Bart Simpson once said, “If God can do anything, could he create a hot dog so huge that even He couldn’t eat it?” Ridiculous question, sure, but the idea of there being a God at all is tough enough to wrap your head around, every bit as tough as believing in the otherworldly splendor of a God-sized hot dog.

I was born a skeptic, long before I ever even knew what it meant to innately doubt things. Part of me blames my brothers, a pair of unrepentant assholes who took pleasure in spoiling for me the mysteries of Santa, ventriloquism and the process of undoing a female brassiere clasp. My parents didn’t help either, since they were always being railroaded by the same shit-eating grins that were nice to me on Sunday mornings. Still, I remember asking hard questions from the outset.

So, God’s just a guy? Like, a real masculine fellow? And He seriously created all this shit, from birds to bees to babyback ribs? And he fucked with Job that hard, just as some twisted social study? And He sees us poop and hump and then sing praise songs on Sunday mornings? Maybe He looks down on us and says, “Great song, guys. Really liked that round you did in ‘I’ve Got the Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy.’ Really felt the joy there.” And He hears me say that I’m sorry for thinking nasty thoughts about Stephanie from Full House and He’s just like, You’re forgiven, we cool? And He maybe looks like Alanis Morissette or Aslan the Narnia Lion or King Triton from Little Mermaid? All sounds a little fishy to eight-year-old me.

Believing is only half the battle. That’s only part of why faith is really hard, and that’s why one of the central themes to my entire relationship with my parents is, well, Is it worth it? Because religious cynicism isn’t new. It didn’t even begin when Dad was in college, when a good portion of his bible college was only faking holiness to avoid the unholy carnage of Vietnam.

But if God can do anything, and I really mean anything, couldn’t he also make His Only Son into the very first Christian cynic?

In 1926, literary treasure Sinclair Lewis wrote a book called Elmer Gantry, a book that took equal time to analyze the persistent religious fervor of the time as well as the many ways you could use that fervor to achieve your own ends. The Evangelical movement of the early 1900s was a true phenomenon, a time when American living rooms and armories and school gymnasiums were being turned into weeklong revival meetings, and when people like Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson were building legions of passionate followers who probably didn’t really know just what the fuck they were actually following.

Elmer Gantry, title character of the novel of the same name, capitalized on this religious nirvana. He was a drunk, loved the women of the night, and was charming as hell. He was a fraud, knowingly condescending the people who were the most trusting. He was, in short, the perfect man at the perfect time. It’s a damn shame that he’s been lost to history.

Of course, he hasn’t been lost to history. Elmer Gantry’s spirit, even if it isn’t explicitly written, is everywhere. And never more clearly than in a bible passage that is among Christians’ favorites, taken from the book of Hebrews: “Faith is the evidence of things unseen.” You’ll hear it quoted an nauseum on Sundays, probably because it does a good job of summing up the bewildering foundation of belief.

But while the believer sees this passage as something resembling validation, the cynic sees this as something else entirely: ammunition.

Watch this video, and move it to about 1:45 if you’re sneaking this in during your mid-morning dump:

We shouldn’t be surprised by this, not in the least. Say what you will about Don Trump, but the man can feel out an audience, and he knew what sort of challenged individuals were hearing him on this day. It isn’t even his fault, really. I’d have done the same thing.

“What’s my #1 favorite book?” he asks, as a rapt audience responds with a resplendent, in-unison, “The Bible.”

Oh, Jesus.

Donald Trump very well may have read the bible. I doubt it, but he may have. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. What does matter, really, is that it matters to people that he says that he read it, and that at least one person thought, “Well, I wasn’t sure about Trump with the housing scandal and blatant, cartoonish racism, but now that he reads the bible…Fuck it, Make America Great Again, by whatever means necessary.”

In 2000, the most telling predictor of how a person would vote was whether or not a person was a regular churchgoer. (You might remember this particular election as the one where we saved ourselves from eight interminable years of Al Gore’s droning speech patterns.) Something like 62% of churchgoers voted for Bush, and while I’m not suggesting that George W. Bush isn’t an honest Christian, I am suggesting that hardline Christian politicians are a disaster. Too much posturing, too much bullshit, too much easy pandering to people who really should know better. “I love the bible” gives a man — Or woman! Ha! — a pass to rely on his gut, which is always stupid. We’ve gone to war over “things unseen.”

Who knows, Donald Trump might be a fantastic president. He’ll certainly walk back on his neanderthal racial positions, maybe he’ll even put his masturbatory deal-making skills to good use.

But if he does, believe me, the bible won’t have the first thing to do with it.

