As it happens, this theory, more like a hypothesis, similar to a hunch, probably a total waste of ink, was first made public in 1976. But it’s new to me. And if it’s new to me, it’s new to you, because the reality of your “youness” resides strictly in my head, a condition that may also be the result of a fungus.

What got me exercised before I could even finish my coffee was an article up on the Smithsonian magazine website today, which presents a neat little précis of the witch history.

We all learned about the trials in high school, of course, unless you were one of those progressive types and learned of them in kindergarten. They began in 1692 and ended with the election of Barack Obama. More than fifty million men, women, and children were accused of practicing sorcery, witchcraft, and the macarena long after they had become fashionable. Of those fifty million, one-hundred million were executed, resulting in a stain on our history so dark, no amount of OxiClean could prove comfort.

Now that’s what you’d think had happened, given the way the old Puritans are popularly regarded. In fact, the trials occurred over a period of one year, 1692 to 1693. A total of two hundred people were accused of practicing the dark arts, and twenty were executed.

Twenty. As in “20.” As in more people are trampled to death outside Walmart on any given Black Friday.

In 1689, English rulers William and Mary started a war with France in the American colonies. Known as King William’s War to colonists, it ravaged regions of upstate New York, Nova Scotia and Quebec, sending refugees into the county of Essex and, specifically, Salem Village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. …

The displaced people created a strain on Salem’s resources. This aggravated the existing rivalry between families with ties to the wealth of the port of Salem and those who still depended on agriculture. Controversy also brewed over Reverend Samuel Parris, who became Salem Village’s first ordained minister in 1689, and was disliked because of his rigid ways and greedy nature. The Puritan villagers believed all the quarreling was the work of the Devil.

In January of 1692, Reverend Parris’ daughter Elizabeth, age 9, and niece Abigail Williams, age 11, started having “fits.” They screamed, threw things, uttered peculiar sounds and contorted themselves into strange positions, and a local doctor blamed the supernatural. Another girl, Ann Putnam, age 11, experienced similar episodes. On February 29, under pressure from magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne, the girls blamed three women for afflicting them: Tituba, the Parris’ Caribbean slave; Sarah Good, a homeless beggar; and Sarah Osborne, an elderly impoverished woman.

All three women were brought before the local magistrates and interrogated for several days, starting on March 1, 1692. Osborne claimed innocence, as did Good. But Tituba confessed, “The Devil came to me and bid me serve him.” She described elaborate images of black dogs, red cats, yellow birds and a “black man” who wanted her to sign his book. She admitted that she signed the book and said there were several other witches looking to destroy the Puritans. All three women were put in jail.

And so on. Cotton Mather, one of the more brilliant ministers of his day, intervened at one point, arguing that “spectral evidence”—that is, dreams, visions, and late-night Mexican dinners—was no evidence at all. Hangings occurred anyway, but the community was never the same.

On January 14, 1697, the General Court ordered a day of fasting and soul-searching for the tragedy of Salem. In 1702, the court declared the trials unlawful. And in 1711, the colony passed a bill restoring the rights and good names of those accused and granted £600 restitution to their heirs.

Think about that for a minute: eighteen years to come to terms with this dreadful episode. After almost a hundred years, the Turks still put their fingers in their ears and hum when you mention the Armenian genocide of 1915. And after more than two hundred years, the French are still trying to calculate how many civilians were massacred in the Vendée and whether it was all just a great rock-climbing expedition gone wrong.

Numerous hypotheses have been devised to explain the strange behavior that occurred in Salem in 1692. One of the most concrete studies, published in Science in 1976 by psychologist Linnda Caporael, blamed the abnormal habits of the accused on the fungus ergot, which can be found in rye, wheat and other cereal grasses. Toxicologists say that eating ergot-contaminated foods can lead to muscle spasms, vomiting, delusions and hallucinations. Also, the fungus thrives in warm and damp climates—not too unlike the swampy meadows in Salem Village, where rye was the staple grain during the spring and summer months.

One wonders whether this seemly simple solution appeals because it explains misunderstood people, or merely aids in explaining them away.

