Can the Church Save Hooters?

My friends, you may have heard that the popular family restaurant Hooters is filing for bankruptcy.

In the interest of full closure, I have a history with Hooters. Over the years, I have had several mistresses who worked there, which, as I pointed out to the restoration committee, is a coincidence. After all, I have also had mistresses who worked for Target, but no one said anything about that. Then the restoration committee was like “we didn’t know about those women,” and that was a whole thing. Anyway, Hooters is a valuable part of the community. They do outreach events like bikini carwashes, which are very useful, because those church vans aren’t going to clean themselves, except there was that one time where I was driving the shut-in seniors to church and I stopped at the bikini car wash and several of the old men died in the van, which turned into another whole thing. But it’s like I told the restoration committee: old people can die at any second, so that was probably a coincidence, too. Plus, now there aren’t as many seniors to pick up.

My point is this: as believers, we must have empathy for Hooters. This is extremely topical, because Christian nerds are currently arguing about whether or not empathy is a sin, because of woke. I have no idea what the argument is about, because I am too busy doing life and leaning in to various things. Stuff ice to say: the Church should try to save Hooters, because this is empathy, which is different from sympathy, which is a thing with a different definition.

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Probably the biggest issue with Hooters is branding. This is something that I understand well: as a premier evangelical brand consultant, I regularly charge large churches thousands of dollars to sit in on staff meetings and say things like “do our moments connect to the mission?” and “make sure all of the fonts and graphics have rounded corners.”

But back to the restaurant. People come to Hooters for one thing: owls. When you have women in tight shorts and low-cut tops, it is difficult to focus on the owls. You would be surprised at the number of men who will look at a hot woman. And this is what people want to talk about—the waitresses. Very few are talking about the actual food at Hooters, which is also made of owls.

Fix: Churches should donate additional owls to Hooters restaurants.

How else can churches help Hooters? Let’s look at the gender dynamic: dozens of men of all ages, competing for the attention of a few attractive young women who are pretending to be interested. At Hooters, this also happens.

Fix: Let’s get off in the box! If Hooters needs more female customers, let’s take the young mothers group that meets at Chick fil-A and simply redirect them to Hooters. As an added bonus, the mothers can drink 6-8 glasses of beer and watch sports as they nurse their babies. The only downside would be if one of the owls tried to carry off a small child, but you would be indoors, so it would be a simple matter of marshalling the other lactating mothers to help you chase the owl around the dining room and savagely beat it with brooms until it released the child.

Now, for the worst case scenario: Hooters closes down. What about all those uniforms that the waitresses wear? We can’t let those be thrown away, because that would be wasteful.

Fix: Churches should buy all the Hooters shirts and give them to married women to wear during services. This way, they can be safe from being sexualized. Ladies, think about it: whenever a man or teenage boy walks up to you, you can simply point to your shirt and say “don’t even think about it; these hooters are OFF LIMITS,” and this will make everyone feel good, because it is a boundary. Also, it counts as empathy.

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