I don’t understand these billboards. What are the people who put these up thinking? Do they think Jesus might come tooling down I94 from Fargo in a tan Ciera and be reassured by its message? Jesus is the big guy. The Holy Ghost is the little guy, kinda funny looking, and he’s driving.
Jesus: Where is Pancakes House?
Holy Ghost: What?
Jesus: We stop at Pancakes House.
Holy Ghost: What are ya nuts? We had pancakes for breakfast. I want to go somewhere I can get a shot and a beer, and a steak, maybe. No more fuckin’ pancakes, c’mon man. C’mon man! Okay here’s an idea. We’ll stop outside of Brainerd. I know a place there we can get laid. What do ya think?
Jesus: I’m fuckin’ hungry now, you know!
Holy Ghost: Yeah, yeah. Jesus. I was just saying we could stop, get pancakes, and get laid.
[As they pass the Sauk Centre exit, they see a billboard]
[Jesus smiles]
Holy Ghost: Hey, look at that. You ever been to Sauk Centre?
Jesus: Nope.
Holy Ghost: Would it kill you to say something?
Jesus: I did.
Holy Ghost: “No.” That’s the first thing you’ve said in the last four hours. That’s a, that’s a fountain of conversation, man. That’s a geyser. I mean, whoa, daddy, stand back, man. Shit. You know I’m sittin’ here drivin’, doin’ all the drivin’, man, the whole fuckin’ way from Brainerd, drivin’, just tryin’ to chat, you know, keep our spirits up, fight the boredom of the road, and you can’t say one fuckin’ thing just in the way of conversation? Well, fuck it. I don’t have to talk either, man. See how you like it. [Pause] Just total fuckin’ silence. Two can play at that game, smart guy. We’ll just see how you like it. Total silence.
[They pass another sign]
Jesus: Unguent.
Holy Ghost: What?!
Jesus: I need Unguent!
At least, that’s the conversation I imagine as they’re on the way to the Big City as they pass these colossal non sequiturs.
These really are billboards mounted along the freeway. I don’t get the point, other than making a display of public piety, unless they really do believe Jesus cruises around on I94.
Those 855-for-truth bboards are littered along the highway here, too, at least the bit from Center to Bismarck. Mercifully, the bboards disappear a bit after Center and aren’t seen at all the rest of the way home. There are some seriously creepy god-based ones in ND.
They’re marking their territory. In the old days, they used to put up severed heads or impaled corpses to scare invaders and let the outside world know that this land was full of badasses who won’t be told what to do by foreigners.
Same principle, only with less mess.
Jesus Christ, PZ, been hitting the Coen/Tarantino sauce a little hard, ain’tcha? This is some Royale-With-Cheese-Give-Us-The-Money-Lebowski shit right here.
Neo-Noir reenactments of the plot of The Long Goodbye starring argumentative asshole truckers in place of Marlowe, set against a backdrop of the desolate plains of Nebraska.
Budget of 5 Million, tops, gross probably around 30.
I was curious, that Jesus I trust you one is the work of Divine Mercy.
On the interstate north to Indianapolis there is (or was) a spot with, on the right, “XXX VIDEOS” and on the left a giant billboard “JESUS SAVES”
My 94-year-old grandfather cracked a joke, and thus proved his mind was still sharp.
I used to live in Burnaby BC, and for a while we would regularly drive down to Seattle, and a few other places in Washington. One of the things that really struck me after crossing the border was these Christian billboards. They probably exist in Canada, but I can’t remember seeing any, but once we entered the US they seemed to be a regular fixture in the landscape.
Billboards here usually seem to advertise that truck stop down the road, or McDonald’s, but Jesus, not so much.
HG: Hey, check it out, man. There’s another one of you on the cross. They love their fuckin’ torture porn.
JE: It was just another gig, you know? How was I to know they’d go apeshit over it.
HG: Hey, the old man knew.
JE: Yeah, and wouldn’t tell me, the asshole. Those nails hurt like a sumbitch. He was just pissed that I was gettin’ it on with whatshername and I wouldn’t let him watch. I’ll get him for that.
HG: (Sighs) Jeez, you’ve been saying that for 2000 years. Give it a rest.
