The Higgs Weldon was a humor site run by Los Angeles stand-ups Robbin Higgins and Paige Weldon and others (sorry to cut you short, others) that did everything from comedic credits to caption contests. The folks over there published my satirical panegyric, “An Obituary for the Coolest Christian,” teasing Christian youth culture (sans the tight pants, iphones, and XS plaid shirts—that’s Christian youth Starbucks culture). Sadly, the site is now defunct, so I post the piece below.

He was the coolest Christian at St. Rutabah Baptist Academy High School: he said phrases like holy bullwhiz or that’s the goshdarn truth (promoting a more conservative, Bible-approved profanity, because you never know if there’s an angel listening), emphasized the screw in Screwtape, cultivated a beard on his neck, brought a bully to Church and then beat him in the parking lot, tore a page out of the Qur’an and ate it, wore a cross on a chain even in the shower. He was Varsity football chaplain.

By six, he’d broken someone’s nose with the Summa Theologica. By twelve, he’d indexed all the Christian symbolism in Lord of the Rings. By middle school, he disagreed fundamentally with C.S. Lewis.

He was the coolest one. He read books like The Consolation of Philosophy and Paradise Lost and claimed Milton was of the Devil’s Party. It was rumored that he kept cigarettes in his fanny pack, that his flip flops weren’t dress code, that he was stoned on Jesus but Buddha gave him a bad trip, that he’d been married at 16 and divorced that summer, only to remarry her and have five kids, that he had a tattoo of Jesus in Ray-Bans, and owned an American Flag made of mixed fibers.

Faster now. He could burp the Lord’s Prayer, kissed a teacher while she was sleeping, tasted his Dad’s ginger beer, snuck into a faculty meeting and wasn’t discovered for the full two hours, could make a paper airplane out of anything, anything, spent a summer in a monastery, hooked up with a nun’s pillow, carved his initials in sixteen pews, refused to learn the order of the months, didn’t believe volcanoes existed, tripped Buddhists on the way to the prayer room, told his Japanese pen pal that tsunamis were divine farts, ate a Jehovah Witness, could justify the War in Iraq, recited the Fox’s Book of Martyrs with a 78% margin of error, drew mustaches in his textbook even when those images didn’t include people, and finally died doing what he loved—running remote-controlled drones into small dogs (the heart attack was incidental).