I have lived a life strongly influenced by religion. My parent’s were members of a Lutheran church in a small town in the panhandle of Nebraska because it was the religion my mom’s immigrant grandparents brought with them from Germany. We didn’t attend often but my mom made sure we went to Sunday School on occasion and always to Vacation Bible School in the summer. In my teens I was searching for a way to be a good person and came upon a group of students led by a Southern Baptist group of adults claiming to be interdenominational. Evangelicals in the late 70’s were very good at sales strategies and claiming to be interdenominational or nondenominational was one of them. If I would have been invited to a Baptist bonfire I wouldn’t have gone. It’s that simple. I did go and there heard the message that most of Christianity in modern America had turned religion into something that we were born into rather than something vital that we chose to live our live from. I was taught that in order to be a true Christian I would need to pray a prayer and ask Jesus into my heart. I didn’t buy the product that night but by the end of the year, I was eager to understand exactly what these people had that I did not.

Late in the spring a leader in the group challenged the students gathered to go to a seminar in Dallas in the coming summer. When this leader explained the seminar to my mom he said that the teacher explained the Bible in everyday language for people so that they could grow in the faith. That August I boarded a church van with the Baptist youth going from the church and one other non Baptist from the group. I had never done anything socially with kids like they were. At the time I smoked and partied a bit with a group of my own friends from the restaurant I worked at. I never imagined that when I left that day I would return as a completely different person.

The seminar was a week long with evening talks Monday through Thursday and then all day Friday and Saturday. The speaker focused on teaching our world’s problems were the result of basic conflicts within us that came as we grew up. Using his expertise from studying the Bible, he taught like he a trusted older brother who wanted his siblings to know the beautiful life that God had for them and that all they needed to do was to lean in and participate in it. I was drawn into it like a moth to a porch light in summer. He taught things from the Bible that were genuinely relevant to me at 16.

• self esteem as God’s beloved child
• assurance that God is real and understanding how to have a secure belonging to him.
• how to have healthy relationships with parents, friends, future romantic partners
• how to possess genuine goodness and the importance of a clear conscience
• how to understand the role of suffering for personal growth and maturity
• how to commit to Bible study and scripture meditation

Like a dry sponge each word was like a drip of pure water that as it fell on me, I soaked it up slowly and with deep thought. With the days free to play in our Baptist host family’s pool, my days were also spent getting to know my new friends. I had never been exposed to kids that had grown up in religious homes like they had. I remember the distinct feeling that finally I had found the way to become a genuinely good person. I returned from that week in Dallas a changed person and as a result devoted my life to the Evangelical faith and its understanding of life. I stayed faithful to that life for twenty eight years. So faithful that there is absolutely no way to live my life now without reference the realities that shaped me for those years. I still live by default by many of the principles and practices I acquired as a result of my religious faith during that time. What I believe happened to me was this. I outgrew the Evangelical paradigm and once you do that, you are incapable of ever returning to it.

Let me give you just one example of how impossible it is to put the genie back into the bottle. One practice of Evangelicals is that of evangelism. It is where those in the faith present in as concise of a version as they can, the plan they believe is God’s plan for eternal life in heaven or salvation. In order to do this, they get very creative and attach their presentation to another event that is meaningful to the people they are trying to reach. Let me share an example.

When I was living in Minnesota several years later, I responded to a request for volunteers to teach reading to refugees in the Twin Cities. One Saturday my husband and I went down to Minneapolis for what they called literacy training. As the first training ended, I told him that we needed to leave because this was not in fact, literacy training at all, but what I believed to be an unethical way to require vulnerable people from war torn countries to adopt the Evangelical gospel. The entirety of the training was designed to use opportunities under the guise of teaching someone to read English, to share how Jesus was the one way, one truth and one life to these people. It was also to subversively tell traumatized people that they were in this situation because their Muslim God wasn’t the real one. As a professional trained in reading and literacy instruction, I was honestly livid when we left. Seriously, once you see this, you cannot unsee it.

As we drove home both my husband and I experienced the grief of having participated in many campaigns to win souls that were just like this. We basically repented on the spot. We called it what it was, acknowledge how manipulative and deceitful it was and vowed never to be a part of anything like that again. It was just one more lesson in a long line of them that made me realize for most people, religion is a club and not a place for transformation like I had always thought it was. This is why we are equally opposed to the idea that we are a Christian Nation as they define it. We are living in an age where Evangelical Christian Nationalism threatens to completely take over the country in a way that has little or nothing to do with the Jesus they claim to know. You cannot make others believe something. You cannot force religion on anyone anymore than you can force someone to learn something. If you are committed to doing that, you will lose both spiritual and intellectual sight like the elderly with serious cataracts. You will become the very godless people you are trying to control.

Christian Nationalism in my opinion is the ultimate con game that has come into play because the average person is terrified of the work it takes to see oneself fully and change. It is much easier to embrace strategies and formulas to convince others of your righteousness than it is to see your pride, arrogance and selfishness. Religion is meant to be a portal to this work not a way to avoid it. I know people with deep faith who are practicing Muslims, Hindus, Jewish and Buddhist as well as full on atheists who are mature, moral and kind other centered people. If we are real and honest, we all know that eternal life is actually a hope and not a certainty. The cheap rah rah of today’s Evangelical genuinely won’t provide what it takes to get through the genuine fires of life, it just will not. Christian Nationalism is the most dangerous detour Evangelicals could ever have taken or will take.

I say this believing that it is nothing but pharisaical. In the same way the Pharisees would wear their scriptures on their heads and boast of their morality, the plethora of Christians boasting in Christian Nationalism principles while using Grindr when they attend a Turning Point Convention or CPAC is the epitome of crazy. I know that there are plenty of Evangelicals doing good things and many doing some self discovery and experiencing personal growth. BUT there are way more just hyped up and hyper focused on the problems in our culture as the fault of the other instead of looking in the mirror. I drive by a Southern Baptist Mega Church almost daily and see their sermon topics on the marquee. The day I see “Southern Baptist Sexual Abuse Crisis Response, Sunday at 9 and 11” will be the day I will swallow hard and visit. Right now as this SBC sexual abuse scandal sits in the shadows, I will invest my time elsewhere.

In summary, if religion isn’t personal and transformative, it is seriously just noise. And if religion is designed to manipulate and control others, it’s not of the divine in any shape or form.

End of Rant… for today 🙂 and please…said with love as much as I know how to say it.