The Evangelical Mind

BACKUP of EMIND 2--February 2, 2006

PERSONAL MORALITY: When Billy Graham heard the Watergate tapes, his response was not shock at Nixon’s contempt for the constitution, but indignation at Nixon’s foul language. Graham’s response was prototypically evangelical. The Constitution? Secular gobbledygook. Foul language by one who passed himself off as an evangelical Christian? That’s scandal!

FUNDIES VS EVANGELICALS: Fundamentalists share the same assumptions as evangelicals. It is possible to see evangelicalism in its purest form in fundamentalism. Fundamentalists are more consistent, less compromising. The difference between the two lies not in the basic assumptions, but in the response to those basic assumptions.

INTERFACE WITH NON-EVANGELICALS: The evangelical responds to an attack on his political beliefs by dodging the matter and making the personal spiritual state of the accuser the issue. Their motive might appear charitable. In fact, this rape-like violation, this knee-jerk evangelical response to opposition--go after their solar plexus, hit em in the nuts, massage their shoulder and express concern that they are going to hell--is an essentially female approach to confrontation which evangelical males have adopted wholesale, to their eternal discredit. But I care so much about you!

MEN: Evangelical males sold out their masculinity when they converted. They are now hollowed-out, intellectually, and have become emotional neuters.

To evangelicals, God is the Individual, the atomized Individual, alone--apart. The only way to peace is by asserting one’s submission to authority--but in any case, the problem of individualism is one of ranking--and the obvious thing is to set up an individual who has all power--and make him your friend through whatever method possible. The Christian religion is a celebration of the individual. Evangelicalism is more individual than most. And it is built to salve the wounds inherent in individualism.

Jim Wallis says that evangelicalism is personal, not individual. I would dispute that.

IMPERATIVE: The implications of the basic imperative are so terrifying--no wonder thinking isn’t one of their priorities--burrowing to the depths opens a Pandora’s box of demands.

Shame--instead of decreasing shame, the evangelical imperative codifies it.

Missionaries tolerate a lazy laity if they support the missionaries with funds.

JESUS: Why does evangelicalism ignore the teachings of Jesus? To evangelicals, the main function of Jesus is as a sacrifice for the sins of man. In order to be a proper sacrifice, he had to be perfect. His teachings stem from his role as a perfect model of God on earth--however, those teachings aren’t practical, aren’t designed to be applied to the life of believers so much as they are evidence of the perfection of the sacrificial lamb. The logical result of such teachings is that one would be slaughtered on the cross--and we don’t all want that. Jesus did that for us. We don’t have to do it again. So, too, with his perfect teachings--they were quaint manifestations of his perfection, and that’s about all.

The main underlying force in evangelical culture is the need to buffer the demands of its theology.

Unlike fundamentalists, evangelicals spend a lot of energy not looking evangelical ideology in the eye. They prefer to avoid the theology’s implications in any way possible.

Jimmy Carter is an evangelical, but he behaves like a postmillenial evangelical, one who still believes Christians must work to create a Kingdom of God on earth.

Impetus for missionary activity: 1) to pave the way for the Second Coming of Christ. 2) to save souls 3) to easy the conscience of inactive evangelicals.

Dispensationalism gives a scientific veneer to an anti-scientific religion.

Evangelicalism works to confine emotion and intoxication to the church.

SEDUCTION: Evangelical Church from Bemidji came to the nursery, and the flirting began: “you have to be a believer to live in a place like this.” Of course, you don’t. But how do you respond?

“Blessings on you brother.”

SCIENCE: Belief in a literal six-day creation takes the wonder out of the study and contemplation of nature. It is a mere showing off by God of his handiwork, and really has no other purpose. The need to believe in a six-day creation robs evangelicals of all but a superficial interest in science. Science is evil, it smells bad, and involvement in the sciences probably would require an explanation to a fundamentalist.

SCIENCE: The hierarchy of scientific knowledge offends the evangelical mind as thoroughly as does the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Just as access to God is personal and immediate, the notion that access to scientific truth is earned, even hierarchical enrages evangelicals. Thus, the propensity for vitamins and health cures--the doctors are as evil as the priests! They try to get between me and my God and charge me for it.

Those who live a life of willful self-delusion view self-delusion as a high virtue and have a talent for recognize others as self-deluded as they.

APPARENT consistency is the characteristic evangelicals look for in a leader, the inner calm which comes from psychopathy or ignorance. It isn’t a dignified calm. It is the false assuredness of the ace real-estate salesperson, for whom confidence is an act. It is a gospel of gall, of pushing forward shamelessly through a sea of the shame-inflicted.

END TIMES: Evangelicals pull out eschatology when it is needed, but discretely leave it on the shelf when it isn’t needed. It comes in handy for converting others. The notion of the Rapture 1) introduces the needed sense of panic 2) makes one feel superior 3) scares the shit out of the non-converted.
Agnes Rolf writes in response to my column: You are treading on thin ice. She included a battery of Bible verses. Also, a warning that I should honor the tradition of my Grandparents, etc. Like most evangelicals, she knows how to go for the gonads. Threats of eternal doom aren’t kind.

Shadow evangelicals: For every active and convinced evangelical, there is one who holds the basic evangelical assumptions but is in rebellion, and another who has simply opted out of evangelical culture without escaping the creed. These shadow evangelicals are prone to re-convert at any time. Underneath it all, they still fear the evangelical God and long for reconciliation with Him.

BAWER points out the cruelty of evangelicalism towards children. Online, I found a website talking about a play put on in Texas by young people at Halloween--showing the fate of kids who weren’t saved; graphically depicting their sins, etc., ODDLY, some of them were sexually abused--the people in hell, in the end, were sexually abused, but there was no sign of their abusers in hell. The play is called “Hell House.” There is a documentary done about Hell House.

Good works are of the devil! Good is evil!

PRAYER: “Lord, we just ask...” Linguistic shorthand for yearning? For frustration? It isn’t really “merely,” it is more, “c’mon, this is all we want, please give it to us.” It is impatient. It is frustrated.

PATRIARCHY: The evangelical mind’s reverence for paternal authority extends to its male sexual abusers: They are quickly forgiven. The victims who blew the whistle are not.

FORGIVENESS: Evangelical forgiveness is often mere appeasement of brute force. Just as the raging alcoholic in the household must be appeased, so the evangelical authority figure must be forgiven his transgressions whether he has seriously repented or not.

VISION OF GOD: The Old Testament God can be loving, capricious or cruel. Evangelicals expect their leaders to be the same and are left empty if their minister turns out to be loving and kind. Loving and kind evangelical ministers are candidates for permanent exile to a moribund countryside congregation, or for a job selling insurance.

WOMEN:Time and again, I have seen an evangelical victim surrounded by women urging her to forgive, forgive, forgive--you must forgive--while the abuser goes through a brief repentence routine and becomes a celebrity. The men envy him to no end! And the women know he is an alpha male who must be appeased.