Yes, what poses as an attempt to explain to non-Christians the “language” of Christianity, in all its many dialects — Roman Catholic, Baptist, and Jehovah’s Witness (we’ll let that go for the moment) — turns out to be a condescending lesson for poor, benighted, and historically illiterate evangelicals (the real target of this piece) about what Christianity is truly about and how they have distorted it.

What source did CNN’s Kirby Ferguson, the writer and director of this video, employ as the basis for this instruction? Marcus Borg. Borg, by all accounts, is an affable chap, and has all his academic ducks in a row. He is also a Jesus Seminar type who denies much of what the Faith has taught as dogma for much of its history.

For example, did you know that to “believe” in a biblical context means primarily to “belove” and has little to do with embracing specific doctrines? Did you know that “salvation” is primarily, if not exclusively, about the here and now and not about eternal life with God, and that it can be worked for? Did you know that if you really understood the Bible in its original context and came to terms with the philology and lexicology of biblical language, you’d be a mainline Protestant or a unitarian (which is certainly the implication of this video homily)?

What a way to start a Sunday. Listen up CNN and ABC and NBC and MSNBC and NPR and anybody out there in the secular wilderness who may desire to learn, never mind teach, what Christianity has historically believed, yes, even in all its many dialects: Next time, would you please contact someone from the masthead of this publication? I’m sure David Bentley Hart or Timothy George or, for that matter, the editor in chief would be delighted to give you a tutorial. And I promise, after your language lesson, you’ll be able to do more than just ask, “Why did the first woman pope write the Gospel of Thomas — and does it come with fries?”

Stott was an evangelical Anglican who for many years preached at All Souls Church, Langham Place, London, where no matter the controversy then roiling the Church of England you would always hear the Gospel, and the utter centrality of the Cross. In fact, Stott’s most significant contribution as a teacher may have been his classic work entitled just that, The Cross of Christ, a thorough and biblical defense of the penal-substitution theory of the atonement. In other words, in answer to the question, “What exactly happened on Calvary? What exactly did Jesus accomplish?” penal substitution replies: “Jesus took upon himself the just judgment and punishment due sinners. He accomplished the salvation of those who believe.”

This contentious doctrine continues to drive many up the walls, eliciting some of the most hysterical (in all senses of the words) reactions from Christians who come from traditions that construe the atonement in other ways. Stott never denied that Scripture pictures Christ’s death as multi-dimensional (as Savior, he is also our liberator, model, and healer), only that the minute you lose sight of His role as the ultimate sacrifice for sin, you have lost the key that unlocks the mystery of the Incarnation and how and why God saves. (Stott also riled critics with his belief in annihilationism. But that’s another story.)

If you haven’t yet read The Cross of Christ, make a note to correct this lapse. It is a great contribution to the Church, one that will continue to engender lively debate, and from a man whose energetic defense of the faith will long outlive the carping of detractors.

Upon arriving at my local googolplex, which now boasts 2,400 screens and sits on enough land to house the cast of Sister Wives, I was given the option of viewing either the 3-D version or the 2-D version.

“How much do I save if I lose a D,” I asked the ticket-monger, with all the insouciance of a certified public accountant. Turns out it was a good five bucks. I sensed a trend. “You wouldn’t happen to offer a 1-D version, wouldja?” Turns out the technology had not progressed sufficiently to offer a moving picture in a purely vertical format that wasn’t just a stick figure waved in front of a beam of light.

“Well, how much would it be if I sat with my back to the screen and somebody described what was happening?” It’s usually at this point that the manager is called, so I slid my $10 bill under the teller’s slot and received my ticket, not just torn but somewhat mutilated, and was told to please go away, or words to that effect (an effect, it should be noted, I tend to have on clerical staff).

As a youth, I was never much of a Captain America fan, I must admit. My comic-book faves were Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, Iron Man, Thomas Mann, and Phil: Sensitive Purveyor of Lo-Cal Treats (a series that was ripped from newsstands without so much as a warning after a Senate investigation). Captain America, to me, seemed to be stuck in the 1940s, and as far as I could tell, the war was over (though please don’t quote me), and Red Skull (not to be confused with Red Skelton) was now in Argentina giving salsa lessons under the name Carmine Escobar. So my expectations for this extravaganza were rather low.

