Originally published at: How white evangelical churches became QAnon hotbeds | Boing Boing
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Just as water seeks its own level, conspiracism will ooze into any congregation – religious or otherwise – of entitled rubes. There are few more fecund fields for finding them in America than Xtianist churches.
It is terrible to see families like that of the former preacher in the video being torn apart by this nonsense.
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These people haven’t read, or at least understood, the Bible anyway.
A quick challenge is to see if they can list the ten commandments. It’s a trick question BTW, because there are two different sets in the Bible.
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When you make a baseless belief a requirement for in-group participation then that in-group will be subject to any kind of baseless belief.
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James Dobson and Focus on the Family deserve a ton of, um credit, I guess(?) for their role in radicalizing the evangelical right. When I was a kid their propaganda would be handed out alongside the Sunday program. Maybe it’s a regional thing and Falwell was bigger elsewhere, but where I was from it was FOTF all the way. They were incredibly active and organized and were responsible for a lot of product and media bans, calling campaigns and violent conflicts at abortion service providers.
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And eight different interpretations of what the commandments are
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Yeah, I know somehow my mom used to get some of their stuff in the mail - maybe from a friend? Shit I get some sometimes. Neither of us were ever Evangelicals. They are Lutheran, for crying out loud.
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Same here. One of my earliest memories of a church-adjacent function that wasn’t actually church was a screening in our community (sponsored by our church, I’m sure) of a series of “Child Training Seminars” (i.e., “how to beat your children for the tiniest of perceived slights and make them believe that G-d loved them because beatings were godly”) sessions on 16mm reels that Dobson & Focus on the Family presented and produced. Can’t recall, but I think it was 2 hours per night across 2 or 3 nights? I was 4 or 5 ish at the time and had already been “trained” to sit quietly and pay attention (no coloring or toys or other childish diversions) in church, and because we were so poor that we couldn’t afford a babysitter I got to attend all of those “seminars” along with my elder humans.
Thank FSM there were donut holes from Dunkin Donuts as an intermission snack, or I would have been pushed beyond my limits of sitting quietly and not being a real kid by those series of nights. This kind of thing may help explain why I was an ‘old soul’ by the time I was 5. le sigh…
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Members of one cult willing to embrace an allied cult? Not so surprising. Especially since Q was assembled out of bits and pieces of many years of white evangelical nonsense - the Satanic Panic, various anti-government conspiracies, etc. It was tailor-made to appeal to them.
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Yeah, that’s all painfully familiar. Except, wait…
You had donuts!?! The closest I got was the monthly church basement potluck when the one awesome mom would bring cherry cheesecake. That’s where I learned my potluck secret: don’t take the first slice and only take one reasonable slice, but also scrape up all of the other partial slices everyone before you left behind. I’d estimate I netted a full 50% additional cheesecake scraps that way.
Also, did you see this one:
It’s a classic of fundie bullshit, for sure.
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It is terrible to see families like that of the former preacher in the video being torn apart by this nonsense.
It’s right there in their bible printed in red, they chose to raise their kids indoctrinated into the religion that states:
I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household. (Mat 10:34-36)
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verse 14.
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They are just being Proverbs 30 xtians
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I was very fortunate that, while my family was nominally Baptist, it most definitely wasn’t Southern Baptist, and my folks weren’t especially religious. The church camp that I went to as a kid spent very little time with indoctrination, and I had a great time there. At least in those days, they were less about sermons and more about activities. I read about what some kids go through being raised in creepy/extremist churches and think to myself, “WTAF?!”
I discovered that the camp closed in 2017, and was bought by a conservancy, which has cleared out the buildings and invasive plants. I’m exceedingly glad it didn’t fall into a developer’s hands, since it was on some prime lakefront property.
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I can remember a friend’s Mum creating a huge scandal in our town by very loudly and very publicly upbraiding the minister of her church when he tried to introduce some of that stuff.
She explained very forcefully exactly how it deviated from what she saw as Christianity and enough of the congregation agreed with her that eventually the minister was asked to find another church.
I have no memory of what god thought.
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Behold the Fifteen (crash!)
Ten Commandments!
/melbrooks
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There are lots of kinds of “suffering” and some are beneficial, some are self-inflicted, etc.
I can sympathize with the traditional churches like the Anglicans, Lutherans, etc. and moderate Catholics [1]. To the extent that Quaziness is causing a conscience conflict among others right-wing fundies, it’s all good. To the extent it’s driving other Xtians to stand up and oppose the whacko monopoly on public perception, I wish them luck-- they’ll need lots of it.
As for the QOP, though, well, they’ve declared me and mine enemies and sworn to kill or enslave us whether now or later. Any sympathy for them is going to have to wait until after cleaning up the harm they’ve done. Could take a while.
[1] Opus Dei and the like are just as bad and also fools. They should know better that the best they can hope for from their “allies” is to be later up against the wall.
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Mercifully no. We had a different curriculum for why rock music (not just rock, anything with electric guitars, drums, backbeats, syncopation, where rhythm or harmony were more pronounced then the melody… so basically everything other than pre-1900 classical, and piano/organ/orchestral or choral traditional sacred stuff) was bad… books, lectures, etc… Too many people would have giggled at that video for it to get shown.
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To my recollection, no one in “leadership” ever cares what G-d might think. Odd dissonance there, but the offering plates got filled regardless.
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