A friend sent me this. I asked his permissions to use it anonymously. He agreed. I made clear the church affiliation and edited one expletive. Without editorial comments, here it is...
I understand fundamentalists (not in the doctrinal sense, but the authoritarian--the ones that are about control rather than belief) the way I understand Daleks from Doctor Who. Daleks are alien mutants who drive around cybernetic battle-machines with a death ray, and the way they find fulfillment in life is by exterminating non-Daleks. If a Dalek doesn't kill you, it's because it needs your help killing another of its non-Dalek enemies, or else because it needs slave labor for a while; regardless, you'll be in front of the gun sooner or later.
It's not a perfect analogy, because you can tell a Dalek from a non-Dalek immediately by whether or not they're a seven-foot-tall pepper-pot with a manipulator arm and a ray gun. You need to spend a bit more time observing social networks to distinguish between authoritarian fundamentalists and those who aren't. But it's fairly easy; their beliefs aren't about doctrine or truth, they're about authority--this is one reason you can never pin an inerrantist down on what any piece of scripture actually says or means, but they'll defend to the death the notion that you're serving the devil by questioning whether or not it's perfectly true. True statements mean something everywhere but in the fundamentalist world, where their only function is to bind people deeper into the authority structure. "Affirm, don't understand" is the order of the day.
Something that's been coming up at work lately for some reason is the argument over whether to stay in a flawed faith tradition, or leave it. In my neck of the woods, that's Church of Christ (CofC), but I know there've been similar discussions about SBC and evangelicalism in general in my blog-circles. Everyone in my department agrees that if you don't believe any of it, there's no point in staying, except maybe social self-preservation if there isn't any community available for non-Christians. The dispute is over whether, if you believe the "fundamentals" (nobody can agree on what specific things are fundamental, which is a discussion I try to avoid, but they at least agree to the idea that some things are more fundamental than others--even if there's not one principle they all agree on), whether you should stay in that tradition to try and redeem it, or leave it to put God's gifts to use someplace where they will do qualitatively and quantitatively more good.
My feeling is, if you're on your own or in the company of another consenting adult, do what you want (which is an imprecise way of saying "It's none of my business"). If you have kids--now there's the rub. If you have kids, there's a chance it might come to be my business years down the line when they come over to someplace like Leaving Fundamentalism or SecWeb's support forum asking for help, being alone and scared and having nobody they trust to turn to when they need to get out of a theologically abusive situation.
I'm tired, so tired, of helping to counsel men who grew up in authoritarian, theologically mainstream (in America) churches, and trying to convince them that there's some point to living life with--and then without--a vengeful God staring over their shoulder. (I'm not the Bible or their church authorities, so nothing I say is "rationally grounded". That's not modernism, which admittedly has its own set of flaws; it's a sick perversion of modernism in which "reason" means "what The Authorities say".) I'm tired of helping to counsel women who display all the symptoms of having been raped as children without actually having been touched. I'm tired of helping to shoulder the fallout when teenagers leave the faith for their own survival and their parents kick them out of the house at fifteen or sixteen. (It's a lot easier now that I have a job that pays too much and I can actually give some material assistance, but the emotional fallout doesn't get any easier to deal with.) Some days I think the universe might be a better place if we all went extinct, and I spend too much time fantasizing about ways to blow up the world.
My stance on staying with a tradition is this. If the problem is that people are saying and doing stupid things, things that make your tradition look bad to people on the outside, congratulations--you're part of a group of stupid humans. You never get away from that, not ever, unless you're cleverer than I am and find a way to kill everyone that you can actually implement. On the other hand, if the problem is that the group is authoritarian and controlling, toxic to the lives of its membership, and a lot of the attrition rate of your kids is coming from suicide rather than their simply growing up and moving on, you can't belong to that group anymore and still call yourself a moral human being--just a coward who's afraid to contradict an authority that's horribly, desperately wrong, and for no better reason than that it tells you it's above you and you're blind or stupid enough to believe it and follow. And it's not an either-or thing, of course; this is all part of a spectrum. But having spoken with people who are glad they stayed in CofC after all their grief, and people whose deepest regret was that they should have left CofC decades ago before it destroyed their children, it comes down to a judgment call: how likely is it that by staying, you're damning your kids to repeat your mistakes or worse, wasting ten or twenty or forty years in the dark, serving the wrong causes, being afraid for their souls, bound up inside cybernetic combat armor screaming "Exterminate!", totally alone?
If you can save the church but lose your children, f*** the church. Let it burn. Let it fall back into darkness where it belongs. No organization, no matter whom or Whom it was founded by, is worth a sacrifice of innocents who have no choice in the matter. Or help it from a distance, if you must, and can spare the time and energy and resources; but don't let it touch your children.
Or create or join a peaceful separatist community. I like that option. I've liked and trusted everyone I've met who's come from that background. There are so many options that don't involve years of rationalizing sticking with the status quo. I'm not saying everyone who stays with the SBC or CofC is dishonest or evil, but I have yet to encounter one whom I'm convinced lives in the same world as I do.
Too often, kindness and indulgence toward the elderly who are rigid and deeply intolerant, but lonely and frightened of change leads to more elderly, ten and twenty and thirty and fifty years later, who are just as intolerant and just as frightened of precisely the same things changing, when the rest of the world has long since moved on. We'll never get anywhere if we don't put our foot down *somewhere*. I don't know a way to fix that, other than to say that it stops with me. No more. I'm done.
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