- ewe2
- Jul 1, 2009
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My brief brush with evangelicalism came when I was a vulnerable 18 year old just after leaving home and having a spiritual crisis as a Christian who was doing Sunday school teaching. This guy appeared from nowhere at my church and used all the tricks of offering a community of friends etc to get me to go to a couple of their meetings. These involved the full speaking in tongues thing, the music, all the trappings. I was living with the family of high school friends and one of them, an atheist, got rather concerned about this and accompanied me to my second meeting. It was rather hard to feel the spirit when someone you basically know and trust is treating the whole thing like an anthropology expedition. Smiling and avoiding confrontation, he went around inquiring about what language they thought they were speaking in. I later made my excuses to avoid further contact, realising I'd been swept up in euphoria, to the snarling displeasure of my 'handler'. I'm still grateful for that intervention, it forced me to start thinking for myself in these matters, and I soon lost contact with all Christianity. There are some ideas specific to Christianity that lend support to harmful offshoots like evangelicalism: that combination of authoritarianism and monotheism is very resistant to other forms of spirituality, it attacks the individual sense of self as a sin, a failure and abuses the concept of family. I think though that I was more hurt by the very hypocritical use of power, that the 'family' was a mask for recruitment and who knows what other coercion might have followed. The whole experience made me deeply suspicious of such appeals in the future.
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Sep 19, 2016 10:24
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