June Must Be Religious Conservatives on Parade Month

Well, we all survived "Porn Sunday" without too much damage to the traditional liturgical calendar. Although give these evangelicals--who are just a little too preoccupied with sex--much more room and they may just spin "Palm Sunday" to mean something uncouth.

Next up: here come the Southern Baptists to evangelize the buckle of the Bible Belt while enjoying all of the mercantile amenities at "Shopryland." Reportedly, SBC messengers are coming through Nashville neighborhoods door-to-door to pad their membership numbers and baptize a million new members. I hope they stop by here. I was baptized in a Southern Baptist church years ago, but I want to have a little fun with them. When they ask me if I would like to accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior, I will tell them, "I imagine so, but I have to ask permission from my wife first." That ought to needle-prick their preference for submission of wives to their husbands. I also want to ask them why they are so hell-bent on destroying our public schools when so many of us are working so hard to rescue them.

One thing I don't get is that the SBC is headquartered here in Nashville, but they somehow have failed to take our town and to turn it into an evangelical Vatican City. Their best answer is to bring in several thousand interlopers to do the job? Southern Baptist leaders need to learn how to work this town better. Network. That's the secret. After all, this is a tourist and music industry town. We're used to interlopers. Half of us are interlopers. We won't be impressed just because they come from across the country to knock on our doors.

I don't think that either "Porn Sunday" or the SBC pose much threat to Nashville or to Tennessee. And it could be worse. We could live somewhere much more susceptible to religious hucksters, say Texas, where the Governor is just about to help the Lone Star State devolve into a church. That would be some kind of history: from a republic to a state to a church. It's like Texas is becoming the-Enlightenment-and-the-Reformation-in-reverse.