By David Emery

Every urban legend provokes an emotional response in those who believe it, be it horror, hilarity, disgust or outrage. The best ones "hit us where we live," one of the reasons they persist in spite of their falsity.

The emotional impact of a story is strongest when it's geared to a target audience — for example, a warning to college-age women about a supposed new date-rape drug that causes sterility, or rumors circulated within the African-American community to the effect that black voting rights in the U.S. are slated to expire soon. Beliefs such as these, though false, touch on legitimate concerns of the communities in which they circulate and therefore granted more credence than they deserve. Understandably so.

There are several long-running legends of this ilk among Christians. One is the claim that Procter & Gamble, the household products manufacturing giant, is owned by devil-worshippers and tithes a portion of its profits every year to the "Church of Satan." Nothing seems to be able to quell this rumor, not even the accumulation of decades of disproof. Another is the claim that atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair has lobbied the Federal Communications Commission to ban all religious broadcasting in the United States. Petitions expressing Christians' moral outrage over this nonexistent affront have circulated for a quarter-century in spite of the best efforts of the FCC and others to debunk the misinformation, not to mention O'Hair's untimely death.

Another Christian urban legend at least a decade old and making the email rounds since 2000 claims there's a commercial film in production which portrays Jesus Christ and the disciples as homosexuals. For many Christians, this is about as offensive as it gets. And like the apocryphal O'Hair story, it circulates in the form of a petition — a particularly effective vehicle for promulgating rumors because it incites moral outrage in the guise of a solution. People sign and forward it assuming they're doing a good deed, when in fact they're just passing along an urban legend.

The version reproduced below began circulating in April 2000: