Oppressed Evangelical Syndrome on the Rise

A strange and contagious malady is spreading through the United States. While at first confined to a few, isolated pockets of the American South, it can now be seen in the news and on television nearly every day. Its victims have meetings every week and more, wherein the problem festers and fortifies itself. Its sufferers have television shows and charitable foundations for their disease. In some states, there are entire channels devoted just to their cause.

THE DISORDER

What is this terrifying, life-changing condition called? Though it does not yet officially appear in either clinical medical literature or the DSM, I have chosen to refer to it as... Oppressed Evangelical Syndrome, or OES.

THE SYMPTOMS

How can you detect a potential sufferer? The symptoms to look for are mostly in the mind of the patient. The patient will experience delusions of oppression and even of evil nearly everywhere he or she turns, mistaking legitimate civil authority for either a sinister liberal agenda or the work of an invisible man who lives in the Earth named "Satan" or "the Devil." The OES-positive person has symptoms similar to obsessive-compulsive disorder, such as feeling overpowering urges to speak to their folded hands daily or to shove pamphlets in your face every time you step into Kroger's.

The most serious symptom is hallucination. The typical OES sufferer speaks daily to an invisible man who lives in the sky named "God," and in a mythical figure named "Jesus" whose stories are mostly rip-offs of Osiris, Mithras, Attis, and Tammuz. They construct elaborate delusions around his existence, firmly holding to the belief that "God" only talks back if you believe in him in the first place, and of course anyone who doesn't hear him just doesn't believe hard enough.

Physical symptoms include swollen PAC bankrolls, inflammation of the inferiority complex, and, in severe cases, periodic total blindness whenever presented with overwhelming physical evidence for evolution or other scientific postulates.