Reason, Behold Your Enemy

If ever, out of morbid curiosity, you have landed on TBN while channel surfing to see what the Evangelicals—that potent subset of the American electorate—might be watching, you may have seen the work of Jack Van Impe, the self-proclaimed “walking Bible” due to his shtick of spouting strings of dubiously relevant scriptural passages during his television program. Jack, like many of his ilk, has been predicting the end of the world for quite a while now. That it never seems to happen when he says it will has not stopped the tenacious Van Impe, whose show is a remarkable example of the televangelical formula perfectly executed: quote scripture, predict the Rapture, scare the shit out of your audience, quote scripture, and shill your latest product.

In the video below, Jack, his otherworldly wife, Rexella, and Chuck Ohman, his almost impossibly mellifluous announcer, inform us of the next grave danger to mankind. Watch the video to find out what it is, and we’ll catch up on the other side.

Did you catch that ordering information? After all, you don’t want to be caught with your pants down when the Satan-helmed alien hordes make their move.

It is very difficult to define a “ridiculousness scale” to quantitatively evaluate the content of this video. But I have to admit that there is little contained in this piece that seems much less plausible than anything presented in the Bible. (Is it silly to think that Satan controls a bunch of aliens out to get us but not silly to believe he rules over the damned for all eternity in a lake of fire?)

It would all be good for a laugh if these weren’t some of the same people who do this: