180 thoughts on “Ventriloquism?”

    1. Lady doctor? Are they offering free well woman exams?. 😛

      Thank you. Thank you. I’ll be here all week.

  4. I’m surprise they have some Black women speaking at their conference. I guess the whole “curse of Ham” has been forgetten.

    1. I have come to the conclusion that IFBs have token minorities to preach at their events to show they aren’t a white folks club. Kenny Baldwin is a popular speaker in that circuit now…I believe for that reason.

      Now whether or not they will let their white kid marry a black one is another issue all together. Lets don’t get too far ahead of ourselves.

      There are IFB mission boards dedicated to reaching black America…ie COEBA and Death Unto Life Ministries…but they are left up to the few black fundies to lead because most white IFB churches have no interest in really reaching out to “that part of town.”

      1. It is depressing to think that they are suckering new people into their false religion, regardless of what their race is. At least the old racist fundies didn’t bother to spread their brand of heresy to the African-American community.

    2. Yes, I’ve got to give them a little credit for letting women speak, including some women of color.

      Yes, I know the conference is for “Ladies,” but we’ve seen some “Ladies’ Conference” announcments featuring only male speakers, or, at most, male preachers and their wives.

    3. I went to high school at the church where Francine Taylor is from. Her kids were about middle school age then. Maybe you could say there was a bit of the “token black family” going on, but the church was certainly not racist towards them or the minority kids who came on the bus ministry. I don’t think any of the families would have kept their kids from dating/marrying the Taylors, though I certainly didn’t take a poll. Many fundy churches may still be racist or default white-only, but I truly believe that church loves all races in their misguided fundy ways.

  5. 4 men speakers at the Ladies conference…will there be 4 lady speakers at the mens conference??

      1. Because (1) he speaks, and (2) he sings. He’s just so talented. If he had a dummy, he’d be listed a third time.

      1. And now I shall make two predictions.

        (1) Once one lady has something, they all want one. So, I predict there will be a mad rush for Mrs. Preachers to get “graduate degrees.”

        (2) There will then be a backlash against this with the tagline being “a PhD on a woman is just like britches” or some equally sexist statement. It will then become a test of fellowship whether someone is “worldly” enough that their wife has a Bible college PhD or not.

        1. Most of these preachermen don’t have PhDs. They have Bible-kawledge-awarded honorary doctorates in hollerification, or something along those lines.

          Such “doctorates” are also given to horses, but seldom to women.

        2. I used the word “PhD” advisedly. I was, of course, referring to the diploma mill “doctorates” which one can purchase from Jack Hyles’ Top Secret Vending Machine on the campus of HAC (but soon to be moved to the campus of WCBC).

    2. I was excited to see her pic there, because I thought they actually included a woman with a real professional degree…then I googled her and found her husband’s bio in which he says, “both Janet and I have earned Master’s and Doctorate degrees from Independent Baptist colleges.”

      Now my 🙂 is all 😥

      1. But “earned” is still more laudable than “honorary”, which (sadly) in most IFB circles means “given to a friend”

        1. I agree. I have only known a couple people with PCC graduate degrees, but they are overall much better educated than your typical Bible College “doctor.” (They may be thoroughly initiated into the mysteries of fundie theology but they tend to be better educated nonetheless.)

        2. Two earned Masters here. One from PCC and the other from Liberty.

          No PHd…and hopefully never will…unless someone else pays for it.

  7. The “Walsh” Couple in the upper right hand are the Pastor and First Lady from my parents church. I went there growing up….

    I still think he hates me for hearing about this heresy that I now hold so dearly… calvinism…

    1. I visited that church as a guest in 2005 who was an upcoming promising IFB trophy but I blew that a few years later. I spoke to the youth group, but because I’m a woman, all I did was “share my testimony” and “answer questions”. I was an upcoming celebrity in the IFB world, I felt so good about myself. I am Australian and I was on a “tour” for a month of all these fundy churches and Crown College because of course “God had called me to go to Bible college there”. I went back to Australia, and a year later returned to the USA to marry a man the IFB didn’t approve of although he was IFB. And now I’m a flaming liberal and while I no longer have upcoming celebrity status, at least I am not part of that scene any longer.

        1. Heh. I go to church and am Christian. My husband tries to avoid going to church and he works in bars and such so no, he’s not still IFB, but everyone blames me for him not being.

        2. Sounds like you need to go to a ladies’ conference and have the time of your life!!

        3. … or go to the conferences and give THEM the time of their lives by letting them use you of an example: “Do what we say or you could end up like leaving“

        4. @leaving: You sound like someone I knew, who came to the US from overseas, and then married a man that the IFB church didn’t approve of… but she wasn’t from Austrailia, so you aren’t she. I often wonder how she is faring these days.

