evangelicals must be of some interest to people. Here are my top five:

The shower-wall method of scripture memorization. About a month ago, I posted about discovering scripture verses on the walls of my new shower. Not wholly a pleasant discovery, but I’ve gotten used to it. I even added some of my own biblical pizzazz (check out Ecclesiastes 10:19). Anyway, I let it go, thinking it was just a weird thing that my roommate happened to do. Then someone from my church commented on the blog, telling me that, no—infact, this is a thing. Like “biblical bling,” and “worship centers.” It’s a thing in the evangelical world. People write verses on their shower walls. Update: I brought this up with some friends in a bar in St. Louis last week, and girls in St. Louis do it, too. It’s now officially a thing, since it happens in the 18^th largest city in the United States. Endorsed by barfly girls, no-less.

Awkward swear-word stand-ins. Kicks and giggles. Oh my word. Oh brother. Stinkin’. Eggs and bacon! These are the ones I hear most often. I think I would kick myself without giggling if I ever used any of them seriously. I have settled for the standard cool-kid Christian curses—effing, holy crap, darn, scheisse (which I think I only get away with because it’s in German—apparently, swearing in other languages is kosher). I will drop something minor every once in awhile, but then I just feel bad for making them look so uncomfortable. About 7 weeks ago I dropped my first and last ever f-bomb during casual conversation following a Life Group. You would have thought I had lit somebody’s grandma on fire. And that she was somehow flame-retardant, and turning into The Incredible Hulk in front of us. There was a lot of stricken-ness going on.

Awkward words in general. He laid it on my heart. Let God take it. I think we should just bless her with all our hearts. Confession: sometimes, I don’t even know what we’re talking about. And I’m kind of convinced that sometimes they don’t know either, and that’s why they just keep getting louder and louder when they pray. Like when your deaf Aunt Molly can’t hear you, so your whispered questions about your cousin’s rehab turn into hisses, then shouts, then family stories for years to come. I have stood in conversation with people during which almost all of the above phrases, and several that I don’t have the stomach for, have been uttered, and at the end, I just feel drunk. Drunk on the love of Christ. But drunk all the same, and drunkenness doesn’t lend itself to clarity.

Extreme movie censorship. Last week someone told me that Schindler’s List would have been a good movie had the film-makers not “ruined it with all that nudity.” I said what you would have said, “You mean, the part where the SS officers are forcing the Jews to strip down on their way into the gas chambers?” Him: “Yeah, that and other parts.” Oh brother. The next day, someone else told me that she thought that nudity was only okay in movies about tribal peoples, because they don’t really know any better. Also, there’s an edited version of A Christmas Story.

The inability to really understand the non-Christian world. This doesn’t hold for all of the evangelicals I have met, but for those with whom it is relevant, their confusion is confusing. I started talking about the inerrancy of scripture with somebody way back when I first moved down here. I explained that I’m ok with it, but think that the inerrancy of scripture is often confused with a human inerrancy in interpretation. That I’m against. And I go on to say that a lot of my friends don’t believe that scripture is relevant at all. The girl looks at me, and says, completely innocently (bless her heart), “I don’t understand.” To which I say, “I don’t understand what you don’t understand.” On which she lays the gold standard of an evangelical response. “Well…If God wrote the Bible…And God can’t lie…” You can imagine the humdinger of a silence that hung in the air after that one.

I love these people. I count them as friends. I don’t present these things to mock or destroy. I offer them as modest observations of a culture that sometimes scares me, sometimes beckons me, sometimes pushes me to despair, and almost always makes me laugh.