In Which We Go To Church Without Going To Church

Baton Rouge, LA--More accurately NOLA, I suppose, but in my mind I'm back in Baton Rouge, and since this post will take as its subject a memory I feel it's fitting to town-stamp it at the memory's site. In Baton Rouge we went to church in a warehouse and listened to a fake preacher who was actually an accountant. The church, which retains the name not because it deserves it but because I can't think of what else to call it, was this one suggested to Eve by the person (I think a he, but his name is eluding me) who showed her around St. Francisville LA. Brief Sunday-morning analysis of the website was inconclusive--we chose the Healing Place Church over Bethany because of the former's less overtly political website; Bethany's scared us, HPC's scared us less, but we shouldn't have worried in the least, because just once before (in a classroom--a brief primer: this fool of a professor equated the perjury charge leveled against a policeman friend of his who had perjured himself during a murder trial with Bill Clinton's acquittal in the Senate of perjury, neglecting to consider that just maybe lying to a jury during a murder trial isn't quite equivalent to saying that someone didn't fellate you when in fact they did (brief, brief aside: Google's dictionary doesn't recognize the verb fellate, and I'm not sure if the reason is more likely to be prudishness or frequency of usage, but a brief experiment reveals that it does recognize the noun fellatio and so it's probably the latter reason)) have I been in a place where so much was said without anything being said. We arrived ten minutes early and sat in the car for nine, watching the cars-nearly all expensive, and nearly all SUVs--file in and steeling ourselves for we-didn't-know-what. They could tell we were first-timers, either because we had quizzical expressions or because we reeked of Christlessness or both, and so ushered us to specially-marked seats in more or less the middle of the warehouse theater (I simply can't think of another way to describe this place) that they tried to pass as a nave--for the entire "service" I fretted, and my guess is that Eve did as well, that they would try to work on us, as it were, but thankfully they left us more or less alone.

The first half-hour was dominated by a predictably solid but mind-numbingly dull band singing what seemed to be secular love songs with two or three references to Jesus scattered throughout. Instrumentation: one drummer; one percussionist (solitary, inaudible conga); no less than four male guitarists, two of whom sang; two female lead vocalists; one mixed chorus of perhaps 25; one bassist; one keyboardist. Type: all young; all dressed nicely but casually; all painstakingly groomed to varying degrees of hipness. Intra-band engagements: one, between blond female vocalist and indistinct guitarist. Favorite Christmas carols of Mac's forever ruined by godawful cover: one, "It Came Upon A Midnight Clear".

Ratio of spoken-word mentions of "dollars" to spoken-word mentions of "God": approximately 4:1. Ratio of amount of sermon devoted to various fundraising efforts to amount of sermon devoted to reading and analysis of biblical passage (from Luke): approximately 1:1. Amount of money raised by church in the previous 21-day period: $830,000. Amount of money spent on new church complex that could instead have been spent on any number of excellent causes in the area:.... but I'm becoming bitter. Eve said after we left that she didn't feel like she had gone to church.