  8. Where do they think people’s mental level is, to advertise a ventriloquist at an adult ladies’ conference? >_<

    1. It’s probably for a children’s ministry seminar. Puppets are popular for some reason. I think it’s a bit cheesy, but most of the fundys I know that use them actually are some of the kindest and most sincere of the bunch…just a little behind the times maybe.

        1. I think we should read it as a metaphor. The wife should be the dummy and her husband should be the ventriloquist who tells her what to do and what to say. Hay-men???

      2. no it’s definitely for the ladies who are attending. I went to the Sword conference at Franklin Road about 8 years ago and she was even doing it way back then. Craziness. She’s almost like the side show. She goes up on stage and does her act while you can shop around in the foyer for any of Bill Rice’s books you may not have inherited from your mother yet. 😀

    2. For me personally, that alone would keep me from going. Ventriloquist dolls eek me.

      1. Ventriloquist acts sort of make my stomach queasy.

        1. Most of the dolls are really creepy. You could do an interesting act acknowledging the meta-creepiness of the whole setup, but this is seldom done.

        2. You can always see the human’s mouth moving. Isn’t the whole point supposed to be that the person’s mouth doesn’t move? If you can see the mouth moving, why bother? Doesn’t that make it a puppet show instead of a ventriloquist act?

        1. If you can see their mouth moving, they are doing it wrong. Or at least very poorly. Which is a common problem with christian “entertainers”.

          All kinds of illusions require way more time practicing than most evangelist would ever dream of spending practicing.

          David Copperfield can perform a $5 trick in front of a thousand people because he spends several days, if not weeks, practicing it to perfection. (And mixing that with an excess of theatrics..)

          For ventriloquism letters are split in 3 groups based on difficulty. The easy ones are those that anyone can say without lip movements within minutes. (Vowels and a few consonants.) The medium ones take practice, but with determination it is totally doable. The hardest ones hardly anyone can do, including top paid performers.

          The trick is careful writing, avoiding letters you can’t convincingly perform. This gets easier by substituting difficult sounds with easier similarly sounding sounds. (A silly accent masks this easily…)

      2. That said, I’d love to see a ventiloquist act in the kind of scenario Darrell has described from his missionary days:

        A missionary ventriloquist performing for a crowd of people who literally believe in witchcraft, and can’t accept that it’s just a stunt.

        I’d actually travel to another country just to see that.

    3. Be nice to people who like ventriloquists. They aren’t all cheesy and lame. Ventriloquist week on Late Night is one of my favorite themes.
      Edgar Bergen, Willie Tyler, Jeff Dunham were/are really good acts. Johnny Carson and Don Knotts started out doing ventriloquist work.
      But then, those guys change the jokes. Most “Christian” entertainers use the same schtick for years on end.

      1. I actually do like Jeff Dunham. What icks me are those ‘life like’ dolls with those creepy eyes and mouth ratchets that look like nutcrackers. Seriously creep me out.

        Jalapeno on a stick, Walter etc. = cool.
        Creepy ‘real’ doll/dummy acts = NO!

    4. Re: Darrell’s hover text. You seem to be assuming the only “dummy” pictured is the one with the ventriloquist.

      1. Why do I never remember to read the hovertext until somebody mentions it? It’s generally the most intelligent–and funniest–thing on the page.

        3. I can’t on my iPhone either. Occasionally I’ll ask someone to tell me what it says.

  9. Fundies see us women as little more than children. I have heard Kay Arthur and “Katie” speak at a ladies jubilee at the PCC campgrounds where it told us on the form we had to wear only skirts or dresses.

    1. I take it that Kay Arthur is now Kay Campbell, or are there two ventriloquists, both named Kay with a puppet “Katie”????

    2. Hmm. A great opportunity to wear a huge Southern belle hoop skirt that gets in everyone’s way. Don’t forget the wide-brimmed hat and parasol!

      1. A very “kicky” old lady that I know once threatened to wear her mother’s flapper dress from the 1920s, beaded fringe and all, if she wasn’t allowed to wear her pants.

    3. Stuff Fundies Like: calling conferences and meetings for women a “jubilee”. Ugh. 🙄

      1. That’s a good point. My fiancee and I were joking last night about taking an inside-out jubilee: skip church for the next 49 years.

