Asklemmy

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Being a kid with ADHD, all of them. Each and every service drove me to the brink of insanity. I stopped going once I was old enough to decide for myself.

I have clear memories of the pastor at my parents' church talking about how the gay agenda's next steps were legalizing bestiality and pedophilia. Probably would've been somewhere around 2014-2015. Looking back, it was absolutely the beginning of the end of me having anything to do with religion, so maybe it's actually the best sermon I ever sat through.

A Catholic Christmas Eve Vigil (not Midnight - different kind of Mass).

The scene was thus: A strange-to-me Catholic church off of something and Capital in Milwaukee, near where my mom, not a religious person but a nice person, took me and my sis when Christmas happened to fall on our regular visitation weekend one particular year.

The priest spoke on and on, as fathers and Father tend to do. The readings familiar, unre(M)arkable, (L)ukewarm, Psalm verse, same as the first.

The Homily was delivered in the patented priestly monotonic nasally drone, the incense and insensitivity flowing too freely. The easily-employed white, gray-haired, "middle class rich", Kohl's-suited, stoic husbands stood, sat, knelt, genuflected, stood, knelt, stood, sat, stood, knelt, genuflected, prayed, sang-chanted, with their wives, who were fully guilt-jeweled for common marital slights, whether real or imagined, or who benefited from rich parents who left their ill-gotten legacies to their ill-raised, now boomer kids who have become reluctantly over-sexed wives. The department store credit cards tucked safely in their expensive clutch purses, these women were fully-prepared to wage full-out Karen-esque, post-Christmas sale consumerist war in the following post-holiday sales season.

Retail workers never stood a chance.

In short: The church was overheated, like hell hot, probably good prep for some of these people, and my not-Catholic mother was next to me trying to morally fix or better herself, or maybe she was trying to impress my sister and I, or, more than likely on reflection, trying to placate my very-Catholic dad and stepmom, but mostly I had been standing for what seemed like FOREVER, and my knees alternately locked and unlocked, and my youth-fitting suit that was too small but too expensive to replace at Kohls just yet sweltered me under imagined and real guilt, and the incense, and the droning, and the HEAT...

I was about 4 seconds from passing out when some stranger approached me and said "Hey, you don't look OK. Let's go outside now before you faint." and I swear it's the best religious experience I've ever had: A human being a human and taking pity on a young kid dealing with physical and emotional distress. I went outside and cooled off in the Midwestern December air. Soon after, my mom and sis came outside and we left in the beater car that smelt like gas if the heater was fully turned on, so we had to leave the freash air selector on and the slider control at no more than 3/4 quarters, but that's OK because the A/C, which hadn't functioned in many presidential election cycles, was fully-replaced by the December air, the religious experiment over.

I'm not at all religious but I hope that guy knows just what he did for us that night. We were faking faith, just trying to be good people, and the droning, heat, guilt, and THAT FUCKING CHRISTMAS INCENSE just did us in.

Lesson learned.

Oh my God this brought back a memory. It was probably the time my friend invited me to their church and expected me to speak in tongues. Like wouldn't let me leave until I was filled with the spirit and speaking in tongues. It was terrifying.

The power team. Apparently vast amounts of sweat, tearing phone books in half, bending steel rods and blowing up hot water bottles is godly and there were several alter calls.

Then I had to see them at Jr. High the next day to preach about how bad drugs are.

Here's an article about a visit.

When i was six i had to sit in my own poop for an hour long sermon because nobody would let me get up to go. Course they also had to sit in it with no reaction heh

All of them. But specifically this one place my parents took me to that just started speaking in tongues right in the middle of the sermon. This went on for like, half an hour, everyone just flailing around and speaking in "tongues", which was just them making up a bunch of gibberish.

My dad said it wasn't a great service.

He's right, it was the worst.

Also, that, plus many other stupid and incongruent moments led to my exodus from the church, and religion as a whole.

I'm much happier now, not being forced to attend these silly wastes of time that are church sermons.

I was raised religion-free, my mother didn't push any beliefs on me (one of the few things she did right) so I grew up as a natural atheist. One Easter when I was very young, I don't remember how young precisely but I was probably 10 or younger, one of our neighbor families offered to take me to church for Mass. I guess they thought they were going to save my soul or something. My mother left the decision up to me. Now, in my mind Easter was bunnies and candy and egg hunts and all that good stuff so hell yes, I wanted to go. I don't know what I expected but what I definitely didn't expect was sitting quietly on an uncomfortable bench for (what seemed like to me) four hours while some guy talked at me. If I wasn't an atheist before that would have sealed the deal.

My grandmother's funeral comes to mind. Some old preacher dude walks up to the podium with a legal pad, flips over a page, drops the "we're at a funeral, act somber" body language like you'd drop a bath robe, and starts what I assume is an average Sunday sermon, occasionally remembering to point to the corpse behind him and insisting "That's what she believed."

He had the gall to offer his hand for me to shake.

When I was like six or seven years old, my great aunt Ruth stayed over Christmas eve. She was a nun, so because it was important to her, we were going to open all of our Christmas presents after mass.

Mass was almost three hours. I remember this pretty clearly because I had a cheap casio wristwatch and I was timing it. I probably didn't hear a word of the sermon.

That one where Trump held up a bible

I've got a bunch of horror stories that take some detail to explain, but I remember a couple moments of shock in particular.

Was actually a Methodist service, Easter Sunday. it was when they cut a baby lamb's throat and it bled. It was great special effects with a real lamb but children started crying.

Also, the time we all went to see Passion of the Christ, 9:00 or 10:00pm showing. There was a mother smacking the shit out of her toddler for crying when the torture started. I'm a different person now and would put a stop to something like that now.

Could be hot Texas southern Baptist sermons running way too long while we all fan ourselves with paper fans we made from the printed agenda, or maybe it was a lively one on some random church-hopping day with speaking in tongues and prophets translating, or maybe it was one where my uncle said shit that was masked condescension cast towards his kids, or or or. It was definitely NOT one where I "went to the bathroom" but actually went hiking.

I threw up in one once. I actually don't recall anything any worse than what it usually was. I actually went further into the evangelical baptist rabbit hole as my family drifted a bit from it, but that would reverse and end with me being an atheist-leaning agnostic.

I do remember Sunday school teachers being angry that I was allowed to have D&D books and games. In a different church when I was in middle or high school, I quoted the movie name "Oh God you Devil" and my buddy whose family took me to church slapped me. That was a good time. /s

I let my college RA bring me along one weekend to a megachurch she attended. The pep rally vibe I can accept as just not my style of worship, but the order of service was short on scripture and long on homilies of questionable theology.