Once again, on tonight’s “Law & Order: SVU,” the killer turned out to be a fundamentalist preacher.
Now, I suppose Dick Wolf is free to take potshots at the Christian Right, if he wants to, but his show is set in Manhattan! Where the hell are all these fundamentalist Christians coming from???
Out of 8 million people in the city? There are plenty of fundamentalists, along with every other stripe of Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist, etc.
Sorry, pal, but there is NOTHING worth calling a Religious Right in New York City.
I’m a religious conservative. I wish there were! But there isn’t.
Dick Wolf knows that as well as anyone. He wants to attack the Religious Right, but his show is set in a place where it just doesn’t exist. That doesn’t stop him from pretending.
You have no idea what you’re talking about.
Do you know how many baptist churches there are in and around NYC? Scores. Hundreds. There’s bound to be a few extreme fundamentalists running around.
Tell it to everybody who’s had his morning subway commute interrupted by some random religious lunatic. 
Okay, okay, those guys don’t really count as the religious right. But it’s not as if there are no religious people here.
If there can be a large population of ultra-Orthodox Hassidic Jews in New York, and there are, then why can’t there be people of every fundamentalist religious persuasion?
Wikipedia lists three Pentecostal churches in NYC: Holy City Ministries, Iglesia Pentecostal La Luz del Mundo (Brooklyn, an Assemblies of God church) and Times Square Church (a multi-denominational megachurch with 8,000 members). I don’t think any of them resembles Dick Wolf’s bogeymen.
One key consideration: The most notoriously conservative megachurches need lots of parking. You can’t have a Jerry Fallwell/Pat Robertson style ministry without parking spaces, and there are few to be had in Manhattan.
I think that killer on SVU must have been based on astorian.
Messiah’s Covenant Community Church in Brooklyn is run by a Christian Reconstructionist. I don’t get the impression it’s exactly a mega-church, but they’re there.
(I don’t really watch Law and Order and its assorted spinoffs, so I can’t really say if they feature fundamentalist Christians unrealistically often; I’m just agreeing with everyone else that in a city of 8 million, you’ll find examples of just about every human group.)
Why would they need parking spaces in Manhattan? Fundies don’t take the subway?
Probably, since it may make for a bumpy exit during the Rapture.
:sorry:
Out of curiosity I checked the website of Times Square Church, and found that they will validate your parking ticket 
An evangelical megachurch in Times Square. O the times, they have a-change’d.
TSC btw was founded by & I think is still pastored by David Wilkerson of Teen Challenge/Cross & the Switchblade fame.
I was born and raised in Queens, but of course, I know nothing about life in New York City.
What was I thinking? Thanks for setting me straight.
It does get a bit old, the way that you can always tell who the murderer will be - just find the richest person in the episode.
And you never noticed that, although there are proportionally few religious conservatives in New York, in terms of absolute numbers there are just *tons *of them?
If the episode made a mistake, I think it’s making the villain a white guy. In my (fairly limited) experience, it seems that most of the Christian conservatives in New York are blacks, hispanics, carribean islanders, etc., many of whom go to the little storefront churches you tend to see in ethnic neighborhoods.
Then again, did they ever specify that the bad guy was from New York? For all we know he’s from some less urban part of the region and got the urge to kill hookers, so, where else is he going to go?
Aside: when’s the last time anyone here saw a street-walker in New York City? I haven’t seen one in at least 13 years, but maybe they still exist in parts of the outer-boroughs.
The L&Os, especially SVU, have gotten so over the top and ridiculous they make Stargate Atlantis seem like a docudrama about a plausible military mission. An excess of NY fundamentalists doesn’t seem that much more ridiculous than anything else on that show.
Wait a second. You complain that there are no fundamentalist Christians in NYC, but you also say you are conservative Christian, who was born and raised in Queens. Which is in NYC. Something doesn’t really seem to match there. :dubious:
Was this the episode with Lee Tergesen as the preacher from a couple weeks ago? Because he just seemed like a crazy street preacher. I don’t remember there being any mention of him running some large church in Manhattan. You don’t think there are at least a few crazy religious individuals in all of New York City? Have you *never *ridden the subway? :dubious: