Something I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions since moving to Winston-Salem is that when I was in the DC area most people would ask me "What do you do?" when they met me but here they ask "What’s your church?".  And it’s not confined to parties or other social situations.  It happens at the grocery store, the barber shop, and just about any other public forum.  It’s also interesting to me that people here will unabashedly share their religious views with total strangers and will invoke religion in discussions of things like schools.  Let’s just say that school prayer is still a hot issue here.

It has never really bothered me that people profess their religion so publicly and it also doesn’t bother me when they ask where I go to church and then invite me to attend theirs.  The public square is as much theirs as it is mine and I’ve always felt that if it made me uncomfortable I could just ignore the question or brush them off.  Although I’ve never done it I’ve had in the back of my head a plan to say "I’ll come if you let me sacrifice a chicken on the altar like I do in my basement".

What does bug me is when members of various churches knock on my door and try to sell me on their church.  This is my sanctuary after all and I don’t like it being invaded.  I understand that most Christians believe it is a necessity to recruit (I don’t know where it is but there’s apparently a passage in the New Testament that invokes people to play Coach K and recruit for Jesus’ team), and as I said before I don’t mind if they use the public square to do it, but when I’m at home I want to be left alone. 

Quick side note: Whenever I hear people talk about the part of the Bible where they’re instructed to go out and recruit I always wonder why they assume it means for their particular church?  I mean if I’m Christian then I’m Christian, so what does it matter where I go to church?  Two words: collection plate.

A notable exception is the Mormons.  Yes this is very inconsistent but there’s a personal reason.  When I was a kid my family was Mormon and at an early age I was being prepared for the day that I would go on my mission.  I started saving money at around 8 years old, but when my parents got divorced we left the church so I never got much past saving $20 for the bike I was going to ride for God.  To this day I’m still on the books with the Mormons and they periodically send the boys in white shirts to my house to say hi.  It’s easy for me to see myself in their shoes so I’m inclined to be sympathetic.  And because they’re so young it’s also easy for me to steer them away from selling to talking basketball over a glass of water that they’re always thankful for, which means it’s almost always a pleasant 15 minutes.

The other churches tend to send little blue haired ladies who are not easily swayed from their topic.  They’re also stubborn and doctrinaire and exactly the kind of people I don’t much want to hang with, but because they’re little blue haired ladies I’m incapable of brushing them off. It would be too much like brushing off my grandmother.  I think if they sent someone younger I’d be able to invoke my chicken sacrifice ploy, but I just can’t do it with the blue hairs.

So I’ve started to think about how I can cut them off at the pass, as it were.  Some ideas include:

• Putting a Buddha on the front porch.
• Keeping a turban by the front door that I can don before opening the door.  They wouldn’t know a Sikh from a Shitzu, but they’d know that whatever I was I wasn’t Christian.  It’d probably scare ’em to death and I’m willing to bet they’d set a record for the 100 yard dash in the 80+ division.
• Put a statue of the Virgin Mary on the front porch and a sign on the front door that says "We’re Catholic and One of Us Used to be Mormon".  This has the advantage of being true and thoroughly confusing.  What could they possibly say?

For the record we’ve been attending the Moravian church down the road for the last several months.  They’re great people, they never once knocked on our door and they spend an inordinate amount of time eating chicken pie and drinking coffee.  Exactly the kind of people I want to hang with.

In anticipation of those of you who I’m sure I’ve offended let me say this: I’ve spent a lot of time in various churches including Mormon, Presbytarian for a couple of months, Unitarian for one service, Baptist with some of my cousins, Lutheran High School for three years, Lutheran College for one year, Catholic for much of my adulthood, Methodist for several services and now Moravian.  There is much more similarity than difference between them, and almost all of the difference is in what I’ll call ceremony.  From what I can tell the doctrinal differences are more important to the church leaders than their congregations so where I choose to spend my time is based more on the people of the church than the doctrine.  That probably best explains my peturbation at being evangelized (I feel like a Verizon customer being cold-called by Cingular) and my inclination to be attracted to the Moravians’ honey-pot practice of "Food and Fellowship."