Jesus Got Rizz

The cutting edge of effective marketing has always been a young man’s game. YouTube has made MrBeast a billionaire while Harrison Ford calls social media “ridiculous” and a “disaster.” But marketing innovation favoring the young certainly predates the conflicting views of Boomers and GenZers. In fact, the paradigm is biblical.

Take God and Jesus, for example. At the same time that God was requiring circumcision as a loyalty pledge, Jesus chose as his first miracle turning water into wine. Someone’s got rizz.

Imagine if Jesus had started with healing sick people or stretching a meal. He would have stayed completely under the radar and died a lonely Jew, working at the ancient equivalent of the Mayo Clinic or as the world’s first Tupperware salesman. But Jesus could read the room. Today, Mardi Gras draws over 50x the attendance of the nation’s largest medical convention. People love a good party. They always have, and Jesus knew it. “Check out this White Zin I whipped up in the wash basin. Would you rather party with me or listen to my dad try to talk the father of the bride into investing in his penis slashing pyramid scheme?” People often ask why if Jesus was so good at miracles he didn’t just levitate himself off the cross. What I want to know is why he didn’t make the Romans a batch of fig and pomegranate mead. Nobody gives any shit to the guy who brings the keg.

The real ShamWow!, Slap Chop guy was Paul. Before he wrote half of the New Testament, changing identities more than Prince and Kanye combined, he was a Roman ICE agent on his way to Damascus to bust up some Christians when the story goes that he was struck blind for three days. He was miraculously re-sighted when he signed on to be Jesus’s new promoter. I think he couldn’t see because he had his keffiyeh on crooked under his MAGA hat (Make the Apostles Gangrenous Again) while he worked out his plans for the world’s first evangelical megachurch. “Let’s see. After 20 centuries of Jewish law, I’ll waive the whole circumcision thing. People can just say they’re picking up what I’m laying down, and I’ll promise them an eternal party with Jesus as the sommelier.” He was as popular as a guy selling prosthetics at a lepers convention.

I don’t know what to believe about any of it. I thought that made me an agnostic, but it turns out that by strict definition, agnostics are just as arrogant as religious zealots and atheists. True agnostics believe that nothing is known or can be known about God or Jesus or Allah or Buddha or Superman or light sabers or I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. I wonder what agnostics think about Dexter, the dog who walks around Ouray on his hind legs, or the fizzy explosion when you drop a Mentos into a Diet Coke.

I wish I had the conviction of a Jim and Tammy Faye. I couldn’t imagine trying to convince people that God wants me to have a new gold-plated swimming pool more than he wants their children to eat. Or how about Ron Reagan? That was next-level arrogance when he delivered his famous TV commercial line, “Ron Reagan, lifelong atheist, not afraid of burning in hell.” The condescending, smug look on his face makes me hope there is a god. I hope Ron’s eternal purgatory is serving as the Walmart-style greeter at the pearly gates holding the door while eating shit with a spoon. And I hope his arrogant smirk is replaced with the shocked look of a Pacific Ocean topographer in a kayak paddling off the edge of the earth.

Maybe it’s my perpetual insecurity, but it strikes me that the people who know always come across as arrogant. I have lots of Catholic friends. I often wonder if they ever think about how arrogant it looks to the rest of the world that they continue to prevent priests from getting married despite all the evidence that maybe the celibacy policy could stand to be reconsidered. I continue to buy toilet paper rather than install a bidet, and I have cognitive dissonance about the microplastics I’m ingesting every time my yellow water cup goes through the dishwasher, so I guess I understand that a fraught policy in place for a couple of thousand years feels pretty intractable. But when it comes to celibacy, maybe they should look at the evidence that we humans are not exactly proficient with abstinence or self-control. Alcohol, gambling, and pornography combine to generate over $2.5 trillion annually. That’s the same as the GDP of Italy, coincidentally, not including Vatican City, the home of the celibacy decree that seems as flawed as the fashion of the Papal Swiss Guard. Maybe the Pope’s security detail should take the oath of celibacy because with those getups, there is no way they are getting laid anyway.

I was not raised Catholic, and thus, was not subjected to the diddling-roulette of serving as an altar boy. I was neither a Penn State football player, nor a Michigan State gymnast. Alas, if my parents wanted to gamble on me playing with a grown man’s testicles, their best bet was sending me on a Boy Scout camping trip with the rest of the unextraordinary youth of my generation.

I just don’t know what to believe. I go to a Methodist church for two reasons: I am married to the children’s minister and I like the people. Everyone else looks as confused as I am, and we make a big deal about welcoming gay people and black & brown people and trans people and disabled people and people like me who fuck up the GenZer’s pronouns. We even had a guy in the middle of a manic episode once grab the microphone while taking off his clothes and telling the preacher’s husband to eat a bag of dicks. We didn’t call the police. We walked him to a coffee shop for a doughnut because he seemed like what he needed was some sugar and caffeine. We’re confused, but we’re not mean. Nor greedy nor particularly righteous. At least I don’t think we are, and the lack of certainty sure feels like a lack of arrogance.

I have gone to Christian churches my whole life. My dad’s family is Greek, and my parents dragged me on an hour-long car ride to Indianapolis to the Greek Orthodox Church every Sunday until I was ten. The whole thing, including Sunday school, was in Greek, and since I was a mono-lingual boy growing up in a farm town in Southern Indiana, my parents decided I would become a heathen if they didn’t break my grandmother’s heart and come up with an alternative Sunday morning ritual. So I’ve been First Christian, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and Methodist with tons of Lutheran, Catholic, and Baptist friends growing up. Is it any wonder why I’m confused?

In case you think all Christian denominations are basically the same, their stark differences are why I don’t call myself a Christian anymore. It’s just become a tainted label, like how claiming to be backdoor friends with your neighbors is now open to a couple of different interpretations. There are big Christian denominations with global influence that continue to double down on their bans on women in clergy, deny sexual freedom, have predictable scandals and even worse cover ups, and hold the door a little too wide open for white supremacists. I’m willing to drop my lifelong team logo to avoid guilt by association. I’d rather not pledge any particular allegiance and prefer to hang out where you never know when someone’s going to take to the stage claiming to be the second coming of the messiah while suggesting that a bag full of penises are culinarily delectable. I only wish that I’d been thinking fast enough to ask him if he recommended oven roasted or pan seared.

I’m just confused, so maybe I should consider the traditions of Catholicism because they never lack for clarity. Catholics believe that the sacrament of communion is not just a representation, but that the wine and bread actually becomes the blood and body of Christ. And while that sounds kinda gross to me, they can’t seem to get enough communion indulging far more often than most protestant denominations. I guess it is real alcohol, after all, and we know Jesus is legendary when it comes to wine. But believing in transubstantiation and consuming flesh and blood? I might prefer to take my chances kayaking in the Pacific.

I was at a rec center basketball game for nine-year olds when one of the kids caught an elbow and got a bloody nose. The game was halted, the players were sent urgently to their benches, and the referee stood guard over the contaminated area while the janitor was summoned to don his hazmat suit and clean up the blood. When finished, he made a big deal about taking his gloves off, turning one inside-out over the other while enveloping the bloody paper towel with latex before disposing of everything in a red-hued ziplock bag with a blood-born pathogens warning written in bold font in two languages. The kid with blood on his shirt was sent home in tears, not because his nose hurt, but because nine-year-old rec-center basketball teams don’t have backup jerseys. I sincerely wanted to be like Bill Murray’s character in Caddy Shack when he ate the doody. I wanted to walk onto the court and lick the blood from the floor, then shrug in ambivalence. Juxtapose that with Catholics drinking the real blood of a guy who’s been dead for 2,000 years, and maybe my confusion is reasonable. I mean, I don’t know a lot of nine-year olds who are slutty enough that I’m worried about bloodborne communicable diseases. But I can imagine the distress I might feel standing in line to drink blood from the same chalice as the rest of the adult parishioners. I would surely be peering at the people in front of me looking for cold sores or other lip scabs. And Catholics aren’t supposed to use condoms, so don’t forget to guess about the promiscuity of the rest of the people in line. It’s a lot to ask to just believe it will all be fine because of ingesting Jesus blood. I guess I just don’t have enough faith for that.

No, I have questions and confusion. I’ll stick with a monthly tablespoon of grape juice from my own single-use plastic thimble served by a woman minister who reports to a lesbian bishop. I like rubbing elbows with people with lived experience rejecting gaslighting, and who know the loneliness of confusion.

There are a couple of billion Christians on the planet, who, if they buy what Paul’s selling, think the other six billion humans are going to burn in purgatory. That’s hard to imagine, although I was in the Smokey Mountains National Park during the first summer of COVID, so I know what an overcrowded hell feels like.

I don’t know what to believe. I’m confused, but I’m also skeptical of pretty much all men making promises with the arrogance of Ron Reagan. I’m ready for the matriarchy, but that feels as likely as a married pope. If I want to see a miracle, I’ll go on a road trip to Ouray and take a walk around town with Dexter. He’s pretty awesome. That much I do believe.