  10. This is from Sterling Walsh’s bio:
    and headed to Hyles-Anderson College in Crown Point Indiana where I received a Bachelor of Religious Education. Since then, both Janet and I have earned Master’s and Doctorate degrees from Independent Baptist colleges.
    Are they embarrassed of their unnamed Bible college, or did they really “earn” their doctorates the “Olde Fashioned” IFB way?

    1. More ashamed. I know him. I went to his church. He has schools that he likes and ones that he does not. And that attitude can change quickly… it went from PCC to WCBC in like 2 years.

      1. The current land run on WCBC baffles me as it is crappy even for a Bible college. I have a sister that works there and one that goes there. They are in such bad financial straits that they had to shorten their semesters this year because they couldn’t afford to operate for as many weeks as they did in previous years.

        Item: I recently had lunch with my old youth pastor (PCC grad). While I happen to know that he preaches WCBC in public, he privately told us that he wants his kids to get an education and is trying to help them find a “real” college to go to.

        1. Hypocrite. Being “real” would be a great blessing, if only these men would do so.

        2. This is the first I have heard of LBC/WCBC having financial problems. They have bought up so much land and built so many buildings over the past 15 years – it is crazy. When prices in that area plummeted (big time!) that had to hurt.

          So many young people who were raised there have left the IFB. Some in the area have nicknamed it “The Compound” – what a testimony!

        3. My old funie pastor who tried to get me to go to BBC, sold his house to help pay to send his granddaughter to Virginia Tech.

  11. To me, “sword ladies” means Red Sonja, et al. I would be very disappointed if none of them wore chainmail and swung longswords.

    1. Yeah, I was also wondering what a “Sword Lady” was. Sounds kind of exciting.

      1. LOL!!!!
        Sword Lady…. Sounds like some Fundyman’s fantasy seeped out with that little slip of the tongue.
        Who printed that thing anyhow?!!

      1. Being in the SCA, I know a lot of sword ladies, a couple of them even belted knights. All of whom could kick the asses of any fundy male who dared suggest they weren’t feminine as well as tough.

        1. “The things you can run into, the people you may meet,
          Walking all alone up on a New York City street!”

          But, yeah, I know a “sword lady” who is chronically ill and past 50 and can still put a rapier right through the carcass of a pig.

  12. That ‘Curt(is?)’ dude in the bottom right corner does not have the prerequisite “Dr.” in front of his name. He must be shady. I wonder if all the ladies will shun him for their ‘How To Shun One Who Is Among Us’ practice. Must keep those skills sharp, haymen? 😈

    1. That’s why he’s in the bottom right corner. They are ashamed of him but had to let him speak for some reason. He’s either related to someone else or has dirt on someone else.

    3. Until he gets that “Dr.” added to his name, he’ll probably continue to get listed after the ventriloquist.

      1. Well, if Jake is right, hosting something like this will put him on the fast track to getting a “doctorate.”

  13. Some of the exciting seminars at this conference
    “50 Shades of Jesus”
    “Being a cougar for Christ”
    “Magic Michael, God’s Mightiest Angel”
    “As the World Burns”
    “One Life to Give”
    “Jesus, Your personal Lord and Shopper”
    “Fighting the Homosexual Agenda at the Thrift Shop”
    “Gay Marriage, the Threat to the Sanctity of Your Second Marriage”
    “How to prevent that slutty 16 year old baby sitter from seducing your pastor”

    1. Re: the thrift shop. I know someone who was told not to buy a Santana t-shirt because someone might think it said Satan.

      1. Santana is an alternate spelling of Santa Ana, known in English as Saint Anne. You know, Jesus’ grandmother.
        Possibly still too Papist for Fundy approval, though.

        1. The botanicas and yerberias in my neck of the woods sell special soap for removing evil spirits.

          For example, if your house is possessed, you use half the bottle of liquid soap to take a bath and the other half to wash your floor.

          The magic soap comes in different colors and scents for different kinds of magical cleansings.

          I’m sure one of them would do for washing demons out of second-hand clothing.

          There are also aerosol cans of “spiritual spray” for convenience.

          I am absolutely not making this up.

        2. I believe you, Big G. I used to work in a coffee shop and we once had a Hispanic woman come in and try to anoint us with “God’s Holy Oil of Gladness.” When I pointed out that someone had just put some oil in a little glass tube and stuck a label reading “Oil of Gladness” on it, she recoiled in horror and told me I was a blasphemer because I had mocked God’s Holy Oil of Gladness. She then instructed us on how to put some on our pillows at night to give us holy dreams.

          Then, another lady, who didn’t know the first lady came in. (I am not making this up.) And she said, “OH! Oil of gladness!! Once I put some on one of the tables in here and later on Jesus appeared to me floating over the table.” She asked if we would be willing to sell her the table to take home so she could have more visions of Jesus.