At first, Captain America seemed to be about how the past was future, what with a scene at the 1939 New York World’s Fair shot as if Steve Jobs and Steven Spielberg were about to enter from opposing wings to the accolades of adoring fans. And then there was the introduction of Stark Enterprises and Iron Man’s dad, Carbuncle Stark (or some such), who was on hand to showcase his “Flying” Car of Tomorrow (a demonstration that went about as well as Ralph Kramden’s demonstration of his “Chef of the Future”).

In any event, Stark Enterprises is certainly there to remind us that the “First Avenger” of the film’s subtitle implies subsequent Avengers, in fact, an upcoming Avengers film, in which Captain America and Carbuncle’s kid team up to fight eee-viel, along with a gaggle of other circus freaks.

But what was most certainly a foretaste of contemporary unsportsmanlike conduct was the introduction of PEDs, not only into the narrative, but also into our hero, Steve Rogers, the runt who would be Audie Murphy but instead winds up the one and only Captain America. Yes, that’s right: Performance-Enhancing Drugs! I was so appalled, I scattered my Junior Mints into the grotesque hairdo of the woman sitting in front of me. When she whipped around to see who had showered her coif with gooey snacks, I took the opportunity to exclaim, “Do you believe they allow minors to be influenced by such a thing! I’m going to Tweet my congressman the minute he’s released from prison!” At which point, she wobbled to the lobby with what can only be described as an excess of purpose.

Oh, yes, the “experiment” performed on young Rogers—to boost his musculature and eventually to create a U.S. army of superhumans—is by means of something called “Vita-Rays”; but we know what it really was: steroids. Yes, my friends, Captain America is a big, fat cheat. Instead of fighting the villainous Hydra with the strength and resources Nature in its wisdom had seen fit to endow him (such as mental ingenuity and physical courage), our Marvel, along with the help of “cutting-edge” science, that perennial source of overpriced medications for nonexistent conditions, was determined to give himself an unfair advantage against his opponents.

And don’t tell me the Germans were busy working on the same thing! That’s what they told Robert Oppenheimer when he went to work on the A-bomb. Turns out the Germans had gotten only as far as courtroom sketches. And once the bomb was built, it was there to be stolen, thus inspiring mass hysteria and some decent James Bond movies.

Think about it: did our Revolutionary War heroes shoot up with HGH when called to forge a new nation? Did George Washington keep an extra supply of Andro in his coat pocket for a little extra “oomph” as he loitered on the shores of Long Island? Did John Paul Jones cycle Deca Durabolin as he took the war to our enemy? I think not! We beat the British fair and square! (Although I’d keep my eye on fresh scholarship regarding Benjamin Franklin. Oral testosterone would explain a lot.)

I can’t opine on the rest of the film, as I was too busy fending off a squadron of security goons who were attempting to drag me out of the theater. As soon as I was able, however, I did get on my cell phone to call my wife and ask if she thought our lawyer, Claxton T. Dummfoil III, could get me a refund of my $9.50, because if not, there went any discretionary cash for Christmas.

Needless to say, I believe a massive investigation into the training regimens of U.S. fighting forces between the years 1939 and 1945 should be instigated immediately at incalculable taxpayer expense. Should it be proved beyond what is reasonable that our soldiers were, indeed, influenced by that roid-raging maniac Captain America, and that they were busy popping Dianabol as they stormed the beaches of Normandy, in honor of their so-called hero, then we as a nation, if we are to act with integrity, should call the Second World War a draw, or at least offer to fight it again, this time with random drug testing supervised by a nonaligned nation.

Don’t let the generally positive critical reception of this picture fool you. And ignore the enormous box office dividends. We must be prepared to stand astride the ever-shifting tectonic plates of popular ethical standards and cry, “Refund!”

The things you learn from the movies. I’d just as soon stay home and watch the all-American game of baseball. Or read a book. You wouldn’t catch Sherlock Holmes behaving this way . . .

Now I am neither a cynic nor a skeptic. I merely assume that everyone is either lying, stupid, or lying to me about how stupid they think I am. So I’m wondering if this name change is merely an attempt to get Muslims to drop their guard long enough for a bunch of flip-flop-wearing Jesus freaks to love-bomb them back to the Lionheart Age. But who am I to judge.

