Category: Life and Shadow

Some mornings, I wake up remembering a flurry of odd, seemingly unrelated moments from the past. A few came to mind today.

The first two were from my long-ago church days: same church, different pastors.

For some reason, the first pastor took a half-hearted interest in me, and in hindsight, it was a little odd. He was married to a woman, but his manner was notably effeminate.

Sometimes after a service, he’d invite me into his office and ask me how my week had been, how my family was doing, and dumb shit like that.

I was in my early 20s and fairly naive, but he never acted inappropriately—I just didn’t understand what his goal was.

I do remember that he was usually very distracted, and when I was in his office, he’d often be on the phone, working at his computer, or talking with other people in the room while I just sat there, silent and confused.

One time, he invited me into his office and absently rattled off the same old questions: “How ya been, man? How’s your mother?” As I started to answer, I noticed he wasn’t paying me a bit of attention.

Instead, he pulled out a giant checkbook from his desk and began writing a check for an amount that seemed obscene to my broke ass—at least in the high hundreds, if not more. I was making $7 an hour back then, so I took notice.

As he wrote the check, he was talking under his breath—whether to himself or both of us, I couldn’t tell, but it was loud enough for me to hear.

“Since the secretary’s not here, we’ll just forge it,” he said in a nonchalant, sing-song tone, scribbling her name on a check that obviously required the signatures of two different people.

I haven’t thought of that moment in probably 20 years. What the hell was I witness to? Well, besides a pastor committing check fraud.

Shortly later, the pastor left the church in a swirl of drama that had nothing to do with money—at least, not that I’m aware of. Churches are skilled at concealing such things, though.

The next pastor was the kind of slick con artist that populates pulpits everywhere. Looking back, there were a ton of red flags around him from the beginning.

When he came to the church, the “board of elders” (a.k.a. a group of successful businessmen) failed to tell the congregation that the dude resigned from his previous position after he was caught in a sleazy motel with the wife of one of his staff members. I learned that later from someone who attended his old church.

The guy was a smarmy piece of shit whose sermons were basically a string of hammy remarks and incredulous stories that he clearly pulled from the folds of his asshole.

He was great at crowd work, and I think he secretly wanted to be a comedian, but he was obviously sly enough to know that fleecing a flock was a steadier gig than working the comedy circuit.

When the pastor came to town, I’d just moved into my first apartment and didn’t own any furniture. Somehow, word got back to him that one of his congregants was in need, so he generously offered to loan me an air mattress he’d recently purchased.

“Try not to get it dirty, though,” he said as he handed me the box. “I’m returning it to Target in a couple of weeks for a refund, and I’m gonna tell them it wasn’t used.”

Needless to say, he was later forced to resign when he had an affair with one of the women in the congregation. I think he became a motivational speaker or some such huckster bullshit.

The one memory that sears my brain the most is from maybe seven or eight years ago. Early one Saturday morning, I was taking pictures in Downtown Atlanta and stopped inside the Marriott Marquis to piss.

The hotel was packed with attendees of a Christian conference, and appeared to be sold out.

I always get a cheap thrill from riding in the hotel’s glass elevators, so I stepped inside one, and behind me followed a tiny Asian girl—obviously a prostitute. When you live in Atlanta, you know what they look like. She was maybe five feet tall and appeared to be, at most, 16.

As the elevator shot up the atrium, the gears of my mind began turning: why the hell is a prostitute at a church conference?

The elevator opened at the 47th floor, and we both stepped out. She turned to the left, and I went to the right, secretly watching her from across the atrium.

She walked up to the double doors of one of the hotel’s executive suites and quietly knocked. One of the doors slowly opened just enough for her to slip inside, then quickly closed behind her.

I don’t know who she was about to fuck, but I can hazard a guess: probably some hot-shot pastor who was paid a small fortune to make an appearance there.

A few minutes later, I rode back down to the atrium level and, as I stepped off the elevator, I walked past a small group of teenagers, likely a church youth group.

A young girl, maybe 16, came running up to a guy who looked slightly older than the rest of them—maybe he was the youth pastor.

The girl’s face was flushed, and her eyes were glazed over as she babbled excitedly: “The most wonderful thing that could ever happen to a Christian has happened to me. I’ve been filled with the Holy Spirit and received the gift of tongues.”

I’m not even gonna touch the “speaking in tongues” and “filled with the Spirit” nonsense—that’s a rabbit hole best avoided.

I’d long left the church and Christianity behind at that point, but it sickened me to the core to witness faithful adherents at the bottom bleating and braying about God, utterly oblivious to the fact that, in that very moment, in the same building, one of their leaders was likely being serviced by an underage prostitute.

It also infuriated me to know that if the truth were revealed to them, about half would simply deny it, and the other half would excuse it with a wave of the hand. “God uses imperfect vessels,” “David lusted after Bathsheba and was a man after God’s own heart”, blah blah blah.

I was raised in the church and spent decades there—I know exactly how Christians have been conditioned to respond to a lack of integrity.

When a leader’s hypocrisy and deception are exposed, a few might shed performative tears and blubber something about repentance, but when the next lying sack of shit comes along, they’ll still fall at his feet in awe and reverence.

Many will immediately refute it and insist on living in tenuous fantasy, reasoning to themselves that their denial and self-deception are the substance of “faith.”

Often, a lack of integrity is met with a shrug or even tacit approval. Although few have the balls to admit it, most Christians love that their leaders are as disingenuous and deceitful as they are, dealing in darkness while claiming holiness.

It’s been disheartening, but not surprising, to watch the so-called Christians of the United States gaze admiringly at a convicted felon, pedophile rapist, con artist, compulsive liar, malignant narcissist, and all-around piece of shit—the absolute antithesis of Christ—and say, “Yep, that’s our guy!”

Not once, but twice, no less.

America’s toxic, bastardized version of Christianity is so far removed from the teachings of Christ that the nation’s so-called Christians wouldn’t recognize Jesus if he were standing in front of them. In fact, they would utterly revile him for his simplicity and purity of spirit—and his brown skin.

It’s become quite fashionable for American Christians to whine about Satan, demons, and spiritual attacks—an obvious narcissistic shortcut to absolve themselves of their own poor decisions and lack of moral conscience.

You’re the real demons, motherfuckers. Your choice to deal with darkness is your own and yours alone, and you delight in it. Grow the fuck up and admit it.

Nor is the phenomenon exclusive to Christians: The citizens of the United States are, on the whole, a dishonest and duplicitous people who despise truth, subsist on catastrophic fantasy, and hide behind a veneer of moralizing self-righteousness that is repulsive and exhausting.

As an American, I’ve learned to ignore everyone’s words because they mean jackshit. Everyone’s lying to themselves and each other, and the more you bleat about your little titty-baby theories and claim moral superiority, the more I know you’re a blithering, willful idiot—it’s just that simple.

Years of disillusionment have taught me to scrutinize a person’s actions carefully. It’s the tiny decisions we make that reveal everything about our character, and I promise you, every choice we make, no matter how small, is being watched and evaluated. That’s the shit we’re being judged on—not our meaningless beliefs.

What I look for now in my fellow humans is even a shred of integrity. Sadly, I find little of it.