Book giveaways as blog promoters seem to be all the rage these days, so I’m going to jump on the bandwagon and do one too. Thankfully, instead an Old Scofield KJV signed by yours truly (the most awesome prize ever!),  loyal SFL reader  Stephen of  Eskypades has offered to stand in the gap and provide  a more recently published book.

On offer is a copy of Matthew Paul Turner’s new book Hear No Evil: My Story of Innocence, Music, and the Holy Ghost. I’ll forgo to tell you all about the book since you probably already know about it and if you don’t, you can get all the information you need from those two links.

To enter this drawing, simply leave a comment on this post or send an e-mail to book@stufffundieslike.com. Make sure that you use a valid e-mail address so I can contact the winner. This drawing will remain open for one week at which point the winner will be chosen either randomly, according to a Divine mandate, or both (depending on your Theology Proper).

The book has been graciously provided via WaterBrook Multnomah Press. So there.

Fundamentalists are fascinated by stories of demonic forces. Nothing thrills the heart like listening to stories of missionaries in Africa (which seems particularly rife with demonic activity) doing battle with the evil hoards.

It’s a small wonder that Frank Peretti, author of such works as This Present Darkness should be wildly popular in fundamentalist circles — the fact that he is a member of the Assemblies of God and plays the banjo in a bluegrass band notwithstanding. His children’s books like The Door in the Dragon’s Throat are widely regarded as great way to give young fundamentalists nightmares. [ed. I didn't sleep for a week.]

The books are horribly thrilling stuff full of sword fights between angels and demons and very insightful information about how public schools are conspiring to make sure that no child graduates from kindergarten without having been demon-possessed at least once. The theology presented in these stories is a little shaky to say the least but did I mention that they have sword-fighting demons!

More than one fundamentalist has remarked that these books have really opened their eyes to the workings of spiritual warfare. One is forced to wonder if they also imagine that Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven is a treatise on ornithology. Or one would if they weren’t caught in such a quandary over whether to laugh or cry.

Among the ranks of shock-jock evangelists perhaps none have aspired to the verbal exploits of “Dr.” Phil Kid. Popular with many fundamentalist churches of more militant type, Phil is the master of Hair-Raising Sermon Illustration. It’s a rare event when he manages to make it through a sermon without some apocryphal tale of tragedy and gore.

And then there are his screaming rants against all manner of other ungodly things like Nintendo video games and interracial marriage…

Here he is in fine form:

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“Who would like to share a word of testimony this evening?”

Testimony time in a fundamentalist church is an experience unlike anything one could hope to find in the outside world. It’s equal parts performance art, spiritual posturing, and the kind of long winded delivery that you might expect after mistakenly asking your hypochondriac great-aunt how she’s feeling today. It is, in short, a wonderful and awful spectacle to behold.

Testimony time has many functions. For example, it’s one of a few times when women and divorced folks get to be heard in the church without being accused of preaching. “I’d just like to thank God for the lesson he taught me this week which I’d like to share with all of you. Let me read you a few verses and then after I tell my story I’ll share a poem that I wrote…”

The Biographical testimony is also a popular one usually involving a description of the horrific sin that the teller was involved in “years ago.” The main point to note here is that while some sins are acceptable to talk about in fundy churches (“I used to be such a drunk…”) some are simply not (“I used to be so gay..”).

Another variation of the testimony is the “Bragamony” which is used for establishing the church pecking order by allowing contenders to matching stories of spiritual prowess. In this struggle for dominance, the timing of the testimony is vital. It’s important not to go first lest your story be outmatched by those following and quickly forgotten. Fall into that trap and you may have to postpone until mid-week service with a considerably smaller audience and must less impact.

“If no one else has a testimony to share let’s turn in our hymnbooks…”

Thanks to Mel, Jennifer, and many others who suggested this topic.

If you’ve ever visited a school library, opened a copy of Time magazine and found this:

Chances are you have been a fundamentalist.

(Unclad bodies are only permitted to be viewed in very expensive religious art galleries.)

If you’ve ever heard a sermon entitled “A Plethora of Pentateuch Principles for Preventing Pre-Teen Promiscuity and Potent Punishments for the Perverted Participants” chances are it was in a fundamentalist church.

(I’m out of town traveling on business this week so updates are likely to be a little sparse.)

