Fundies, revivalists, and camp-meeting attendees still have this unfortunate tendency to brag about how terrible was the previous life they got saved from. You think that's a testimony? Well listen to this. It filters down into all evangelicals, where your "past" is referred to more artfully, but still with this competitive air. In the first weeks of my Jesus Freak days, Stew went on with great seriousness about how he had been involved with "white slavery" before he came to Jesus. Yeah. Hard rain's gonna fall, eh?
I keep hoping it will go away, but it clearly has some enduring appeal. Looking for completely unrelated information today, I ran across "Since coming to faith as a 16 year-old, heroin-shooting Jewish rock drummer..."
Reaching for every trump card, there, aren't ya, fella?
I think partly it's because so many fundies and evangelicals are born into families with serious alcohol/dru/abuse problems or have personally recovered from same. The experience of salvation is thus cloaked in the language of and acquires some of the bragging about hitting bottom (and NOT a bikini clad one) of aggressive AA members who are asserting their superior recovery status in the rooms. In other words, there's a peculiar reverse snobbery about shy, timid, law abiding good citizens looking up to former rapists and wife beaters who now beautifically claim to have been liberated from their former wicked selves. Noone wants to go to a talk about how an honor student found Christ. But how a bank robber heroin addict did, that gives a vicarious thrill to the church mice...
ReplyDeleteI had a pretty ordinary life, just a bit stuck and confused.
ReplyDeleteShould have qualified my statement: so many of the most vocal, public fundies and evangelicals....
ReplyDeleteI consider myself an evangelical but have to muzzle myself all day and say nothing in reaction to the appalling things I hear.. If I were to object, I would be fired. So I consider myself a stealth warrior in that I have to somehow feed my family and avoid offending people whose views and habits and outright hatred of God make me cringe. Hence my "retriever" ID--fondly hoping that if I am kind, hardworking, a team player, helpful, etc that it will be a better advertisement for my faith than my saying "burn in eternal flames!" Would be (when I hear two coworkers prattling about kids who are witches, for example). I'm rather hot-headed, so God probably chuckles seeing me having to zip my lip and be tolerant instead of an avenging angel.
I had a dear friend in high school whose Evangelical parents forbade her to have any more contact with me. Before the crisis, I used to hear her mother talk about someone who had sent her a gift of apples: she was scornful, complaining that he must think she was an idiot, not to realize the magical danger. I never knew whether she thought they were poisoned apples as in Snow White, or something to do with the Garden of Eden. Anyway, she turned out to be psychotic, and her husband, my friend's stepfather, was a pedophile. The whole experience was a barrier to my own faith for a long time. It was a shock to learn they were crazy, because they were incredibly interesting people, good company, and my first exposure to Christianity.
ReplyDeleteYour poor friend! I hope she escaped from the pedophile or killed him. At least she had you for a friend, that must have helped.
ReplyDeletethe most off putting thing about the faith for me in my youth was when (as a very pious 13 year old) I overheard our socialite AngloCatholic Knightsbridge rector in London making fun of my mother's manic behavior at a church fete, to the assembled tittering church ladies. I left the church and didn't go back til I was 22.
we were all raised cold roast Anglicans in the US and all over the world by parents who were tribal Christians. They could not understand it that all 3 of us kids were quite passionate about our faith, from tiniest kids on. I attribute it to having a saintly French Canadian nanny who was a devout Catholic, prayed with us every night, and tenderly mothered us until I was nearly 5. She was A dwarf because her drunken farmer father had thrown her down the stairs as a kid and she never grew thereafter. I cried harder when she died than when my real mother did. My mother was, not to put too fine a point on it, batshit crazy. A beautiful, witty, narcissistic woman with chronic, ever worsening manic depression that NEVER stayed under control for more than a few months from the time that I was 5 on. My dad (an exNavy officer, and financial exec) wd be away on int'l business trips for weeks, leaving us in her erratic care. We latched onto the Sunday School lessons about Jesus loving little children like hungry jackals. We were scared, neglected and hungry a lot of the time despite my father's career success, because he would not see that his darling bride hadn't the slightest interest in raising us. All 3 of us kids became very evangelical, and later on became quite doting homebody parents ourselves, in reaction.
She came out fine in the end, but it was her brother the stepfather was molesting, and things didn't end well for him: he died of AIDS quite young. She managed to separate herself from the craziness fairly early on and build a solid family, still within the faith.
ReplyDeleteTo this day, I'm uncomfortable with people who seem a little too deep into what I'd call "supernaturalism." I try to be open-minded (and/or obediently faithful) about things like miracles and the efficacy of prayer, but I'm suspicious of people who see supernatural intervention in every event, if they strike me as more whacked out than devout. There's a kind of glassy-eyed ecstasy that I distrust. So if someone tells me he used to be a white-slaving devil-worshiping Mexican cartel lord, but now every minute of every day is a trip to Disneyworld because he's got Jesus, I'm more likely to think he's a nut than a saint.
Which is not to say I can't be very moved by stories of people who genuinely hit rock bottom--in a less melodramatic fashion--and clawed their way out with God's help. I know I could not go on as I was.
PS, and I should have added, I'm awfully sorry for the hell your folks put you through, and I'm glad that God found a way to send in rays of light here and there, such as your nanny.
ReplyDeleteMike Warnke was a wonderful raconteur. He made his mark with the ex-satanist spiel, but I noticed that his later talks didn't mention that anymore--which was fine with me; I couldn't connect with that sort of history.
ReplyDeleteMy life while growing up, and that of most of the people I knew, was, while not boring, not dramatically disastrous. There were tragedies--accident, disease, some really bad choices--but mostly they were hanging on. Maybe there was some selection bias--I've known many more since.
Warnke was exposed as having made it all up. He's a good example of how evangelicals like that stuff.
ReplyDeleteI know. I'd wondered if dropping the satanism from his later work was a case of guilty conscience, but apparently he went hog wild about the same time with different kinds of claims, so I guess not.
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