My late father-in-law, an Episcopal priest, had a cartoon taped to his kitchen wall in Sherman that skewers an obnoxious feature of American religion. In the cartoon, a grinning devil, sitting on a throne surrounded by flames, instructs a horned apprentice, suitcase in hand, who is about to head upstairs to torture the human race.
“Remember to quote lots of Scripture,” Satan says.
If you work as a reporter for more than four decades in Texas, as I have, you will—regularly—encounter the most inappropriate, unfortunate and downright bizarre invocations of the Almighty. It’s enough to make me, a church-going Episcopalian who has—until now— kept my beliefs in the closet as a reporter, ruefully agree with the quip I saw on a refrigerator magnet. A man says to the Prince of Peace: “Please Jesus, protect me from your followers.”
Case in point: my interview years ago with an ambitious Texas Baptist pastor who had his eyes on
