Someone should have warned you about this.
Evangelicals stopped listening to their prophets a long time ago. We should have stopped trying to make them.
Everything that’s been happening over the last month (dear God, it’s only been a month) with the advent of the Musk administration and Tronald Dump’s ascendance to a figurehead position in the executive branch makes perfect sense to those of us who were raised in 1990s fundamentalist Evangelical churches and its bizarro-world culture.
The gaslighting, the passive-aggressive toxicity and abuse, the [likely unlawful, certainly inhumane] elimination of livelihoods without compunction or due process, having someone else come in and do the dirty work? We church kids, especially those of us who are victims and survivors of spiritual abuse, have seen these antics before.
If there was ever a mission for the American church, it stopped being the humble, Spirit-breathed ambassadors of a victorious, risen Christ a long time ago. This is not to say that there aren’t sincere, devout believers who admirably live their lives striving toward a standard of Christian love and expressions of gospel, because there are.
I am saying that the body and the institution, despite any rhetoric to the contrary, are one and the same, and service to the institution is what matters. It’s how American Christianity has fallen, how the Republican Party has similarly fallen, and how the West, too, will fall without addressing these uncomfortable realities head-on.
American Christian culture is a matrix of systems of control. So, too, is American (and, increasingly, global) conservatism.
I know this because I was raised in it. The story of my family in America is a story of how deep the rot goes.
My paternal great-grandparents emigrated from Finland and were lay leaders in the Apostolic Lutheran church movement, steeped in the Laestadian revivals in Scandinavia. It was a charismatic movement, a forerunner to American charismatic movements culminating in neo-Pentecostalism around 1901.
It was also a cult. Laestadians — there are still a few around today — believe they are the exclusive church on earth (even within that movement, there are fights over who is really saved, which should tell you something) and are highly ascetic. My great-grandparents had 16 children — Apostolic Lutherans are the OG quiverfull movement — and were very strict, if not outright abusive. Nearly all of those children abandoned their parents’ faith when they entered adulthood, including my grandfather.1
In the place of that religious abuse: food addiction, alcoholism and substance abuse, deep emotional and psychological damage. Nature abhors a vacuum.
This kind of exclusivist, fundamentalist religious movement wasn’t unfamiliar to America at all: holiness movements, typically found in Wesleyan/Methodist congregations, insisted on cultural and social sanctification: no dancing, no going to the movie theater, no drinking, no smoking. For the ladies: long dresses, no make-up, no jewelry, no short hair.
If you were wearing lipstick at the movie house and Jesus came back, you weren’t going. If you died tonight, do you know where you’d spend eternity? These may appear to be different lines of thinking, but they’re saying the same thing: be like us, or be damned.
He who the son sets free is free indeed. She who joins the church better keep her mouth shut and not show her ankles.
Eternal salvation/damnation is a means toward control. Dress and conduct are forms of control. Compulsory tithing and giving are forms of control. Church attendance anytime the doors are open? Control. Alignment to doctrinal purity? Control. Small groups? Control.
The only people who don’t see it are those who haven’t been destroyed by it.
Weaponizing government isn’t anything new to these people; the tactics were refined and perfected by the church. When I was a credentialed minister, at the end of the year, the denomination would send a renewal form. It was really an interview form for the recipient to reapply for his/her job. There were a series of yes/no questions, each of which sought an affirmation of the denomination’s [problematic] doctrinal commitments, including speaking in tongues as primary evidence of Spirit baptism and a pre-tribulation, pre-millennial rapture of the church.
Answer any of those questions the wrong way, and they would pull your license. Of course, they would first seek a conversation about why you answered the way you did, but at that point, it’s fait accompli.
A Bible college professor put it one way: “The kingdom of God is bigger than the [denomination].”
More commonly put, “If you don’t like it, you can leave.”
Of course, both of these lines sound good and, technically, they are accurate: God’s family is much bigger than the immediate family that shows up Sundays at your local building, and no one is obligated to stay within one organization.
It doesn’t take much brain power to realize what it is these lines are actually saying: We aren’t wrong, you are. The distance between that and shipping families on military transport planes to their countries of origin is less than you may think.
To spend a career in a Christian fundamentalist denomination such as the one in which I was raised is to rack up thousands and thousands of dollars in student loan debt for positions that are often below poverty level. It is to raise children in that environment and have no choice but stay content within it. It is gaslighting, holding ministers economically hostage.
And when we consider that the overwhelming majority of Bible college graduates — some put it at 80-90% — are out of vocational ministry within a decade of graduation (a statistic invoked from the pulpit of a Bible college chapel), it stops looking like God being a mighty fortress and more like thousands of naive souls locked in basement cages.
I saw what happened to disgraced or even failed ministers and faculty members. One placed himself in virtual house arrest, unable to work after being falsely maligned by fellow ministers and laypeople. He had to leave this part of the country to move forward with his life. Another, a beloved, long-time professor, ended up working as a manager at an office supply store. Another professor, a victim of character assassination and slanderous accusations, was left to rot in his home as an incurable disease slowly claimed his mobility and quality of life. The churches within the denomination wouldn’t come near him. One collegiate roommate I had ended up working at Chick-fil-A (which has far better benefits than most churches, but still).
And me? I was gaslit throughout my time in Bible college, in a degree program that didn’t exist(!), treated with contempt by collegiate administrators — including a nasty email confirmed to have been sent by the college president — when I spoke out against that school’s draconian policies (and even correctly predicted much of what we’ve seen in the past decade) in the student newspaper. When I applied for credentials, I was brought in front of a district official and accused of moral misconduct. (Incidentally, the stress and abuse from that experience drove me to moral misconduct!)
I left that school and got my degree from an excellent UW extension school, applied for an internship with a campus ministry across the country, and was accepted. They were excited to have me at first, we talked on the phone about ideas for working with students and everything seemed simpatico. Not long after I moved and got to work, I was placed in front of that organization’s leadership and lectured about how I was keeping the gospel from being shared because I was reluctant to hand out flyers in the student union — flyers, I noted, that were being thrown away moments after they were being handed out.
The rest of my time there was as free labor, while I watched the staff play matchmaker with numerous students throughout their larger community. (I’m reasonably certain they had someone lined up for me, but I was engaged and already had a wedding date on the calendar.) Incidentally, they were a large chapter, but they got their big numbers not from doing ministry work on campus, but from importing enrolled, already-converted church kids from around the state. I was told I had successfully completed the internship, earned my license there, then returned to Wisconsin and waited…
….where I was told months later that I had failed the internship and would need to redo the year-long program elsewhere in the country. Moreover, another local official told me I would never do ministry in this district. I was newly married and had my entire vision for life and service ripped from me. They came for my freshly imported license, claiming I had a “contentious and rebellious spirit.”
I gained 125 pounds from the stress of being subjected to those years of abuse. Much of it still hasn’t come off years later. Oh, I should not that this was 2007, and the economy was just starting to collapse.
I ended up working back at the sub shop where I had worked while in college, then in a hotel. We moved twice, I worked in other hotels, then in a call center for one of the largest banks in the country. Lost that job shortly after having our twins (numerous employees from that time were let go under questionable circumstances shortly after having children), returned to Wisconsin after, worked in a call center, then backed my way into digital marketing and writing for the internet. Only now, ten years later, do I feel like I’ve caught up and even then, I’m an underemployed white dude regularly asked, ‘What are you doing here? Why aren’t you teaching someplace?’
And the cycle starts over again.
The moment you fall out of line with the systems of control, you aren’t getting let back into them, much less back into the good graces of those who hold the levers. I thought this abuse was just the province of religious fundamentalists, not realizing that an entire political party was being swayed by a similar totalitarian bent, particularly after Barack Obama was elected twice.
I saw the lack of leadership in the GOP after Mitt Romney failed to upend Obama in 2012: anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty could. They wanted someone who could win, and ended up with just about every rich white guy in the party (and Ben Carson and Herman Cain) trying to stake their claim as the next standard bearer. Trump won out not because he was the best of the bunch, but because of how weak they all were by comparison. And their weakness is proven time and again as stooges for Orange Caligula today.
The acceptance of Trump’s autocratic impulses comes from an electorate that has been steeped in the tacit and deceptive, self-arresting language they learned in the church: “If you don’t like it, you can leave.” Now, it’s not leaving a congregation, it’s leaving the country.
It was fascist and wrong then, it is fascist and wrong now, it just so happens that the stakes are so much higher with the Constitution, judicial review, the rule of law, our right to self-determination and our standing as the hallmark of democratic republicanism in the world all dangling over the abyss.
I wish I had seen this for what it is and given you all fair warning a long time ago. I spent years fighting against the tide inside the camp shouting toward believers, but that’s not where people needed to be warned. They were already lost to a system of control that wasn’t about to listen to a disgraced, blackballed now-former adherent.
Ideas have consequences, and these ideas that threaten now to strangle the free world flourished first in our churches. This is American Evangelicalism’s original sin; to take our faith and conflate it with the freedoms we were blessed with and decide that the sacred and secular mandate to be a blessing to others wasn’t as important as our sense of self-assuredness and comfort.
We made the flag an idol, and now worship a deeply amoral man whose commitment to it in total was a hug in a photo op. Meanwhile, the real threat is an unelected, unauthorized civilian who uses his children as human shields and young goons as his weapons throughout Washington, terrorizing the nation as he indiscriminately hatchets government into oblivion.
The lust for control starts with compromise and ends in chaos. For the former, it’s too late; we must figure out how to manage the latter when it inevitably melts down and destroys us all.
Several of those siblings’ families splintered and stopped talking to one another, even though they lived within a few miles of each other in the Upper Peninsula’s Copper Country. Others left the UP outright for a better life in Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee. The economy up there was largely logging and mining, and even in the 1950s and 60s, those sectors were showing signs of decline. My grandfather left for Milwaukee in 1964, and his grandchildren today are scattered from coast to coast.