Holiness Rankings, October 2023

(Our periodic check in of the holiest people and trends in American Christianity. Improve your chances of making the next rankings by disclosing the sins of your rivals in the comments.)

1) Me

In the interest of full enclosure, I originally ranked myself much, much lower on this list, but that counted as humbleness, which then raised my ranking back up to the top spot. This is what is known as a causal fallacy, which comes from the Greek phrase for casual fellatio, which my youth pastor said you should only get from your wife, otherwise you’re going to be sharing everyone else’s fallacy, or something, I think there was an object lesson with bubble gum.

2) Modest wedding dresses

One thing that Christian women love to do is say “Today is my wedding day. Well, time to show off these amazing jugs.” There are several reasons women do this. First of all, they probably want to send a message to all of the married men at the wedding, and that message is you could have had me, but you chose that hag Emma instead. Another reason is that women want to look hot on their wedding day in case their husband turns out to be a turd. Then, the next week or whatever, when they are looking for a different husband, they can walk into the singles group at church and be like remember me? And the single guys will be like yes, you are that hot bride, do you want to go to the apple orchard and do a medium-level make out in my 2015 Toyota Camry afterward?

Anyway, Christians are arguing about modest wedding dresses again or something. I don’t know. I haven’t seen this many Christians interested in wedding dresses since my freshman year at Christian college, when you couldn’t look at anything spicy in the computer labs or the Dean of Students would call you the next day, so the best you could do¹ was that one photo from Break or Ebaumsworld of the sexy bride, and everyone printed it out and made the same joke, DURRR THIS IS WHAT MY WIFE WILL WEAR FOR OUR WEDDING, and everyone laughed, anyway none of us had girlfriends.

This one:

3) People who don’t drink coffee in church

Last week, John Piper said something about Christians drinking coffee in church, my team will link to the quote. Many people got upset about this, except for me, because I don’t drink coffee in church. I get my morning pick-me-up discreetly, with those Crystal Light packets of caffeinated drink mix. Of course I don’t mix them in water, this would be too distracting to the other believers; I simply open the packets and pour the contents into my mouth, or arrange the powder into lines atop my hymnal, which I then gently snort up my nose. It’s called being considerate, which is one of the Spirit fruits or whatever.

4) Kate Shellnutt

Good to see Kate make an appearance on the rankings. I don’t know why she hasn’t been on before, probably because she committed too many heinous sins or whatever, I have no idea, my interns put this list together.

5) Hell Houses

Folks, it’s getting close to Halloween. Quickly, here are the holiness sub-rankings for your church:

1. Hell House

2. Heaven’s Gates, Hell’s Flames production

3. Hallelujah Festival

4. Harvest Festival

5. Trunk or Treat

Obviously, the holiest thing your church can do is a ham-handed haunted house to scare pagans into converting. Lots of people criticize Hell Houses, but perhaps they just haven’t been to the right one. Come to my church; I have been put in charge of designing this year’s production. Instead of rooms where people go to hell for using Ouija boards or getting too much casual fellatio, I have given it a thoroughly modern feel: every room will be someone from Atheist Twitter writing galaxy brain tweets on their phone like IF GOD IS REAL, WHY DID ELON TAKE MY CHECK MARK? Get saved, kids, or this is your future.

6) Andy Stanley

Lots of people are angry at Andy this week. I guess there was a conference that made everyone upset? I don’t know the details, because I would never attend a conference where I am not a speaker, that’s basically giving your brand away for free without a commitment, which is another thing that my youth pastor talked about, I think the object lesson for that one was rose petals.

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1. kids, this was a magical time when you couldn’t immediately look something up on your phone. They year was 1874