The Gospel According to Beer and Mulder

It started out as just something to do on a Sunday night, an unnamed ritual that slowly turned sacred. I would pull into his driveway around 7:30, get out of my car, and look around to make sure no one was watching me. I would grab the 8-pack and quickly go into his house.

We’d scavenge dinner–raviolis, ramen, or if someone was feeling productive, pasta and sauce–and half watch The Simpsons and King of the Hill. Everyone knew, though, we were really there to do two things: watch Scully and Mulder chase monsters and drink beer.

That dark apartment offered something profane and yet, somehow, holy. For once, Sunday night wasn’t claimed by sermons or altar calls. No one watching my performance, no one to answer to. Just a TV show that demanded faith and beer that tasted like freedom. It felt closer to sacred than anything the church had offered in a very long time.

And I liked that.

Much of my early life had been stuck in the other kind of Sunday night: crammed into a pew, listening to the same hymns, trying to keep my heavy eyelids from closing. It was never optional. Back then, church wasn’t something I chose or questioned; it was just what Sundays were made of.

Maybe that’s why I liked the new ritual so much–it was as far from church as I’d ever been. Cold, cheap beer, friends slouched on the couch, Scully rolling her eyes while Mulder insisted, “They’re out there.” No pews, no prayers, no guilt.

This wasn’t just frowned upon at ENC–this was a fast track to expulsion. The morality code everyone was forced to sign was clear: no alcohol, no exceptions. But our den of iniquity was a safe haven. The glow and flicker of the television, the sagging couch, the smell of stale beer and takeout food–this was one of my first real fuck-yous to the church. Yes, that gnawing at the back of my brain whispered “what if you get caught,” but that feeling was dulled with every swallow.

That apartment became a sanctuary where, instead of first communion, I had my first beer—a real rite of passage ten years overdue. Most kids get baptized in beer and bad decisions at 14. That first sip was about finally breaking a rule, rebelling in my own simple way. My original baptism was being dunked under water on a Sunday night revival years earlier. Now, beer foam and aliens felt like a better form of evangelism.

At the end of the night, after Mulder and Scully had wrapped up the monster of the week and I was buzzed but not enough to drive home, I’d head back. By the time I pulled onto campus, the buzz had worn off, and it felt like church Sunday all over again–except I carried the secret of the Morality Code rule I had just broken. But I knew I had next Sunday to be saved again.

The Sunday nights of my youth promised salvation through altar calls and proclamations of faith. But the Sunday nights of my early adulthood saved me in the only way I could be back then—by friends, beer, and watching a true believer and a skeptic chasing the unexplained.