Winston Churchill during a lunch with the Arab leader Ibn Saud, when he heard that the king’s religion forbade smoking and drinking.

Back in April, we brought you the story of an Ohio preacher who noticed that attendance was flagging at his church and wanted to bring the good word to the people in the place they would be most ready, or at least well-lubricated enough, to receive it: the local pub. That preacher booked a pub for a few hours a week and held a service on Sunday evenings.

Presumably there was a sign outside the bar: Thursday: All-you-can-eat shellfish, Friday: Hits-of-World-War-II-themed karaoke. Saturday: Disgraced teen-star look-alike contest Sunday: Vespers with the Electric Padre. Barflies knew what was going on at the pub on Sundays and could choose whether or not they wanted to participate, thus those who weren’t interested would be spared that most dreaded of all pub conversations — the one that begins “A certain somebody died for your sins. I’ll give you three guesses.”

There is that approach, the odd but restrained kind, and then there’s what a couple of Charlie Churches in the UK did to nearly sink a pub that had been going strong for over 30 years. The couple took over the bar promising that they would make it a place where a couple of women could “come into the pub, buy a bottle of wine and feel comfortable drinking it.”

By that they meant, “a place where Ned and Maude Flanders could walk into a bar, school the assembled on the immorality of drink, and their sons Rod and Todd could enjoy a round of a biblical boardgame.” Stopping short of declaring prohibition, the couple banned horse racing, took down the dart board, and initiated a policy whereby anybody caught swearing faced a lifetime ban. And if that weren’t enough, they ruined that most British of traditions, pub quiz night, by gearing the questions to biblical matters, ex. “Who had the most wives in the bible?” A) The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, B) King Solomon, C) Rashomon, D) ‘D’ is for the devil, who you will meet in hell soon enough you ignorant heathen.

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of finding yourself taken unawares by a proselytizing effort, you’ll sympathize with the plight of these poor pubgoers who were seeing their local turn into the homebase for Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show.

A smattering of their responses from the ABC report:

A 61-year-old regular at the pub: “Any swearing and you were barred. It was well over the top.”

His more succint wife: “You can’t run a pub and not swear. If they are Christians, they should run a church, not a bloody pub.”

Another regular: “They should have built pews in here rather than chairs. I have no problem with their religion but … a pub is a pub.”

An elderly gentleman whose arse impression was worn into one of the stools: “Those two were almost the ruin of this place. They told everyone who swore once they would be banned. They barred people who had been coming here for 30-odd years.”

While religion and drink have gone together ever since someone first figured out how to hide a whiskey flask in a hollowed-out bible, this particular mixing of the suds with the sacred threatened to bankrupt the bar. The pub’s owners gave the couple their walking papers and hired a new manager. After being fired, the man and wife, apparently insane, barricaded themselves in the apartment above the bar with three of their six children.

It’s all the same to the pubgoers though, as the new manager has returned the dart board to its former glory and put up a sign, “Swearing Now Allowed.”