WOMEN: The sexual abuse victim is a threat to the evangelical belief in the rightness of all male authority. The victim must be controlled, supressed, handled, managed, and not for the victim’s own good but for the preservation of the group identity. The urgent demand that the victim forgive is an attempt to put the sordid mess out of view as quickly as possible so the authority and rightness of the alpha male does not come into question. Moral failure in a subjected follower supports the ideology; moral failure in a leader threatens the entire group and must be covered up. So it is that the victim must be blamed.

What about the abusers? They are ritually given a free ride. It is the abused who infuriate the evangelicals. They weren’t good enough. This is cruel. Gloria--emphasis on the abused doing the forgiving. In this sense, evangelicalism is a defender of brute force--brute force can always be justified--weakness is to be hated. Evangelicalism has a hatred of the victim running through it.

SEX: Sexual sin is central to the evangelical mind. Indeed, some evangelicals think of nothing else.

LEAVING evangelicalism is virtually impossible. It is easier to quit drinking, for at least there is a place for you to go--Alcoholics Anonymous. But there is nowhere for a former evangelical to go. Non-evangelicals don’t understand, and most former evangelicals are too ashamed of their apostasy to discuss it, or too reprobate to care.

LEAVING: Grandpa wanted out of evangelicalism. Dad wants out of evangelicalism. So many people want out of evangelicalism, and they love to listen to the rebels--but then they get pulled back to the ideology by the longest, most elastic bungee cord ever devised by the oppressors of the human mind.

SEX: Evangelicals are in complete accord with the worst elements of mass media culture that sex is really all that matters. It all comes down to sex. Sex, sex, sex.

THE MOST frustrated people in the world are those who think they have found the truth.

GENERATIONS: The first generation of evangelicals felt the transformation first, then lived the holy life. The second generation has the holy life thrust upon them, and then has to cough up a transformation.

Where are the Northwestern graduates? They have vanished. So it is with evangelicals with potential. They evaporate, disappear. They go to sleep.

IMPERATIVE: Nobody seems to agree with me that the one overriding fact of evangelicalism is what people do with the evangelical imperative--the need for everybody to convert or spend eternity in hell. Nobody seems to take hell seriously, least of all those who actually believe in it. Either evangelicals don’t really believe it, or they are shockingly unconcerned that people around them are going to have their skin burned off forever and ever. Is that why they are unconcerned about torture of those of a different religion?

HELL: The ethical implications of hell aren’t brought up. Hell functions as a lever to enforce the rules. It cannot be used to push people out of their evangelical envelopes of comfort. If it is used for that purpose, the existence of hell is effectively denied.

DEATH: A dying fundamentalist clings to life with an unseemly tenacity.

If one is not preparing for death, one is not living. Perhaps the better word for death is oblivion.

DROPPING THE BIBLE: I can’t count the number of times I have seen a television evangelist find an excuse to raise the Bible up above his head and drop it to the floor, or otherwise do it violence. One wonders.

INTERNICENE STRIFE: The best source for dirt on televangelists is fellow evangelicals. Although they tend to focus on minor matters of doctrine, if the televangelist has done anything morally wrong, they’ll point it out.

Joyce Meyer: $900,000 per year salary. $95 million in revenue per year. Is her salary tax free?

LAW: The notion of “rule of law” makes an evangelical yawn with indifference. The Bible is their only law, and evangelicals, more than all those hair-splitting legal heathens, have that under control.

Put a “man of god” in there and let him cut the corners, cut the legalities, slice through the red tape, do the right thing, do our dirty work, suffer on the cross so that the rest of us may be free. The world is so evil, so bad, that fighting that evil in the public sphere inevitably requires that one things which might look a little shady if they were exposed to the light of day. In fact, it is the light of day that is evil. Expose the lawlessness of the leader? No, punish those who leaked the lawlessness to the press.

Why evangelicals need so much reassurance in their services; why humanity on the part of the preacher, even if it is counterfeit, is so inordinately rewarded--because evangelicalism, even in its most minor forms, is an authoritarian system of holy terror, and entertainment brings relief.

Critics of the hard driving evangelicals use weak arguements like “God doesn’t want us to..” in order to justify their laziness in evangelizing others. They never look to the root of the problem, the theological root of the problem: The existence of a real hell where real people are going to burn. Get to the root of the matter, and you might escape! Dare to see to the bottom of the issue!

But seeing to the root of evangelicalism is frightening, and unless you’ve been there yourself, it is unkind to criticize.

Religion sometimes coincides with spirituality, but not often.

Evangelical can be an insult; it can be the highest compliment. People will fight to keep it in their camp.

AFTER TALKING WITH MARK: He mentioned the “This American Life” on hell. The minister in Tulsa who gave up on the idea of hell and lost his congregation. His ministers resigned. And so on. The utter necessity of hell--as related to WHY people are so scared of saying what I said in my article: They are still scared that the evangelicals are right, even though they have a distaste for evangelicalism. They know that they dislike it as a matter of taste, but they haven’t made any intellectual break with evangelical assumptions, the main assumption being hell. There is no credible theistic alternative to the dualism of evangelicalism on the religous market today.

SUBSTITUTIONARY ATONEMENT: Who is willing to take on the crude nature of substitutionary atonement?
Mel Gibson made it clear in his brutal movie what it means. All people who recoiled from the gratuitous violence might be asked--don’t you question, then, the nature of a God who would require such a sacrifice?

DOGMAS: What about the superstitions of the virgin birth, the resurrection, the miracles--some people might suspect these didn’t take place, but they remain quiet. They don’t see the damage those doctrines do. They aren’t ready to take on the whole unholy infrastructure. But it is the entire unholy infrastructure which needs be rooted out from the base--not just chipped at from around the edges, not just compromised, but rooted out.

What about the symbolic cannibalism of communion? It would be abandoned with disgust if anybody thought about it without fear.

HELL: What keeps American evangelical churches full? A firm, vivid belief in hell! Break down the belief in hell and the masses will trample each other on their way out the door. Subtract hell and evangelical faith morphs from practical necessity to an intolerable pain in the ass.

One person who believes in hell is a tragedy. A million persons who believe in hell is a statistic, and a very useful one to psychopathic leaders.

A populace convinced of hell is putty in the hands of the authoritarian ruler. From the desperate mother who uses hell to get her children to behave to the televangelist who invokes hell to milk contributions, a host of tin-horn dictators depend upon hell to prop up their unholy regimes. For the desperate authoritarian, hell is less a matter of truth than a vital question of power. What else can explain the ruler’s visceral panic when some naive innocent doubts hell’s existence?

WOMEN: Oppressed? Far from it. For the many females desperate to regress into dependence upon a strong male, evangelicalism provides the perfect excuse--and throws a veil of sanctity over the whole sordid endeavor. Long live glorious, ignoble, God-excused dependence, with the ups and downs of the resulting depression disguised as noble spiritual struggle!

WOMEN: The coterie of dependent females in the kitchen of at a fundamentalist gathering, around the table later, discussing their males, managing their males, problems managing their males, they aren’t open, they are operating in shame, in secret, kids and men aren’t meant to hear their conversations.

