I've noticed a few things post election:
Evangelicals aren't posting constantly about how we should all "pray for the President" anymore.
Also, they have suddenly stopped claiming that "leaders are appointed by God and deserve our respect."
Funny how God only appoints and demands respect for Republicans.
Funny how they only scream about praying for the President when it is a Republican.
Also worth mentioning, none of the stay at home, Evangelical moms are posting incessantly about #savethechildren anymore.
Guess it wasn't about saving the children after all --- it was just about virtue signaling before an election.
Any reason why an evangelical or traditionalist should remain in the Episcopal Church and not leave and go to the ACNA or other group?
“Ireland is no longer a Catholic country. We are now a pluralist country with Catholic laws that we are gradually dismantling. The most important next step is removing the anachronistic control that the Catholic Church has over the education of our children*,”* it said in a statement.
Thinking about the maternal line tonight. My mom had a very complicated relationship with her late mother. My mom’s side of the family is from Irish stock, but not Catholic. Digging through the genealogy on her side, combined with the fact that all the women on that side have incredibly strong intuition, we believe they were practitioners of the old ways. My grandmother had the misfortune of living in Texas in the 1950’s. She wanted to be a teacher, but was pressured to marry a Southern Baptist, pop out a bunch of babies, and be a good little oilfield wife. She was not a good mother to my mom and her siblings. She was especially hard on my mom, no doubt because she saw herself in my mom-who has always been a spitfire, questioned the patriarchal structure of the church, and pursued her goals. I’m still dealing with generational trauma and constantly checking myself to not inflict damage from learned behaviors on my daughter, and honestly it makes me fucking furious-because while my grandmother had her fair share of issues, I have to wonder how many of them could have been avoided had she just been allowed to be, and raised her children accordingly. For what it’s worth, my mom refused to raise me in the Southern Baptist church, and we’re raising our children outside of religion.
Are any of you familiar with Converge (formerly Baptist General Conference and Converge Worldwide)? Were any of you part of a church affiliated with this Baptist denomination, or did you just visit a church affiliated with it but weren't a member of it or of Converge?
What were your experiences if that is the case, and would any of you say that the church(es) you went to that's part of Converge or that Converge itself a cult or is cult-like?
I visited one church that's affiliated with Converge and I would say it is a cult or is cult-like. I noticed many Christians there behaved artificially especially with how they talk about their faith. The church and its members are socially conservative and oppose women's rights and LGBTQ+ rights, among other civil and human rights. They also believe the Bible is "infallible" and "inerrant" and believe that all humans are sinners who deserve God's wrath and need Jesus as their savior. I know a few people who go there and have noticed how fake they are in their behaviors and how prejudiced they are especially towards former Christians like myself and towards non-Christians, liberal Christians, independent and educated women, LGBTQ+ people who affirmed their sexualities and genders, and anyone who accepts that evolution is true and that there's evidence to support it.
That church is likely leaning more towards young earth creationism but it is a creationist church. I also noticed that the services felt more like a concert with a motivational speaker than an actual worship service, but all the churches I visited seemed like it. All the churches I went to in my life had meaningless prayers, rituals, sermons, homilies, and/or songs. I found Protestant Sunday services and Catholic Mass to be meaningless and boring. I was a Catholic before 2016 and a nondenominational Christian between 2019 and 2021 (I never considered myself an evangelical Protestant of any denomination or no denomination), but I was not religious between 2016 and 2019 and I'm no longer religious, and in fact I'm an agnostic atheist now.
I feel like I'm living in a Kurt Vonnegut novel where everything gets turned around and starts to make NO SENSE. How did this happen?? The bastions of 'family values' now see Trump as some kind of prophet or even saint while dismissing the current seemingly-devout president as being in league with Satan?
I read this blog post this week: https://theswordandthesandwich.substack.com/p/ministry-of-violence and it stirred up some shit for me.
I grew up surrounded by the culture of Dr. James Dobson. My parents knew people who loved the Pearls' books. We were told very explicitly that people who didn't hit their children were poorer parents than those who did. We were told that cultivating obedience to authority was the ultimate goal of parenting. We were told that people outside of our family always said that we were so well behaved, but "if only they could see how you act at home."
