Lines Composed a Few Feet from the Number 15 Bus Stop

Today's message is part of the Inspirational Messages from Inspirational People series, sponsored by the Church of the Orange Sky.

It's late evening and I'm sitting at a bus stop in downtown Prince George. The town's bus stops are peculiar locations these days. A couple of years ago, a local realtor helped finance the purchase of new benches for almost the entire transit system, and in exchange, he got his name plastered all over town: Bob Zayonc, realtor. Zayonc is a former minister who left the church under peculiar circumstances, though his Remax website (here) proclaims that this experience made him "a practical, progressive-minded problem solver." But Zayonc's advertising is fine - he's a businessman now, sort of a Christian reconstructed capitalist.

Zayonc's being followed by some more exciting company, though. The bus stop nearest my house now features a queerly Christian evangelical quotation about the divinity of Jesus, attributed to Mohandas Gandhi. I'm not as familiar with Gandhi's written ramblings as I ought to be, but it's probably safe to assume this quote has been yanked as far out of context as, for example, the creative creationist "quotation" of Darwin acknowledging the complexity of the human eye. Hurray for quote mining.

The message is obviously from some sort of evangelical group, but it's oddly difficult to tell which one. In small print on the sign is a web address - "truthinadvertising.ca" - which, as you can see here, doesn't actually have any meaningful content on it at all. When the muse struck me with the inspiration for this blog entry, I thought I was going to enjoy poking my way through a "Christian advertising" site. Sadly, that won't be the case. However, it does seem bizarre to raise money from evangelicals - or other groups, for that matter, but I assume these are evangelicals - to put up signs with Gandhi quotes. He's the sort of person my Baptist church used to condemn - someone too concerned about earthly good and social justice that they didn't remember to save their own soul by coming to Jesus at a good young age (or even an old one, which wasn't perfect or even good, but was still acceptable, as moronic pseudo-prophet Timothy Lahaye explains in his tell-all non-self-help book).

Anyways, to the evening at hand. I'm in another bus stop, and this one has another Christian advertisement in it. In a way, it's convenient. It's one-stop shopping for transportation: $1.50 for a ride to my house, plus a free ticket to heaven, fine print not included. Downtown Prince George is full of such interesting juxtapositions. A few blocks from where I'm sitting, there's an intersection where you can quite literally, just by crossing the street between stops, take out a mortgage for your house, buy insurance for your car, gamble away what's left, then pray for God's forgiveness (and maybe some cash from heaven, mana-style) with some friendly if mostly elderly Anglicans. (I'm allowed to denigrate Anglicans because some of my best friends are Anglicans.)

Today's bus-stop advertisement is for "Alpha," a Christian evangelism program that is like a combination of Contagious Christians' absurd "Matthew party" concept in action (i.e. invite non-Christians to an event, then ambush them with the gospel), plus the last great fad in evangelical circles, the "small group." For Anglicans and atheists out there, a "small group" is when you go to a fellow churchgoer's house, sit in a circle, eat a few chips from a bag someone thought to bring, awkwardly try to explain to the group how you failed in your "walk with God" over the past week, then have a nice group prayer and engage in entirely non-religious small talk until it's time to go home.

Alpha's that, plus Pavlov. The way it works is that the churches get together and storm the town with ads about the grand new program where you can "discuss the meaning of life." In accordance with modern evangelical marketing standards, the fact that this is an explicitly Christian discussion of the meaning of life is something you might not notice at the outset. At least, the ads don't bother to mention that Alpha is Christian; on the other hand, there aren't many non-Christian groups that can afford to advertise the fact they want to talk to you about the "meaning of life." Either you don't realize Alpha is Christian or, using your brain (at this stage, whether that brain comes straight from God or took a detour via Australopithecus afarensis isn't really germane), you cleverly surmise it, and don't care. Either way, if you're still interested, you're shifted into stage two.

Now, you're drawn into the program by the prospect of free food. The first meeting is a free dinner. The dinners don't last, though - somewhat like Pavlov's dogs, eventually the bell rings but all you get is food for the soul. And not even chicken soup, at that, but Nicky Gumbel, who is apparently the Church of England's answer to Stephen R. Covey. (Yes, Gumbel is actually an ordained Anglican minister, which is a little surprising given the company Alpha now keeps.) Since we haven't yet perfected reliable storage and transmission of the disembodied voice that speaks to people like Neale Donald Walsch, Gumbel addresses Alpha attendees via their host's television set. At some point, there's a sermon along the lines of "does God cut it or bite it in today's secular world?", which is also, incidentally, the topic which suckered me into a Baptist church back when I was an impressionable youngster.

You might come for the free food, but the hope is that you'll stay for the religion. As Christian sermons go, Gumbel's inspirational speeches could be worse, though the spectacle of a bunch of adults sitting around receiving truth from their TV set conjures up all kinds of disturbing and depressing imagery. Fortunately, being a Mac user renders me immune to the danger of falling victim to such Orwellian oblivion, and has ever since a very hot Anya Major threw a very cool hammer through a very large Big Brother way back in 1984. (You too can become a chic nonconformist via a credit card and a visit to Apple's online store.)

It seems to me that religious organizations need only spend money on bus stop advertising if they have so much money they're beginning to see opportunities everywhere to spread their considerable largesse, or if they're growing desperate because they can't think of a better way to remind people they're still there, other than prancing about at election time decrying the trinity of modern evil (gays, liberals, and abortion clinics). Prince George's churches aren't particularly wealthy (even the Catholics have had to give up a decent chunk of their real estate holdings to Wal-Mart and Canadian Tire), so I'm going to go with unimaginative desperation. Perhaps they could spend the money on a new food bank instead. Prince George could use another one, it would be very similar to Alpha except for the videotaped lectures, and, if that weren't enough, there's already a long and honourable tradition of rice-Christians.

(Rice Christianity, incidentally, originated in Europe with the Edict of Milan, not in East Asia with rice. It's one of the few ancient concepts that Europe invented and then spread to Asia, rather than the other way around. I've always wondered why we forgot to take the credit for this one. We certainly didn't hesitate to appropriate the credit for most everything else.)