In other news, Coral Ridge Ministries, founded by the late Dr. D. James Kennedy, is also changing its name, to Truth in Action Ministries. This, too, is an attempt to facilitate “outreach,” which presumably was hindered by what most people assumed was the true motto of Coral Ridge Ministries: “Miserable Lies in Amber.”

Whether these fresh, fab soubriquets affect the desired change in public perception remains to be seen. Christianity is all about new beginnings, after all. So mazel tov.

But there is another change in name that has been nagging at me for so long that I hit a pastry chef in the pancreas the other day just to get it out of my system (along with a stale cruller). What change is that you ask? (Just play along.) This:

“I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Christian church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins…”

When I began attending LCMS services after years in evangelical churches, punctuated by non-communicating attendance at Catholic Masses, I was jolted by that Christian. Every other English version of the Apostles Creed I have ever encountered in a church setting translates the Latin catholicam—as in “sanctam Ecclesiam catholicam”—correctly as catholic.

Yes, yes, I know, evangelical churches inevitably punctuate that “catholic” with an asterisk* that explains how “It’s not that kind of catholic, like in Roman Catholic, but catholic in the sense of universal.” Thanks. Explains the picture of Benedict XVI with the red slash through it in the Welcome Center.

But at least the “catholic” was preserved, the tradition, the original, intact and respected. Not in the Lutheran churches, or at least in the Lutheran churches using materials produced by Concordia Publishing House. At first I thought this to be a recent innovation. I would have sworn on a stack of Smalcald Articles that I learned my Small Catechism with the “catholic” in the Creed. But an edition of the catechism published by CPH in 1943 also translates “catholicam” as “Christian.” So the one I used had to have also. Did I imagine that “catholic”? Or had I recited it so many times in other contexts that I read it back into my boyhood church experience?

“But isn’t it the same thing?” you might ask. “Christian and catholic/universal?” No, you idiot. And who asked you? Didn’t Gnostics fashion themselves Christians? Didn’t Montanists? Don’t Mormons today? And Jehovah’s Witnesses? How about oneness Pentecostals? And there are a smorgasbord of nondenoms that would rather be caught reading out passages from The Story of O than one of those man-made traditions commonly known as a Creed. Anyone and everyone can call themselves Christians, including mainline churchniks who have longed jettisoned any notion of the Fatherhood of God and the divinity of His Son. My goodness, even the atheist Marxist Slavoj Zizek considers himself a Christian materialist, and Richard Dawkins wears a T-shirt that reads “Atheists for Jesus.”

(I must remember to breathe during these things . . .)

When I was but a teen, back in the days when garbage was still garbage and the Recycling Regime had not yet enforced segregation of our detritus, I was as pious as an assassin’s bullet. I wanted nothing to do with religion, organized or ramshackle, and thought the existence of a personal deity about as likely as Joe Pepitone’s being elected Emperor of Japan. My main obsessions were movies, books about movies, and Valerie Bertinelli (not necessarily in that order.) This caused a great disturbance in the Force, namely, my mother. The woman who taught me my Small Catechism as we sat across the kitchen table when I was but knee-high to a Buick Riviera was concerned for my soul, and not only because I was fast turning into a miserable blaspheming apostate. You see, my best friend was a Catholic-turned-charismatic-fundamentalist type who also worried about my eternal destiny, and he and his mother were determined to see that I was converted, and not by the frozen chosen who surrounded me five days a week in my Lutheran parochial school.

So my mom asked our pastor** to pay a friendly visit one evening to perhaps steer me back onto the straight and narrow before I swerved into a bridge abutment. What I remember from that talk was his response to my complaints about how my friend kept hectoring me about how I needed to be born again. “I was born again at my baptism,” the pastor reminded me, adding: “We are catholic in our faith.”

