Who Does God Choose?

Recently my mother of 86 years died and I went home for the funeral. In addition to the normal sadness of such an event, coming from a missionary family of a sect, and having been withdrawn from (disfellowshipped, shunned) years ago, there were the usual sparks and conflicts.

View from Mom’s grave

I learned my brother had resigned from being an elder because two of his children had left  the hard core churches of Christ, both children leaning in a Calvinist direction.

This is sad for me because I don’t get Calvinism. Calvinism is one of the least attractive sectors of Christianity for me.

John Calvin had a harsh father who insisted Calvin study law and become a lawyer, even though Calvin had no desire to do so. Calvin got his law degree, but instead of practicing law, he became a protestant preacher, the Reformation having taken hold in Switzerland a generation before him.

If Calvin lived today he would probably be described by a psychotherapist as having Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder or simply as an Obsessive. Obsessives are concerned with rules, guilt and harshness, over gentleness and functionality. The punishment is more important to them than the maturing of the person being punished. The older son in the Prodigal Son story was an obsessive. Obsessives are described as bitter and perfectionistic, often sickly, with families that don’t like them. Their marriages burn out quickly.

Calvin was fascinated by the writings of an early church father named Augustine, who lived 400 years after Christ, and 1100 years before Calvin.   Early church fathers were irritated by Augustine’s teachings on humanity’s depravity and predestination. Augustine and Calvin taught that God is all powerful (“sovereign”), and that humans are completely weak (and evil, depraved), so weak that we cannot choose to follow God. God must infuse us with his Spirit. And we cannot refuse His Spirit once he has chosen us, because we are completely weak compared to God. Once God has chosen us we cannot fall from His grace. And God chooses us before we are born, to be eternally saved, or eternally lost.

Augustine by Antonio Rodriquez

We, as humans, are not permitted to complain about this arrangement, because humans originally sinned through Adam, and therefore we are all guilty of sin, and all deserve damnation, because all sin. Calvin asked why should those who deserve damnation be permitted to complain that some get chosen to be forgiven? All deserve damnation. Therefore nobody should be allowed to complain about it.

The whole of Calvinism rests on the doctrine that all humans sinned through Adam and therefore are so evil they are unable to choose God. We are not permitted to complain about the justice and fairness of everyone being condemned to hell. Nor are we permitted to complain that some select individuals are chosen by God to be forgiven and regenerated, to show the world that God loves us.

Wow! That seems evil to me! And that is not the kind of God I want to get close to, have a relationship with, and worship. If that is the plan of salvation, then I believe God has a PR problem, and a morale problem.

Why would Augustine and Calvin come up with such a God, and more to my current point, why would my nephews be attracted to that doctrine? I think because they all share one factor: they all had harsh fathers. They had very little control over their lives as children, fear being the prime motivation, and having a God that matched this arbitrariness and harshness makes total emotional sense to them.

I was also harsh on my children, which they like to remind me of. They tell me that having been raised in a fundamentalist sect is not an excuse for me to have raised them harshly. They have a point.

Our pictures of God are formed before our logic develops. Our pictures of God are formed from our early experiences with our primary caretakers.

There are two or three forms of Calvinism and not-Calvinism: 

1. Strict Calvinism (several of the divisions of Baptists are strict Calvinists, as are the Presbyterians)
2. Arminianism (a little more free will involved in choosing God). John and Charles Wesley, Methodist, Episcopals, and the Pentecostal movement embraced Arminianism.
3. If you’re not a Calvinist you probably believe in one of the forms of Pelagianism.
4. The Eastern Orthodox Church never respected Augustine, therefore never taught predestination.
5. Universalism came out of Calvinism, teaching that since everyone sinned through Adam, everyone will be saved through Christ, to combat the ugly version of Calvinism where God wants to show wretched humanity how loving he is by choosing some of us, but not others.