Whether or not you think God is watching this election, it’s tough to doubt that even Jesus himself would be giving a cynical side-eye to the whole circus. History has proven that the evangelical vote will probably swing things, and likely in the direction of whatever candidate can convincingly quote Paul’s letters while also justifying their position on women’s rights. Should be fun.

But what is really at the heart of all of this — politics, fatalism, the female brassiere clasp — is the existential “God question,” also known as Pascal’s wager.

Blaise Pascal was a 17th-century mathematician and kook. He was a famous hypochondriac and neurotic, tendencies which were proved right when he died when he was only 39. Fortunately for us, his neuroses informed much of his morbid worldview, which eventually gave us his famous religious theory. “Pascal’s wager” is basically this: if there’s a chance that heaven and hell are real, isn’t it preferable to just go ahead and believe in God? You lose nothing by believing, while choosing not to believe means that you get an eternity of hellfire and brimstone if you choose wrong. It’s basically the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade writ large. Basically, if you’re on your deathbed, wouldn’t you pull a quick Constantine-style conversion, just in case you’d lived wrong the entire time beforehand?

Is this fatalistic? You bet your crucifix-clutching ass it is, and that’s why this is so fundamental to the gameplan of any politician worth a damn. How many races are decided based on gut reactions, whether it’s abortion, gay marriage, immigration or some other gut-based issue? And it all comes back to Pascal’s wager, and the idea that we’d rather err on the side of afterlife certainty than take a chance on the possibility that maybe, just maybe, we’ve been wrong all along.

What would Jesus do, really? Do we have any idea? We’ll get into that next time.

Me, Two Fingers, One Thumb, and the Female Brassiere Clasp

Do you ever wish you could unlearn something? Like that you’d never smoked that first cigarette or hadn’t memorized all the moves to “Bye, Bye, Bye”? That’s how I feel about the bra clasp.

My brother Ryan had a way of ensuring that my sexual development was stunted, starting with the black-market sale of a topless truckstop calendar that I could only view when I was underneath his bed. The deal was that I could look at these totally ’80s nudes, but only when I was totally out of sight, and only when I was under his bed. Don’t bother calling the BBB; he gave me a flashlight, as any good 13-year-old porn purveyor would.

But it’s the day that I was educated in the mechanics of the bra clasp that really changed the trajectory of my romantic experience, and I had no part in making it happen. I was sitting in my room reading the liner notes to the Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey soundtrack — “God Gave Rock ‘n’ Roll to You” is still a total jam — when Ryan and his friend Marty happened upon my solo rock opera. Marty reached under his shirt and pulled out something foreign, something I’d never seen before but have worn in several well-received Halloween costumes since. Yeah, it was a bra. They’d stolen it from a well-endowed classmate, and decided to make me their proxy.

I was nine. What did I know about bras? Just that they hid boobs from plain sight. And what did I know about boobs? Nothing but what I’d absorbed while enjoying flashlight-lit trucker calendars from under Ryan’s bed. And on this day, Ryan and Marty decided to teach me how to unclasp a bra, long before I’d ever had a pube, or had even entertained the idea of seeing a real, human boob.

A thumb, two forefingers, snap. In fifteen minutes, nine-year-old me was snapping the clasp as readily as I’d snap my own fingers. It was automatic. Ryan and Marty had made me a bra-snapping cyborg, probably before they’d even seen the elusive female nipple.

Fast forward five years. I’m now a real adolescent, and I’m watching Empire Records with my first “girlfriend.” The kissing is becoming a little repetitive. Is this what people do? Just keep smacking and lapping at each other’s faces? My hairless, scrawny little hands creep toward what is apparently a bra, and Ryan and Marty’s lesson becomes vivid in my mind’s eye: thumb, forefingers, snap. The bra is off.

She and I both looked at each other, both thinking the same thing: you shouldn’t be so good at unsnapping a bra. Truth is, I didn’t want to be, and I truly wasn’t ready for what happens when you’re trying to play it cool and now you’ve got a boob in your hand. Ryan and Marty hadn’t prepared me for that part.

The point is, Ryan is terrible. Also, boobs.

The Pastor’s Kid is becoming a book. It really has been a passion project, and it’s gotten more popular than I thought it would. I think there is a seed here that will hopefully make for good reading, and hopefully make it a little more broad.

So, 200 or so pages. What will it be? What I’m hoping is that it can be a good cross-section of what I do and don’t know about faith, and the questions that are inevitably unanswered. I’ve loved being a pastor’s kid, and a big part of that stems from the fact that my parents are vastly different from me. I respect them, I revere them, but I could never be like them.

I hope to have it done by mid-summer. Go Pastor’s Kid.



Next time on Pastor’s Kid, we’ll finish this examination of Jesus-based hyperbole, and look at how the bible is consumed by those who love it most.