Years would pass before I’d find my way back onto the narrow path (admittedly veering to the right and to the left now and again, as the Old Adam is a lousy driver). And I know I’m but a lowly layman who spends most Sundays hunting down a church, any church, that still uses the Common Service of 1888. But I do implore the powers that be in the LCMS: put the “catholic” back. I don’t care where or when saying “Christian” became de rigueur; it seems to have started in the Old Country, with German translations influenced by pietists who wanted to put more distance between themselves and Rome (but I could be mistaken about that). And frankly, I don’t care. Just put it back. Why? As has been said many times and will need to be said again: Luther never had any intention of starting a new church. In fact, he never left the church he was in—he was kicked out. And despite all the nasty things he had to say about the popes and how the “power of the keys” was wielded by same, neither he nor any of his successors ever denied that the Catholic Church was a true church, as it had the Word and the Sacraments. We, along with Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans, and Orthodox, are members of the “one holy, catholic, and apostolic church.”

Catholics and Lutherans may debate from now till kingdom come about the nature of true apostolic succession: whether it is a matter of an unbroken line of men upon whom the laying on of hands has conferred episcopal authority, or a matter of perennial apostolic doctrine. But we English speakers should be saying the same words come that point in the liturgy when we express a common ancient faith as members of “one holy catholic and apostolic church.”

Whether a Campus Crusade or a Coral Ridge changes its name don’t make me no never mind, really. I am a member of neither, and both are parachurch entities. Here today and gone tomorrow. So go with God. But I am a member of the church catholic. Or at least I thought I was. And I take it personally when I’m told that I’m now a member of something else. In fact, I will not say “Christian church.” I will mount a singular, solitary, albeit quixotic protest by continuing to say “catholic church,” in a loud and clamorous voice. Now I just have to find a church to say it in . . .

*Every time I saw that asterisk, and considered its intention, I was put in mind of that exchange in Woody Allen’s film Bananas, when Allen, a budding Latin American revolutionary, reads out the charges against a member of the deposed regime, which includes the slaughter of thousands of civilians, torture, and other horrors: “How do you plead?” Allen asks. “Guilty,” the accused responds, “but with an explanation.”

**My pastor at the time was Kazimierz Kowalski , who is now a popular priest in the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. The man who succeeded him in my old church, Leonard Klein, is now a priest in the Archdiocese of Wilmington, Delaware. Never let it be said that Lutherans have never done anything for the pope. No thanks are necessary, but we are open to small gifts of cash.

I, myself, am outraged. Even if I weren’t myself, I’d at the very least be irked. To think that buried deep within the spirit of the first Protestants, nay, the first Evangelicals, lies the hate that dare not speak its name, unless it’s being spoken by virtually everyone in the mainstream media. Sure, Bachmann is no longer a practicing Lutheran, having now graduated to even meaner wards, certificate in hand, no doubt, declaring her free of rum, Romanism, and ratiocination. But the question remains: When she sat under the teaching of those perfidious Lutherans, did she ever speak up in favor of the papacy? Did she ever wax wistful about the triple tiara? Did she ever put in a good word for Alexander VI or Leo X (or Malcolm X, for that matter, but don’t get me started on the race issue)?

In short, can we allow the election of a Protestant to the highest office in the land? Do we want mayonnaise sandwiches served in the White House cafeteria? Could we abide Moose Lodges and inflatable swimming pools and NASCAR logos to dot our fair land? Will we stand for the iconoclastic debaucheries that will be the very ruination of our churches, not to mention our bowling alleys? I think not, my friends.

In 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama took heavy incoming for having congregated with the likes of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose idea of interfaith dialogue consisted of Holocaust agnosticism. In the interest of fairness, I think Bachmann’s having fraternized with anti-Antichristers like Lutherans and their ilk (and there’s nothing more icky than having an ilk) should also come under the scrutiny of every patriotic American currently off medication without written permission from a board-certified physician.

Granted, I would as soon have voted for that kid Urkel before pulling the lever for Ms. Bachmann, even had her ecclesiastical wantonness never come to light. But now I vow not merely to ignore her as if she were a pimple on a 13-year-old’s forehead, but to lead a charge against her, fearing that pimple a full-blown melanoma. I will scrutinize, analyze, even deodorize, every anti-Antichristy thought, word, and deed Ms. Bachmann has ever thought, worded, and didded, seeing them for what they are, mere cover for the oldest prejudice still eligible for federal aid.

And I will begin that awesome task just as soon as I get closure on this whole Area 51 thing. Weather balloon my . . .

