J is for Jeezus

J is for Jesus. I know this because the lady in the dinged-up 1990s minivan told me so.

My interaction with this person began innocuously: I had gotten off my bike at the foot of the Boise foothills to make a phone call. Coming to a halt at a nearby stop sign she rolled down her window and asked me if I was freezing. This is a perfectly reasonable question to ask a person wearing Spandex at five in the evening the day after Christmas. I told her that, yeah, I was fine. That would have been a great moment for this Good Samaritan to roll up her window and go on her merry way.

Instead she took the opportunity to brandish a candy cane and ask if I believed in Christmas; if I knew that J is for "Jesus," and R is for "chevron." Now, a question about one's belief in a major Christian holiday in Idaho is code for "are you a Christian?" and after a brief discussion that consisted of her asking pointed questions about what I believe and me nodding like an idiot bobble head doll, she eventually wished me well, waved, and drove off.

J is for "Jesus?" Chevrons? There's an acronym for that: WTF. It turned my head that after millennia of Christian dominance over the Western world, this woman had the gall to talk to me in ciphers, as though Nero's spies might overhear and feed the twain of us to the lions.

But once an oppressed group, always an oppressed group. Just think about all the people you know who life has kicked around, or social conservatives, or spokespeople for labor unions: Like Nietzsche's slave morality, these people carry the politics of oppression with them wherever they go, even when they're in charge. Within the broader oppressed community, authenticity is defined––as it always has been––by suffering and underground-ness.

So now that Christianity is a mainstream faith cherished two or three times a year by millions of sensible people the question is, who's the most hardcore kind of Christian? After all, these establishment Christians can't be the real deal.

The answer: Christians who speak to each other in code. J can indeed stand for "Jesus." And the chevron (usually with an eye drawn somewhere in it) is the original for the Jesus fish that now adorns so many car bumpers. Clearly I was dealing with one of the most hardcore Christians of all––a modern-day Paul or Arius––; one of those people who sacrifice the warmth and comfort of friends, intelligence, success, social competence for…heaven? Legitimacy? Communion wafers? It's impossible to say for sure.

I'd always been told that there are three topics that shouldn't be discussed in mixed company. Those are sex, politics, and religion. This formula subjects these three areas of life to the rules of propriety, which is the source of my general antipathy towards Pride Week, the Tea Party, and Evangelical Christianity. Some people prioritize their beliefs over manners and decorum just like how someone who hates pants might one day decide to not wear them to work, and the effect is a lot like when someone reads over your shoulder, or how tall people seem to tower imperiously over your personal space.

I'm not religious, and like most decent people I consider on-the-spot religious discussion a kind of intrusion. Though invisible from the waist down on account of her battered minivan, my candy cane-wielding believer was clearly not wearing pants. It was as though during her spiel about whether I was One of Us she had casually dropped them out the window as a token of our newfound familiarity. Except it wasn't. It was like something a crazy person would do.