Mr. Bageant,
I recently read your article What the Left Behind Series Really Means and I felt compelled to email you. I grew up as an ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), the most liberal group of Lutherans in my area. You'd think that I would've grown up loving my Christian faith.
Instead I feared it. I was molested by a peer as a high schooler and sexually harassed by a teacher and was constantly told it was hopeless, I could no longer get into heaven because of these transgressions. Even as a teenager, I would come home to an empty house and think "This is it, they've been raptured, I'm going to have to face this alone."
I've escaped to a boarding school with a wonderful roommate and boyfriend, both atheist. Even now I fear that someday my family will be missing, I will be thrown into torment, but now I won't be alone. It's kind of miserable at times, and sometimes I hate myself for it, but that's the way it is, and I'm surviving.
Sincerely,
M
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Dear M:
Oh, how my heart goes out to you. My escape was joining the Navy at age 16. I cannot tell your age from your letter, but I think I can safely guess that your life is about to grow by leaps and bounds. Fundamentalism allows for no personal growth, much less self-realization.
Do you think most non-fundamentalist Americans understand that so many of our mainline churches were seized (or sold out for the sake of building membership) to the psychotic Christian right under the evangelical guise? Hell, most liberals, whether they be yuppie body-obsessed West Coasters, urban Jews, Yankee WASPs, or just plain middle class liberals, still think all Lutherans are the people Garrison Keillor descibes to them on NPR in his liberal comfort food monologues. (He actually knows better, the guy was rasied in the Church of the Brethren for godz sake! But hey, having your ass kissed by the naive liberal middle class while they throw money at you, hell ...) So it is nice to hear a real Lutheran give it to 'em straight up!
Regarding the attraction to atheism that immediately takes hold when very intelligent, knowledge hungry people escape the darkness of fundamentalism, I did that too. But later I came to understand that not all isms are the same. Buddhism for instance (which is not a religion but a system of universal actions and reactions, laws if you will) is a deep wellspring of meaning and truth, a practicable path toward the alleviation of misery in mankind.
Yes, those rapture attacks do come, regardless, don't they? For an old man like me, they remain in the form of deep self-doubt ... a shifting, unidentifiable anxiety. But I know where that doubt and anxiety originated, and it originated in a religion that deemed me born in sin and worthless at birth in the eyes of a God I can never satisfy on earth and probably not in death either, considering the conflicting marching orders to the grave he gives in his highly debatable ghost written best seller, the Bible.
American Christian fundamentalism has always been here, and always roughly the same proportion of the population -- about a third. Big deal. America is the home of nutcase religions, Mormons, Scientologists, Nation of Islam, Pentecostal ... I make no effort at being "into diversity" here. All of them are fucking nuts, or purposefully stupid, no matter how many drunks they have supposedly saved or movie stars they have led to happiness out of the misery of their millions of dollars.
By the way, statistically speaking, membership in fundamentalist churches in America is now declining slowly. Big deal. It matters not shit if half of reasonable, observant working Americans have given up on voting because they know it no longer makes much difference -- and the other half are knee-jerk Democrats in the belief that it makes them guiltless of the crimes America perpetrates upon the rest of the world and its very own people, depending upon income and status. Groupies for the The Democratic Pussy Mafia ... whose previous choice was a man so gutless he could not stand up and say an election was stolen in front of our very eyes, and now seems to be a woman most working Amricans cannot stand the sight of and never believe a word she says. (Pleeze put a steel clamp on my tongue please! Readership for my book, according to the sages of printed pages, is supposedly the liberal middle class. And no, I'm not an S&M freak who loves clamps!)
Let's see, oh yes, statistical growth of belief systems ... Secular humanism here is rising slowly in America. And the Islamic faith is growing like wildfire all over the world, mostly because of their birth rates among the poor, who are prone to fundamentalism, just like here.
In any event, you have an old Southern uncle down here who is cheering on your life and future.
Uncle Joe
PS: I don't know if you've traveled much to other parts of the world, but if and when you do, the big picture about America may fall into place, which helps people like us understand how our lives came to be this way.