In fact, when the infallible date of May 21 was first announced, I was dismayed by all the naysayers mocking Brother Camping and his peculiar brand of narcissistic eisegesis. Could I at least have a few days of wishful thinking, please?

Well, the day has come and gone, and my AMEX bill must still be paid Tuesday. But before those of you who saw through this hokum have a good gloat, keep something in mind: Camping was just an extreme example of a scary form of idolatry that is very, very old and very, very prevalent in every denomination—namely, the cult of personality.

The rapture rap, after all, is newish but not new. It’s a product of the 19th century, popularized by Anglo-Irish Calvinist John Nelson Darby and sent coursing through the veins of American fundamentalist Christianity via the correspondence courses turned study Bible of the phony “D.D.” and dubious family man C.I. Scofield. But the fires of millennial apocalypticism tend to dim over time without fiery types to preach its eerie imminence. Granted, Camping has all the charisma of a coroner reading a Microsoft end-user licensing agreement, with that hangdog look and intonation just left of kill me now. Yet he proved over time sufficiently convincing in his “studies” to convince hundreds of thousands, if not millions, that his gimcrack methodology was sound, nay, properly prophetic. And he has been far from alone in preaching that the end is nigh: “Who can forget Herbert W. Armstrong, who started his own quasi-Adventist church dedicated to British Israelism and doomsday speculations. Trending more mainstream, I remember Pat Robertson spouting something on the 700 Club about 1988 being the year to end all years. Today John Hagee and, yes, Hal Lindsey are still going strong, only they’re smart enough to know that actually picking a date is bad for business. (Keep in mind that Lindsey’s bestselling Late Great Planet Earth was published more than 40 years ago—and he’s still on TBN covering events in the Middle East with all the joyful expectation of Robespierre at a gallows half-off sale.)

You might be saying to yourself, “Sure, a buncha fundy, dispensationalist cranks with clever marketing skills. Tough luck on their ignorant, desperate disciples.” But ask yourself something: If your pastor, preacher, teacher, elder, priest were to walk into an open manhole tomorrow, only to be replaced by some less-winsome personality, would you leave your church? If so, leave now.

Better yet: if your pastor, preacher, teacher, elder, priest were to be led out in handcuffs tomorrow, or discovered to have run off to Acapulco with the 16-year-old daughter of the youth minister, would you consider leaving the Church, full stop? If so, leave now.

Evangelical churches seem to be particularly susceptible to superstar preachers, because of the emphasis on preaching. We want to hear a new, fresh take on the old wooden Cross. We need some spiritual Red Bull to keep our enthusiasm up, but too often we wind up with just the bull.

But priests, too, can beguile, if less flamboyantly or on a lower scale. They too can usurp from their proper recipient the devotion and attention of congregants. But liturgical churches, those that emphasis not just our faith but also the Faith, the creeds, and the fact that the church is the bride of Christ and not a franchise, offer greater, albeit not infallible, safeguards against the cult of personality, not to mention the Armageddon clock-watching. (Perhaps the liturgical calendar, with its reassuring rhythms, provides its own kind of antidote.)

So the next time you hear that your guy (or, in some cases, gal) will not be leading worship on a particular Sunday, ask yourself if your heart sinks a little, and whether you even reconsider showing up for services until he/she makes his/her return. If so, ask yourself why — and in whom you have been putting your faith. May 21 may not have been the end, but of the making of many self-styled prophets there is definitely no end.

As you read on, you quickly realize that these “submissions focused on faith” reflecting how “filmmakers [are] considering issues larger than themselves,” as Peter Cooper, the festival’s director, put it are about psychos, hypocrites, quasi-fascists, and empty, lonely believers looking for something more out of life.

Now, I have not seen any of these films. Very few people have. They’ve yet to be put into general release. But what I found interesting was that the Times writer didn’t stop to google a little film history as a basis of comparison for this new generation of films that “use faith—and specifically Christianity—as either a narrative fulcrum or key expositional backdrop.” From Going My Way and Song of Bernadette and A Man for All Seasons to The Mission and Shadowlands and The Passion of the Christ to five films for which Christianity is, apparently, a fool’s paradise only.

