I have a confession to make. Late at night, if I am sprawled in front of the TV, I occasionally flip over to the God Channel with the sole purpose of making myself angry. It’s a somewhat bitter and mean-spirited hobby, to be sure, but one that generates a perverse pleasure. And sometimes it seems a useful way to jolt me out of a numb theolethargy into sharper thinking.

A few nights ago, I succumbed to this urge and jumped midstream into a ‘prophetic conference’ (side note: do they need to advertise the venue and times of these to their faithful in advance?) and a sermon based around Gen 1-3. The speaker used this passage to advance a number of points, including (a) that eating steak helps to bring animals into covenant relationship – to cheers and whoops from the crowd, (b) that humans and apes share such similar DNA because we were all formed from dust, (c) that the word ‘woman’ derives from ‘curse’, (d) that children not born to parents in committed, loving relationship were likely to be worse off and (e) that the greatest crisis facing the church was a ‘Judas spirit’ that desired intimacy with God without commitment.

What was most profoundly distressing about this sermon was its familiarity; for years, I have been to conferences and services packed with similarly banal exposition. If I thought this were unusual – if the audience had been left feeling strained and awkward, for instance, or if the channel had quickly changed tack – that would have been better. But I had the sense that the assembled crowd were satisfied and supportive.

There’s nothing like God TV to make me feel that I’ve lived at least partly in a bubble of insanity for the whole of my adult life. I sat in silence, staring at the now-blank TV screen, filled with a mixture of regret and disappointment in myself for wasting so much of my life in crazy meetings listening to well-off white middle-aged men spout a rambling mixture of biblical thoughts, obvious moral platitudes and narrow-minded opinion. My tactic has worked again. I am angry, seething with this godforsaken channel, with those on either side of the plexiglass pulpit, but mostly with myself.