HELL: The evangelical is attached to the notion of hell in part because it is the only check on his compulsions.

NARCISSISM: Evangelicalism encourages narcissism. Ryan’s wedding. The self-centeredness of anthropomorphizing God. 2ndbestDad. Competition. Ranking. Always competing, always ranking, always making God out to be Melvin writ large. Big Daddy. Big husband. An eroticized personal relationship with God.

There are so many things which are distasteful about evangelicalism, things which make people wrinkle their noses. It is time to elaborate those things, to tease them out, to make them ludicrous.

Once an evangelical female eroticizes Jesus, sex with her mousy husband is over! What a relief.

HELL: Ask an evangelical “Do you wish hell to be empty?” The likely response: “Well, it won’t be.”

“Yes, but would you empty it if you could?”

Watch the squirming as their desire for revenge against their enemies, for the right to think of themselves as superior to the hell-bound world, fights with their knowledge that no decent person would with any other person, no matter how depraved, to suffer burns for eternity in hell as they are convinced it exists.

CHARITY: Having successfully denigrated all good deeds of non-evangelicals as futile, evangelicals trump up their own meager good deeds beyond all proportion.

Ede, to Chad, about Madison the baby: “I hope she grows up to love Jesus.”

Assumptions: Jesus is living. Jesus survives as a conscious entity who will get pissed off if he isn’t loved.

Chad had a dream when he was fourteen that he was in hell and was attacked by flesh-eating centipedes. It so upset him that he wrote his Grandma DeBoer that he figured he had better do somthing to get right with Jesus. She called him back on the phone, crying, ecstatic at his apparent conversion.

SCIENCE: What is the effect upon the evangelical of not paying heed to geological time?
What is the result of the evangelical’s contempt for open-ended historical inquiry?

EVANGELICAL THEOLOGY: Dallas Theological Seminary puts out scholarly treatises which are anything but scholarly--their conclusions are foregone. There is no freedom to come up with anything but support fot orthodoxy.

Evangelical impulses which are ignoble: For simplicity, against nuance and subtlety. Suspicious of nuance and subtlety.

VISION of GOD: If you attribute the random daily events to a diety who is a projection of your father, do you have any choice but to be angry? Unless you are so scared that you don’t allow yourself even that.

I am blessed to have Ede and Dad in my life to give examples of evangelicalism close up.

Evangelicalism restricts. It holes up. It will be a trick to demonstrate that these are evil tendencies.

Evangelicalism gives its adherents an excuse to despise the different. It enables them to ignore the teachings of Jesus--which are anything but parochial.

SUBSTITUTIONARY ATONEMENT: If the main mission of Jesus is as a sacrifice, his teachings can be easily ignored--as the example, the unrealistic example, of what God would demand. In effect, the emphasis on Jesus on the cross allows evangelicals to ignore his teachings.

The emphasis on the miracles of Jesus is inherently selfish. The belief in miracles is like believing in the lottery; it is a dream of dependence, a dream of unearned wealth, a dream of living like a child, forever. Heaven, too, becomes an eternal welfare state for the dependent. The heaven of the evangelical’s imagination resembles the new home built after

SUBSTITUTIONARY ATONEMENT: The crude sacrificial exchange--the life of a perfect innocent in exchange for indulgence from a despotic god--appears in ancient religions everywhere. Christianity, through substitutionary atonement, made the process more efficient by making it a one-time slaughter, for which generations of farm animals and virgins should be eternally grateful. It is no less crude, however.

Competition: There is a constant drumbeat of “we are the greatest” in any evangelical’s telling of stories. Our church is the greatest. We have a wonderful pastor. We have a wonderful youth program. We are building a new building. We are the greatest.

CHURCH CULTURE: But in order for these “we are the greatest” stories to have any traction, they have to be told to fellow evangelicals. Nobody else would care. And so, the gatherings of evangelicals consist of evangelicals beating each other over the head with the greatness of their youth programs and Christmas galas.

EXCERPTs FROM YELLOW NOTEBOOK--2005

Evangelicalism attempts to address the problem of loneliness and alienation by creating the ultimate individual--God--who has a motherly, feminine son--alleviates loneliness by (?)

The laboratory of the USA has produced evangelicalism, one of the loneliest religions possible. Even the celebrations of togetherness have a “thou protesteth too much” air about them, a disproportionate sense of relief and shelter which reveals an anxiety.

The number one item on the agenda of the shame-soaked modern individual: reduce shame. Justify myself. Cling to a larger entity, be it a group or an ideology. Cling with a desperation equivalent to the problem at hand. It is a biological imperative to feel included, to feel justified. The Christian religion’s genius is to create metaphors which express this shame--the foremost of which is the image of Christ on the cross.

For a Christian marriage to be noble, it must involve suffering, for nothing is so noble as to hang from one’s cross, and in a solidly middle-class society, about the only suffering one can claim is that inflicted by one’s spouse.

ETHICS: Evangelicals fancy that they have a monopoly on the code of ethics of a five-year-old--do not lie--and by God, they take pride in it--in not telling white lies, etc. and they see any shades of gray, even in the service of good, to be depraved. But their dwelling on the five-year-old’s morality shows that their greatest temptation still lies in the realm of a five-year-old: Cheating, stealing and lying.

Child-like morality: Don’t have sex or play with your gonads.

The face of the evangelical to the outside: you do not count. Your opinion doesn’t count. You may rise to the level of “interesting,” but only as a pet. You may never enter into the evangelical secret society, the fold, the fellowship.

Evangelicals as Masons: The shared sense of initiation, a nationwide fellowship. The shared initiation is powerful.

Pursuing this sense of apartness is not easy--or is it? When every mind is inclined in that direction--when the universial psychology is one of anxiety towards the world.

MALE INTIMACY: Evangelicalism does, however, allow for male intimacy. They can show their emotions and hug and have heart-to-hearts; it is quite close to gayness in that regard. It satisfies a need for male companionship and closeness. Spiritual talks. Talks about marital issues. Frank talks. Crying. Being vulnerable. Being stripped naked by the conversion experience. Loving Jesus and the effeminacy he represents. Building up Jesus into an idealized you in the leader and then bowing down to him--the erotic undertones aren’t very under. No wonder overt homosexuality makes evangelicals so damn nervous. Clearly sexless marriages.

Sexless marriages! Tom Lee. Orville Lee. John Mosiman.

Jesus represents sort of a feminine ideal.

ART: It is no mystery why there are no evangelical poets, no great evangelical artists, no truly great evangelical scientists--the habit of mind which attracts evangelicals to evangelical churches is not conducive to great art. It is not used to digging to the bottom, seeing underneath, much less seeing things as they are. They don’t have the ability to subjectively interpret.

Lack of shame is a prerequisite of great art. As is a lack of fear, and a faith in one’s self. All three are verboten in evangelicalism.

The evangelical single male: a lost soul.