When I have confronted Calvinists with the illogicality of their theology, they respond without logic. They reply: “It’s a mystery. Only God understands it completely. We are limited human beings, limited by space and time, we cannot see the big picture.”

In other words they admit that it makes no sense. But they want a pass card, a get out of jail free card, which I am not willing to give them. Are you telling me that God and his prophets wrote an entire Bible to reason with us, and made us logical beings, but wants us to suspend that logic and accept that we cannot voluntarily read the Bible and accept the gospel ourselves? That the Bible is actually only a tool for those who have been chosen? That’s not what the Bible claims to be. That is not what the gospels claim. No. Jesus tried to convince people, and that is what I try to do. If God is in the habit of not trying to convince people, but just zapping them with the Holy Spirit, then why is the example he has given us, a book of arguments to convince us?

Yeah, it’s not logical, and no, you do not get a free pass card.

Servetus burned at the stake under Calvin’s rule

Predestination makes God out to be somewhat evil. And that is unacceptable to me. Predestination has turned more Christians into atheists than any other doctrine. If you are teetering, then just read a history of the life of John Calvin. He could have taught Hitler a few things. The only other doctrine that has turned a comparable number of Christians into atheists is the warped doctrines against sexual desire, also originating with Augustine of Hippo.

After my mother’s funeral we cleaned out the house for my father, throwing things out and saving some mementos, especially the photographs. The next day my father emailed myself and my daughter that we were not invited to his birthday dinner. He said he had suspended the withdrawal (shunning) rules for the funeral, but that was over and he couldn’t suspend the rules for a birthday dinner. Almost enough to convince one that God is a Calvinist!

Sex and Evangelicals

99% of Fundamentalists and Evangelicals have been opposed to having sex before marriage. “Save yourself for marriage” has been the watchword. They point to passages of scripture that teach about marriage. And they point to verses that condemn “fornication.”  Fornication is a term that is used in the Greek portion of the Bible as a catch -all for any kind of disapproved sexual activity. But there aren’t a lot of verses that define what that disapproved sexual activity is. The apostle Paul disapproved of homosexuality, adultery (sex with someone married to someone else), prostitution, lewdness (undefined) and uncleanness (perhaps referring to Jewish uncleanness laws in the Law of Moses).

Notice the lack of mention of masturbation. In fact nobody in the Old or New Testaments seemed to care enough about masturbation to even mention it, even though masturbation is the most common  sexual activity in the world by far, practiced by 75% of the population, married people masturbating more than singles.

The apostle Paul seems to be relying on the Hebrew Bible to define sexual sin. The Hebrew Bible condemns bestiality, prostitution, male homosexuality, cross dressing, rape, and adultery (capital offenses), sex during a woman’s period, and sex before marriage (less severe offenses).

The punishment for sex before marriage was that the offending couple had to get married, or the young man had to pay a fine to the young woman’s father.

Most of these laws were addressed to male heads of households: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.” No commandment to not covet thy neighbor’s husband.

The custom in the surrounding areas was for a man to buy his wife from the father of the bride. The parents of the bride were supposed to guarantee that she was a virgin. For this reason young people were not permitted to date for most of the period covered by the Hebrew Bible. Marriages were arranged.

This was very practical. If a young woman became pregnant, who would take care of her and her child? Forming a responsible society that took family and children seriously guaranteed that Judaism became a major force in history. Children were viewed as a great blessing. Small families were seen to not have been blessed.

There is one book that is an anomaly in the Hebrew Bible that discusses passionate sex, and that is the Song of Solomon. It is a play, perhaps a musical, with a chorus that speaks lines and a young woman with dark skin being prepared for marriage to a young handsome king. Full of lusty passages, it is used by evangelicals and especially pentecostals as an allegory of the passionate love of Christ for the church. It falls down however, when taken in the perspective of the real Solomon: who had ambassador-wives (300) and concubines (700), 1,000 women he had sex with. So this woman in this play is sharing her husband with 1,000 other women.

