It’s Hard to Watch Good People Struggle With Religion
The best people prop up the worst believers
The best people prop up the worst believers
Everyone has their own definition of what it means to be a real Christian. Usually, people think of real Christians as the ones who agree with them, though this doesn’t solve anything.
When I wrote Dragged Into the Light, a book about Christians who believe the world is full of monsters, including and especially Reptilians in the halls of power, it was better shorthand to call them a cult than it was to call them a sect.
Still, I got more than a few notes from Christians who were a little offended to be lumped in with fringe, “not real Christian,” beliefs.
I get that, and although I knew it was a possibility as I was writing, I also wanted to at least start to have this conversation.
“Christian” has been beaten into meaningless, and as I see the frothing approach to divinity that seems to have taken hold, I wonder why good, honest people struggle so desperately to reimagine Christianity as a force for good.
Acting in Bad Faith
For me, real Christians don’t let their faith prevent them from being good. As more people use their very specific take on the Bible to sow discord in the culture and give their dogma the force of law, these are the believers I struggle most to understand.
They are committed to finding morality in God and the Bible even as the facade of an all-knowing, all-loving creator dissolves into nonsense. With so much anger and hate among the vocally Christian, nearly all of it attributed to God and the Bible, this minority group’s faith is baffling.
I know that they will say, “That’s how faith works,” but I also know it is a deeply unsatisfying answer as ethical people come to realize that going to church on Sunday is counterproductive at best.
Come to Think of It, Maybe We Are Living in the New Babylon
Our religious myths will define us whether we like it or notmedium.com
In my book about internet prophet Sherry Shriner’s conservative Christian sect, I followed the struggles of people who had lost faith in the prophet but not in the message. Faced with evidence that Sherry was a liar and con artist, it was easier for them to believe that she had been replaced by a clone than that their core beliefs in her teaching had been misplaced.
Yes, I said, “clone” but don’t let that distract you.
It was frustrating to watch them try and piece together a new prophet-less religion, given how much they had relied on Sherry for truth and insight. But the idea that it was all a lie, that the president wasn’t really a Reptilian, or that Lucifer didn’t have them personally marked for death, had become part of her followers’ self-image.
When people suggest that this is because they were crazy, I always think about people I consider real Christians.
For the best, most moral Christians, religion is an integral part of their self-image. In a world where “Christianity” has an increasingly violent, intolerant connotation, they are forced to spend a phenomenal amount of intellectual energy trying to justify being good while also being Christian.
Keeping Your Religion, a Thread
I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that most Christians believe that most other Christians have got it at least a little wrong.
The trouble is, there’s a built-in factionalism that keeps splintering, an ignored crack spidering across a bay window. QAnon is at least part of the latest iteration as conservative Christians continue to lose faith in the “anointed” leadership and authority in general.
A Bagel Manifesto
Stories about coming to terms with belief, culture, and the profound sense of loss that no one really cares about bagels anymore.bit.ly
Evangelical ministers especially are starting to feel the pinch and have begun preaching against conspiracy theories, but I honestly feel like they’ve made their bed and should start making peace with having to lay in it.
If you make your living claiming that the establishment is corrupt, you can’t act surprised when your own claimed authority is undermined by someone saying the same thing. Even if it is about Reptilian overlords. Bible-beaters like that are just boring, but real Christians are provocative.
The thread is worth reading, but the professor didn’t bury the lede. It’s a strange thing, to prop up fading hope that there are moral answers to be found by just looking harder at the Bible.
I used to be part of a prison book group (I was a volunteer, not a convict). There was a tacit agreement among us non-believers not to push back too hard against the notion of God acting in the inmates’ lives.
It feels patronizing to say, and maybe it was patronizing, but I think we all felt like hope was probably a difficult thing to come by among the incarcerated. We didn’t lie about our own beliefs, but no one would have profited from kicking others’ down.
If the beliefs are perfect, but the practice is flawed, it takes a lot of extra effort to live out your beliefs.
Rev. McGowen’s concern seems to be people running out of gas when it comes to religious practice. For instance, I know there are many churches that have taken a hit over mask requirements.
There is nothing positive or interesting to say about people who won’t go to church if they have to wear a mask. Maybe it’s a Catholic thing to notice, but Christ is alleged to have endured greater suffering than that for his followers.
But for the people who continue to go, it must be weird to see how many people they know don’t believe in church enough to throw on a mask. Some of these people donate a full tenth of their salary, but masking up is too much to ask. How much must that chip away at your credibility as a serious believer?
Belief Takes a Lot of Effort
McGowen’s thread seems to be about the people who want to stay faithful as they watch hate creep into their congregations. The central question troubling them isn’t so much the existence of God, but rather the spiritual utility of church. That’s a slippery slope, though.
If church is where you learned about God and church is wrong (mistaken, bad, or immoral), the thought that the problem isn’t the system but rather the belief itself isn’t too far behind. If the beliefs are perfect, but the practice is flawed, it takes a lot of extra effort to live out your beliefs.
What Comes After the Purity Culture Reckoning
I wish I still had my copies of the popular sexuality and dating books from my youth so I could see which quotes I…www.christianitytoday.com
Recently, I read a compelling and terrifying Christianity Today article from Rachel Joy Welcher called What Comes After the Purity Culture Reckoning, and I’m still having trouble processing it. Welcher is an Evangelical author who has written a book on the matter.
You should read the article, but the shortest version is that she recognizes how much damage religious sexual culture does to the wellbeing of their teenage children and would like to find a way to mitigate it using the Bible.
There may be a longer, more coherent solution in her book, but in summary, she argues that people who want to keep religion as an integral part of their sexual lives have to do more digging through the Bible (and their hearts) to find better answers to why fornication is wrong but married conception sex is holy.
A Serious Problem, a Terrifying Alternative
Welcher’s main struggle is there are no good books that explain how to be a Christian sexual being that people can hand to their children. She’s repelled by the idea that so many books are aimed at women and can be boiled down to, “try not to flaunt it and do your best to resist men’s advances.”
It isn’t only the notion of putting the burden on young women that’s a problem from her view, but the entire project of claiming immutable truths about teenage sexuality.
“In everything we do, say, and promote, we must take time to step back and ask ourselves, ‘Is this really of Christ?’” she writes. “It is exhausting but holy work.”
“Exhausting” is the key term, and the word I turned over and over in my head as I read.
There May Not Be Such a Thing as a Sane Superstition
Very little separates reptilian overlords from mainstream religionbytonyrusso.medium.com
Dealing with the ethics of sex is already difficult. Struggling to put it in terms that a young person can comprehend is even more complex and fraught. Adding the extra layer of citing Biblical text borders on the impossible.
Real Christians seem to know or at least sense this, but they keep trying. I can’t for the life of me imagine why.
Setting aside the real danger of increasing a kid’s sexual anxiety and need to fit in, there’s an abdication of responsibility and authority. It’s like saying, “Go ask your father” or, maybe literally saying, “Go ask The Father.”
This is where real Christians lose me, the need to appeal to authority for their own praiseworthy choices. I don’t have a guess how they look at the moral quagmire we navigate every day and make sense of it in terms of God’s will. Or maybe it’s best to say I don’t get why they try, why every moral action needs divine justification.
It’s not just that being good is hard enough. It’s that by accepting and amplifying the idea that God does inspire from the Bible, it justifies the evil as well as the good, and saying that bad actors aren’t “real Christians,” doesn’t solve anything.
Tony Russo is a journalist and author of “Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult.” Subscribe to his Bagel Manifesto here.