Free Long Time Leaving by Roy Blount Jr.

preacher looked at him, and repeated, “I say, everybody who wants to go to heaven, stand up!”
    The old man still just sat there.
    “Brother Henry,” said the preacher, “didn't you hear me? I said everybody who wants to go to heaven, stand up!”
    Brother Henry looked around and said, “Oh. I thought you were getting up a group to go
now.
”

Total Immersion, Up to a Point
    I was born Methodist. Then one morning in Sunday school we were singing “Red and yellow, black and white, we are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.” I looked around the room and noticed that—although we had a picture on the wall of Jesus being sweet to several easy-to-love-looking youngsters of every hue (shepherds’ offspring, judging by their outfits and the literal lambs in their midst)—the “we” of whom we sang was not the “we” who we were.
    “Blond and brunette, also sandy, Jesus finds us fine and dandy,” we could have sung legitimately. But as to skin we were all pretty much the color of that Crayola (since discontinued) labeled Flesh.
    This revelation did not convert me on the spot to either atheism or multiculturalism (I was only eight), but it did make me wonder why our elders insisted upon teaching us that song if they didn't mean us to mean it. Perhaps I was being too literal. I was loath to practice hardshell literalism, certainly, because that would have entailed giving up all my worldly goods and loving my neighbors—including Marcella across the street who sat on my brand-new drum and broke it Christmas morning—as myself. Over the years, I became a cumgranosalist: taking things literally but with a grain of salt.
    You can't really call that religion. If cumgranosalism can be said to have a rite, it is a joke I told on
A Prairie Home Companion
back in 1995. “Do you believe in infant baptism?” one old boy asks another, who replies, “Believe in it—hell, I've
seen it done.
” That joke set off a chain of e-mail to the
Prairie Home
Web site, beginning with this entry from the Tarheel State:
    I laughed so hard I almost peed my pants, and my SO [Significant Other, presumably] said, “I don't get it.” So I explained it to him, losing of course any inherenthumor. My SO thinks that I only get this joke because I'm a Southerner brought up Presbyterian amongst Baptists. So did this joke fall flat outside of North Carolina?
    The first response to this query was from a man who identified himself as “a Lutheran Christian” born and raised in northern California: “I laughed out loud when I read your account. I guess I just never thought of ‘believing in infant baptism’ quite that way before. I doubt that my employer would get it either, so I don't speak for them.” The employer was not specified.
    A “Lutheran raised Methodist in Oklahoma” wrote that the joke “cracked me up and also my husband (a Lutheran, raised Lutheran in Oklahoma), although it took him a little bit longer to ‘get it.’ ”
    “I'm a Jewess from Chicago and I think it's the funniest thing Ray
[sic]
said all night,” put in a regular listener.
    A man who was “born and raised in Texas to a Baptist mother and a Presbyterian father and attended Presbyterian church as a child” testified as follows:
    The concept of infant baptism was foreign to my Southern Baptist mother and she refused to allow it to be done to me. She held out for years insisting on a full body immersion in a running river to carry my sins away, but finally relented to a ceremonial Presbyterian sprinkling at about age 12.
    If she could do it again today, she'd hold out for the river and I doubt if she'd let me come up again.
    I think the joke went best with Southern Baptists and is more regional.
    “That's ridiculous,” came a quick response. “I'm a Roman Catholic from the Midwest and I laughed my butt off. *love is real* *imagine* *remember* John Lennon 1940-80.”
    However, a man in Houston, who described himself as