Can you think of any activities you don’t enjoy but are willing to tolerate? If so, are there related and superficially similar activities you will not engage in? If so, what are they, and what are your reasons?
Answering my own question: I’ll attend occasionally attend Sunday afternoon services at my wife’s and father’s churches, but not Sunday School, even though the latter is considerably briefer. Why? Well, I grew up in their denomination, the Church of God in Christ. It’s a black Pentecostal denomination that places a lot of emphasis on individual participation in the service. Conggregants stand up and testify about what God has done for them; multiple congregants will volunteer to read Scripture during the sermon; periodically an especially fervent person will “shout” ecstatically. During the Sunday afternoon service one can opt out, simply sitting and watching while thinking about how groovy one’s wife is. She’s extremely groovy and is given to moving prettily while singing in the choir, so that’s easy.
But Sunday School is different. COGIC churches have SS for adults and children both, you see; many churches even segregate adult men and women during the lesson. But Sunday School is less education than indoctrination; everyone attending is pressured to participate. That has led me to some awkward moments in which I have to choose between lying out of my teeth to preserve the peace; giving my truthful opinion and sparking an argument; or refusing to answer questions and thus eliciting a full-on press from obscurantist dweebs trying to explain their faith to me. Once, for instance, the lesson was on a certain incident in the Book of Judges, in which a character named Jephthah promises God that, if God gives him the victory in battle, to sacrifice the first thing he sees upon coming home. Jephthah won the battle and upon coming home saw his young daughter, and after some vacillation put her to the sword. The teacher asked what this story meant to each of us. The only honest answer I could give was something like Well, it tells me the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was a fucking monster undeserving of anything but a punch in the nads. That would have been impolitic to say aloud, of course, but I couldn’t bring myself to utter the standard God’s ways are mysterious and beyond human ken, so we must trust in him no matter how evil he sometimes seems. Instead I opted not to answer, sparking the aforementioned attempt to explain things to me; said lesson stopped only when I made a subtle observation about my size, the size of the teacher, and the consequences of my losing patience with him.
Learning from this, I made a new rule. I’ll tolerate the occasional afternoon service, but not Sunday School.