• 목록
• 글쓰기
• 게시판 리스트 옵션
  • 수정
  • 삭제

Former Satanist High Priest Now America's #1 Christian Comedian, thepornfans.com screamed the flyers peppering the Oberlin College campus. I had seen "Christian comedians." Most Americans are Christian, which might make most American comedians Christian, but that doesn't mean religious humor. Most comics are secular, and even anticlerical to make theism the worthy butt of some jokes. But to Warnke's evangelical fans, "Christian" means one thing totally different. Ask them in the event that they're religious and they are saying "No, I'm a Christian." Ha. Evangelical humor? It might be interesting. It was positively free. I went.

It was free to me, at the very least. Everyone else forked over a requested "free will love offering" at the door. "Thanks," urged a Christian waving a can at me. "You're welcome," I said, guarding my wallet and ducking past a desk of books, tapes, and SatanBuster T-shirts. (A card requesting another "love reward" was shoved in my hand earlier than I escaped the lobby and walked down the aisle for a front-row seat.)

You never saw so many Christians! The concert was in Finney Chapel, a large hall devoted for decades to secular concert events for our own students. Oberlin's a secular, even freethinking college. I didn't recognize more than thirty schoolmates in the throng of several hundred. The corridor was jammed with remarkably clean-lower and nicely-scrubbed religious families from neighboring towns and counties. Little boys raced about throwing pieces of paper. Teenage women stood around wanting guardedly cute in tight jeans and baggy sweaters. Wives demurely herded their households to seats found by their husbands, who regarded oddly calm and content material in their patriarchy.

The road manager warmed up the crowd. "We thanks," he prayed, "that Christians can have more fun than anybody because the big questions are settled." He praising the teens present. Punctuating his words with "man," "y'know," and "bizarre," he introduced the star of the show. The publicity flyers had shown Warnke casually reclining in jeans and sneakers, looking harmless in lengthy hair, antic grin, and double chin. But when he emerged onstage the his swimsuit was polyester, and his sneakers sneakers of leather-based. He carried a cold black Bible with gold leaf shimmering fiery bronze within the stagelight. Bobby McFerrin's "Be Happy" was piped to the audio system; once it had faded and Warnke had snapped on the sound crew for lousy timing, the show began.

I had questioned what constituted "Christian" comedy. Once you eradicate jokes about religion, sex, and private misfortune, what's left that was actually humorous? It wasn't Warnke's material, which concerned Jell-O, yogurt, Teflon, airplanes, nose choosing, politicians, five minutes of canine jokes, and ten minutes on "that bastion of society, the family," with its hardworking father, harried mom, and people darned youngsters. The group ate it up. He pretended to insult six or seven sects easily represented in the viewers however the gags have been anonymous, relevant to any group. He did show ability and insight in fingering evangelicals who needed a godly excuse for all the pieces, including quick meals. He threw in a parable at times, however did not actually start preaching till an hour had passed. The segue was very easy, sliding from joking about his "weirdness" (the teen theme once more) to chastising the gang for judging him on the premise of appearance.

The fun being over - if that account of an entire hour seems transient, effectively, Warnke himself might have been briefer; I am doing the reader a favor - he introduced Warnke Ministries, claiming a staff of 35 Kentuckians handling 50,000 prayer requests per month and proselytizing in prisons and psychological hospitals. But he positioned the most emphasis on his folks's counseling of abused children, and the group's working with local police forces and supplying "knowledgeable testimony in courtroom to get convictions" on the relationship of the powers of Satan as utilized by child abusers!

In the following days I searched that 12 months's newspaper indexes for Warnke's little woman, and did not discover her. I was not surprised. Of course Warnke would slam "Satanism." Just as Christianity can not not declare salvation with out supporting a satan with which to threaten its followers, Warnke could not claim to be "America's #1 Christian comedian" with out his background as a "former Satanist excessive priest." His little lady was as illusory as the Satan to which he claimed she was sacrificed, no extra actual than the cannibal Jews of the Middle Ages stated to use blood and foreskins from Christian infants. What I had not anticipated was that Warnke, alternating between holier-than-thou and lowlier-than-thou, would feed pablum humor to a corridor of mental youngsters, and then shock them. I assume he shocked them, as they gasped at the precise moments. He definitely shocked me.

For the past hour, Warnke had been telling the weakest of jokes, his repertoire limited by the childish conservatism of his viewers. He spoke to an group considering itself clean of mind, limiting its porn to Bible atrocity couched within the King's English of the sixteenth century of the myth by which they lived. Then, after introducing the aims of Warnke Ministries, he gave the shock fiction of Satanic crime on a strong symbol of vulnerability. Can you guess what adopted?

You wager your backside dollar, for have been you there, you would have lost it! Money! For a quarter of an hour, Warnke pleaded for funding, sending teen women out shaking their cans. Decrying any similarity with Jimmy Swaggart or the Bakkers ("Take a look at me," he leered, tossing his tresses), he beseeched the crowd for specie "to pay the phone bill." The crowd gave generously, the little lady nonetheless vivid to them. Warnke returned to jokes - on Southern food, directed on the "ladies fixin' to get married" - to maintain the giving going strong as the ushers "ushed" their approach to the rear.

The "comedy concert" now little greater than a camp meeting, Warnke led a hymn. The crowd knew all of the lyrics. I did not stand with them; sitting conspicuously in the entrance row, I used to be noticed by Warnke, who beamed a fast, benevolent smile upon me. After the songs he asked the unsaved to face, forgiving upfront the "righteous and frightened" who sat. From my limited vantage level (I was up entrance and sitting, in spite of everything) I noticed solely two stand for salvation. One was a woman behind me, bent with age, who audibly swore as she struggled to rise with help from relations. The other was a man who had heckled Warnke. He may have been a plant - shills are common at such gatherings - but for this crowd, I'm sure he was just a household man who wished to save lots of face via submissive repentance. He'd most likely been saved twice this month.

The concert ended with Warnke praying for the crowd and reminding it that providing buckets still circulated. The sheep, newly fleeced by one more traveling shepherd, this one a Tartuffe of polyester as an alternative of sackcloth, left Finney Chapel, discussing ecumenism as they sorted themselves into sectarian crews as their church buses, youth group vans, and household automobiles started to pack them off for house.

I wrote "Christian Comedy from Hell" after attending the live performance, which was sponsored by the poor dupes of Oberlin Christian Fellowship in 1988. The article appeared in Big Apple Atheist in 1991. The exposé "Selling Satan: The Tragic History of Mike Warnke," by John Trott and Mike Hertenstein, first appeared in 1992 as a thirty-thousand-word article in Cornerstone journal, and was revealed as a full-size book by Cornerstone Press in 1993. The e book remains to be in print and is on the market from Amazon.com. Another Cornerstone replace was featured in 1992. In January 1995 the Skeptical Inquirer reviewed the book. A 1995 assertion is offered online from the Watchman Expositor.