One summer, during seminary, a friend asked me to be a girls’ counselor for his church youth group at their annual trip to a Southern Baptist camp in the Sierras. I said yes because we were friends. I should have said no because we were friends. We should have both known better. I was in the midst of some of the most difficult work of my spiritual life as my beliefs about the world and God were being de-constructed one by one.  And it was hard for me not to feel anger at the religion of my childhood. Even though I wasn’t Baptist, bringing me to a Southern Baptist camp at that time in my life was like inviting a parolee from out-of-town to the local prison for a summer picnic. But I still said yes because I liked and trusted my friend and his co-leader. And the teenagers were great and reminded me of the kind of kids I would have been friends with when I was their age.

The theme for the camp that week was kingship. Every day, worship revolved around one of the following kings of the Bible: King David, King Solomon, and King Josiah. Of course, the last day of camp culminated in a special celebration of King Jesus. To assist in our study of each king, the kids were divided up into smaller groups as were the adults. Our task was to make a presentation on the king we were assigned. I ended up in one of the King David groups. Our task was to give a presentation on the following verse from 2 Samuel 8: “David also defeated the Moabites. He made them lie down on the ground and measured them off with a length of core. Every two lengths of them were put to death, and the third length was allowed to live. So the Moabites became subject to David and brought tribute. The Lord gave David victory wherever he went.”

All the children were sent out of the main assembly room to go work on their presentations while the adults were left behind to do the same. Naively, I believed we were meeting separately from the children to allow for more age-appropriate conversations about the complex theological questions that arise from an examination of the socio-political context of the Davidic monarchy, specifically in this text, how the name of God is invoked to bless King David’s mistreatment of prisoners of war and practice of exacting tribute from the survivors.  But within a minute of the kids leaving the building, someone in my group piped up: “Let’s do a skit!”

Now, in my life, the things I know with absolute certainty have dwindled to only a few truths, one of them being this: Christians love skits. Apparently, there is no story too morbid or moralizing that cannot be helped with a little bit of mime, music, and sign language. Especially stories about the torture and murder of prisoners of war which are infamously lacking in theatrical pop and humor. But still, even though I knew skits were so popular among Christians, I believed it was for the benefit of the youth that so many churches resorted to hammy productions on why it is important to wait for marriage before having sex and how we know that the End of the World is nigh (the latter being a good argument against the first).

But here we were–adults choosing to do a skit even though there were only adults in the room! It was like we’d all decided to talk in baby voices to the babies. But then when the babies were gone, we were still talking in our baby voices. It was then I realized that we liked talking in baby voices. The skits were for us, not the kids. Ideas for the skit began flying around the group. We would do a CNN-like news report from the battlefield. A news reporter would interview the surviving prisoners about their experience and then David himself would be interviewed. The entire push of the news story would be, in effect, to “prove” the power of the one true God in helping David defeat his enemies. No one seemed to think that a bubbly news parody on the brutality of war might not make for the best skit material.

More importantly, no one asked what seemed to me to be the most obvious question. Did anyone have a problem with the story? No one did. David was only following God’s will, they said. If that were true then, I responded, “Doesn’t this make God sound kind of, well, vicious?” My seminarian mind struggled to even attach God to the story at all as I had learned that people then used the name of God much like people do now–however they please to justify what they are doing. But I was talking to a group of Christians for whom that argument would be a non-starter. Still, in addition to the slaughter of surrendered prisoners, didn’t anyone have a problem with the obvious use of psychological torture inflicted on both those who were killed and those who survived? Could anyone imagine what it must have been like to have been lined up in that row–completely defenseless–and to know that you had a two out three chance of being killed or a one out of three chance of having compatriots on either side of you killed. This was brutal. Sadistic, even. Killing soldiers who have already surrendered and subjecting them to such a capricious, deadly test is a war crime that could have only been designed by bored sociopaths.

“But they were heathens,” someone said, as though that explained everything.

