I think I was born into a cult. V3

I think I was born into cult.

Not one of those cults where the kids are abused and the adults are all sleeping with each other but a cult nonetheless.

We don’t have leaders luring us down a path of destruction to anarchy or mass suicide but instead we have leaders whose role is to save us from the inevitable anarchy of society through godlessness which will lead to the destruction of planet earth and what is in essence the mass suicide of stubborn non-believers.

We are only focussed on beliefs, values, rituals and actions that are the God-ordained, right ways of living in order to avoid the inevitability of the above. To ensure we stay focussed on our salvation we have constructed enclosed, safe communities.

Essentially, we are here living in the world but we were not of it.

We have contrived our social circles, and those of our children, to ensure the least amount of pollution to our souls. We attend schools, churches and classes where we are taught our doctrine and where our beliefs are reinforced, with children whose parents and grandparents have received the same teaching. We attend play dates, youth groups, camps and conventions only with people who hold our beliefs, ensuring that we are so immersed, it would be outrageous to question the beliefs of an entire community of such morally upstanding people.

Our grandparents built and funded our own private schools which were attended by our parents and then us and today are attended by the generations that have followed.

Our community even has its own language made up of religiously-bent phrases which are interspersed with emotive words like ‘heart’, ‘spirit’, ‘tongue’, ‘soul’ and ‘eternal’ which are delivered with such ease that we perceive no notion that these phrases are meaningless contrivances of words to anyone from the outside world. We use them so comfortably that to ask what these words really even mean would make you would look a fool.

We are encouraged to commit to daily ‘quiet times’ to conduct our own personal devotional time to focus our hearts on things above.

As a result, we have built a utopian society where no one feels pressure to conform or sidelined for differing beliefs and we celebrate individualism. We have protected our children from the evils of the outside world and raised thoughtful, considerate, self-assured and well-rounded humans.

We are happy to be judged by other members of our community and to receive their feedback as this encourages us in our journey to be more reliant on the Bible’s teaching. Being judged by a member of our community is always done in love.

We are open about our problems and struggles and are not shamed by, or ashamed of, admitting we might not have it all together or that we have a mental health issue or that perhaps our family isn’t as happy as they appear on church pews on Sundays.

We are always happy to hear of other people’s failings and to come together within the community to help workshop solutions for them. Perhaps that family didn’t read the Bible together around the table after dinner? Perhaps if they had forced their children to attend church their child would still be a member of the community? Maybe they could try reading Dr James Dobson? And of course, we prayed for them.

We are Reformed Conservative Evangelical Christians and our mission is to accept the truth of the Bible into our hearts and acknowledge Jesus as our own personal Lord and Saviour and thus achieve our salvation from the hell that we deserve as dreadful sinners.

From the beginning of our existence, we are taught that we are dreadful sinners but despite this, we are better than the other children because we weren’t born into an immoral family careering straight into hell, we are better than Mr and Mrs General Public because we are right.

We are better because we have two parents and they are married, we attend a private school that holds real beliefs and we don’t watch bad television or listen to bad music. We have real family values, the right family values, we believe in something, not like those other families living their pointless lives without values, morals or principles, those ‘broken families’ whose children attended state schools and are all desperately searching for the truth in the wrong places like alcohol and secular music and television and movies and drugs and worst of all; sex. We know the truth and we pity them.

But, above all else, we are right because we attend church, not once but twice every Sunday, and not just any church; it is the right church.

We aren’t like those other Christians; those happy, clappy, loudly disrespecting God’s reverence Christians or those Christians who idolise statues with their stained-glass windows who are clearly more caught up in the tradition of their services than what Jesus actually did for them on the cross or even those Christians who interpret things like communion and baptism differently and we are certainly better than those Christians that have female pastors. Heaven really does forbid.

No, we hold services the right way, we read and interpret the Bible the right way, we dress for church the right way, we sing the right hymns, the right way.

We know we were right because the Bible tells us so.

The Bible, that document which was put together by hundreds of men from multiple cultures and backgrounds, from tens of thousands of texts and snippets of manuscripts originally written in three different languages over many, many centuries and then translated by men over many more centuries into thousands of languages and then put together in a document, the inclusions decided upon by a committee of men, that we call the inspired word of God. It is God’s only book which houses all of the answers we need to find our own personal salvation.

Thanks to Mr Luther sometime around 1500, we Protestants swapped the Pope for the bible and we got personal salvation.

Despite the hundreds of years since and the evolution of science and society and thinking we stand firm on Mr Luther’s interpretation that the bible is the only document we need and his interpretation is God ordained. The Bible is the inherent word of God and clearly contains everything we need to make good decisions in life, raise our children right, inform our political views, give clarity on all moral and values-based issues and also saves us from hell and damnation. It is the ultimate self-help book.

With the corner stone of our belief system, that everyone can and should read the Bible and interpret the Bible for their own personal salvation, we are fortunate that our interpretation of the Bible is the right one.

Despite countless science experiments demonstrating that two people can both see and hear one event and come out hearing and seeing two totally different things; we remain steadfast that our interpretation is the only right interpretation.

Given Jesus’ teaching on humility, our rightness doesn’t manifest as arrogance, it can’t be arrogant to espouse what the Bible clearly tells us, that we alone are going to heaven and everyone else is hell-bound. It is a fact; a truth.

Due to our rightness, we feel it is entirely appropriate that our communities and our countries should be run on our values. Our values are superior to those of other denominations, religions, non-believers and all those morally upstanding individuals that hold differing belief systems due to their own personal experiences and thoughtful interrogation of the issues at hand.

Despite Protestantism being based upon everyone’s individual right and responsibility to personally read the Bible and interpret it for their own salvation, it should be noted that this does not apply when it comes to how we interpret ‘values’ derived from the Bible.

We have rightly coalesced a charming, historic idea, based on our rose-tinted view of the good old days, primarily the 1950’s, of values with Biblical teaching to take a firm position on a whole gamete of issues. These range from working mothers and who is best placed to undertake childcare responsibilities to abortion and gay marriage. Our position is supported by our correct interpretation of the Bible.

We are so very confident in our superior interpretation of the hidden meanings of the Bible and God’s actual intentions of those words that we give full support to all sorts of things that the Bible makes no clear mention of. We use the Bible to support our politics, our family values, misogyny and to justify all sorts of ad hoc issues, even whether a Voice to Parliament for the Indigenous people of Australia is a good idea. We allow politicians to use the Bible and conflate it with conservatism to win votes and hold power.

In many cases we think that it is irrelevant who is the most well-equipped, intelligent or best placed person to undertake leadership roles in our society; if their values don’t match ours, or if they are of an inappropriate sex, we won’t support that person to a position of authority and we may feel it appropriate to discredit them. This also works the opposite way, despite the actions of an individual, if they espouse our values, we will support them to obtain a position of authority or leadership.  

As an example, the Australian Christian League, in a e-newsletter circulated to subscribers, interviewed candidates standing in a recent election, one question they asked was; ‘Do you support drag queens reading to children in public libraries’. It is inconsequential what the individuals gifts and talents are for leadership, this one question demonstrates an allegiance to our values and would sway the support or otherwise of the ACL and therefore its subscribers.

Sometimes it might appear that we are completely ignoring the teachings of Jesus, who was a bit of a rebel, on love, acceptance, kindness and patience and that we might be sidelining an historic or cultural lenses application to the Bible but it’s important that we highlight to our communities and our nation the really big issues that are feeding into the complete collapse of family and societal values.  Like drag queens reading to children in public libraries.

However, we are very sorry that our rightness has offended you.

In our belief system there is right and there is wrong, everything is black or white and there is no grey area or room for one’s own personal experiences. We think that people can be so open minded that their brains fall out.

It is a blessing that we know it all and that we are right and we thank the Lord that he put us here to let everyone know. There is no room for victims to also be perpetrators and vice versa. There isn’t room for people to meet in the middle and there is no room for opinions to be changed; one shouldn’t change their opinion if they are already right. As the saying goes; I could agree with you but then we would both be wrong.

As we are completely confident that we are right; questioning the root of our beliefs really is a pointless exercise, we are right so let’s leave it at that. If people do push us though, we do have two handy responses. There are many others, for example ‘we hate the sin and not the sinner’ which is very useful when it comes to defending our values but the two biggies we use to deflect questions around our beliefs are the following:

Firstly, we say; ‘Oh, but you need to have faith!’.

Of course, you can’t argue with my faith. It’s a zinger!  It’s such an easy ‘back in your box’ type response.

Faith, by definition, is a strong, personal conviction, it’s a confidence that something is true despite any facts.

It’s probably worth noting that when we use the word ‘faith’ we aren’t using a definition of ‘confidence’, we are using a definition of ‘certainty’. We are certain it is true despite the facts and we apply that same certainty to our denomination, doctrine and dogma because we are ‘mature in our spiritual journey’.