Dad doesn’t count non-evangelicals as people.

Calm is not welcome in the evangelical church.

The reams of molding prophetic tracts.

Mark Noll: Premillenial dispensationalism is the most well-developed intellectual movement in fundamentalism. In fact, it has taken over and won the day. The assumptions of premillienial dispensationalism have spread faster in the liaty than in the clergy, thanks to popularization by television evangelists and the writings of Hal Lindsay. I would they are held by almost all who call themselves evangelical. In fact, due to the holy Harlequin novels produced by Tim LaHaye and his ghost writers, people from less strident religious traditions who nevertheless gravitate towards the apocalyptic, and they are many, hold premillenial dispensational beliefs whether or not they have ever heard of the term. Why bother winning over seminary scholars when you have already won the minds of those whose literature is found in the supermarket check-out lanes?

The founders of premillenial dispensationalism, Darby, Scofield and Lewis Sperry Chafer, share one thing in common: A paucity of theological training. But together they created a many legged ideological monster, a belief system which resonates with the American public like no other, a theology which most seminaries don’t teach to this day. However, if the seminary graduates know what’s good for them, they don’t argue with the premillenial dispensationalist assumptions of their congregations. There’s no better way to lose your church than to disagree with parishoners who believe in an imminent rapture of believers!

The scholars of premillenial dispensationalism have a joyless, almost clerical task. Provided with truths they cannot question--the innerancy of scripture, its literal interpretation, the use of the Bible as an infallible legal document--they are doomed to work towards a predetermined goal of upholding the dogmas. Of open ended scholarship, they know nothing. In fact, they fear it. They are, in fact, lawyers, arguing for their case, working backwards from the dogmas to find evidence for conclusions long ago reached.

Evangelical nuns.

Darby started with the assumption that scripture was innerant. To prove his case, he developed the theology of dispensationalism.

The theology of conversion doesn’t always reflect the role conversion plays in evangelical society. The conversion experience is a powerful glue for the evangelical movement, but it has unintended consequences for evangelical theology. Some of the theology is designed to keep up the need for conversion experiences and emotion.

Although the theology says one might have a sober conversion, the culture prefers a spectacular conversion.

The theology might say the conversion is permanent, while the culture thrives on constant crisis.

THESIS: That many of the dogmas of evangelicalism are meant to support a system which gives its members a sense of significance. To the extent that they extend significance, they are honored. When they become inconvenient--such as the imperative that all be converted--they lose their steam except amongst the fanatics.

There is a separation between the evangelicalism of the evangelical seminaries and the evangelicalism of the laity. The seminaries exert little control over the laity. They’ll just “find another church,” like they were shopping for health clubs, if they are in a big enough city to have options.

Shopping for a church is a ritual in evangelicalism. What they’re looking for is a good leader, a good pastor. Doctrine might matter a bit, but not much. “He’s just a down home guy who preaches from the Bible,” probably is the best endorsement.

So, there are many flavors of evangelicalism. Some are milder, some are entrepreneurial, some are more authoritarian, some are more emotional, some are intellectual, some are upper class.

The problem happens when it comes time to get a new pastor. People who came to the church due to the last pastor can become disoriented. However, they have in the meantime developed some doctrinal and social loyalty to their church--so it is difficult to leave just because the new pastor isn’t in the same mold as the last.

Transition between pastors can redefine a church. Because of the importance of the pastor, because of the authoritarian leanings of the laity, having a pastor with an appropriate temperament is important. But finding one can be impossible.

Evangelicalism is a democracy. People vote on doctrines with their feet. Unpopular doctrines die. Popular ones fill churches.

Evangelical loyalty is to individual pastors more than it is to a particular named denomination. Although there is some denominational loyalty, people will move from church to church to find where they feel the most comfortable. There is no uniform loyalty to a denomination like that which characterizes the Catholic Church. In fact, most evangelicals would have a tough time telling you why they are one church and not the next except for that they feel more comfortable there.

The ancient theological disputes which resulted in the various Protestant sects are laughably irrelevant to most lay evangelicals. They’ll jump from one denomination to another in a heartbeat if they like the minister.

For some, the evangelical imperative dawns on them like a blinding flash--they head off to the mission field. For others, it dawns slowly, too slowly to prompt action. For many, it remains as a festering sore, a constant source of guilt. Others, soothed by a sympathetic minister who spends a lot of time addressing his own guilt for not doing more to convert the unsaved, manage to put the evangelical imperative in the background--a vague mist of “we should really,” but nothing which would disturb their daily life as accepted members of the larger community.

Hypocritical evangelicals are easier to get along with, but they are hypocritical nonetheless.

Passive aggressive prayer: Evangelical prayer sometimes is a way for people to get their way without having to confront offending others. It is covert, passive, subterranean. Enlisting other passive people in your prayer effort is a way of increasing the likelihood that the prayer will be answered. So, if you are praying to fix one outside the fold, or to influence one outside the fold, rather than confront him, you disuss the issue, no matter how confidential, with your fellow evangelicals. To the non-evangelical, this appears to be transparent gossip. It is always a bit of a surprise to the evangelical when the person who is prayed about feels betrayed. Here again, decency rears its head and the evangelical scurries for cover. The sin here is that the person found out about the betrayal, not that the betrayal occurred.

In fact, there is much that is secret in the evangelical world that when it is exposed to the light of day, the evangelical will back down and admit that it wasn’t decent. Mainly gossip, cutting corners, backbiting, short circuiting procedure. Of course, if it was never brought to the light of day, the evangelical would never think twice about it.

The luxury of navel gazing: By shutting off all speculation about the nature of the spiritual world, evangelical religion allows its adherents the dubious luxury of endless self-centeredness. Exploring the nature of the eternal with open-ended study can pull one out of the daily mess; without that ambiguity, one is tempted to bring to bear the fixed nature of the eternal God on the messy affairs of one’s daily life.

Speculation limited: Evangelicals appear to have great debates about theology--in fact, those debates are so limited in nature that they qualify as a tempest in a teapot. Should there be drums in church? Can the divorced re-marry? At what age are children responsible for their salvation? What is the “age of accountability?” Furious debate on these harmless questions partially slake the evangelical’s intellectual restlessness without requiring them to tread on uncomfortable ground.

The sheer effrontery of evangelical prayer, addressing God as a best buddy. Their refusal to allow anybody else a shred of dignity extends to their Lord!

AFTER GETTING HOME from Arizona by crossing through the Bible belt of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska and listening to dozens of evangelical Christian radio programs en route:

“Of course, we know we’re all going to live for eternity, it’s just a matter if we’re in smoking or non-smoking.” --Janet Folger of Faith 2 Action

“Can you hear Him now?” --church billboard.

“No word yet on why the liberal ministers contacted the IRS rather than speaking with Rev. Parsley face-to-face, as is mandated by scripture”--Christian newscast.

“First the prospect, then the procedure,” --Chuck Swindoll, going step-by-step through the procedure which we will go through after death. Separation of the soul from the body, etc.
Very specific, very mechanical.

“I want every one of you fathers to go home tonight and sit down with your family and have family worship time.” --some professor of family worship.

Also, a seed company advertisement had some verse from Corinthians on seeds. II Corinthians 9:10: “Now may he who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food, supply and multiply your seed for sowing, and increase the fruits of your righteousness;  was included on a Texas seed company advertisement.

Focus on the Family: All Alito all the time. Everything depends upon this appointment. Fake host. Who gets to play the fake host who asks the softball questions?

Dobson: “Thanks for finding me down here in California.” As if the guy didn’t know where he was.

Stanley: “Listen to me now” “Listen carefully.” etc. Browbeating.

Parsley’s speech is growling and hateful. And threatening. Opponents to God will regret it.

There was another evangelist who was snarling and sarcastic about other churches, about the sell-church concept. Whatever that is.

How to deal with evangelicals: When I got home, there was an anonymous tract in the mail. No return address. Should this upset me? Clearly somebody thinks I need Jesus. Can I respond with sympathy? Can I hold my fire? Should I hold my fire? Should I confine my observations to here?

The bulk of Christian music presents Jesus as a sort of meglomaniac--hey, the bulk of evangelical preaching talks about God and Jesus as if they demand constant praise. This is crazy. Glorify God? This is the prototypical alcoholic male asshole demanding constant attention and praise. The ultimate narcissist.

We’ll spend the whole time in eternity praising Him. Boring. But we’re supposed to love it.

I must investigate further the asshole God of the evangelicals who demands constant glory and praise. This is unsavory. He is a son of a bitch. A narcissistic bastard.

Prayer: The badgering of the diety to act like the CIA and intervene to change people and circumstances--expresses a desire for an extra-legal (supernatural) force to step in and make things right--or, at least, more like what is desired by the evangelical. It is a pagan desire. The desire to appease the gods, to yell at the gods.

Multiply out any activity or circumstance for eternity, and it becomes hell. Heaven? The sure and certain hope of total oblivion, the droplet returning to the lake.

JANUARY 21: Today’s reading: NYT article on one evangelical scholar’s worry about the 85% support level that evangelicals have shown towards the Iraq war. “Bush is a brother in Christ, so wherever he leads us, we will go,” was the attitude as he summarized it.

Dad talks about conversion of the Muslims. Conversion, for Dad, brings mysterious and threatening people into an arena where he has command of the secrets. I think Dad overrates the importance of theology to evangelicals, or at least is frustrated when they are inattentive to theology, for that is where he garners his significance.

Part of the initiation ceremony is to reduce the neophyte to zero and raise the authority of the long-time adherents. This glorifies the organization, and also glorifies those who have been in the group for some time. The neophyte agrees to the emasculation as the price of admission into a secret club, pulled in by the powerful human longing for tight kinship.

This initiation ceremony is one of the secrets of evangelicalism’s success. The aura of secrecy--it draws people. And there is an aura of secrecy. It is a secret club with secret codes. The Masons and Elks have fallen upon hard times, busted up by the end of the male-only schtick. But in evangelicalism, it continues. And with drama--with God, with enemies, with wars and struggles with Satan and with sex and power--it is very compelling, much more compelling than the Elks. Evangelicalism includes the entire family, but it has some nice perks for Dad--a constant drumming up of his authority and right to be in the secret club.

Evangelicalism ties itself brilliantly into some of the deepest human longings--the desire to subjugate to a strong leader, the desire to be part of a tightly knit clan, or at least one which appears to have some sort of initiation ceremony and some sort of exclusive intimacy between the members; the desire for a personal God who heals hernias and finds wallets; the desire to consider such matters as worthy of the diety’s attention; the desire to have oneself be right and the rest of the world sadly mistaken--these are the powerful allures of evangelicalism, the appeals it makes to human instincts.

Evangelicalism is not so covertly built upon the desire of its followers to shuck away responsibility.

Compared to historical incarnations of God, evangelicalism’s view of God is radically small, radically unspiritual, radically peurile, radically unkind, radically sterile, radically materialistic, radically simplistic, radically unmysterious, radically unflattering and astonishingly bleak.

Wedding all good to an all-powerful male: an urge in evangelicalism which shows up in the view towards god and pastor.

It might appeal to an old lady to “praise Him all day long,” but is it any wonder that kids wrinkle their nose at the prospect?

Today: Read an article which talked down the liberal attack on the right-wing evangelicals. Said that some liberals say:

George Lakoff - whose book Don't Think of An Elephant has become a kind of bible that explains their electoral demise for many liberal Democrats in the US - describes those who tend to vote for Bush as the products of authoritarian 'strict father families' who are motivated by self-interest, greed and competitiveness. These people hate 'nurturance and care', apparently, are religious bigots and lack the therapeutic sensibilities of their liberal cousins.

Well, I kind of agree with the above analysis. I think of Lees--very competitive, greedy and self-interested. According to this article, we aren’t supposed to denigrate people of faith; I could take the tack of trying to understand that faith as a way of seeing those people more sympathetically.

In the guise of a political theory, Lakoff offers a diagnosis of human inferiority. You can almost hear him murmur: 'They actually take their children to see The Passion of the Christ….' In previous times, such contempt for people was the trademark of the authoritarian right. In today's 'inclusive' society, it is okay to denigrate sections of the electorate as simpletons if they are still gripped by the power of faith.

Lakoff and others argue that many people who vote for Bush, or who are influenced by the religious right, simply do not know what is in their best interests. Instead of acknowledging the failure of its own political projects, the liberal elite prefers to indict sections of the public for being thick and gullible.

After reading a couple of copies of the Dallas publication “Veritas.”

Bill Bright and his wife sat down and deeded their life to God. They put down all the things they wanted and valued and deeded them to God. The seminary prof writing the article did the same thing. He opened the envelope 25 yrs. later, sort of a time capsule, and was appalled at some of the things he wanted--like a sports car. I am more appalled by these stilted family things--the utter unnatural nature of the family rituals required. Oh, how I hated those family devotional sessions, the prayers before trips, the family services. Ugh. The attempts to read C. S. Lewis at the supper table, the sense of failure when those attempts fell prey to reality, as they always did. I think these are some of the impossible hoops that evangelicals set up, designed to make sure their followers fail.

Of course, they fail in the biggest hoop of all, converting others--but that imperative has already been so diluted that it is only useful on fresh converts. To make sure the rest of the laity is adequately held down, supressed by shame, you have to keep inventing new ways for them to be inadequate.

EDE IS really wondering why God gave her, the perfect Christian, leukemia. Humility, perhaps? Humility--Not a virtue understood by the evangelicals.