I think the thing that bothers me most is that my parents still think they did spanking "right." They think that because they hugged us afterwards and told us that they loved us and that's why they hit us then that made it all okay. But, here's the thing, I grew up to become a psychotherapist who works with adolescents. I learned a lot about attachment and how it works. Most importantly, I learned that when a person comes to expect pain and comforting from the same attachment figure, that person is more likely to develop a disorganized attachment style, which is the attachment style most highly correlated with significant emotional disruption and difficulty in funcitoning later in life.
They thought that they were doing God's will, but they were just perpetuating intergenerational transmission of trauma and disorganized attachment. It's just so fucking sad and it makes me so fucking angry.
Anybody else have similar experiences with this?
"I know of at least one large church in eastern Washington State, where I grew up, that has split over the refusal of some of its members to wear masks."
I wonder what church that was? Spokane or more rural?
The linked article is an interesting and sensitively-written piece. How is your evangelical church handling our great social+political Divide these days?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/evangelical-trump-christians-politics/620469/
Compared with other ardently evangelical, major Abrahamic sects I've studied over the last half century both directly and indirectly, modern day Adventism is clearly among those that seem to have achieved the most "respectability" among those looking on from outside.
Which would be remarkable to me considering the early days with EGW being little different from what is regularly seen in, for example, the Pentecostal and Southern Baptist... IF I didn't know a bit (but only a bit) about the efforts of several early and mid-20th-century SDA leaders' efforts to clean up the church's (public) act.
BUT... a Cultic Pyramid is still what it is, and one need only understand the dynamics of such things from conceptually informed, direct observation of what goes on at the middle and upper levels to see how the "good looking" cults get away with what they do and continue to grow. (Which is something I have been able to do in investigating several other Abrahamic sects.)
In my experience around the Adventist Church since 2003, it's as plain as the nose on my face that Groupthink, Social Proof, Implicit Social Contract & Unquestioning Acceptance of Authority are no less conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, imprinted, socialized, habituated, programmed and normalized into a neural network of cognition in the Adventist's brain than is the case with any Hasidic Jew, "holy roller" charismatic Pentecostal, theocratic Southern Baptist, militant Jesuit Catholic, Smithian/Youngian Mormon, Watchtower Society Jehovah's Witness, Shi-ite Islamic, or Russian Orthodox Christian.
But compared to a
... keep reading on reddit ➡I acknowledge God and that will not change. I went to a cult called the International Churches of Christ or ICOC for short. In there I was mentally and emotionally ruined and I did manipulation tactics to them. For a while I was angry at myself and God that I stayed there for so long. I did some praying and he answered so I can have the tools and knowledge to recognize places like that and be one guard if one becomes like that and to help others deal with their trauma in a Christ centered way. I have found so many leave cults and never deal with the fallout and just leave God when it is the cult that did the damage.
These cults twist Gods word and at their core are about gaining political power through social change in their direction, essentially it is about ego. To them it is about gaining as much influence as possible and that is why many are becoming what I call Evangelical Lite. This is where they appeal to younger audiences by having modern Jesus music, lights and hype messages to make it fun and interesting. Now there are normal churches that do this but just to keep with the times so they get a pass. The evangelical cults however do it merely to gain more members thus increasing their power and influence in society. They will love bomb you and say you are amazing and then when you are hooked they will do a 180 and you learn to go along with it. They will guilt you, shame you and see you as inferior if you question them or disagree even slightly.
Since leaving I have become closer with God. Not only that but I see him as far more multidimensional and having complex simplicity than I ever have before. It would be the equivalent of looking at an orange with my eyes and at the same time smelling and tasting it and experiencing its flavor without actually eating it. I have had more compassion, tolerance and understanding for others. I am seeing people how Jesus sees them and I have developed an exceedingly incredible amount of hope and love towards them. I am starting to see people for who they are within. Even where I am I acknowledge evolution and am more liberal than half of the church but not seen as a stranger. I am there for the other liberals, the science minds and the critical thinkers who may feel out of place and do not know how to share it with others too.
