I freely admit that one of my favorite moments after leaving the church was the day I realized, “Hey, I don’t have to go hang out with church people anymore.” I didn’t have any real problem with church people in general, though. I had a problem with certain people I used to go to church with who were, for lack of a better expression, total dicks.
One of the problems with religious meetings in general is that they function as a form of enforced community and homogeneity over a collection of people who quite possibly might have absolutely nothing in common. It’s considered bad form, however, to point any of that sort of stuff out. As such, the church ends up being a hotbed of low-key resentment and quiet backbiting. Everyone’s supposed to be nice to each other, since otherwise Baby Jesus will cry. If you’re going to call somebody out you’d better be prepared to do it in a Biblically-approved way (um, basically, you need lots of Bible verses) or get censured for pointing out that someone else is being a dick.
It’s easier to simply remain silent. Or leave. That is the true reason there’s so much movement between churches. Group dynamics change constantly. A key person leaves or a new person comes and now everything is thrown out of whack. Two people get in a fight and stop talking and all of the sudden nothing can get accomplished. One person constantly undercuts another person just to maintain their position in the social hierarchy and no one else notices or is willing to speak up. These things happen in all groups, churches included. But churches have an added level of difficulty, since everyone’s supposed to get along because Jesus.
There’s also the added level of change: that of theology. People leave churches because they disagree with the teaching on a fairly regular basis. In my experience, however, this is a secondary concern. If people leave because they don’t like the theology it’s usually because something in the group dynamic has changed. The big reason I’m aware of is usually, “Pastor So-and-So left/died and I don’t like Pastor New Guy nearly as much.”
For all the talk, meanwhile, of who is right, the churches that do the best job of bringing new people in are the ones where people feel, for lack of a more accurate term, welcome. This was the not-so-secret of the success of the megachurch movement. Smiling people greet you at the door and make sure you know that there are small groups you can join on Wednesday, prayer nights on Thursday, and special programs on Saturday nights.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong to this approach to Christianity. Yes, it’s shallow, crass, and manipulative, but that’s pretty much how the modern American consumer culture works. Willowcreek and Saddleback are less houses of worship than Best Buy with a totally different set of products. The objective is to get people in and make them repeat customers.
In talking about a different – but related – subject on Tuesday, Ed Brayton said this:
I have made two arguments about this subject repeatedly over the years. The first is that there is not one Christianity, there are many — and just as many Islams. The Christianity of Bishop Tutu could hardly be more different from the Christianity of RJ Rushdoony, for example, and the Islam of Osama Bin Laden could hardly be more different from the Islam of Muqtedar Khan and many others. The fact that I think all variations of both religions are false does not mean they’re equally dangerous or destructive.
This is something that cannot and must not be ignored. I think that most people are, at least on a visceral level, aware of the fact that not every proponent of a particular system of belief shares a mind with every other proponent. But there’s a very human tendency to want to categorize people and put everyone of a certain category in to a monolithic bloc that you can either claim as your own or decry as your mortal enemy.
Former Conservative of the mysteriously named Confessions of a Former Conservative had this to say a few days ago in a post called “Categorizing:”
At one point in my life, I assumed that every atheist wanted to tell me how stupid and delusional I was and mock my beliefs. Why? Mostly because of internet trolls, Bill Maher[,] and Christopher Hitchens. Now most atheists do not fall into that particular group. Once I started talking to some atheists that weren’t actually a part of that group, I realized it wasn’t true.[1]
The problem with apologists is that they start out by introducing themselves according to the least-useful demographic information.[2] Someone who is so invested in their beliefs, no matter what they are, will be overbearingly interested in sharing them with others, even those who have absolutely interest. And the apologist will then judge those people who aren’t interested according to that apologist’s own framework of acceptable humanity. If the witnessed-to has the temerity to disagree with or blow off the witness they then get tossed back in to that box of unreasonable people in [insert category here].
Since the apologist is so invested in their beliefs that they think you, random passer-by in the street, also need to know about it, chances are they won’t like you if you don’t agree with them. The act of witness, then, is an act of self-reinforcement. It can also be used to reinforce the in-group/out-group mentality of the not-fully-committed.
Witnessing is a high-pressure situation, both for the witnesser and the witnessed to. For the witnessed-to it’s the act of being confronted by someone who insists on entering their personal space that causes the problem. For the witnesser, though, it’s usually pressure to conform by making the act mandatory that causes problems.
I was heavily involved in outreach during my last few years of Christianity. I was really good at it, so people kept asking me to do more. The only problem was that I hated actually doing the witnessing part. Instead I was the guy who tried to come up with ways to make other people feel comfortable with and good at sharing their faith. It was, I suppose, hypocritical.