A tack: It was taken by Bruce Bawer--that evangelicalism is really not religion at all; it is counterfeit religion. It isn’t spiritual. It isn’t benificent. To mock the idea of belief can’t be the purpose of my book, for I am not comfortable with the secular disbelievers. I find them sterile, even frightening. There is faith in the people with whom I am comfortable. Trust and faith. A general faith in humanity, in the goodness of things, in the goodness of the universe. This is to be compared with the sterility of Lyla’s belief, or utter lack of faith, the gap which seems to be missing in Rolly’s secularism, and Jim McKenzie’s--both leave me a little wondering, if only because they rule out rather than rule in-- “and then that is it for us!” as a final answer seems cold, because there seems to be more. Faith in humans. Faith in the future. As opposed to fear and lack of faith that is shown by the gay activists and evangelical Christians. A critique of evangelicalism from a point of view of faith. Bawer made the argument, but somewhat stridently, postulating too strongly a new religious view.

Criticizm: Evanglicalism is deeply cynical, and stridently critical, even of itself. Defensive. Making fun of its opponents and even its allies. Mocking. Mockers, scoffers--evangelicalism is full of mockers and scoffers. The ministers mock and scoff and it is entertaining for all. They imitate. If they are showmen, they imitate and mock. Now, to them, scoffing is any making fun of evangelicals, not a general state of scoff towards all. And they feel so much victims of scoffers and mockers that turning the tables delights them. The minister is given permission to mock and scoff and express anger by slamming his fist on the Bible. An angry subtext.

TONE: When I was writing for the Dakota Student, I often sucked the audience in by seeming to be on their side only to slam them over the head. This would be a good model for The Evangelical Mind. Anticipate their responses, really get under their skin--by using their arguments to destroy them.

I AM STUCK on the alpha male issue in evangelicalism. Todd Pederson. George W. Bush. The whole authoritarian organization and psychology which arises around strong males--it must come from the genes, the need to protect the clan by serving a strong male and by submitting to a strong male. It may be adaptive. Indeed, it seems adaptive. The raging, roaring, loud, bumbling, strong, mocking, mean alpha male. Let us gather round him! He don’t suffer fools gladly. He is not a nice person, and we don’t wish that he were a nice person. A nice person wouldn’t protect us all as well. A nice person wouldn’t do what it takes when out of sight. We are offended by nice people with leadership pretentions--who do they think they are? What kind of world do they think we live in? There is a contempt for nice people. It goes back to why women, the beautiful women, go for a Randy Faul rather than an....Eric Bergeson.

Thus, the bitterness of many pencil-necked liberal males towards the alpha male systems. They suffered under them, and still do. So did the women. Those who escaped are bitter--or angry at themselves for the degree to which they did assent to their own biology and submit to neanderthal males. They are angry at fundamentalism and evangelicalism--which amounts to male dominance apotheosized. Their anger clouds their vision. It is anger at themselves directed outwards.

I mean, the door-knobbed alpha males always get the women. It is in the genes. Women who are allegedly liberated from the doorknob male system are angry to the extent that they still subscribe to doorknob male dominance--or to the extent that they are tempted by and attracted to doorknob males. Evangelicalism raises doorknob male dominance to the level of religion. If the women have weak husbands, and many of them do, they either eroticize their pastor--or Jesus.

How do you have sex with the pastor? By listening to him describe sexual sins in his sermons.

In evangelicalism, you are responsible for your own health. If you get a tumor, it is because you were a bad Christian. That view isn’t stated out loud, but you hear it all the time. Ede on Bob--if you people would just behave, you wouldn’t have troubles. Troubles are good: They point out to the inadequate that they are inadequate and need to get their act together, need to convert, need to have better devotions--whatever; it is not important. What is clear is that evangelicalism raises personal responsibility to a metaphysical, magical level (or lowers it to a medieval level): you are responsible for your ill health. God allowed it into your life for a reason--and that likely was so that you would improve.

The obnoxious perfectionism of Ede pisses everybody off. Oh, how everybody else wishes there were some divorce in that family, some disaster. Well, the nursery might qualify. But the resentment comes from Ede’s ideology. She has a heart of gold, but what motivates it? The need to be superior?

The logic: God must have had some reason to kill Elmer. Pretty soon it starts hitting on Elmer--he did something wrong.

Jesus’ mission was noble. He was trying to reverse the human tendency to turn religion into a club of judgement. Sure enough, humans took and turned him into a God, sacrificed him as atonement and made him perform miracles such as helping them find a lost checkbook or smoothing out the purchase of a new home.

Emotion! The Christian Women’s Club speaker was talking about praying for a new home, and I just said, Lord, if it is your will that we get this new house...” and the women suck it up like a sponge. Paganism. Just like the Hindu household gods.

Hoffer is my model. They called him caustic. I hardly think so. Pithy, yes. Caustic?

Good people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

Quote from a weblog on the military, but applicable to evangelical’s views--on safety, on Bush, etc.

Some of the value I got from the religious services of my youth, I do miss. I recall the beauty of the sanctuary at Calvary Baptist for an evening service. I remember the fun of singing hymns at Camp Joy. I remember the fun at the Tabernacle at Camp Koronis.

How much of the aesthetic had to do with the evangelical nature of the proceedings? I think there was a level of comfort there--a spot on the continuum--where I enjoyed the evangelical service. I enjoyed the intimacy with a group of people with a common belief. I enjoyed the sense that there were people there who cared about your problems.

Some of this might have been a projection of what I regarded as good unto the ministers and the other evangelicals. I assumed they were charitable and led upright lives. I assumed they were safe, perhaps because I hoped they were safe. We were the remnant, the true church, and we had to trust each other if only because the rest of the world was so untrustworthy.

Evangelicalism is cozy. Sitting in the pew, listening to the service, listening to the pastor, listening to the music director, listening to the hymns--I spent hours, untold hours in darkened sanctuaries. Sometimes at Sunday evening service. It seems I remember Sunday evening services the best.

I looked forward, a little, to the beating up of the parishoners, the invitation, the beseeching sermon, the five verses of Just As I Am. An invitation was spectacle. I wanted to watch it. It was adult, it was solemn, it was really the most dignified ceremony in the evangelical church--despite my current assertion that the whole invitation and conversion ritual is a stripping away of the convert’s dignity. In fact, they are a celebrity at the same time. I am not sure which is the correct view. There are ironies, there are contradictions.

Conversion--can be beautiful. It is a ritual of hope, a ritual which gives a clean slate, a ritual which can change things, can breed the miraculous, can be sincere, can be authentic, can be life-changing. And yet, so often it is not. So often it is counterfeit, maudlin, contrived.

As a “saved” member of the audience, what was my hope when I saw somebody convert? For friendship? For credibility? For an apology as a part of the repentance? Intimacy with the new convert? Closeness? Sex? Whatever it was, the conversion of another was a powerful drug, a drug which the cynic will not understand until he has tried it. I don’t think my emotions had anything much to do with the convert’s avoidance of eternal hellfire. The real joy was in the possibility of intimacy, of conversation, of shared belief, shared struggle, of safety, of another with whom one could be safe, of safety in numbers--for I had a fear of the outside world.

