Now don’t get me wrong. I like fundies. Fundies are the people responsible for showing me how to follow Jesus, and for teaching me darned near everything I know about the Christian faith. Any Christian tendencies I display can be laid squarely at the feet of fundamentalist Christians.
I’d love to say I’ve outgrown it, but I doubt I will anytime soon.
With this as a foreword, let me set the scene. My church does not have a regular Sunday night service, so I ventured down to a local Bible church close to home. What followed was a display of demagoguery that was almost frightening in its non sequitur jumps of logic.
The subject for this evening was the evils of an institution that pays me, the infamous Godless Public Schools (hereafter known as GPS). According to the pulpiteer this evening, the GPS is a monolithic institution of social engineering that is destroying America by trashing the family unit and subdividing it by age grouping.
About five minutes in, I had gone into full “Seth and Amy” mode as the preacher decried the falling birthrate among Christians and comparing it to birthrates of Islamic families; noting that this was a harbinger of Muslim conquest. Really. REALLY? What about the little rugrats born to young hormonal kids of no religious affiliation at all? Are they merely cannon fodder doomed to fall to the Mohammedan hordes?
Even modern-day youth ministry came under fire as an accessory to the destruction of America’s families. Really. REALLY? What about those kids who WEREN’T raised in good Bible-believing homes? Instead of being decried as part of the problem, could these ministries not be part of the solution by building a “resistance” movement, if you will?
The usual rightwing boogeymen made their appearance as well in this diatribe: Global warming and the scientists that believe it, the global warming champion Al Gore, the mainstream media, and those ubiquitous gays and their “agenda”.
The bottom line: America is dead. Only a “Holy Ghost sent revival” can save the day. But what hope the minister held out in one breath, he took away with the next with a dismissive “but I don’t think it’s going to happen”.
Hoo boy. This is how the culture war, if it’s a legitimate battle anyway, will probably be lost. The warriors, instead of praising what light is there, will go around pissing on the candles and cursing the darkness as the sign of a lost cause.
Jesusfishfood 