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TAKE MY GOD, PLEASE Comedian Thor Ramsey on homeschooling

Thor Ramsey spent years playing clubs before he became a Christian. Now he plays churches exclusively, but only because the better pay and less grueling schedule give him more time to spend with his wife and daughter. "You'll know when you cross a line in the church by the reaction of the crowd," he assured me. "You will know you've crossed the evangelical boundary."

"Do church audiences heckle?" I asked. I tried to imagine how a Christian comedian handles hecklers. How'd you like it if I came to where you work and forgave you?

"I get so frustrated with how the Christian conservatives have taken over, and there just needs to be an antidote to their rhetoric," said Christian comedian Michael Rayner. "So much of Christian pop culture is just dreck, you know what I mean?""No," said Ramsey, "but they always come up after and tell you if something struck them the wrong way. They'll heckle you at the end of the show. I do a whole bit on the Left Behind series, and I use the phrase buck naked. A guy actually e-mailed me. There's a verse in the Bible where Paul talks about 'coarse jesting,' and he felt my using the term buck naked was coarse jesting. At the time, I was all earnest. I e-mailed him back, giving him some examples of the Bible being real and not whitewashing things. You could say Adam and Eve were buck naked in the Garden and it would be biblical. Or there is the story of Onan spilling his seed on the ground. When people say that their pastor preaches through the Bible, I know they skip stuff. We went back and forth, and he actually ended up saying—this is an actual quote—'Just because the Bible talks about it, doesn't mean we should.' I go, Boy, that's a mentality you can't argue with right there. There was nothing I could do." He shook his head. "Now I've just got a policy: 'Thank you very much for your comments. I'll take them into consideration.'"

"That's the weird thing about Christian audiences," a comedian named Michael Rayner told me: "They will find so many bizarre things offensive when you're just joking around. Sometimes in my regular comedy club sets, I'll say, 'Usually the comedian tries to flirt with the cute girls, but I'm happily married. Me and my wife make sweet Christian love.' Now, the audience thinks that's really funny, that I say 'sweet Christian love.' But in a Christian audience, that's actually too scandalous sometimes, talking about sex with your wife. Wow, that's scandalous!"

Rayner is an L.A. guy with a bit of a nerd-chic aesthetic. "So many Christians are sort of downer Christians, you know what I mean?" he continued. Often, he said, he gets along better with atheists than with other Christians, in part because of his strong left-wing convictions. "I get so frustrated with how the Christian conservatives have taken over, and there just needs to be an antidote to their rhetoric," he said. "So much of Christian pop culture is just dreck, you know what I mean? It's some kind of preachy, weird message. The thing I hate even about Bible tracts is it's always the biker who's smoking and drinking and doing IV drugs that's going to hell and not the rich businessman who doesn't care about his fellow man, or some Enron executive who raped and pillaged a pension from the working class."