There is the sense, too, of strategy in the conversion process--of somebody who has lost their position rising back to the top with a conversion--of sensing that somebody is about to convert--and just as often, being totally surprised by somebody who seemed converted but obviously, since he just went forward, wasn’t. That in itself is a shameful secret, a deception. There is a constant theme of secrets revealed in evangelicalism--every convert, in fact, who is already in the church--reveals their secret when they convert--they were not converted before. Or, if they rededicate their life, they were hiding something horrible, something wrong. Secrets revealed--that is one of the possible allures of an evangelical service.

“On fire for the Lord.” People who are really on fire for the Lord are usually unbearable, even to their fellow evangelicals. In fact, on fire for the Lord is almost a warning phrase. Stay away. This one’s out of hand. He actually believes this stuff and is taking it seriously. Stay clear!

CONSIDER how it feels to have some of your closest and nicest relatives, on some level, wish you ill. They won’t admit it up front, but if there is the possiblity that ill fortune might bring you to Jesus, they’re all for it. In fact, prosperity and calm in an unbeliever can only be a temporary calm. There must be something wrong. If not now, soon. Otherwise, their belief that there is only peace through faith in Jesus will take a beating.

Speculate: Why don’t Jadi and Jonathan keep in touch? Possibly it is because I don’t keep in touch with them. However, there has to be more to it. Jonathan keeps in touch with Mom and Dad. Jadi and Marianne keep in touch with Mom and Dad at least a little bit. They are wary of non-evangelicals. I don’t speak the language. They like me. But they are troubled by me. My existence is anathema to them, if in fact--perhaps they don’t think of me at all! For my part, I am not eager to spend time tip-toeing around the issues with them.

Their secrets--probably aren’t safe with me. Their failings aren’t safe with me. Neither are mine with them. Both of us will use evidence of failings to flail the other, if only in our own mind. We know this, and so we avoid each other.

Honestly, I do secretly, and sometimes not-so-secretly, wish the more arrogant evangelicals ill as well. They have been hoping for my destruction, and thus I find it difficult not to hope for theirs.

How evangelicalism divides: Division, incidentally, isn’t necessarily a bad thing to evangelicals. Jesus is the great divider! Broad is the path which leads to destruction!

The demand for a dullard: Is the need for a Bush, or another dull male--which I associate with the tendency of the homecoming queen to marry the most obnoxious jock--the need to have a powerful force which can be controlled by female wiles? What about the males who also enjoy the leadership of alpha males, drunken, junior high-like, doltish males?

And what about my enjoyment of the energy and spontenaity of males? Of males like Jordan, who are all boy, all men, go go go? I enjoy them! But they are still boys, and I would not want to be under their authority. I enjoy them as long as they are under my authority.

Rod Parsley: His Hitler-like screaming--something to do with the shame of the followers at a previous defeat. Germany was humiliated by the defeat (and peace terms) of World War I. The screams of Hitler directly expressed and addressed that humiliation. What humiliation, then, have those who follow the American demogogues suffered? The humiliations of failing in a capitalist system? The psychological humiliation of being raised in evangelical religion? The shame of holding to a faith which cannot be lived without a sense of shame, a sense of being on the cross? And anger at that shame? A desire to have that shame transmogrified into pride through forceful rhetoric, forceful perspective-altering rhetoric? When Parsley and others scream in anger, and their crowds rise up in joy, is it not the relief of finally feeling pride after a life of shame? Preachin the gospel. He had the anointing! It is code for: He will make us feel pride where we once felt shame. Defensive pride, but pride nonetheless.

Outline for Evangelical Mind

What is an evangelical?
Culture vs. Theology

Why no great philosophers or artists in evangelicalism
anti-intellectual
anti-reality
Van Cliburn
but there are many evangelical athletes, although their conversions don’t always stick.
And there are evangelical politicians.
Why no artists? Why no university professors in the humanities? There are plenty in
engineering.

Emotion vs. intellect: Emotion trumps intellect every time in the Ev. Mind.
The need for the initiation. It isn’t just a form of association; it is a form of instant trust.


Bush and Meirs:
Her prime qualification is her faith.
All else follows from the fact that she shares the initiation--she had a conversion.

Keillor quote from pg 315 of the Ev. Encyclopedia: “They were not people of the word, so their friendship meant nothing to us.”
Evangelical separation from the world: In fact, most evangelicals view themselves as
estranged from the bulk of humanity. Some fundamentalists codify this separation and
live in separatist sects; others merely draw the line in their head between humans
who are saved, thus worthwhile, and those who are not, who are seen as sinners in
need of redemption--potential converts, at best.

Ballmer: Premillenialism is a theology of despair. Postmillenialism is a theology of gradual improvement of the world. Most evangelicals have drifted to premillenialism, the notion that God will rapture his saints from a hopelessly degenerate world in the rapture. Premillenialism has goals other than social improvement. There is no motive for social improvement in premillenialism. It is more likely that premillenialism was a lazy way out for those tired of attempting to improve the world. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I would argue that premillenialism became the logical refuge for those exhausted of efforts to improve the world, or not predisposed to attempt to improve the world gradually. Postmillenialism was a lot of work, both the think about and to execute. Premillenialism simplified matters. In fact, premillenialism is much more in synch with the evangelical mind than postmillenialism.

Did the theologians lead the way, or were they dragged along behind the premillenialist bandwagon? Or, did seminaries which espoused postmillenialism simply wither?

This explains why any attempt to improve the world today borders on theological heresy in the evangelical church. There is little impetus for social action--unless one reads the Gospels literally, which apparently nobody does.



Evangelical Leaders:
What is required
A way around the evangelical imperative
Why moral failings amongst evangelical leaders are so frequent

There is a perpetual issue in evangelicalism of forgiving the leaders of the movement when
they lapse. It goes down into the trenches.

EVANGELICALISM, ALCOHOLISM, GAY CULTURE--all provide shelters from the universal modern human dilemma: Shame. People with a strong personal identity are mystified by all three, save for the chemical element in alcoholism.

All provide an intoxication, a faux sense of acceptance and belonging.

The ones really left out in the cold by all this, and hated for it, are those with a strong personal identity, a strong sense of self which doesn’t depend upon ideology, chemicals or sexual identity for its foundations.

The evangelical leader can use his sinfulness to his advantage, but he has to be careful not to use up all of his credibility by going over the line, or by crying wolf too often.

The early American republic was a festival of personal sins--drinking, adultery, gambling. It is no surprise that the focus of America’s most characteristic religious movement retains a strong emphasis on personal character lapses.

To the extent that evangelicalism reduces human failings to one central issue, conversion, it allows its adherents to excuse the problems of all non-evangelicals to their lack of a conversion experience. However, sins within the evangelical church, by evangelicals, are submitted to the microscope. So, do not expect your evangelical friend to care deeply about your personal problems until you have a conversion experience. A conversion experience, becoming a Christian, is the first step to all human problems.

The urgent motive for helping fellow evangelicals with their problems: We must keep their witness intact. We must keep our faith that a conversion solves all things intact. We must keep a unified witness to the world. It must, must, must be solved in-house, or the faith will suffer.

