Sometime around September fundamentalists dig out the big plastic trunks of  sheet music and set to work on one of the largest outreach events of the year: The Annual Christmas Cantata.

Unlike the Christmas pageants at other churches, wassailing and gay apparel are shunned in lieu of a much grander tradition — if the evening is to be deemed a success,  someone in the cantata’s plot has to die.

Maybe it will be a father who dies at the beginning of the story.  Perhaps it will be a nice old lady who dies in the hospital after sharing her sage wisdom about the true meaning of Christmas. Better yet is the tale of an errant boy who staggers home on Christmas Eve to learn that his mother died while he was away playing the prodigal. The main thing is that there must be death by act three in order to hammer home The Message of the cantata.

The rest of the world may consider this a season to be jolly but fundamentalists know to keep the tissues handy when going to the annual cantata.

Hark the Herald Angels Sing
A Tear-Jerking Death Scene is Just the Thing.

Almost every fundamentalist evangelist has a fish story that goes something like this…

Back in the summer of ’76 I was preaching a week of revival services up in a little town in rural Ohio. The pastor invited me to go with him to visit a man named Bob (or Jim, or Hank, or Bubba) who everyone in town knew as “Killer.”

Now Bob was a real sinner. He had been in the Hell’s Angels and he had been in Prison. He had tattoos and a leather jacket made out of the skins of his enemies. He hated preachers and he hated God and he hated Jesus and he hated apple pie and and he hated everything. He’d kick puppies and curse at small children and drink and do drugs and kill people. He was a honest-to-goodness sinner.

And nobody could ever witness to Bob…until I went to see him that day.

I looked him in the eye and I said “Bob, you’re going to burn if you don’t quit all that boozing and kicking puppies.”

And he looked at me and said “Preacher, I’ve just never heard anyone talk the way you do. I reckon I’ll get saved.”

And Bob got gloriously saved and joined the church and got baptized. He cut off all his long hair and stopped doing drugs and married a beautiful woman and had fourteen kids and became a missionary to the Congo where he is still serving today.

And I’d like to see anybody try to top that story about how I saved Bob.

Almost every fundy evangelist has got one of these stories but the details may vary. Sometimes it’s an old guy with a shotgun or perhaps a dying man in the hospital. One thing remains the same though, it always includes a rousing narrative about how the evangelist did what nobody else had managed to do. They’re a real wonderment.

Somewhere back in the beginning of fundamentalism (about two-thousand years ago, to hear them tell it) there was evidently a law made that if a fundamentalist church runs a Christians school, and if that school has a sports team it must bear the name Eagles, Crusaders, Knights, Warriors, or Conquerors.

Female teams will bear the name of their male counterparts with the word “Lady” affixed to the front to indicate the femininity of the players.

And these team shall bear one of the following colors: red-and-white, green-and-white, blue-and-white, or red-and-black. So shall it be without end, yea verily. So let it be written, so let it be done.

In 1996, Juno Online Services launched an e-mail client that took the fundamentalist world by storm. The reasons for this were twofold

1. It was free.

2. You could send e-mail without having to connect to the evil Internet. (which is a known cesspool of pornography and Calvinism)

And (in typical fundamentalist fashion) once Juno was accepted as the e-mail client of choice, there was nothing for it but to keep using it for the next 12 years. This is known as “sticking by the stuff.”

There is an advantage to having so man fundies remain loyal to the Juno brand, however. Now, whenever someone gets an e-mail with the subject line 10 Steps to Revival in your Church Now! or Democrats want to force all children to be gay! from baptistpastorjeremiahhalstead1611AV@juno.com* it’s easy to figure out what kind of person its coming from.

*this address for entertainment purposes only. Any resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental and not intended