          Yeah, it was a smidge creepy.

        3. It’s people like that the fundies I know are proud of separating from: “Those foolish charismatics with their superstitions.”

          They seemed unwilling to recognize that there were lots of superstitions among their own ranks too.

        4. B.G. & D.S.–
          My older daughter lives next to the town of Berkeley, CA. I enjoy walking through most of the little shops there, but WOW! Who knew there were so many soaps, candles, potions, etc. to “cure what ails you”.

    2. I’ll give them credit for the eye-catching titles. Now if we can only come up with some more intriguing content. The Homosexual Thrift Shop sounds fun, and I can’t wait to hear the rebuttal to the Gay Marriage/Second Marriage one. But wait, don’t Real True Xtians stay married FOREVER? 🙄 😛

  14. So, I looked at Dr. Sterling Walsh’s picture (the second person on the bottom row), and my first thought was, “Does he have a mullet?” Upon closer inspection, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t and that it was just a trick of the jpeg light, but it almost made me smile.

    1. No mullet. It’s either a televangelist hair cut, or the style of the finance guy at the corner car lot. They both seem to sport the same pompadour.

      1. Completely televangelist haircut
        also that picture is like 10 years old
        he looks the same … just a little chubbier and a little whiter hair

      2. Mulletts… Ya know, since they were popular in the 80’s…and since the 80’s aren’t considered “current” style…. He may very well be allowed to sport a mullett now days?
        Fundies may just bring the mullet back!!

  15. This particular page makes me think we should come up with a Fundy Speakers version of the kids’ game Guess Who.

    “Is your speaker a Calvinist?”
    “Does your speaker carry a black Bible?”
    “Does your speaker wear black ties?”

  16. Dr. Sterling Walsh is pictured twice (right end of top row and second right in bottom row). What’s up with that? Is he speaking twice?

    2. Hmm. Melanie Smith is also pictured twice, but she has a different picture for her “speaker” personality than she does for her “special music” personality. Have we just found the fundy Bjork???

      1. Well let’s make it a trifecta – It looks like Kay, of “Katie” and Kay, is also pictured twice.

        I haven’t found a second picture of the dummy yet. Still looking.

  17. Why is “Dr.” Sterling Walsh shown twice (top row, far right and bottom row 2nd from left)?

    Is it because his wife also has a “doctorate”? Can’t be having the wimmen-folk think she can possibly usurp his authority, amen?

    1. I think he is listed twice as a speaker and as “special music.”

      Mother in “Under Wraps” to her kid staring at the mummy: “Now, I’ve told you it’s not nice to stare. Some people are just special.”

      Kid: “Well, this guy is REALLY special!!”

  18. I don’t like the “hurts in sand . . . blessings in stone” message. It is sooooo typical fundy to say the way to deal with bad things happening is to just pretend they didn’t happen at all. Someone with more Bible knowledge could speak to this better than me, but isn’t there some verse about God keeping a record of our hurts or something like that?

    2. Folks, everything you do or say, good or bad, is written in sand, if not in water. It will all wash away with the tide.

    3. I too was bothered by that. It seems dismissive of the pain one has experienced.

      The Bible verse you may have been thinking of might be this: “You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book” (Ps. 56:8)

      1. Best IFB craft ever: once for VBS we were told to do a craft where you blow up a blue balloon and then smear it with glue. Then you wrap black yarn all around it to cover it up. (Which, if you think about it, would take FOREVER.) Then, when the glue dries, you pop the balloon and are left with a crunchy hollow sphere of yarn. (Yes, I know the balloon would actually stick to the yarn and not “pop” like they were thinking, but they used the KJV so we knew we could take their word for it.) This was to illustrate how the earth was “formless and void and darkness covered the face of the deep” in Genesis.

        Even my own fundy mother, who most if you know is a very special kind of crazy, said, “That is the most ridiculous craft idea I have ever heard of in my life. What are kids going to do with a bunch of crunchy gluey yarn!?!”

        1. We did the same in elementary school with string. Only it didn’t have any meaning. :mrgreen:

        5. DS, to answer your parental unit’s question, you could have always worn your crunchy sphere-shaped yarn as a wig and pretended you were the Bob Jones family.

    5. “Hurts in sand….Blessings in stone”

      Sounds like part of the “don’t sue or talk badly about us after we hurt you” indoctrination.

  19. I couldn’t get past, “Sword Ladies”

    I kept looking to see of Lorena Bobbitt was speaking at this conference. 😯

    And if “THIS” is the “Time of thier lives” then I pity them indeed.

