When it comes to any sort of group activity — pep rallies, sports, flash mobs, gang bangs — I’ve just never been much of a joiner.

In the context of Nightcharm, I’m something of a mutant. Virtually all of the team here are lapsed Catholics who ultimately turned to some other form spirituality, but I was never raised with religion, and I’ll never turn to it.

My sojourn with The Gay doesn’t really fit the established pattern either. I never bore the paralyzing yoke of difference and guilt that hetero-slanted faith places on people. People may want to chip away at me, but no one has ever touched me. I have no soul-rending rejection by a het love interest that haunts me. Even if I could mystically condition my orientation away — it seems rather like trying to learn to breathe, in the sense that it’s so much effort put into an act that doesn’t require it — it wouldn’t alter my social mobility a bit. Shame and inferiority fostered by the Father have never broken my back.

Lately, it’s been nigh-impossible to distinguish actual manic God Waddery from an Onion or Landover Baptist spoof. Whether it’s numbingly sincere or cynically staged to drum up the masses, it does nothing so much as further convince me that God is both history’s longest-running scam and the most prevalent form of diagnosable mass hysteria on record.

I’ve really tried to place myself in the mindset of a person who has always moved lock-step with the Moral Majority (easily one of the most asinine oxymorons ever coined) and, say, takes it upon themselves to call for a ban on a book precisely written about the dangers of that practice. Frankly, it leaves me stymied.

Why doesn’t self-awareness ever kick in? Is irony really a learned skill that’s just lost on certain people? If the Medieval power structure that still exists today had seized upon some other sacred text penned by a primitive culture that couldn’t comprehend where the sun went at night or why women menstruated, would we now have to constantly fret over whether sex acts and cotton/poly blends are affronts to Groon, the Haunter of The Swamp or Tekeli-Li, the Volcano Deity who whets her appetite with the blood of young virgins hurled into her molten embrace?

When I asked a Catholic acquaintance what the cosmic significance of her giving up iced coffee for Lent amounted to, she seemed bemused by the idea when she really thought about it. Then, when I inquired why eating flesh was taboo on only one day of the week but not others, another girl chimed in and said, “Because they have to feel guilty about something!” I ask myself what sort of god derives his pleasure from forever demanding that his followers give up their own as they walk through a series of tedious rituals to prove their fealty? Is this what I’m missing out on?

The two kids in the above clip are iconic in their diametric opposition — the dumpy, marble-mouthed, sexless “good” girl who needs to be protected from “the cussin’” by Daddy versus the free-thinking longhair who’s surely side-eyed by the community for being “trouble.” I’ve met her and been him, and while the latter may be tough to go alone, the former has got to be interminable in its upkeep.

One of the all-time camp pious family spectacles for me was Rick Santorum‘s 2006 concession speech. As if the blonde, pearl-wearing wife wasn’t enough, it was the kids — the kids! — who proved to be the most uproarious moppet props in recent memory. These are the Republican ideals of “pure” youngsters: the elder daughter clearly counting the seconds until she can go to college, the son looking like a clock tower sniper, and the immortal little girl struggling futilely to weep as she clutches her dolly clad in identical gingham. Whenever an ideology unwillingly descends into parody, it’s time to reevaluate the mission statement, and Old Time American Religion has become so overheated that it’s no longer lampoonable. I have trouble feigning interest for three whole minutes when the Jehovah’s Witnesses knock on my door; how can I ever hope to have enough focus to pull this level of performance off?

I don’t know what’s more galling at this point — being condemned by the pulpit-pounders or having them reach out to you condescendingly like you’re an alm-beseeching leper. Church signs — once the bastians for apocalyptic “Repent! The End Is Nigh!” hysteria — are now repositories for dickish sarcasm that smacks of bitterness as young people realize they don’t need to have their asses in a pew to spiritually “connect” with a god who appears in snack food but can’t save children from becoming machete-wielding soldiers.

Religion is a product that runs the risk of becoming obsolete when consumers tire of it because it fails to deliver on its promises, and so it needs to remarket and tailor its sales pitch in order to keep from becoming Mr. Pibb or the other three Baldwin brothers. This video advert (below) for a new-and-improved church in Texas that’s niche-marketed for those “impacted by same-sex attraction” — sort of the theological variation on Hostess “Extra Fancy” cupcakes with the lattice frosting design — encapsulates every reason why I’m a lifelong atheist.

There’s the God’s Eye view of people standing in place in a rigid, conformist pattern, glazed-eyed and Xanax-controlled. The music wouldn’t be out of place in one of those self-help or make-money-in-real-estate infomercials. The men visually and verbally dominate, drawling lame parroted pablum about their community’s success in fixing broken people. There’s nary a looker in the lot, and young people are almost entirely absent. The few women who chime in — if they aren’t lesbians themselves — are trying to put pleasant spins on marriages of desperate co-dependence. I count one flash-in-the-pan non-white member in the mix. Would the world really be worse off if this kind of pack mentality died out all together?

In the end, I can’t imagine anything more spiritually devastating than sitting out on a hill waiting in vain for God(ot) to “fix” me, never realizing that his house actually creates the problems so that it can take credit for their solutions that never come.

© 2010, Shawn Baker. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com