Hate to say it, but those For “Truth” billboards have been smeared all up and down I-5 in Oregon, too. Along with a bunch of anti-abortion billboards that feature pictures of smiling babies alongside cute little fake facts about pregnancy.
Every time I see the latter, I want to replace the pictures with pictures of babies throwing up, pooping, or otherwise being disgusting little mess-makers without changing anything else on the billboards.
I’m still guessing there’s more “South of the Border” billboards.
re “South of the Border bbds” @9:
True, especially on I-95. Can’t say about any other Highway, since all my N-S travel has been I-95 (or US1)
along the east coast. Approaching the S.o.t.B. facility, billboards for it are ubiquitously frequent.
Otherwise, up in the New England region, such Jeebus signs (of the OP) are rare and ‘out of the ordinary’ (but they do exist sparsely). So, I’m pretty glad I don’t live in a region that has a plethora of these eyesores.
Remove the comas and this reads like Kerouac. On the road gave me great wanderlust when I was 19.
They are saying: — and much of your income, but they leave that part (and many other parts) out.
I’m so glad that I live in a place where I am mostly spared from such visual pollution. The regional district here bans all billboards with the exception of the electronic one outside the city owned arena and the ads on bus stop shelters. The only place the by-law isn’t in effect is on the First Nations reserve that the highway passes through on the way to the airport. On that 1 km stretch of road there are 30 double sided billboards — way too many to read as you are zipping past at 100 km/h.
Mo is really the holy ghost? Now I’m confused.
I find myself even more disturbed to learn this empty piety is part of a nationwide campaign. I figured that this was the work of some local church posturing on the highway…but if it’s everywhere, think how much money is being spent just to say, “Jesus, I Trust in you.”
While travelling through PA with my family we saw one of the call xxx ones, so just for giggles I called. They put me through one of those obnoxious automated interfaces, complete with bad Christian music, only to be told there was no one available and to call back during regular business hours, it was a Sunday…. I worry that someone in real distress would call them, like they recommend, only to be told no one is there to help you, that would be a deal breaker for someone with real emotional problems or depression.
from Caine @4:
=====
So they are opposed to commercial ads trying to generate revenue, but they are in favor of their billboards trying to generate revenue. Very typically christian of them.
*chuckle*
{sorry to be so childish}
Sounds about right.
It’s interesting to see how in the US, Protestantism — which was originally aiming to remove questionable fluff like the adoration of saints from Christianity and put God himself back in the centre — has evolved into full-on Islam-style prophet worship. I guess they felt baseline Protestantism lacked that famous Catholic human touch?
Except worse, I guess. At least Muhammad isn’t immortal and has no superpowers. But seriously, American Christians seem to talk about Jesus waaaay more than about God. It’s good they’re the same guy, or someone might get jealous.
In my town I’ve seen about half a dozen yard signs with the image and text from that first one, so it’s not just billboards.
Travis@6, I haven’t seen those kind of signs locally, but at least one of the electronic signboards in Saskatoon currently has an ad running for some antiabortion group. Saskatoon Transit has the occasional religious theme sign on or in their buses, one of the more silly examples being a “War on Christmas” themed one from a few years ago.
http://timgueguen.blogspot.ca/2010/12/phony-war.html
re 20, 21
Zeppelin, yes, even worse. at Least Islam forbids graven images of The Prophet. Our (quasi-Islamic)Protestants rejoice in adoring His graven images, no matter how ethnically distorted they are. Protestants forbade the iconography of saints, martyrs, etc. But images of the deity are mandatory. …leading to the billboard plastering of the image along every rural highway…
(consistency, of which, they find “inconceivable”)
timgueguen@23,
Is the antiabortion group Birthright? I have seen some of their ads on buses in Ottawa, and a few other places in the past. My girlfriend is from Saskatoon, I’ll have to show her that Christmas ad. Ugh.
Travis@25, the current Saskatoon sign is from a group called weneedaLaw.
I guess Jesus is hanging out in Burma Shave…
Zeppelin @ #20 & #21
The god-man, Jesus, was always the center of Protestantism. True, it rejected indulgences, saints, and priests as intermediaries (more or less), but Jesus was a core tenet. From the Nicene point of view, there is no conflict between god and Jesus.
