As I have mentioned a time or two before, I used to be Christian. I wasn’t just Christian, I was a fundamentalist. I spoke in tongues (“praying in the spirit” we called it), I attended services 4-5 times a week and sometimes entire weekends were spent in services. I’ve helped paint the church, I’ve joined in food drives and done other “good works.” My family is littered with fundamentalists, and we even have several pentacostal preachers amongst us. All the preachers are men, of course, since women are not generally allowed to even speak to the congregation from the pulpit, even if are women speaking about the scriptures to an audience of all women. This, despite that church members are mostly made up of women.
I believed that the King James Version of the bible, while not completely without a few errors in translation, was the revealed Word of God. For a long while, I was a part of a sect that admitted that the original words of God were lost, but that the KJV, despite that it was not a direct translation but rather a version of a version or translation of a translation, was a good place to start and that we should learn Greek and Aramaic to get back as close to the original as we could. I did in fact learn some Greek and used a Greek/English interlineal bible (where both languages are included by alternate lines). I was taught that if there was an apparent inconsistency, then it had to be the result of either mistranslation or misunderstanding, because the original was made of words directly from God and written down by man at his direction.
Used to be… until many things happened, the biggest was seeing that, at least in my profession, the very worst abuses seem to be perpetrated by people professing to be Christian. I think Muslims are dealing with that same issue right now.
I thought we were better than non-Christians, because we held ourselves to a higher standard. I thought doing good works included being a “good steward” of the earth, and that God expected nothing less from us, and that fundamentalists, at least those that were ‘in fellowship’ with God (church-speak for doing what we believed God wanted), all tried to do the same. We were encouraged to help the less fortunate among us. Looking back, clearly the help was directed either to those we might ‘save’ or those among us who were struggling, and we always expected some form of repayment. Repayment might be a ‘recommitment to Jesus’ or ‘acceptance of salvation’ for the unbeliever. At the very least, we could expect God would reward us with ‘stars in our crown’ once we got to heaven.
I believe there are still lots of good people in Christian congregations, people who try to do good things and who don’t cheat or otherwise abuse others. It does seem like there are an awful lot of batterers in church, both the kind that beat their wives and the kind that beat their children, but I’m sure that isn’t the majority. I thought doing good things was not only an individual policy, but one supported by the institutions. That isn’t the case, at least among some.
The National Association of Evangelicals, an organization of literally millions of Christians, (whose motto is “cooperation without compromise”) has had some problems recently, headlined by their top guy, Ted Haggert, who resigned in disgrace. You’ll remember him, he condemned homosexuals from one side of his mouth while he used the other side for other purposes (guess he had a big mouth). I can’t resist including a blog post [1] I saw on that topic. They nominated another guy, Joel Hunter of Florida. Rev. Hunter wanted the organization to include reducing poverty and fighting global warming to their platform. The evangelicals would have none of that, saying that they were afraid of being called liberals, so Hunter was not permitted to lead the organization. The Colbert Report had a great story, [2] saying that “nothing is more Chrisitan than refusing to do good works so you won’t be called names.”
It was really all about appearance after all.
Print this post [3]
[4]