My husband and I had our son baptized in the LCMS church to make his parents happy. A recovering Catholic and budding atheist, I really didn’t know anything about them. At the meeting with the pastor, I got both barrels. I was told that Catholics were all going to hell because we put too much emphasis on good works and charity, and the only way to Heaven was by absolute belief in the strict interpretation of the King James Bible. Good works were unnecessary and the path to Satan. I was also told that the reason Catholics prayed to Mary and the other saints was because we knew that God didn’t listen to us so we needed intermediaries…while their brand of Christianity had the direct line. I guess the highly educated and science believing nuns who taught me in grade school forget to mention this.
The next time we were in an LCMS church was for a cousin’s wedding. I swear, every third sentence out of the pastor’s mouth was an instruction to the bride to obey her husband.
Then at my brother-in-law’s funeral, that particular pastor spent half an hour bitching about the fact that my brother-in-law didn’t go to church every goddamned Sunday, but MAYBE God took pity on him and allowed him into Heaven.
Cut to my father-in-law’s funeral a few years later…my husband and I asked that pastor to please keep that shit to a minimum. He agreed, then proceeded to explain to the congregation that Melvin was a good man, but it wasn’t enough, so everybody pray extra hard that God won’t leave him outside the gates for too many centuries.
When my husband died, his relatives were ticked off…not only was his service not in a church, but the officiant was a female pastor of a non-congregational, all-inclusive, all-welcoming church who managed not to mention God or hell or eternal torment…so no fun for them, and no more invitations to family events for me. Darn.
We like to think that the scary Westboro/Liberty/Fischer kind of evil eKstra Krispy Kristianity is relatively new, but they’ve been around forever, and they’re considered mainstream.