In the New Testament there is no mention of multiple wives as in the Hebrew Bible. And evangelicals wax eloquent about Jesus quoting the creation story (Matt 19) to tell us that marriage was created for one man with one woman: How else can a woman give herself sexually to her husband if she cannot trust that she is his one and only?

In the New Testament Greek portion of the Bible, several of the sexual and marital rules from the Law of Moses are repeated, but there is a major shift: women are starting to be mentioned as having equal rights in a marriage. The gospel of Mark reports Jesus talking about a woman divorcing her husband.   Paul says that men do not have sexual control of their own bodies, but their wives do. Wives should not deprive their husbands of sex and husbands should not deprive their wives of sex.

Conservative Christian advice columnists have repeatedly stated that the more partners a woman has before marriage, the more difficult it is for her to relax and enjoy sex with her husband later. About 3% of the population waits until marriage. While some of the cautions may be true, they leave out the fact that those who now remain virgins until marriage are often dysfunctional, with major lack of differentiation from their parents. They are emotionally reactive and, from what I have seen, end up having the worst levels of bickering with their partners after marriage. So virginity does not guarantee the marital bliss they were promised, and they feel painfully betrayed for having believed this evangelical story.

What then is God’s will for unmarried people today about sex? I cannot answer that question.

However I can make some observations: The only group of Christians successfully raising children who are virgins until marriage, and whose marriages are relatively happy are blue collar fundamentalists and pentecostals. Key word: blue collar.  In blue collar working class families (construction workers, technicians, food industry, transportation) it is fine to have babies at age 19 years old. So to get married at 18 years old is encouraged, and to have 4 children is also encouraged. These blue collar families tend to support 1950s values: an obedient wife who stays home, mostly, is poor, and devotes herself to raising lots of children. The entire congregation becomes a support system to encourage these young teens, and then young married adults with lots of children.

Mark Regnerus wrote that evangelical teens have the same amount of sex as teens in the general population, 97% have sex before marriage, but they have more shame and guilt about it. The average evangelical teen starts having sex at 15 years old. Why? Because most evangelical parents will not condone their children getting married until they are 25 years old. Ten years of virginity is unfathomable to these teens, so everyone just looks the other way. Most teens stop attending church.

Few self-respecting upper middle class families can tolerate their 19 year old son or daughter getting married. They see them as being condemned to a life of blue collar poverty. Status is powerful in American society. College is shamed into our children’s psyches from way before first grade. Nothing can get in the way of a college education: not marriage, not pregnancy, not sex and not our evangelical faith. If an evangelical girl gets pregnant, 95% of them get an abortion, even though they believe that abortion is murdering a baby. (The same percentage of women in evangelical churches have had abortions as in the general population.) Dropping out of college to become a poor futureless mother is too much of a shame burden for evangelical middle class and upper middle class women, and their parents are often the ones who urge them to get an abortion, against all their values.

Sarah Diefendorf did her PhD thesis on small support groups of young men wanting to remain virgins until marriage. These groups occur in intense churches who meet at least 4 hours per week, and who encourage extremely traditional 1950s values. She said the the small support groups were powerful, but ended abruptly at marriage. The men felt lost and confused about how to deal with their problems in marriage with no support group.

Sara Moslener wrote Virgin Nation, a book about how the sexual purity movements in evangelicalism is more about explaining our fears than about sexual purity.

So what is the answer? There probably is no one answer. But this is true: Our system is broken. The members of evangelical churches are too full of shame to be able to support each other around figuring out a sexual morality for today.

Toilets are Unbiblical

I grew up in a religious tradition, the Churches of Christ (Restoration Movement), that emphasized God’s original intent, for example:

1. God’s original intent for the church was a simple congregational group led by elders in every congregation. Therefore denominational hierarchy is unbibilical.

2. God’s original intent is one man for one woman, therefore divorce is unbiblical, as well as homosexuality and transgender.

3. Worship in the New Testament church was originally singing acapella accompanied by the heart, therefore any other instruments of music are unbiblical and unauthorized by God.

Using this logic I have discovered that the sit-down flush toilet is unbiblical.

The individual flush toilet is a fairly recent invention of humanity, originating in 1596, and becoming popular in the 1800s, and mass produced in England by a man named Thomas Crapper. The Romans had a similar idea for their public latrines during the time of Christ, 2000 years ago. The Romans used a sit down arrangement in a row, with the normal holes for poop
ing and peeing, with running water below, that ran into the sewer lines. I’m sure this design lowered the disease rates in their major cities. The first water flushing latrines were used in the Indus Valley in 2600 B.C., but flush toilets have been for richer societies for the most part, and the majority of people worldwide, even if they have flush toilets, use squat toilets in the floor of the bathroom.

Before the use of the flush toilet or the sit-down latrine, people squatted, usually above a pit latrine. Squatting, according to experts in scatology, is the healthiest way to poop, and, according to some theoscatologists, is the original intent of God.  We were created to squat while pooping. The apostle Paul, when trying to persuade his readers of particular points in his theology sometimes appealed to Nature. Nature has taught us that our sit-down pooping is unhealthy for us.

For instance hemorrhoids are a western phenomenon, only common in sit-down toilet societies (http://www.marksdailyapple.com/squat-poop/). The position of sitting while defecating increases strain on the colon three hundred percent (yes, they measured the pressure in the colon for this statistic). Sit-down toilets, constipation and appendicitis have also been closely associated in western sit-down toilet societies, as has Crohn’s Disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appendicitis#Causes, all of which are lower in non-sit-down societies.

When I lived in Africa each home had a separate servant’s quarters with a bathroom. The shower and toilet in the servant’s quarters were all one contraption, the toilet bowl being buried level with the floor of the shower, requiring squatting for elimination. A chain was pulled for flushing, the water flowing through the shower head, and draining into the toilet bowl buried level with the floor.

So my conclusion is that God, in creating humans, originally intended us to squat while pooping. Any other method of pooping is unbiblical.

The Seventh Day Adventists have long regarded natural health
as something that God has commanded us to take seriously.

One of the main problems with squatting while pooping is that pants get in the way. This could be why we never read of pants in the Bible, another innovation that has ruined our health and taken us away from God’s original plan for humanity.

I write this partially as humor, but also to challenge our thinking about what preconceptions we bring to the Bible when we read it, and to think about God and the Bible from a broader perspective.

Why we Vote for Donald Trump

As the race for President heats up, many people are flocking to vote for Donald Trump because he has said that he will stop Muslims from immigrating to the U.S., and he will build a wall against Mexican immigration, and make the Mexican government pay for it. He trash talks his opponents, whether they be presidential hopefuls, or critics, threatening to both sue and to expand the libel laws to allow for more suing of critics. Trump has said that he will endorse water boarding for use in torturing prisoners of war for information, and will bomb the families of the leaders of ISIS.

This has galvanized a large portion of the United States, mostly whites, who are now realizing that their long sleepy dominance of the U.S. is fast fading. As the numbers of non-European Americans has risen to 25%, and the country elected, what?, a black president, so have the stories of black people killed monthly by local police risen. Both the nation’s racial readiness, and the advent of cameras everywhere, has led to a new accountability for white dominated police departments. Whereas in the past the police could mete out whatever justice they wanted to the lowest rungs of society, now it is frowned upon, and liberal whites are shocked at what was going on all this time.

The middle class has been steadily shrinking, so parents have been urging their children to have a better chance of staying in the middle class by getting the all important college education, incurring huge college debt, averaging $35,000. Who has the most to lose with these changes in the U.S.? Blue collar America, especially white blue collar America. So Donald Trump appeals to the lowest, basest fears.

Jesus mentioned that hypocrites point out the sawdust in their brother’s eye while having a plank in their own eye. We project onto groups what we don’t want to admit is part of our own group. Are white people the problem? Surely not, we say. It has to be the immigrants! Statistically immigrants are much more law abiding than the general American public. Why? Because they have worked so hard to get here. They are more grateful, and they know to watch out more carefully what they do, because they are not from here.

Germany in the 1930s was in financial crisis with runaway inflation, and high unemployment, with stories of going to the bakery to buy bread with a wheelbarrow full of almost worthless money. The people were scared. So they elected someone who demonized groups of people:  Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, mentally retarded people and the largest group: Jews. (For centuries Jews in Europe had been banned from owning land (farming) or being licensed in trades, like bakers, carpenters, blacksmiths, or leatherworkers. So Jews had gone into banking, clothing and jewelry in order to make a living. This created a stereotype of Jews in Europe, and an envy by those less fortunate or industrious. Hitler capitalized on the people’s fear, unemployment, projection and envy, and was elected to parliament. It took a few more years of maneuvering and jailing his opponents before he could be Prime Minister and finally Der Fuhrer.

Vladimir Putin has done the same thing in Russia recently, whipping up the Russian people’s fury against Ukraine and the United States as the economy and political power of Russia fades. Donald Trump is doing the same.

Who votes for Donald Trump?

1. The religious right.  Fundamentalists, pentecostals and evangelicals have traditionally been more authority-minded and authoritarian than the general public. They admire people who use the military, and are often the first to encourage their children to join the military. They confuse nationalism with Christianity and believe they are loyal Christians when they go off to fight for U.S. interests.

2. Blue collar workers. People who have been marginalized by our society, starting work at minimum wage and barely getting a raise each year. Why would like to identify with someone who is rich, famous and claims to be able to make a profit.

3. White people who want America to stay white. When I was learning to read the reader we learned from was full of Dick, Jane, Sally and Spot. Now the readers are full of Juan, Immanuela, and Zenab. This panics those who want everything to go back to the 1950s when black people weren’t allowed to vote. Stop change! is the cry of poor white Americans.

but the people there did not welcome him, because he was heading for Jerusalem. When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them ?” But Jesus turned and rebuked them.

Luke 9

Inspiration of the Bible: Questions we were not allowed to ask

When thinking about the Inspiration of the Scriptures, we were allowed to ask:

1. Who wrote this book or letter,
2. To whom was it written,
3. In what era of time was it written,
4. What were the customs of the day?
5. How much has the text been altered over the years when we compare different copies of the text? What is the probable original text?
6. What was the goal of the writer? Of what concepts was he/she trying to convince his/her audience?

Questions we were not allowed to ask:

1. How much does the author disagree with his contemporary Scripture authors? Does Paul disagree with James or with Jesus? Do any of the laws in the Law of Moses contradict each other? Is there a change in the status of women from the Old Testament to the New Testament?
2. Did Jesus break or contradict the Law of Moses, or the books of wisdom?
3. Did the prophets of the OT contradict each other? Did the concept of resurrection of the dead gradually develop over time (as N.T. Wright believes) from no resurrection to a definite resurrection?“It is all the more surprising, then, to discover that, within the Bible itself, the hope of resurrection makes rare appearances, so rare that some have considered them marginal. Though later exegesis, both Jewish and Christian, became skilled at discovering covert allusions which earlier readers had not seen – a skill shared, according to the gospels, by Jesus himself – there is general agreement that for much of the Old Testament the idea of resurrection is, to put it at its strongest, deeply asleep, only to be woken by echoes from later times and texts.” N.T. Wright
4. Was the author correctly reporting from the Spirit of God?
5. Do I agree with the author?
6. Can I find wisdom to lead my life in other literature outside the Bible?

Most fundamentalists say things like: “The Bible says…” And some of the biblical writers use similar phrases: “The law and prophets…”  “What do the Scriptures say?” However, when one starts to say: “Paul says” or “Isaiah says” then we begin the long walk out of fundamentalism.

As fundamentalists and evangelicals, we were not allowed to question the inspiration of any part of Scripture. The Roman Catholic Church never had that perspective. They always viewed different parts of Scripture as having varying levels of inspiration. (Evangelicals do the same, by quoting their favorite scriptures and ignoring their not-so-favorites.) The liturgical churches usually ask the congregation to stand during the reading of the stories of Jesus, and sit during the reading of other parts of Scripture. Martin Luther, a Catholic priest who demanded that the Roman church repent and reform in the 15th century, was not shy in examining which books he thought had more inspiration than others in the Bible.

How does viewing the Bible as less than perfect impact a person’s faith?  If one is in James Fowler’s Stage 3 Faith, then questioning how deep a particular passage is inspired, may cause someone to lose their faith entirely. But if you are in Stage 5 it is refreshing and deepens your faith to examine how close to God’s Spirit you perceive the writer of a book in the Bible has come. We examine secular writers this way, why not then the writers of the Bible?

When the apostle Paul wrote his letters, he started with his credentials: “an apostle of Jesus Christ.” Then he worked on persuading his readers, pleading with them. He didn’t expect them to just accept everything he said as 100% inspired. He expected his readers to be convinced by his arguments. So are you convinced by all of Paul’s arguments? He was writing to churches 2,000 years ago. We are not the ones he was writing to, so the answer is probably no, we are not convinced by every single argument Paul makes. Some of his arguments sound odd and strange to us, not being familiar with the customs and beliefs of his day.

The Torah

When the apostle Paul told Timothy that the OT Scriptures he had learned as a child were filled with the breath of God, and were profitable for teaching and would equip the man of God, he was talking about the Law of Moses, the books of wisdom and the prophets. The same books Paul said were “a mere shadow of the things to come,” (Col. 2:16-17) and the writer of Hebrews said were weak, fulfilled and fading away. (8:13)

No, we cannot say that Paul’s statement that the Scriptures were God-breathed means we can never disagree with the Scriptures. Paul freely showed how brighter revelations made much of the OT obsolete (and the religious leaders of his day hated him for it, accusing him of not believing that God had inspired Moses).  As evangelicals we are taught that Jesus fulfilled the Law, and did away with it  by bringing a better sacrifice and a better worship.

Objection:

If we don’t have a fully inspired Bible, then there is a slippery slope to “anything goes.”

Answer:

In fundamentalist churches we can find people who have justified anything and everything from adultery, multiple wives, child wives, wife-swapping, and even murder. Holding to the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures does not guarantee we will stay in the safe zone.

The apostle Paul wrote a wonderful passage, one of my favorites, to the Jews in Rome:

For it is not the hearers of the Law who are just before God, but the doers of the Law will be justified. For when Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them…So then, if those who are not circumcised keep the law’s requirements, will they not be regarded as though they were circumcised?  (Romans 2:13-15, 26)

 Paul reasons that our consciences should be attuned to God and keeping His will, and that it is not our circumcision (or even our baptism) that makes us Jews (or even Christians), but the way we act in daily life. Paul says that non-Jews, who had never had access to the 10 Commandments, could follow their consciences and end up keeping the 10 Commandments, and be counted as righteous before God.

Using that same logic, couldn’t people who don’t accept the full inspiration of every book of the Bible, still follow the principles of love and grace taught by Jesus? And wouldn’t God accept them as righteous?  
It is not the inspiration of Scripture, or even theology that ultimate demonstrates the grace of God in our hearts, but what shines forth from our actions. 

Albert Schweitzer was a liberal in his theology, but he raised money and opened a hospital in western Africa because he saw a need, and was motivated by Jesus’ teachings to minister to those in need.

So if you were to ask yourself, how much of the NT writers do you agree with, what would be your answer? And would it shake or strengthen your faith?