As for Islam, there’s plenty of Isa ibn Maryam: 93 times in the Koran, numerous times in the inscription on the Dome of the Rock. After all, Islam almost certainly grew out of various Judaic/Christian cults floating around greater Syria in late antiquity, and Jesus plays a central role in Islamic eschatology.
And oh yes, there are miracles associated with Muhammad. Foremost, there’s the business of angels revealing the Koran to him. That’s a miracle. There’s also a birth miracle told in the legend of “The Year of the White Elephant.” And there’s the miracle of his “Isra and Mi’raj” in which he flies on a magic black stallion (Buraq) from Mecca to jerusalem, and leaves his footprints in the stone of the Temple Mount. You can still see them at the Dome of the Rock.
I think living inside a supernatural narrative distorts the way people think. Sure, they’re marking territory, but it’s also likely that they really do imagine that these billboards can and will convert people.
Why not? Consider the culture. Over and over again they read or recite their testimonies. Often enough an indifference or hostility towards God is suddenly overcome by something simple and unexpected. God has reached out through humble means (like the appearance of a waterfall, a sunset, a newborn or even a billboard) and wham! you just KNOW God is real and Jesus is Lord. You’ve been saved!
Play a common theme often enough and people come to believe such things really happened — and will happen in the future, too. You never know what will prompt the hardened heart of the nonbeliever and get them to recognize and admit what they already know. So let’s put up lots and lots of these billboards! Why, folks will stagger gratefully to our churches, tears of gratitude streaming from their eyes!
No, it probably doesn’t seem farfetched. They’ve already accepted much weirder stuff.
@robro
Jesus worship may be ideologically compatible with Protestantism, but I know that German Protestants, for example, put much more emphasis on God (and on the harder-to-falsify aspects of their religion generally) than on Jesus. The stereotypical northern German rural Protestant grandma has a plain, unadorned cross in her bedroom, not a picture of Jesus.
I think those sign and even that public prayer has two functions.
They remind the christian who is doubting his faith or has fallen away from the church that it is OK to come back and it is a sign to all of the practicing christians that they are not alone in their belief.Kind of a “We believe too”
they are not aimed at the truly un-believing .
The kind of believer who says after the are saved that they did not believe in god but now accept jesus.
uncle frogy.
I am grateful I do not see signs like that very often! (I rarely notice any)
uncle frogy
The thing is, they’re almost always done like they’re introducing some mysterious person you’ve never heard of before, and I mean, come on, unless you’ve been living in a cave and only discovered civilization last Tuesday, if you’re in America you know the basics about Jesus.
I’d actually be amused to see the billboard; wondering who it was that had to put up a billboard to tell his Jebus he Trusted him. “why tell us, you trust him???” I’d mumble to myself.
Like the frequent movie trope of a desperate suitor hiring a skywriter to emblazon his love in the sky.
I would, also get cynical, next thinking that the billboard was put up as a form of apology for an incident of distrust. “good to see you got enough money to buy a billboard …”
A couple appear on the NJ Turnpike between NYC and Philly, and the PA Turnpike has them scattered along it (more in the rural areas, fewer in the Philly region).
Those things are dangerous—I have to be careful not to roll my eyes so hard I have an accident.
tmink128: i was thinkink the same, this definitely reads like On the Road
Haven’t seen many billboards lately here in Toronto (there were a few around the time of the Harold Camping predictions) but inside the buses and subway cars there are fairly common ‘Bus Stop Bible Studies’ adverts, usually right next to a ‘Pregnancy Crisis Centre’ advert where they try to lure unsure young women in to convince them of the ‘truth’.
@Trickster Goddess:
I’m so glad that I live in a place where I am mostly spared from such visual pollution. The regional district here bans all billboards with the exception of the electronic one outside the city owned arena and the ads on bus stop shelters. The only place the by-law isn’t in effect is on the First Nations reserve that the highway passes through on the way to the airport. On that 1 km stretch of road there are 30 double sided billboards — way too many to read as you are zipping past at 100 km/h.
Though there that annoying Pregnancy Crisis center/anti-abortion one that was up there for years that I wanted to Hulk Smash every time I drove past. Very glad it’s gone now, since I live out on the peninsula and had to pass it a lot.
And all this time I’d thought they were writing about a Mexican friend of theirs.