One exception to this may be Vera Farmiga’s Higher Ground, in which the central character, a Pentecostal Christian, “is a seeker. She’s got to find herself,” as Farmiga, the film’s director, describes her. While the director sounds like she attempted to provide some nuance, and is not particularly hostile to faith, I couldn’t help asking, Is this is as good as it gets? A case study in which everyone’s lost and no one is found, to twist the lyrics of “Amazing Grace”?

More typical in tone appears to be The Ledge, about a man threatening to jump off a tower and the cop who’s trying to talk him down. The Hollywood Reporter has already reviewed it and has this: “British-born writer-director Chapman, who has also penned books on the battle between faith and reason, makes it all too clear which side he is on. All well and good if he allows the religious viewpoint to make its case. But [actor Patrick] Wilson’s character is so plainly unhinged and his view so extreme within Christianity that the debate is meaningless.”

The most famous of these films on faith is undoubtedly Kevin Smith’s Red State. Smith, director of indie faves Clerks, Chasing Amy, and Dogma (in which singer Alanis Morisette, of all people, played God), as well as the critically slammed Cop-Out and Jersey Girl, is as well-known for his profanity-laced, wildly funny, and frankly frank-frank discussions about his life and the movie business as he is for his work. (If you haven’t seen the YouTuber of Smith describing his time as a scriptwriter for a Superman iteration, you can find it here. But be warned: If you’re easily offended, or even not so easily offended, by coarse language, shut down your computer now.) Smith has more than 1.7 million followers on Twitter, not to mention flesh-and-blood fans who turn out in droves for his personal appearances, especially when he is in dialogue with someone like real-life comic-book superhero Stan Lee.

Well, Smith has made the blogs jump again (the last time was when he was kicked off an airplane for supposedly being too fat) with his recent performance at Sundance. Smith was there to show Red State, dubbed variously as a religious thriller and a horror film and based on Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church (WBC). Michael Parks, last seen in not one but two amazing performances in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill I & II, plays a hate-filled preacher who lures young gay men into his compound in order to kill them. So, no, A Man Called Peter this is not.

What was the main focus of the press coverage of Red State? A review of the film as a film? How mainstream Christians (whoever they may be by MSM lights) might react to this film? Would they fear being lumped in with the WBC types? Were there any positive Christian characters to offset the haters? Did Smith, himself a Catholic who has been known to thank God in the end credits of his films, believe he had any responsibility to distance some nut job’s self-appointed anti-gospelling from the gospel of Jesus Christ itself?

Uh uh. It was how Smith blew up the auction for his film. He basically bought his own film to market himself, and apparently used the forum to explain how the system hasn’t worked for him in the past and how he was going to take Red State to the streets himself, town by town, venue by venue. This (euphemism alert) “annoyed” a lot of professional film buyers, who felt set up.

As for that LA Times piece, where was the reaction to these films by festival goers themselves? After all, the filmmakers are there to get attention from distributors—they’re there to sell their wares and, unlike Smith, cannot count on their personal popularity to bring attention to their work. The reaction from audiences would, I think, be some indication of the films’ marketability. Even though attaining blockbuster status is most probably not a concern, nor even remotely likely, you would think that the immediate reaction of some of those who had seen the film would be fetching fodder at least for this article—especially given how films on religion have been known to encourage protests and boycotts from average filmgoers and not just fringe cultists (The Last Temptation of Christ, any one?).

Were any of the audience members who saw these films Christians, by chance? Did they perceive the films as mere hatchet jobs, the product of some anti-fundamentalists with an ax to grind? Were any of the Christians depicted in any way as three-dimensional—flawed but perhaps strengthened and ennobled by their faith? Did anyone come away seeing something positive in Christianity, something they might like to explore? Or did all these entries do nothing but confirm an already anti-religion, anti-Christian bias?

In which case, would that be all that surprising? Even to the Los Angeles Times?

And so, based on the authority vested in me by myself and “Dwayne,” with whom I struck up a conversation at the Macy’s Home Store, I do hereby submit for your approval a Protestant Syllabus of Errors:

1. That non-Roman communions, congregations, and denominations may not have as many popes as they please, assuming sufficient parking is made available.

