![]() ![]() I was left with the increasingly cynical feeling-an existential threat to my entire sense of myself and the world-that Christianity was just a means to an end. ![]() But why was there a “Christian” position on congressional term limits, a balanced budget amendment, and the line item veto? Why was there no word on racial justice and unity for those of us in the historical shadow of Jim Crow? ![]() With many of these issues, there did seem to be a clear Christian position-on the abortion of unborn children, for instance, and on the need to stabilize families. Even as a teenager, I could recognize that the issues just happened to be the same as the talking points of the Republican National Committee. ![]() A religious right activist group from Washington placed them in our church’s vestibule, outlining the Christian position on issues. They waited to claim a new word from God and sold more products, whether books or emergency preparation kits for the Y2K global shutdown and the resulting dark age the Bible clearly told us would happen.Īnd then there were the voter guides. When these prophecies were not fulfilled, these teachers never retreated in shame. I saw a cultural Christianity cut off from the deep theology of the Bible and enamored with books and audio and sermon series tying current events to Bible prophecy-supermarket scanners as the mark of the Beast, Gog and Magog as the Soviet Union or, later, Saddam Hussein or al-Qaeda or the Islamic State as direct fulfillments of Bible prophecy. And yet, in the church where the major tither was having an affair everyone in the community knew about, there he was, in our neighbor congregation’s “special music” time, singing “If It Wasn’t for That Lighthouse, Where Would This Ship Be?” I saw a cultural Christianity with preachers who often gained audiences, locally in church meetings or globally on television, by saying crazy and buffoonish things, simply to stir up the base and to gain attention from the world, whether that was claiming to know why God sent hurricanes and terrorist attacks or claiming that American founders, one of whom possibly impregnated his own human slaves and literally cut the New Testament apart, were orthodox, Evangelical Christians who, like us, stood up for traditional family values. I saw a cultural Christianity that preached hellfire and brimstone about sexual immorality and cultural decadence. I saw some Christians who preached against profanity use jarring racial epithets. The cultural Christianity around me seemed increasingly artificial and cynical and even violent. Nonetheless, from the ages of fifteen through nineteen, I experienced a deep spiritual crisis that was grounded, at least partially, in, of all things, politics. The songs that floated through my mind as I went to sleep at night were hymns and praise choruses and Bible verses set to music. I memorized Bible verses through “sword drill” competitions, a kind of Evangelical spelling bee in which children compete to see who can find, say, Habakkuk 3:3 the fastest. I was reared in an ecosystem of Evangelical Christianity, informed by a large Catholic segment of my family and a Catholic majority in my community. I am an heir of Bible Belt America, but also a survivor of Bible Belt America. ![]()
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