I despise the term “homeboy” or “homey”- other than that- “eh”.
It’s rather infamous in fact, since it’s a parody of the Christian fish symbol (take off the feet and replace “Darwin” with “Jesus” or “IXΘYΣ”, or just leave it blank). Lately there are also fish that say Satan (with horns), Gefilte, Mutant (with three legs or other weirdness), or my personal favorite, Cthulu (with tentacles).
As for the T-shirt, it’s ugly and dumb, but not really worth a mention otherwise.
First off, it’s A/G, not AoG. Second of all, it’s become highly tiresome to have the visible supposed adherents of the denomination used as a means of stereotyping us all, and I’d expect better from you, Tom. A/G members may be pretty devout, but tight-assed isn’t a word I’d use to describe the people I know. (Five churches in five different states, plus friends in a number of others.) Whatever John Ashcroft’s personal convictions, you’ll find that A/G adherents run the gamut from those who don’t dance, see movies, watch television, play cards or listen to secular music to those of us who are film fanatics, sing Elton John songs in the car to our kids, vacation in Vegas and even have the occasional cocktail, though perhaps not in public. We don’t all anoint ourselves every morning, demand the draping of artwork or act like humorless, dour, sticks in the mud. If we did, it wouldn’t be my church – for the last 30+ years.
Like FriarTed mentioned, there are far worse t-shirts – This Christ’s For You in the Budweiser logo and Christ in the Coca-Cola font, declared to be the “real thing” – which are meant to show one’s belief in Christ. Unlike those, the Homeboy shirt does so in a stupid way, but not an offensive or pandering way.
However, while the A/G people I know do include some wonderful people, with open minds and good senses of humor, (and two of them routinely use the notation AoG in their notes to me, but I will correct my usage in the future), every one of them brings to the table a theology that is a bit stiff. Perhaps I just don’t know enough A/G members (although I can count nearly 100), but with the exception of one Southern Baptist (who was a loon, personally, regardless of belief), every person I’ve met who would condemn wine with dinner as carousing, insist that I was damned for my papism, and tell an abused spouse that she had to stay with her abusive husband because God demanded it was A/G. (These are all real-life examples.) Clearly ggurl has a sense of humor and perspective and I did not claim that she was either atypical of A/G adherents or that she did not belong. My use of tight-assed was intended only for Ashcroft, himself, while pointing in the general direction of A/G theology. For my hasty characterization, I apologize.