Shunned by Sunday school, Slemp seeks something to worship.
Slemp got kicked out of the church for suggesting in Men’s Sunday School class one morning that “Amazing Grace” is a satire. Unfortunately, a couple of other men knew what “satire” means, and told on him and the next thing you know, he was back to heathen, with an ‘r.’ Slemp’s (former) church will neither permit militant inquiry, nor bobbed hair.
Brother Slemp is now free to either adopt a religion or start one, or none of the above. If he stays in his local religious tradition, there is a protocol that he knows well. If you get kicked out of a church, you can only go to another one with looser standards than the one you were not fit for, and you spiral downward from there to snakes and strychnine. In the mountains, everybody knows the progression the serial-churched must follow, but nobody speaks it out loud.
The main criteria for Slemp in picking a new church was to not pick one where you will go to hell because of false doctrine, and maybe one where they do not do blackface in their nativity scene. He probably would prefer that to Joel Osteen’s teeth show, or those on television that sell beer to the congregation.
Slemp wants to find a new denomination in which the clergy doesn’t fool with children, and that rules out the largest protestant and largest non-protestant denominations right off the bat. The other difficulty is to find a church with a straight music minister who doesn’t do “Amazing Grace” every day. You can wear out anything. Even resting high on the mountain.
Slemp has actually toyed with the idea of starting a cult. He always wanted to be a cult leader, but is not sure what he would tell them. Maybe its about time for a new religion and Slemp thinks he may be just the guy to start it. Every couple thousand years or so somebody starts a cult and goes on up from there.
What would you teach your cult? You would first teach their hearts to fear and then offer relief for those fears. You know, sort of like politics.
Nowadays the worst fear of anybody who has much sense is humans screwing around with sunshine, trapping its warmth down here and not returning it up. We are abusing the Sun and I don’t know how long it will take it. The Sun is the giver of life to animals and plants and we can look right up there and see it, without trusting Joel Osteen to explain it to us. So one idea would be to worship the Sun.
Or at least add another Sun to the Trinity.
You could also get your cult to worship multiple things. Billions of people worship several gods at a time and that seems to endure very well, and there would be a lot of holidays. We could worship computers, cell phones, debit cards or Gibson Mastertones with gold tone rings.
To the aspiring cult leader, remember if you say anything long enough and get enough people to repeat it, it becomes true.
Larry Webster is an attorney in Pikveville.