2. That Protestant pontiffs do not speak infallibly on every conceivable subject morning, noon, and night, as befits autodidacts.

3. That sermons may not last longer than the director’s cut of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900.

4. That “children’s church,” in which the minister gathers every urchin under the age of 13 in a bunch to listen to a monosyllabic précis of the sermon, would be deemed cruel and unusual punishment under Article 3 of the Geneva Convention.

5. That the “passing of the peace” may not involve quick updates to one’s Facebook page.

6. That Red Bull may not be used in place of wine during the Lord’s Supper for the sake of conscience.

7. That church is not itself a parachurch activity, hence the light show.

8. That the invisible church cannot be revealed via a really big sign.

9. That the Creeds are not traditions of men and no more binding than @#$%^! My Dad Says.

10. That the Scofield Study Bible is not divinely inspired, being the version Jesus and the Apostles used.

11. That the Gloria, Kyrie, and Sanctus may not be sung to the tune of “Funky Cold Medina.”

12. That divisions within the church are not evidence of pride and hence cannot be remedied by dividing into new denominations.

Please feel free to add to this list as you see fit. I, for one, believe it is infallible as written. And Dwayne is with me on that.

Fast forward. Really fast. More. More. Stop. (Oh, you went too far. Why don’t you listen?) Reports are that a movement is afoot to abridge and amend the baptismal language currently found in the Book of Common Prayer. Whether this would be a matter of employing colloquial language; dumbing down the theology, with its supposedly antiquated talk of sin, death, and the devil; or leaving Christ out of it altogether, offering a “spiritual but not religious” initiation into the glories of Erastianism, remains unclear. But given that the CofE has only one thing that holds together, however tenuously, its various factions and wings, namely the Book of Common Prayer, messing with its initiatory sacrament will be seen by many as just one more hammer in the already overstuffed coffin that is organized religion in England.

Let’s face it: if anyone thinks that “earthing” the language of baptism will miraculously enthuse millions of unchurched Britons, I have a birth rite to sell you for a mess of porridge. I have no idea what the average Anglican vicar or bishop believes about baptism. I’m sure there are as many opinions as there are prelates. And so I guess this should not be seen as all that scandalous. And that’s the problem. Nothing, apparently, is sacred. In a church. Including what it means to be a member. Of a church.

It’s easy to mock this kind of stuff, but frankly, it always makes me sad. Think what you want of Hank 8’s break or Betts I’s compromise, the Church of England has produced some of the more outstanding and astounding Christian thinkers, artists, and witnesses of the past four and a half centuries: consider Thomas Cranmer and Richard Hooker and the translators of the King James Bible and George Herbert and John Donne and John Wesley and Samuel Johnson and William Wilberforce and Christina Rossetti and the G.K. Chesterton who wrote The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday and  and C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie and John Stott and Alister McGrath and N.T. Wright.

To those who insist that this theological insanity/inanity is the result of a rebellion against authority, true enough. Had the church in England remained faithful to Rome, what’s happening regarding faith and morals would not be happening regarding faith and morals. But I do wonder if the above-mentioned greats would have been permitted the freedom to express their faith exactly as they did (and do) if they were members of a more controlling institution obedient to a universal bishop. Freedom is never free. It costs, even kills when used recklessly. But it can also give life where before there were ecclesiastical chains.*

If that’s not offensive enough, try this: I believe the solution may be not more authority but less. Given that the one book that historically had bound Anglicans together, that of Common Prayer, is so easily mangled, well, can anyone spell anti-anti-disestablishmentarianism? Let those various factions finally stand on their own. We’ll see whether the High Church or the Broad Church or the Low Church survives if each must rely on the tithes and offerings of its congregants and not the public coffers.

Bet on the evangelicals. Just not with real money. They hate that.

(*Yes, yes, I know: the CofE in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was hardly a model of open-minded inquiry and freedom of conscience. It, too, knew how to rein in—and drive out—dissidents. The Puritans come to mind. But after the Armada invasion and Guy Fawkes, on the one hand, and Oliver Cromwell and the Roundheads on the other, religious violence was dreaded precisely because it had comprised all-too-real chapters in the nation’s history.)