A long time ago, within the wooded bowels of the North Shore I was a good church-going lad. Good enough to attend Sunday School. Good enough even to get promoted up the church chain and start teaching wee tykes the Sunday School lessons myself. Which was bloody cool, ‘cos at that level all you’re really talking about are fables – Jesus was a good dude who did good things. He healed cripples, fed a few thousand people on some bread and a couple of fish and brought a mate back from the dead. I mean, what’s not to like?
Eventually though, I hung up my chalk and duster, passed the teaching manual onto the next kid, and started hanging out with the adults listening to the sermons. Which was also cool. The minister was someone I respected and liked, as were a lot of the congregation – and, for a while, the sermons just seemed to repeat the notion that Jesus was most certainly a good dude.
But then one day the tone changed. The same minister got up to speak and started prattling on about the immorality of homosexuality. After years of hearing feel-good tales about a cool Jesus – learning what a good Christian should do – this was the first time someone stood up and told me something I shouldn’t do. Being far too interested in the ladies, I wasn’t about to run off and rebel against this particular edict anyway, but it did stir up another reaction in me – one of disgust. Not with the misguidedly-labelled ‘immoral’ gay population, but with a religion that in the space of an hour revealed itself to be so bloody uncool – the opposite of the guy who’s image hung up there on a cross behind the babbling minister.
So I walked out. I don’t know how many of the congregation took that to mean I was ‘one of the boys’ but there were certainly some queer looks coming my way as I strutted down the aisle. I haven’t been back, though I’ll still attend the odd Christmas service if I’m somewhere special and am still struck silent when I tourist my way through the churches of Europe. But it constantly, constantly gets on my wick when I see, read or hear people invoking religion to tell people what they cannot do. A lot of the crap that gets said just doesn’t click with my Sunday School teaching manual image of what Jesus was like.
Now I know Jesus wasn’t all peachy – after all, he was the guy who promised eternal damnation to anyone who didn’t accept his teachings (and eternity is a really fucking long time) – but he was, generally, a pretty stand-up guy. Which is why whenever someone preaches prejudice, intolerance or hate at you all you gotta do is say, "C’mon man, what would Jesus do?"
Which is exactly what Michael Moore did on Hardball earlier this week. Gold…
What would Jesus do? via Hardball, powered by YouTube
good stuff