By William Matthew McCarter
I’ve had trouble with church my whole damn life. Not the Catholic side—my dad’s people. They had their own strange rituals, incense smoke and bloody saints staring down from the rafters. I’m talking about the other side.
The Southern Baptists.
And I put that in quotes because they damn near put it on a billboard.
Not just Baptists. Not just Christians.
No sir.
“Southern Baptists.”
Hard “S,” hard “B,” capital letters dripping with judgment like cream gravy off a biscuit. The kind of people who worshipped not just God but God™—the Old Testament edition, the one handing out plagues and drownings like door prizes at the church picnic.
You didn’t just screw up with that God—you got smote. Smote at the drop of The Ark of the Covenant.
Full-on Sodom and Gomorrah, grab-the-women-and-children, run-for-the-hills smiting.
And if you somehow crawled your sorry ass into the New Testament—big if—you got Jesus. Merciful Jesus. Bleeding-heart, lamb-carrying, sandal-wearing, “let the little children come to me” Jesus.
But most folks never made it that far.
Old Testament God hogged the spotlight.
He was the headline act.
My granny, God rest her soul, decided I needed a double dose of Jesus after my parents split. So at the ripe age of four she marched me into First Baptist Church of God’s Own Wrath—and that’s when the trouble really started.
See, I’d only been to two churches before:
St. Stanislaus Catholic and Ste. Marie du Lac.
Both had big bloody statues of Jesus nailed to the cross—arms stretched, ribs poking out, eyes rolling like he hadn’t eaten in forty days. Made sense. Catholics love a dead Jesus. They build their whole aesthetic around it.
But First Baptist?
They had a cross, sure—backlit like the goddamn gates of heaven.
But no Jesus.
Just naked wood. Like somebody robbed the grave before the stone even rolled away.
And me—four years old, high on Welch’s grape juice and Sunday school lies—lost my goddamn mind.
I tugged on Granny’s polyester dress, pointed at the glowing cross, and hollered:
“HE’S GONE! SOMEBODY STOLE JESUS!”
Now, Baptists call this “having a fit.” You’d have thought I’d set off a bomb in the baptismal. Heads swiveled. Granny clutched her pearls. Mom hustled me out like I was smuggling Satan in my OshKosh B’gosh.
Strike one.
Granny didn’t quit. Next week she tried again. Mom got me dressed while Granny sat glued to Oral Roberts on the Zenith, praying for my salvation.
This time, I wasn’t even thinking about Missing Jesus.
I was locked on the seats.
Not pews.
Seats that folded up and down.
To a four-year-old, that was architectural sorcery.
So I did what any respectable child would do. I shouted, loud enough to wake the dead:
“LOOK AT THESE SUMBITCHES!”
That’s when I learned you didn’t holler about stolen Jesuses and you sure as hell didn’t yell “sumbitch” when Granny was talking to Miss Duckett.
Mom dragged me out again. Strike two.
But Granny had one more play. She called in Mrs. Cunningham—the preacher’s wife—who swore she could “break me in like a colt.”
So next Sunday, I was banished to sit with her, exiled from Mom and Granny like I’d been sentenced to Baptist purgatory.
After church, Granny asked how it went.
I told her plain as day:
“She whipped my ass.”
Strike three.
New record.
But somehow, I made it. I learned to sit still, learned to play the part. Before long I was a Sunday school prodigy—flipping pages, quoting scripture, racking up gold stars.
My favorite story?
David and Goliath.
I idolized David. Youngest in the family. Same as me. The little guy who cold cocked the big bastard with a rock and walked off a hero.
But then it got weird.
After David kills Goliath, King Saul promises him his daughter. But only if David brings back two hundred Philistine foreskins.
Foreskins.
That word hit me like a lightning bolt. Magic beans? Holy relics? The secret sauce of biblical badassery?
So I asked Mrs. Cunningham right there in Sunday school,
“What’s so important about all them foreskins?”
She nearly choked to death on her RC Cola. Said it was “grown-up talk.” Told me to leave it alone.
But I couldn’t.
Brother Cunningham cornered me later, asked if I’d been reading my Bible.
I said proudly:
“Yep. King David and the two hundred Philistine foreskins.”
He never asked again.
And I kept thinking about those foreskins.
Like maybe they had powers.
Maybe David stitched them into a cape or something. Nobody ever explained what Saul did with them. For all I knew, he planted them in the ground hoping to grow dick-taters. Which, honestly, doesn’t sound that far-fetched considering how many dictators sprouted up in the Middle East after.
Years later, someone in Sunday school asked if their uncle—who’d lost a leg to diabetes—would get it back in heaven. Mrs. Cunningham launched into her spiel about “glorified bodies” and wings and halos. And all I could think was:
“Do we get our foreskins back too?”
She punted me to Brother Cunningham, who just stared like I’d asked if Jesus wore boxer briefs. Nobody gave me a straight answer.
It wasn’t until eighth-grade World History—learning about medieval relics and splinters of the True Cross—that it clicked. If nobody ever claimed the Holy Foreskin, then Jesus must’ve taken it with him when He rose.
Which means we probably get ours back.
I guess that’s one more mystery waiting on the other side.
Unless somebody comes back from a near-death experience saying,
“I saw a white light… and got my foreskin back.”
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William Matthew McCarter is a professor, novelist, and musician who calls himself the “Scholar in the Holler.” A son of the Missouri Ozarks, he has spent more than two decades teaching literature and cultural studies while building a body of fiction and music rooted in the backroads of Southeast Missouri, his own Southern Gothic landscape. His work blends William Faulkner’s sprawl, Bret Easton Ellis’s bite, and Hunter S. Thompson’s bravado, moving between the classroom, the page, and the stage with the same restless energy. McCarter’s scholarship confronts questions of identity, tradition, and cultural survival, while he carries those same themes into a raucous performance with his band. Whether professing, storytelling, or singing, he stitches together rural grit and intellectual firepower into a voice that is both unapologetically local and defiantly literary.
