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For those who are recent readers I offer this reprint from late last year. It still sums up how I feel:

Been talking to a kid who can’t escape the scary Jesus of his childhood. It was obvious to me that the terrible Jesus, the Jesus of the Revelation, owned John body and soul. John had run from scary Jesus his whole life, and never realized he ran right into His suffocating arms. I have felt those same arms, and having purchased my freedom at the cost of respect and professional reputation, I am adamant to stay free.

All this pathology related to Jesus probably seems odd to those outside our context. We live in the Bible Belt. It is a region dominated by the specter of Jesus. His shadow stretches across our southern states and into our institutions: church, school, civic organizations, even factories and business offices. Buttons, plaques, bumper stickers, auto decals, calendars, tee shirts, and business names intone the name of the odd Galilean whose memory, like a Protestant bogey man, is still used by denizens of the Bible Belt to frighten children into obedience and women into submission.

In a two square mile area around my home are more than a dozen churches: Nazarene, Independent Fundamentalist Baptist, Lutheran, Anglican, Charismatic, Pentecostal Holiness, and Presbyterian. Extend the boundary to seven miles and there are nearly 100 churches, three Christian bookstores, a half dozen independent ministries, and thousands of suburban crackers who drive SUV’s, attend megachurches, call on the name of Jesus, and take their kids to soccer. It is hell in the middle of Oklahoma.

Common sense should lead us to safer states. We heretics have our own list of safe havens, oases of sanity where the happy pagans outnumber the Ned Flanders clones and their bitter, driven wives. Places like Seattle, Portland, Santa Fe, Pasadena, San Diego, and Denver are transformed in our sanctified imaginations into secular sanctuaries, a photographic negative of the biblical sanctum sanctorum, cities where the long arms of Jesus cannot encircle us in the guise of His servants. It is a myth, of course, but it comforts us in the moments when we allow ourselves to daydream about leaving Oklahoma.

Our grandparents left this place once. They moved to California in the 1930’s to escape the Dust Bowl. They took their apocalyptic religion with them. Enclaves still exist in California: Bakersfield and Covina are full of our fundamentalist relatives. Would that they had stayed. They moved back en masse immediately before and after the War, and it took them less than fifty years to make Oklahoma a dust bowl again.

Comments

[Resident Atheist]

Yikes. Scary, but true.

Although my experiences with fundy family members certainly won't hold a candle to yours, dealing with my grandmother these past few months has been particularly trying. She's taken my "coming out" (I'm not gay, but atheism is almost as bad) very poorly, and is convinced that I'm on the road to hell and gets weepy every time she sees me. As she firmly believes that two of her sons (my uncles) are burning in everlasting torment as we speak, I have little hope of changing her mind about this, or even of having her understand my position.

I'm all in favor of reclassifying fundamentalist faith as a communicable mental illness. I've seen it destroy too many good people to pretend there are any circumstances that could justify its existence.

The day I realized that I couldn't imagine a more dismal dreary hell than the fundamentalist heaven was the day I knew my days as a fundy were over. Who knew that I would spend years looking for some way to be saved from the message of salvation? Life's funny that way.

Thanks, Greg.

[Tedd]

Greg,

I have been reading your posts for a while and agree with most of what you say. I am confused about one thing though. Do you dislike the church in principle or do you just dislike what the church has come to stand for in the inerrent-Bible belt? If you dislike the church in princple, how ought Christians to live together? If you dislike what consumerism and fundamentalism have done to the church, what (if any) model of church do you think would bring us out of this mess?

Thanks for your site, I really enjoy it.

Tedd

[Scott]

(laughing as I type)

Thanks Tedd, I mean that, and welcome to the blog.

Just get ready 'cause to Greg the church is a dinosaur. It's a dead cow and we need to bury it.

[Dean]

Greg wrote: "Been talking to a kid who can’t escape the scary Jesus of his childhood. It was obvious to me that the terrible Jesus, the Jesus of the Revelation, owned John body and soul. John had run from scary Jesus his whole life, and never realized he ran right into His suffocating arms. I have felt those same arms, and having purchased my freedom at the cost of respect and professional reputation, I am adamant to stay free."

The scary Jesus of my childhood led me to Buddhism. Thanks for expressing it so well.

[Tim]

This post troubles me because it feels like I could have written it. The "secular sanctuaries where the long arms of Jesus cannot encircle us." I have idealized other places, Asheville, Austin, Dallas. A friend of mine purposefully, for this very reason, fled Shawnee for Norman and says she has found significant respite from it.

Though I feel funny saying this in a public forum, I applaud the bravery of those who have left (geographically and ideologically). I am gald I count many of you friends. Were it so that I had the courage. A different kind, perhaps.