Don’t expect deep thoughts this week, for I’m struggling with recalcitrant book prose, and beyond that all I’m fit for is reporting on the lunacies of the world. But this is a good one, for it combines all the best of America: guns and God.

The Louisville [Kentucky] Courier-Journal has an article this week whose title tells all: “Kentucky Baptists use gun giveaways to lure unchurched to Christ.” You couldn’t make that up, could you? And it’s just as bad as you think (there’s an amusing but also frightening video at the paper’s site):

In an effort its spokesman has described as “outreach to rednecks,” the Kentucky Baptist Convention is leading “Second Amendment Celebrations,” where churches around the state give away guns as door prizes to lure in nonbelievers in hopes of converting them to Christ. As many as 1,000 people are expected at the next one, on Thursday at Lone Oak Baptist Church in Paducah, where they will be given a free steak dinner and the chance to win one of 25 handguns, long guns and shotguns. The goal is to “point people to Christ,” the church says in a flier. Chuck McAlister, an ex-pastor, master storyteller and former Outdoor Channel hunting show host who presides at the events as the Kentucky Baptist Convention’s team leader for evangelism, said 1,678 men made “professions of faith” at about 50 such events last year, most of them in Kentucky. In Louisville, he said, more than 500 people showed up on a snowy January day for a gun giveaway at Highview Baptist Church, and 61 made decisions to seek salvation. McAlister’s boss, Paul Chitwood, the Kentucky Baptist Convention’s executive director, said such results speak for themselves. “It’s been very effective,” he said in an interview.

One of the giveaways was near Murray, Kentucky, where I spoke at Murray State not too long ago. Here’s one of the lucky converts there:

They do, however, interview other pastors and laypeople who think this guns-for-Jesus gambit is a travesty, which it is. It makes me ashamed to be an American. When I feel this way, I remember H. L. Mencken’s quote from The American Mercury:

QUESTION: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, why do you live here? Answer: Why do men go to zoos?

Some of the funnier quotes from the Courier-Journal piece:

“The day of hanging a banner in front of your church and saying you’re having a revival and expecting the community to show up is over,” said McAlister, who hosted the religious-themed “Adventure Bound Outdoors” on the Outdoor Channel for 16 years.“You have to know the hook that will attract people, and hunting is huge in Kentucky,” he said. “So we get in there and burp and scratch and talk about the right to bear arms and that stuff.”

Asked what Jesus would think of the gun giveaways, McAlister said, “I don’t know, but he was pretty handy with the whip when he ran the money-changers out of the temple.”

A Baptist church in Oakwood, Ga., last year gave away .22-caliber rifles at services to attract men who don’t think going to church is “manly,” its pastor said, according to news accounts.But Chitwood said McAlister came up with the idea of focusing the events on the hot-button right to bear arms, and McAlister said it was his idea as well to give away firearms in larger quantities.“We have found that the number of unchurched men who will show up will be in direct proportion to the number of guns you give away,” McAlister said.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!

h/t: Barry