If we didn’t have that certainty in our denomination, doctrine and dogma we might face questions from other community members such as; ‘How can you call yourself a Christian and believe THAT?’ or ‘How can you read your Bible and not believe THIS?’. We work on the assumption that through faith you will obviously arrive at our correct interpretations.

It may appear that it is a very big ask to ‘just have faith’ because ultimately, we are saying it is faith in the inherency of the Bible, it is faith in predestination, it is faith in grace not works, it is faith in the existence of heaven and hell, it is faith that a man died on a cross because his father said so 2024 years ago to save you from your wicked sinfulness to avoid the burning fires of hell for all eternity. It may appear that we are asking for a bucket-load of faith but really, how big of an ask is it to put your common sense aside for the salvation of your soul and eternal life?

Secondly, we like to say ‘don’t get bogged down in all of that, is it really a salvation issue?’

You might then ask; ‘Well, what is a salvation issue?’ To which we would say that you need to have faith that Jesus died on the cross to save you from eternal damnation because you are dreadful sinner. Now this might feel uncomfortable to you as you have values and morals and you give to charity and you love your neighbour and you have taught your children to be upstanding members of the community but I will remind you that it is by faith and not by works that you will achieve your personal salvation.

If you query the notion that you became a dreadful sinner because of a talking snake, I will remind you that you may be getting bogged down in a non-salvation issue, it is not that you are pulling at a thread that might create a hole in one of the salvation issues you are supposed to have faith in.

Equally don’t get bogged down by the irony that the corner stone of Protestantism is your individual right and responsibility to interpret the Bible for yourself and yet for most denominations if you don’t hold dear to their interpretations you’re out, this is not a salvation issue. Likewise, the irony that Protestants have splintered into thousands of denominations over individual interpretations and yet each thinks they are absolutely right as opposed to the Catholic Church which has no denominations, they all agree on the same theology, but don’t let that bother you.

It could be said that this all feels a little self-centred and inwardly focussed, that we are only concerned with our own personal salvation and what is happening within our own saved communities and not the wider world around us.

The truth is that the world is a shit hole. We know it’s a shit hole because the Bible tells us it’s a shit hole therefore what would you have us do? It’s a fait accompli so all we can really do is get people to read their Bibles and trust in its teaching, we need to focus on eternal justice for sinners rather than social justice for other humans who have access to the Bible just like we do and could easily pick up a copy and resolve their problems just like we did.

It would be a pointless use of time to get caught up in social justice issues as Jesus may return soon and equally, our salvation isn’t based on works, we are saved only by grace alone.

Sometimes it might seem like we are saved through works given the diligence we apply to the rituals we undertake and the activities we maintain in the undertaking of living out our faith but these rituals are merely an enactment of how strong our faith really is, it is in no way a display to other community members that we are more committed than they are.

Jesus was very clear in the bible about his thoughts on Pharisees who were overzealous in their commitment to rules and regulations, we certainly don’t want to be like the Pharisees. Thus, it is an expression of our faith, we have a deep need and desire to live the way God wants us to on the back of being saved by him, we follow the rules and regulations set out by our denomination as a response to our deep faith and spiritual maturity.

All of this faith and certainty we have, that results in the effort we put in to demonstrate to God, and to the rest of the community, that we have accepted Jesus into our hearts, is all of course ultimately for one cause – to get into heaven, or more importantly, to stay out of hell.

Whilst it is by God’s grace that we are saved, setting aside that we are only saved if we are predestined to be so (finger’s crossed), we are absolutely not impacted in our commitment due to the threat of looming hell fire and damnation as a punishment for being born sinful (and in God’s image and fearfully and wonderfully).

We do not adhere to our faith due to a fear of hell. Our community doesn’t use a ‘fear and consumption’ style doctrine to get people to believe. The threat of burning in hell for all eternity at the whim of an all-powerful yet gracious and loving God is no incentive at all to embracing faith. Whilst fear of punishment has been used by all societies since the dawn of time to induce people to conform, and stories of hell pre-date Jesus and the bible and can be seen in ancient mythology with mythological gods, we are more moved by God’s grace than the threat of hell fire.

Despite some very solid arguments that Jesus never mentions hell as a form of eternal punishment and that ancient Jews didn’t believe in a soul existing outside the body and that the idea of a heaven and hell for all of eternity came far after Jesus was on earth, if we let this one go what will we have to hold over people, how in hell will be able scare people into believing God’s grace!

Give us something to work with!