A Warning Received from the ‘Protestant Death Society’. 😱 Wanna Have a Laff? 😉

I KNOW THAT SOME OF YOU have a sense of humour… so here is something that I hope will put a smile on your face on this grey winter’s day as I give you the background to the attached image of a spoof letter I wrote to myself in 1990 from the imaginary (yet not so imaginary!) “Protestant Death Society”. Let me explain…

If I had a dollar for the number of times that church people have tried to shut me up, I would be a rich man.😎 Well, sometimes they just say, “Can’t you try and be more balanced”, with that typical squidgy-grey face of mediocrity. By “balanced” they mean, “Please can you water down what you say. It offends my need to not be shocked by truth”. But there are many who really have tried to “shut me up” (mostly in the past, but very occasionally now). I would say that it’s hilarious, were it not so devious. When I have given advance notice of some article which could be somewhat controversial because so many are indulging in whatever it is I am writing about, I would suddenly find that my inbox would be full of veiled and not so veiled threats. I remember the first time I came across this ugly phenomenon more than 35 years ago. I had given advance notice in a flyer that the next issue of the Diakrisis Journal (which was then a 50-page magazine in hardcopy print as there was no real public internet or email) would contain an article showing “the origins of the papal Antichrist myth”. Well, in the Red-Hot Prot/Reformed Mafia scene that was as serious as throwing a hand grenade into a crowded marketplace! There is nothing quite like exposing a shibboleth in the Christian scene to be the mirage that it really is. Some of the warnings to me were relatively polite in that smarmy, insincere, disingenuous “I will pray for you” manner. Yuk! Others were just downright nasty. A few were menacing, telling me not to do something I “would come to regret”, or that there would be “consequences”, or even insinuating that I or my family could be in danger. This is so-called “Christian” people!😆 I was like halfway through my time in theological college, about five years after I came to Christ. I thought I had entered the “suburbs of heaven”. But, boy, was I in for a rude awakening!

So, I say it again: I cannot even begin to tell you the number of times church people have tried to shut me up. I use the words “church people” deliberately rather than “disciples of Christ”, because all these folks busy themselves with upholding the law (for everyone else except themselves!), like the legalistic Pharisees who were totally into the letter of the law rather than the spirit behind it, or the rationalistic Sadducees, who busied themselves with temple administration and ritual. The visible church is stuffed full of such folks. And once they realised that I had a platform through my journal, or later after the mid-1990s because I dared to stand up to the evil of the “Toronto Blessing”, or in the late 1990s after I published a large article about Israel, they were gagging to gag me! 🙂 And, believe me, they tried everything: Malicious unfounded gossip, vicious lies, the circulating of slanderous letters (often sent in advance to people in whose venues where I was going to preach or give talks), and much more. Honestly, they were obsessed. I even had some ignoramus (a pastor!🙄) sending out a mass-mailing to people condemning me for referring to myself as a “troubadour” — a label I would still gladly apply today — for a troubadour is just a travelling poet, and I’m just passing through. [For your info, the word “troubadour” originates from the Old Occitan word trobador (12th century), meaning a composer of poems or songs. It derives from the verb trobar, meaning “to find, invent, or compose,” which likely stems from the Vulgar Latin tropāre, “to compose, to sing”. Classical Latin tropos = “song”].

I reluctantly had to come to the conclusion that the visible church is a hotbed of jealousies and resentments, bitterness and spite, mendacity and slanderous intent, the inability to agree to differ, the dogged desire to cling to shibboleths rather than truths, along with the censorious desire to stifle those who expose the truths they wish to hide. It took me until 2010 to realise all this fully enough to act on it, and it led to my hiatus from the Christian scene for some years. But now it is all just “water off a duck’s back”. Besides, many of those “try-to-shut-me-up” people from the past have died off now, plus (by deliberate design, so as to avoid the idiots!) hardly anyone reads my stuff these days so I am inconsequential to any would-be “try-to-shut-people up” type of people. 😶‍🌫️

So how did I respond to all this at the time? With humour! It is extremely cathartic to deal with human evil in a disarmingly humorous manner. I found it to be fittingly subversive. For I discovered that I not only had to become the underground resistance to the Devil outside the church (which I fully expected) but also to the demonically-inspired people inside it (which had blindsided me with surprise). This is the context to the attached spoof letter which I wrote to myself from what I called the “Protestant Death Society”. It was a lampooning satire on the kind of nonsense to which I was being subjected through letters received from these self-appointed “prima donnas of the Imprimatur” (as I call them). The Latin word “imprimatur” means “Let it be printed”. It refers to when permission is granted by an authority that something can go into print. It is particularly used to refer to permission granted by the Pope of Rome, which is why I thought it to be amusingly applicable to be used regarding the kind of Red-Hot Prots who were taking issue with me over my proposed article about the myth of a papal Antichrist.😉

Anyway, that is the context of the attached spoof letter from the “Protestant Death Society”, which I sent out far and wide in 1990. I had actually long-forgotten all about this, but yesterday a friend in the US (who I have known since 1985 when I met him “by chance” in a car park in Malton, Yorkshire!) was going through some archived papers when he came across not only some old copies of the original hardcopy Diakrisis Journal from the early 1990s but also a number of other missives which I sent out by snail-mail post — this being among them. So I thought I would give you a laff by sharing it with you. Yuh gotta laff at something!

With Love and Laffs from me to you…

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© Copyright, Alan Morrison, 2026
[The copyright on my works is merely to protect them from any wanton plagiarism which could result in undesirable changes (as has actually happened!). Readers are free to reproduce my work, so long as it is in the same format and with the exact same content and its origin is acknowledged]

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