This barber’s son says you should check out Doug Muder’s UU World article, “Not My Father’s Religion.” The tagline says it all: If my working-class father started attending a UU church, I’m not sure who he’d talk to.

The barber’s son also wants you to check out Facilitating Paradox’s response and Trivium’s two-parter. For bonus points, check out the barber’s son’s post about his grandparents fitting in as UUs.

And that’s all there is about that.

“Gay Jesus art sparks violence… and hope” from MyOutSpirit.

“Could the gnostic gospels be considered fanfic?” from the Blind Bookworm.

Here’s the deal with freaks and geeks: I love them because I am one. I play Civilization IV. I go to the comic book store now and again. I TiVo Battlestar Galactica. I listen to Belle & Sebastian, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Hem. I’m a Mac switcher. Hell, I even blog.

So I’ve been asking myself, what would it look like if the halls of my congregation were filled with more of my people? What would it take to reach them? What would they gain from being a part of us? And what we would we gain in return?

We don’t blanch at the idea of targeting Cultural Creatives—or from thinking of ourselves as Cultural Creatives—so I don’t think we should blanch at targeting freaks and geeks—or from thinking of ourselves as freaks and geeks.

I’d even bet that there are more freaks and geeks out there than Cultural Creatives, even in Cambridge. And then there are the freaks and geeks masquerading as Cultural Creatives.

I’m not actually proposing that we market ourselves as a freakshow, and I don’t think we need to do UUism differently on their behalf. I just think that there are a lot of UUs-who-don’t-know-it in that demographic, and I was once one of them.

Jeff W. wrote in the comments to the last post,

Maybe UU churches should try marketing themselves with banners that say “Come join the freakshow!”

How would you market UUism online? This question has gone around the UU blogosphere before, so let’s make it very specific this time. We’re talking viral advertising, not broadcast.

1. Target it to these specific groups: underemployed urban hipsters, fortysomething Morissey fans, single moms getting an MSW at night classes, or Dragoncon ticket holders. They must be freaks, geeks, outsiders, or otherwise square pegs.

2. Or come up with your own obscure demographic group, and tell us the keywords that would pull up the ad on Google. So “Decemberists” would work for urban hipsters, and “Zachary Quinto AND Spock” for hard core trekkies.

3. Tell us what you’d have it link to. Like the YouTube ads that David Wallace Croft linked to in the comments.

4. The clincher: It has to work as a Google text ad. Click to continue reading “Write the web ad: “Come join the UU freakshow!””

This one from the wife: Are we a movement that attracts more outsiders than most? Or as frequent commenter 4alarm puts it, are we a nerd party?

Since there’s been such a wonderful flurry of comments, I added a new thingy to the sidebar to give linky goodness to the most frequent commenters. Spread the love and give them a click.