Goblinposting In The Name Of Shared Values

“I know my humor is outrageous when it makes the Unitarians so mad they burn a question mark on my front lawn.” –Lenny Bruce

I’ve been a member of a Unitarian Universalist church for a little over three months, and I am happy to report that I do not regret it. I’ve even been fighting through anxiety and getting involved with congregational activities, going so far as to join the Communications Committee.

My introduction was basically, “Hi! I wrote a book about witchcraft, and I inexplicably have 70,000 followers on TikTok, so… those are my qualifications?” To which the rest of the committee was like, “Ooh, we may have a use for you. Why don’t you take over the church’s painfully neglected BlueSky account? We literally just met you, but we are confident that this won’t go horribly, horribly awry.”

I may have paraphrased that last part a little. But it was nice to be trusted without scrutiny.

This is what Unitarian Universalism looks like in my head. Although to be fair, this is what everything looks like in my head. (Image courtesy of Edar.)

The committee chair emailed me the BlueSky login credentials a few days later, and my first order of business was to run a search for Unitarian Universalist users and follow all of them. About a third of them followed me back, so that at least gave me a small audience to work with. After that, I posted details of upcoming church events, along with some quotations from UUs of note — those posts didn’t get much traction, but BlueSky doesn’t work algorithmically the way other social media platforms do, so I remained optimistic and continued to skeet away.

And y’all, I promise my goal was to keep the content reverent and respectable. But then two things happened, the first being harassment from an online troll.

I didn’t even know anti-Unitarian Universalist internet trolls existed. But yeah, they totally do. And they are a surly folk.

This particular bridge dweller was a conspiracy theorist from Canada who’d apparently based his entire personality on a cease-and-desist letter he’d received more than a decade ago, and the semi-coherent comments he left on my posts reflected this. It was easy to block him and move on, but at the same time, it was disconcerting to think that something as benign as an inspirational quote could attract such vitriolic attention — if random, pitchfork-wielding netizens were going to come for my church, I wanted to give them a reason.

The next thing to happen was a glitch at the finale of this past Sunday’s service. Normally, once worship concludes, the choir processes down the aisle singing “Go Now In Peace,” and then everyone remains seated for a few minutes to listen to the postlude. This time, however, the minister decided to end things right after the last hymn, and I don’t know if he forgot to alert the choir master or what, but there was this moment of awkward silence and people blinking at each other, and then the minister was like, “Um… we’re done. You can go home now.”

And with that was goblin mode activated. (Image courtesy of Edar.)

I could not begin to tell you why this struck me as the funniest thing in the world, but I was still giggling about it an hour later. And if I found it that hilarious, I figured other UUs would get a kick out of it as well. So I hopped onto BlueSky and posted the following:

We apologize for any confusion resulting from our decision to end today’s service without having the choir process out as usual. If someone could check on the choir and perhaps lure them out of the sanctuary with delicious snacks, that would be greatly appreciated.

It didn’t go viral or anything, but it did get a few more likes than my standard content, which was all the encouragement I needed. A few minutes later, I posted again:

As an inclusive, non-creedal community of faith, we do not doubt anyone’s commitment to Sparkle Motion.

And you know, I wasn’t even worried about the general response to that one. I was entertaining the hell out of myself and on a damn roll, which led to…

A gentle reminder to our congregants: SMASH THE PATRIARCHY is a valid and commendable goal but not a practical service to offer in next month’s silent auction.

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We are an affirming congregation, but we do ask that monthly drum circle participants please refrain from identifying as “STOMP regional cast.”

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Listen. We’re not accusing anyone of donating 17 gently-used copies of Steal This Book to the church library. We’re just saying the Social Justice Committee has some questions.

I’ll show myself out. (Image courtesy of Edar.)

As of right now, no one from the committee has noticed the posts… or at least, they haven’t told me to stop. Or maybe they’re scheduling a meeting with the board of directors to discuss my impending excommunication. Hard to say. But I am throwing some legitimate UU content into the mix, so hopefully, that’ll balance things out and help the jokes land.

And hey, if you’re on BlueSky, do me a solid and give the church a follow. It would be cool to show the Communications Committee that I can drum up engagement, thus moving me one step closer to getting my hands on the church’s official TikTok account. At which point the trolls won’t know what hit them.