Heathens? Heathens? People still used that word? I was speechless. A group of Christian youth pastors were justifying these gruesome killings because the victims were “heathens.” Oh, and because the Bible said God was okay with it.  So was the word “heathens” the magic key to getting away with every possible crime against humanity?

I didn’t have enough ground beef for my meatloaf. So I thought I’d throw in a few heathens.

So many heathens these days! The world wouldn’t miss a few for my leather crafts.

Can you really call it a genocide if they were only heathens?

I was horrified and angered. I couldn’t believe this was really happening, that we were making a skit–a skit!–about brutality and terror that had neither brutality or terror in it. We were telling a story of religious violence older than the Bible itself and no one had a problem with it. Religious violence? Nah. They were just heathens.

Of course, there was still the matter of casting that needed to be resolved.

 “Who wants to be the heathen?” the group leader asked. My hand shot up. I didn’t even have to think about it. Never have I taken more perverse pleasure in the fact that my name is only one letter away from heathen.

I’m not exactly sure what I planned to do once I got on stage. But I knew with absolute certainty that I didn’t want the role of the “heathen” to be played by someone who actually believed heathens exist.

When it was our time to take the sanctuary stage, I took my place as a survivor between two other actors playing the parts of dead soldiers.  I dropped to my knees and placed my hands behind my head. And as the lights came up, we began our super cute skit on war and death. A large, tall woman playing the part of a brassy news reporter, thrust a microphone into the faces of witnesses to the battle; her interviews were quippy and humorous. David was somewhere off-stage, apparently using the rope to dry his laundry or fashion a new belt out of his newly purchased, multi-purpose instrument of death.  I kept my head bowed as the newscast continued, leaning forward for a time and bringing my hands and face to the floor.

And then, as the only surviving heathen in sight, it was my turn to be interviewed. I hadn’t really planned anything except complete and total dissent and sabotage. The adrenaline of the moment surged through my body. And I tried to call to mind the lessons of war and violent trauma that I have gratefully only ever received second-hand and mostly through film and books. Pictures of dismembered bodies lying across barbed wire or in a field, the faces of young men matted with blood and dirt, the stories of fecal stench signaling the convulsing terror of the battlefield. It didn’t take long before the moment quickly jumped track and took me with it. I began to cry. Long, hard sobs released themselves from my body. I began to shake and, um, drool. When the CNN reporter put the microphone up to my face, I was incoherent, distraught, begging for my life. The auditorium went quiet. I thought I heard someone ask, “Is she okay?” The other actors on the platform looked at each other, the humor of the skit having been sucked into the earth, uncertain how to proceed with this very unfunny, very unwelcome ad-lib.

Our fearless CNN newscaster, an old skit veteran who had weathered her fair share of theatrical crises, recovered first. “As we can see,” she turned to address the audience in the silky voice she had adopted for this role: “Not everyone is celebrating King David’s victory today. Let’s just hope the Moabites take to heart this lesson: before you step onto that battlefield next time, you had better be sure you have a longer rope.”

I’m not sure I was able to effectively communicate my point. And ten years on, I also understand that perhaps I did not choose the most effective means of persuasion. No one takes kindly to sabotage. Especially in a skit.

But whether anyone understood what I was doing up on that stage–and my youth pastor friend from seminary did voice understanding and support–I realize that I probably acted out like I did as much for myself as anyone. I was tired of religion that asked me to be complicit with suffering. I was tired of glib Christians. I was tired of being a glib Christian. How many people had I harmed in my own life because I believed I could speak with the authority of God’s voice? How many times had I committed a bloodless act of religious vioIence believing I was in the right? I was tired of thinking I knew the answers only to discover that none of those answers were helping me face the complexities of adult life. I was angry at how little of what I was taught as being absolutely true was holding up under the scrutiny of critical thinking. I felt lost in my life but I also knew that I was far enough off the well-carved road of my religious upbringing that I could never go back. Like I said earlier, I probably should have stayed home. But you know us heathens. We never do what we’re supposed to do.