Many modern preachers have discontinued the use of a pulpit, preferring instead to roam the stage freely sporting headset mics and using slide presentations. Fundamentalists, however, remain big fans of the old-fashioned pulpit and continue to put flowers in front of it and bestow upon it the title of the “sacred desk.”

The pulpit itself is no mere common piece of furniture for it has countless uses to the fundamentalist preacher. Among these are…

• Holder for the microphone for those churches where holding the mic in one’s hands is forbidden as a Freudian no-no.
• Resting spot for the ubiquitous cup of water that sits on it in testament to the fact that the preacher is no lightweight who will only be preaching for twenty minutes. He plans to preach until he is dry then preach some more.
• Place for the speaker to set his wide margin preaching Bible (KJV), his watch (a completely pointless gesture), his ream of sermon notes (if he is of the note-using school), and all of his source material (consisting of a single volume of Sword of the Lord illustrations and a book of Great Poems For Sermons.)
• Solid surface on which to pound while making dubious points. The rule is the thinner the argument the louder the preacher must yell and pound.
• Line of demarcation between an official speaker and someone just giving a talk. Women or divorced men, for example may be asked to speak from the floor instead of from the place of authority lest they profane that hallowed spot.

So synonymous is this wooden box with the pastor himself that the search for a new pastor is carried out by a “pulpit committee.” Beware to those who would handle it carelessly lest they be struck down.

For when the claim of the “appearance of evil” just isn’t enough to create the required amount of fundamentalist guilt, the “weaker brother” technique is the veritable Swiss Army knife of fundamentalist arguments, ready to be whipped out in a moment to get the job of conviction done.

The argument goes something like this: “Now we know that there’s nothing wrong with doing X, but X is something that someone out there somewhere may think is wrong. And if that person by some chance happened to see you doing X, or thinking about doing X, or talking about having done X, or goes through your wallet and finds receipts for costs incurred doing X, then that person may stumble.”

The Weaker Brother claim is great for making rules against all those things that aren’t morally wrong but that fundamentalists are convinced you shouldn’t be doing anyway. He’s a handy guy to have around. The problem is that nobody really ever seems to know who the weaker brother is. Certainly nobody in a fundamentalist church claims the title for themselves. As near as one can tell he’s sort of a shadowy character who spends all of his time hanging around outside places like bowling alleys and gas stations that sell booze, looking to see if anybody else is going in so he can get offended. The weaker brother apparently has a lot of time on his hands.

Be on the lookout for him wherever you go. He may be weak but he’s a fundamentalist force to be reckoned with.

On the shelf next to the Sugar Creek Gang series, you’ll likely find at least a few Danny Orlis books on any fundamentalist boy’s bookshelf. In 1954, author Bernard Palmer wrote Danny Orlis and the Charging Moose the first of fifty-two books staring Orlis as the teenage hero with the heart of gold. Unless one has read of Danny’s adventures they may never realize what a hotbed of crime and intrigue the woods of northern Minnesota can be.

Of course not every story takes place in Minnesota, our fearless hero manages to get involved in everything from being a bush pilot to playing football to having adventures on the Alaskan highway. Not bad for a young lad who is barely old enough to shave.

And it’s not just high crime and wild adventures either, by the 1970’s Danny (who was somehow still a teenager) was also tackling the tough moral issues in stories such as The Live-In Tragedy and A Teen-Age Marriage.

There are many lessons to be learned from books like these: capture the bad guys, resist peer pressure, and above all avoid the charging moose.

Before multimedia displays and PowerPoint presentations, fundamentalists had chalk. Credit where it’s due, if done well, chalk talks were a great way to keep people’s attention and make a point. If done badly, however, the presentation may end up looking vaguely like a cubist artist’s impression of a sunset at the North Pole. In short, it’s a royal mess.

In the really extravagant chalk art presentations, a black light may be used to reveal hidden images at the end of the talk. Or perhaps, the artist would draw upside down and then later reveal the real picture by flipping over the canvas. Not too many people do this anymore; it’s really a shame. Watching someone doodle on a screen in MS Paint just isn’t quite the same.

If you’ve never seen a chalk talk done, you can check out a video of none other than Peter Ruckman giving a presentation while drawing an “original autograph.”