Why the Churches of Christ, and most evangelicals, should vote for Donald Trump

Recently Donald Trump, in campaigning for the U.S. Presidency, has made several comments that play into the fears of Americans: that no Muslims be allowed to emigrate into the United States. Evangelist Franklin Graham (son of Billy Graham) has affirmed Trump’s stance by saying we cannot import more Muslims into our country “until the war with Islam is over.”

Why should the  group known as the Churches of Christ (Restoration Movement, fundamentalist, Bible belt) vote for Donald Trump?

The Churches of Christ split from the Christian Church in the 1840s-1860s, ostensibly over denominational hierarchy, and musical organs being introduced into the Sunday morning worship, upsetting the traditional American acapella four part harmony singing. But the unspoken reason was because the northern Christian Church did not support slavery, and the southern Churches of Christ were solidly in the Confederacy. There were some racially integrated anti-slavery churches in the David Lipscomb influenced Tennessee area, but the rest were solidly pro-slavery, and their feelings ran deep. After the Civil War there were many warnings in journals published in the Churches of Christ against racially integrating congregations because of the immorality that would be stirred up by white women listening to black preachers, and how, after the service, the black preachers would shake the white women’s hands with both their hands, and how would the white women be able to resist committing adultery with the black preachers? (Foy E. Wallace, Sr., Bible Banner)

During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s the white Churches of Christ were silent about civil rights, or even hostile. One of my Arkansas friends remembers hearing a sermon referring to “Martin Lucifer Coon” in a Church of Christ he was a member of. No tears were shed in white Churches of Christ when King was assassinated.

In the one college associated with the non-institutional wing of the churches of Christ in Tampa, Florida, there was a ban against admitting black non-athlete students until 1972, mainly because of one major contributor to the college.

So the (white) Churches of Christ should vote for Donald Trump because they have always been afraid of dark skinned people. Donald Trump will lead the nation in protecting, defending, drone striking, water boarding, and bombing dark skinned people with foreign religions who threaten to attack us.

Statistically the danger of being attacked by a Muslim extremist is far less than the danger of dying in a car crash, drowning in a backyard swimming pool, accidentally shooting oneself with a handgun, or even being shot by an American police officer. But none of those things are popular things to campaign against, or be elected because of. Can you imagine a presidential platform including the banning of backyard swimming pools?

The Churches of Christ are solidly within James Fowler’s Stage 3 Faith. Stage 3 is characterized by an allegiance to one’s group. The group or church holds one’s faith. If I am in Stage 3 Faith I am not strong enough to hold onto my faith by myself, so I hold onto my church, who holds onto my faith for me. They prop me up, support me and hold me safe. Departing from my church would be terrifying, because I would fall apart. But Stage 3 is the most xenophobic (fear of other races) of stages of Faith. My group is good, all other groups are inferior, or if I am even more insecure, all other groups are evil, and bound for hellfire damnation. Jesus warned against this: “Why do you pick the sawdust out of your brother’s eye, when you have a plank in your own eye?” And the story of the Good Samaritan. The people of Jesus’ day hated the Samaritans because they were half-breed Jews. They hated them more than they hated the Romans who had conquered them.

People in Stage 3, and this includes the Churches of Christ (and Franklin Graham, who is Baptist), have great difficulty viewing life from another group’s point of view. If I were in Stage 3 Faith, it would be very difficult for me to view life from the point of view of an Afghani, a Palestinian or a Pakistani. To be abysmally dirt poor and uneducated, to read in the newspapers about American drones flying in and shooting my people. Surely I would believe the Americans are the out group, the enemy, the dangerous giant.

Joseph Stalin

People in Stage 3 have little interest in negotiation, mediation and talking through something. If I am in Stage 3 I am frightened and I want immediate relief. I want to feel that my group is strong and powerful, superior and maybe even ruthless.

2. The Churches of Christ have been teaching “spare the rod and spoil the child” for decades. They do not focus on “of such are the kingdom of heaven” when talking about children (unless they are arguing against infant baptism). They see children as a source of disobedience, and the rod or spanking paddle is the instrument that will give them well behaved children. They are proud when they are harsh and their children are well behaved. Force, threats and fear are the primary motivators of their child rearing, and so why shouldn’t they look to force, threats and fear as the primary instruments of diplomacy.