Still, it was helpful. See, I pushed the idea of making friends, then demonstrating Christ to them so that they’d know Jesus’s love and whatnot. I did this partially to avoid having to evangelize on street corners. But I also did it because I was friends with non-Christians and I totally believed that the best way to get someone to change their view of something was to show them, day in and day out, that it was possible to get along with someone who disagreed with them.
This plan worked surprisingly well.
I was Outreach Coordinator of my college’s InterVarsity chapter. The group was, to put it lightly, dysfunctional. I’d even call it spiritually abusive.
I’d been cultivating friendships with the guys on my floor. One was a pretty devout Christian of some non-pushy sort. One was an open atheist. Those two guys were, like, best friends. The rest of them were all over the spectrum. To this day I have no idea what most of them believed since I never got around to asking.
At the beginning of my second semester at Outreach Coordinator I knew the IV situation was intolerable. I resigned my post and stopped going to almost all of the IV events (save a Bible study run by a friend). I had two key levels of support when leaving: my church back home and my friends on my floor. My pastor back home gave me all the cover I needed, basically by telling me that I didn’t have to stay in a place that treated me like shit. My friends on my floor, though, gave me the confidence I needed to leave, since I knew I would have friends.
They went from being my cynically-declared “mission project” to being my safety net.
I didn’t leave the church then. I still had a lot of leaving to do, really.[3]
I was ineffectual, at best, as a reluctant apologist. When I left Christianity it wasn’t because someone put a copy of Hitchens’ god is not Great in my hands and called me an idiot for believing in the mythical sky fairy. I figured my beliefs out on my own. I did make a key realization early on in the process, though: there were people who were good people who also weren’t Christians. I had absolutely nothing to offer them except some vague promises of an unproven eternal existence and the obvious sentence of a lifetime hanging around with intolerable, judgmental assholes. That made it really hard for me to want to try to sell Christianity to anyone anymore.
Eventually I did read god is not Great. I was not impressed. I just saw Hitchens as an apologist and I’d had enough of that sort of bullshit to last a lifetime.[4]
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[1]I added an Oxford Comma to the quote, since it reads as, “Bill Maher and Christopher Hitchens are (were) internet trolls,” otherwise. I’m pretty sure that FC meant this to be a three-item list. And I’m being pedantic because I’m a goddamn Oxford Comma apologist.
[2]I would also argue that it’s primarily their least interesting demographic category, at least on the atheist side. Basically, if a belief can be reduced to a single sentence that contains fewer than ten words, i.e., “I don’t believe that god exists,” your belief is fundamentally uninteresting. On the other hand, if your belief can be described as, “I am a member of the religion professed by 80% of my country’s population,” you’re also decidedly uninteresting. In the former case the belief really doesn’t have much worth talking about. In the latter case the belief is statistically meaningless.
[3]One specific moment later involved that same pastor who’d helped me leave IV pissing me the fuck off when I said I was leaving the church I grew up in for a more liberal church. He said, “Oh, you’ll like it there. They don’t teach the Bible.”
He later walked it back, told me it was a joke. While I want to give him the benefit of the doubt I also want to know what, exactly, possessed him to choose to make that particular joke.
[4]There’s irony here, I suppose. In decrying categorization of whole chunks of people due to their religious beliefs I’m offering a whole new category of “apologists.” What can I say? Sometimes categorization is useful.
I left a Bible study when they decided we should get more intense and start hanging out socially and doing service projects together. Thanks, but I don't have that sort of time or the desire to spend so much of it with you.
The smiling "welcoming" people are actually very off-putting to me. They are creepy scary. They are only being nice to me because they have an agenda to insert their propaganda into me. I was there for the theology, when I was there. Such a convenient way to rationalize hating and punishing myself.
Apologists for anything are kind of like people with Asperger's who will talk to people about things only they care about. Except people with Asperger's don't realize what they are doing and apologists fully realize what they are doing and do it anyway because they think their propaganda is vitally important.
Posted by: jessa | 01/11/2012 at 10:59 AM
[i]"Basically, if a belief can be reduced to a single sentence that contains fewer than ten words, i.e., “I don’t believe that god exists,” your belief is fundamentally uninteresting.[/i]
Check it out: "God is in the future. So is perfect humanity." Yeah. Tell me that's not interesting.
Posted by: The Everlasting Dave | 01/11/2012 at 12:57 PM
I just stumbled onto this blog from randomly clicking your name at S,N and... wow, this is great.
I've always thought of rabid US evangelical or fundamentalist Christians and the new militant atheists as two sides of the same crummy coin, but I could never articulate that as well as you're doing here.
Posted by: lurking furry | 01/20/2012 at 11:35 AM