A neighborhood war breaks out over who has the best Fourth of July display. Meanwhile, Bobby's lazy, selfish attitude (which includes skipping church and stealing money from Peggy to buy pizza) prompts Lucky to take him to a fire-and-brimstone preacher, who scares Bobby into being righteous.
Tropes:
- Adults Are Useless: Due to the war between Rainey Street and Milton Street, Hank and Peggy get so preoccupied that they just brush off Bobby's sudden shift into fundamentalism as finally learning a lesson than question what's actually going on.
- Bittersweet Ending: The war has stopped and Bobby's back to normal, but at the cost of both neighborhoods needing extensive cleaning and repair and all the 4th of July supplies being either wasted or destroyed.
- The Fundamentalist: The pastor at Lucky's church preaches heavily about sinners and going to Hell to until it outright warps Bobby into one to the point where he's even calling random people at the Arlen mall sinners before security shows up to escort him off the property. It takes Lucky telling the boy not to take what the preacher says so literally to get him to snap out of it.
- Here We Go Again!: When a sparkler-bedecked kid from Applebee Street rides past Heck Dorlan and the Rainey Street group.
- Karma Houdini:
- While likely unaware about Bobby's easily impressionable behavior (and definitely meaning no harm), the preacher ultimately never gets chewed out for warping the boy into calling people sinners.
- Bobby himself Zig Zags this. While neither Hank or Peggy find out about his antics at the mall or at Tom Landry Middle School, he is assigned to cleanup detail when he comes out about destroying Hank's Uncle Sam statue. Though this doesn't last as Bill, thinking Bobby's just a decoy, soon shows up to continue the fight and make things much, much worse.
- Lazy Bum: Bobby. In one scene, Hank sees his son lying on the couch, watching cartoons, in his underwear, with a pile of potato chips on his chest that he just laps up with his tongue.Hank: Bobby, would you do me a favour and stand up? I just wanna see if you still can.
- Parental Hypocrisy: Despite deriding Bobby for missing church, Hank himself skips services to decorate for Fourth of July. Bobby notices, and takes this to mean his father is a sinner who needs to repent.
- Retcon: While this could be due to him having married Luanne, Lucky now goes to church instead of "church coming to him", like in Season 10's "Church Hopping".
- Scare 'Em Straight: When Bobby skips church and steals from Peggy's purse for pizza money, Hank wonders if there isn't a way to do this, like sending him to a prison and making him pee in front of other guys. Luckily, Lucky has a backup plan — take Bobby to his church.
- Shout-Out: Hank wonders if they could scare Bobby straight by having him pee in front of some prisoners is a reference to Beavis and Butthead's "Scared Straight" where the duo had to attend such a problem, and Butt-Head was made to defecate in a prison toilet while Beavis and the prisoners watched.
- Too Dumb to Live: Bill decides to blow up Heck's fireworks shed after Bobby's impassioned speech about forgiveness under the impression that Bobby was nothing more than a decoy, nearly destroying both neighborhoods in the process.
- You Keep Using That Word: When Bobby is preaching in the mall, he calls everybody he sees as a sinner a "fornicator", probably not realizing that the words means a very particular sin.