3. The Churches of Christ, as all blue collar religions in America, are strongly influenced by the military industrial complex of America. As long as transportation of goods is cheap, then we will continue to lose our manufacturing industries to countries that pay ten cents per hour for labor. What is left are sales jobs, high tech, healthcare, teaching, service industries, construction and military jobs. Military and military related industries are 15% of the economy. For blue collar workers it is 20% or more of their employers. So there is no discussion of conscientious objection in these blue collar churches. They fly the American flag out in front of their church buildings, as if to say: we are part of the military industrial complex, we pray for victory in all the wars that the United States fights, we do not question the morality of our leaders, we are Stage 3 Faith, and the United States military holds our faith.

For these reasons, the Churches of Christ, and most evangelicals, should
vote for the zenophobia of Donald Trump.

The Loneliness of leaving a Cult: the documentary, Sons of Perdition

Two of the boys who escaped the cult

Last night I enjoyed the documentary, Sons of Perdition, about people who leave the FLDS, a polygamist Mormon sect on the border of Utah and Colorado. Although the sect in which I grew up was not as cult-like, I found many similarities to the way I was raised and the way I left my sect.

1. Arrogance of the group toward all other groups. They preached superiority: We follow God; nobody else follows God.

2. Isolation. A deliberate effort to keep members separated from the influence of anyone outside the group; keeping members ignorant of the way outsiders think and live.

3. Fear of leaving the sect. Anyone who leaves is going to hell. Anyone who leaves is shunned. Anyone who leaves the sect loses their family.

The bishop and the bishop’s father, who was bishop before him, had 70 children.

4. Obedience to crazy rules is important for many reasons:

     a. Obedience to seemingly odd rules shows that you are willing to obey God even when you do not understand why.

     b. Obedience to crazy rules isolates you from outsiders.

     c. Obedience to crazy rules shows that you are not leaving the group, that you are part of the in-group, can be relied on, and are safe.

5. Lack of self control. The reason they were seemingly self controlled while in the sect was because the sect was so controlling, not because they were self-disciplined. Now that they are out of the sect they can’t make mature decisions for their lives, like resisting crystal meth.

6. Taken in by promises, gullible. They were easy prey to salespeople promising grand things.

One of the boys’ family portraits. The women wear ankle length dresses.

7. Longing for the idealized pieces of their past life they left behind in the sect. They still sang the old songs, they reminisced about the happy times in their large families. They knew only one source of happiness: big families. One boy remembered one happy time with his family together, tickling Dad. Yet family was also the source of their worst memories.

8. Feeling lost spiritually and existentially. They worried about being damned to literal hellfire, and they also worried about not having a literal father and mother to relate to on a daily basis. They had no faith to replace their lost faith, except faith in a future idealized family they would one day have.

9. Having to constantly tell themselves they were not going back. They had to remind themselves of the reasons why they left, and promise themselves they wouldn’t go back. Many of them went back into the sect several times before they could finally decide not to go back anymore. They rehearsed all the reasons they had left, repeating the reasons over and over to each other.

10. Banding together with those who left. They formed tight knit groups on the outside to support each other.

11. Traumatic memories. Those who left were plagued by unprocessed trauma waiting to be sorted out. They seemed to re-create their traumas, finding demanding habits to serve, and getting thrown out of their new homes, so they could once again experience being thrown out. They were stuck in a loop.

I felt sad after watching the documentary. I saw my parents caught up in, and reinforcing, the traumas of the sect I grew up in, shunning and withdrawing from family members who left. I still enjoy the old barbershop four part harmony acapella songs I grew up with in church, and long for an acapella group to sing those songs with. I joined church after church, believing the sad promises of community and faith they promised, as a facade for their nickels and noses agenda.