    3. Don – You and george have a ventriloquist act don’t you? I can never remember who does the talking. :mrgreen:

      2. *sigh* …with friends like these…

        “Nothing to see here citizens, just keep typing. Scroll along folks.” 😉

      3. It must be Don that talks. He has the ‘stache to hide lip movement.

        Which means Don is actually George, so we have been blaming the wrong gremlin for our typos.

    1. That article you linked to had one of the most interesting malapropisms I’ve seen in a while:

      In the parliaments of our time, she could very easily be defined as a “Cougar.”

      I’m assuming they meant parlance.

      Trivia: Neko Case used to play drums for Cub.

      2. Yeah. I’m pretty sure the author didn’t meant The Parliaments, a Doo-Wop group from the ’50s, since he said “of our time”.

        No offense meant to anyone who actually remembers them from their time……..

        2. I don’t remember them B.G. I was more into Crystal Gayle, Ronnie Milsap, and The Oak Ridge Boys back then.
          Unless I was at home. Then it was Southern Gospel. Country ranked similarly to rock and funk in our Fundy house.

        3. One of the things I love about this site: a post about ventriloquism can digress to the point where we’re referencing Neko Case and P-Funk.

  22. I’d like to see a speaker at a mens’ conference bring a ventriloquist doll. Would never happen, of course, because men are adults whereas women are considered one step away from children.
    One thing I do appreciate is that they didn’t call every lady “Mrs. John Doe” (tack Mrs. onto her husbands’ name and identify her as that). The times, they are a changing.

    1. Well, there is also a tradition in African American churches of calling the couple “pastor” as a collective noun or “pastors.” E.g., “Pastors Jake and Linda Baker.” I kind of like that idea . . . emphasizing that both spouses are equally part of the ministry work of the pastorate. Eastern Orthodox Christianity has a similar tradition of honoring the priest’s wife and her role in the church.

      1. I also like that idea. In my experience pastors’ wives have been relegated to the nursery and occasionally to passing out little gifts on Mothers’ Day to all the Moms.
        My mom grew up as a Baptist pastor’s kid and her mom always told her, “The pastor’s family should be in the background and never take the spotlight away from the church members.” In other words, be invisible.
        I will also note that much of the wisdom I have heard in fundyland was from the mouths of pastors’ wives. But you had to be sitting in a rocking chair in the nursery in order to get a chance to hear it.

      1. It’s pretty scary when the doll & the operator have the exact same makeup painted on… 😮

    3. I love Bro. Spiers’ white suit. I bought a white suit a few years ago, but my wife won’t let me wear it to church. Too showy for her, I guess.

    4. Hahahaha. Play that funky music white boy! Plus I loved the green screen action. Hilarious!

    5. The first forty seconds ago was almost straight up Prog-Rock..it was actually pretty decent.

  27. Terry Fator – Ventriloquist – won America’s Got Talent a few years ago. Check him out on YouTube.

    1. Oh, the Ron Brown incident. For a while whenever reruns of Joy Junction used to air, I’d always get weirded out by the Ron and Marty segments; but when that story first broke I was honestly shocked at how sick this pervert is.

    2. Great. 🙄

      People already think Christians are perverts. Now they’re going to think we’re cannibals, too.

      1. Well there is that whole communion thing, take eat this is my body, take drink this is my blood.

  29. From now on, I’d like to be referred to as Dr. AfterGlow. Based on fundy standards, I’ve earned it.

      1. Dr. Fundystan, why don’t you any contact info on your website? Do you ever listen to the GWs on PCR? We have a nice little lounge on FB.

  30. Write your hurts in sand and your blessings in stone….

    This makes me see red. I am a victim of a bad church cover-up and this is one pithy saying that smacks of shutting up about what happened to you and just keeping a smile pasted on your face!!!! 👿

    1. Once pastors find out this kind of mask exists, they’ll be ordering them by the gross for their congregations.

  32. Does “Katie” say the things Kate really wants to say? I’m an adult, if a woman with a hand puppet is trying to talk to me seriously it just isn’t going to work. Ventriloquism is demonic magic art anyway, don’t they know that? 😈

    1. Puppetry and ventriloquism have always struck me as a creepy way to interact with people. The thought of an audience of grown women being entertained/taught by a ventriloquist does seem a bit demeaning. Or something

    2. For an exploration of puppets saying things their operators really want to say, see the movie “The Beaver.”

  33. More patronizing of women. Clearly their contribution isn’t taken seriously. It’s basically a kids’ show.

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