by [I’m participating in Monstrous May, a daily art-prompt challenge started by Johannes T. Evans. I’m mostly use the prompts to develop a story about a small Indiana town in 1987 where evangelical overreach leads to myriad personal tragedies as well as supernatural disaster.]
The town felt smaller than it was. The university was a few miles down the highway and the rail road still ran through town even if the trains didn’t stop there anymore. Industry was already moving to other regions by that point, but the chemical company and RV manufacturers were still going strong.
Because the university was so close by, the town had more TV stations than a place of its limited ambitions would warrant. Of course there were the big 3 plus the PBS station broadcasting from the vocational high school, but there were also two independent stations—one airing the newly-arrived block of programming from Fox and one dedicated to Christian programming. The latter was where all the sinister work sprang from, hiding its agenda behind a veneer of nostalgia and poverty. The other stations had the networks’ morning and evening programming, the mid-day soap operas, and the syndicated talk shows in the afternoons before the kids got home from school.
The station didn’t have any of those. In the mornings they played the big Christian shows—PTL and The 700 Club, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson leering at their audiences over the morning coffee—then repeated them in the evening, as though the station couldn’t afford to play anything else. In the mid-afternoons, they ran old sitcoms like Gomer Pyle and I Love Lucy before shifting to broadcasts of smaller-scale preachers and evangelicals, each trying to find their hook, their shtick, their unique spark that would capture the attention of Falwell or Robertson and get them a permanent sinecure on one or the other’s cable networks.
The old sitcoms whose edges had been sanded off with the passage of time seemed safe, a comfortable alternative to the other stations when the kids were home sick from school, and if you turned them on a little early, turned them off a little late, no harm done. You just heard a little bit of Pat Robertson or one of his acolytes decrying the tragedies of the feminists, the excesses of the homosexuals, the ever-present threat of the New World Order—that one-world government run by you-know-who. And with time you listened a little longer, tuned in a little earlier, set it running in the background even when the kids weren’t home from school. After all, they made some good points: music, movies, and television were just sex, sex, sex; people were living in ways you were never allowed to; and all the chaos in the world had to be working to someone’s advantage.
Pastor was a big fan of the station. He counseled all his parishioners to watch it regularly and was looking for his own opportunity to end up on air. He strove to make his sermons more theatrical, less bogged down in scripture or Biblical interpretation, and was always on the lookout for a big media opportunity, the dramatic, performative blow he could strike against the already-amassing Satanic forces of secularism. Even if such forces could not be found, they could be imagined, and that was enough to rile people up and turn their attentions to the music store selling all that punk rock, the movie theater playing The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the children, alone and unsupervised, engaged in who knows what kind of behavior.
And so the message spread, slipping into more heads, pushing its agenda ever further.
