I’ve blanked a lot out of my memory but I do remember one particularly awkward time where the pastor spent way too long explaining how god designed the asshole and its not for fucking.

When we were young and first married, my wife and I decided to try a church that we had saw online. The website and name made it seem like it would be alright and more modern thinking. We were wrong.

We pull up and the church building is a double wide trailer, a congregation of about 30 people. The preacher appears to be in his 70s.

He sees that he has guests and singles us out and puts us on the spot to introduce ourselves to whole congregation. He never refers to my wife by her name instead just calling her “Wife”. He prays for us multiple times during the service and bring us up during the sermon. (Still just referring to us as TORFdot0 and wife)

Speaking of the sermon, he begins the sermon talking about the gay democrat agenda and how the gays are ruining God’s institution of marriage and how it will soon be illegal to be married to a woman. This gets an audible sigh from the ladies in the front row.

He also preached to cherish our Bible before the black socialist devil in the white house takes them from us.

He compared the Bible to an old hound dog and started barking for going on two minutes. It’s like a dog because it warns us of things to come.

After what seems like an eternity of a sermon, he invites the kids up to the alter for some “Hallelujah” Candy (it’s the Sunday before Halloween). One child takes a second handful of candy and the elderly pastor chastises him and then bends him over his knee and starts spanking him in front of the congregation.

Needless to say we did not give that church a second visit.

I went to a wedding, my girlfriend’s friend was getting married.

For context I’m a brown skinned native American man and my girlfriend was a white girl.

The pastor of the wedding had never met the people he was marrying and assumed that I was the groom.

I told him I wasn’t and he moved on.

I thought that was the end of it.

Queue the pre-wedding little religious ceremony thing and the same pastor who had met me assuming I was the groom and shook my hand said that he believed that with the power of Christ any relationship can work, even ones between people of different races.

He looked directly at me when he said it.

I was the only non-white person at the wedding. I’ve never wanted to beat an old man’s ass before. I didn’t know I had that urge within me.

And now I know.

All of them except the one where they handed me a collection plate and I thought they were giving me the money so I took it.

Not church per se, but my uncle blew his brains out. At the wake, the priest turned his little speech into how evil abortion is. Yes, let’s talk about killing babies… Anything not to tell about the dude who killed himself.

When I was a freshman in college, I let this youth group convince me to visit their weird church. The “pastor” was a young guy who spent the entire sermon talking about how he squandered his time in college before eventually dropping out. Fortunately, the old pastor took pity on him and gave him a job as an assistant—running errands, cleaning, etc. Then one day the old pastor died, so our hero basically just took over since no one else wanted to.

When it was done he tried to sell us bags of stale coffee.

A Mormon service… the amount of brain-washing and misogyny was incredible…

It was right around the release of Star Wars Episode I, and the new pastor thought if he brought modern pop culture references into his sermon, maybe The Youths would sit up and pay attention.

The sermon was a whole thing about “being a Jedi Knight for God” and it was insufferable. I’m not sure time has ever gone by slower. I was twelve and absolutely not won over, I wanted to crawl out of the pew and die.