(Barry’s church dealt with a sex abuser in front of the congregation and didn’t report it to the police. He was admitted back into the fellowship.)

The extra-legal nature of evangelicalism. Evangelicalism has a contempt for the law. Emotion, conversion, rededication--all are seen as ample evidence, ample penance, for any type of sin, up to and including murder. The notion that a conversion experience is not an acceptable legal argument for the release of a prisoner infuriates many evangelicals.

TAKEN FROM JOURNALS:

True believing fundamentalists seem incapable of displaying authentic human concern. They are incapable of empathy. Problems are an admission of imperfection and evidence of lack of faith. Problems are not everyday matters. They are enormous matters to be dealth with in testamonies and in sweeping metaphysical terms. Doubts, ambiguities and ambivalence are manifestations of a weak faith.

Humor increases as anxiety rises in an evangelical situation. Humor is a value because it serves as a pressure release rather than as a way to soften the truth. Evangelical humor is usually vindictive, even abusive.

Yet, it is tolerated because it is the only acceptable form of aggression available for the laity, save for athletics. Intellectual aggression is taboo.

In a smiley true believer, there is an inhumanity and an insubstantiality that is palpable and troubling. There are human evangelicals, but they are the exception.

An evangelical’s need for drama is as intense as an alcoholic’s.

Amway, Herbalife, and many other companies can take on cult-like characteristics and draw the same type of people as evangelicalism. Take the campy dress of Goebbels; how much different is it from the flamboyant suits of Jim Bakker? Gaudy, cheap, attempting to cover up or downplay the body. Hitler and his antacids, Bakker and his makeup.

THE CONVERSION ritual verifies the rightness of the already converted. The convert is emasculated, taken back to zero. This puts the already-converted in a position of superiority, if only by default.

The conversion of others is a vital sign of the veracity of the movement’s tenets. The alleged transformations which occur, which may seem dramatic on the outside, are very much transitions from one form of denial of self to another, from addictive behavior of one kind to addictive behavior of another kind.

Alcoholics and evangelicals understand each other well.

Rollie Leeman converted a four-year-old. Ede’s grandchildren are talking about Jesus. Steven Kent wants to go to a seminary where he won’t have to fight the theology too much. He already knows. Even the mildest form of evangelicalism strikes Bob as evil.

IN AN evangelical setting, only the psychotic can succeed. The demands of the theology simply cannot be fulfilled. In fact, the theology is so cardboard thin that it is merely a vehicle for the psychotic to wield power.

Rarely has a more ready audience been prepared for psychotics than the group of people with evangelical leanings. They bring with them:

--the search for a single cause or single cure
--the disdain for intellectual complexity
--the desire to be told
--a quick forgiveness for mistakes having to do with abuse of power or sex
--a fear of original thought
--a vision of the holy grail
--a hatred and fear of those of different beliefs and appearance

The leader creates a demonology, is willing to tell, is willing to refuse approval to his followers forever, is willing to ask forgiveness forever.

--a tolerance for unfulfilled prophecies.
--a thirst for prophesy so profound that it applies no test of truth to past false prophesies
--an alcoholics passion for constant crisis. Some maelstrom must be maintained to keep the flock united. At the same time, too many people can’t come into the fold or imperfection will get in the side door.

“I will pray for you.” The phrase implies not that there is mutual support, but that you will have to to all of the changing, come to meet them where they are as the manifestation of all good, and then give them the credit.

ROLE OF PRAYER:

--as a club in public meetings
--as a thief of credit for actual competence or achievement.
--as an equalizer. All have power.

In fact, the weakest ones, the ones least able to deal with life can, through prayer, become the strongest.

--as a justifier, a benediction, a blessing of most anything
--as a confessional
--as oratory
--as spontaneous communication with God.
--an overpowering indicator of the personal nature of God. THUS, it must be informal and King James at once: “We just ask thee” is a permitted form of prayer poetry.

In prayer is revealed the evangelical view of God. And for the evangelical, he is weak. Like the evangelical pastor, he is preoccupied, strangely hesitant to do what is in his obvious interest unless he is browbeaten to do so, in a distant phone booth attempting to run the earth remotely.

The word “just” is a staple of evangelical public oratory and prayer.

There are a vast number of evangelicals who fill a pew only because of an accident of birth, marriage, or tradition and who merely lack the intellectual or emotional will to leave. They fill the pews and the offering plate, but are neither the hardcore followers nor the hardcore leaders.

LEADERS are psychotic or naive. All have the capability to convince themselves that they are following the great truth, while in fact they ignore it much of the time and are seldom authentically troubled by the enormous gap between evangelical belief and evangelical action.

EVANGELICAL HUMOR: In response to the vast undercurrent of feelings of inadequacy which run under the entire movement. Humor is a jockeying for position, a testing of the waters. it is a constant, never-ending pursuit for many evangelicals, with a distinct difference between the humor of the followers and the humor of the leaders. Self-depracating humor never comes from the followers, only from the leaders, and then sparingly, and in a way which upholds the notion of a vast body of “shoulds” which the followers cannot possibly meet.

JOKEs about small lapses in hygiene, for example, although they might show the leader to be human, actually reinforce the notion that there is correct way in such matters--a way which is discernible only by a chosen few. This shame is right in line with the shame induced by consumer advertising.

THE tendency to claim exclusive knowledge and to regard it with solemnity, however trivial it may be, is an evangelical pattern.

THE GNAWING conviction that the theology is hollow results in the gathering of credentials. “We have a biology professor who attends our church.” Or better yet, a doctor. Successful professionals are clung to as evidence that the faith is legitimate.

HOMOSEXUALS and evangelicals are in the same corner of the universe. Both seek group identity to verify their existence and legitimacy. They understand each other, as all fanatics do. And they need each other to survive as a group.

The fall of communism has brought gay rights to the forefront of evangelical demonology. The evangelicals used communism as a foil for years. The threat of communist warfare and the communist denial of God provided the fear needed to get many to convert.

Witness the camp game at Lake Beauty; the sermons of Nels Pederson at Koronis.

With communism gone, homosexuals became the obvious target because they were 1) organized 2) unabashed--providing much shocking materiel for sermons 3) Alien--nobody, at first at least, seemed to know one 4) Scripturally in the wrong 5) Mirror opposites of evangelicals, yet with a fanatacism which attracted them to each other like a magnet, ready-made enemies ready to do battle.

Their similarities outnumber their differences. 1) Conversion

The Cold War military could never have considered gays, for propaganda reasons. (?)

EVANGELICAL demonology is more instructive than its theology.

CON-ARTISTRY and the evangelical: The snake-oil connection. Salesmanship and evangelicalism are intertwined. They share a disregard for the product to be sold and a belief that the ends justifies the means.

Bible Camp is an example: Ethics fly out the window when the powerful sales pitch for conversion is given. Win friends and convert them, just as Amway salespeople attempt to recruit their friends and relatives first, convinced that to do so is an enormous favor.

The sense of violation is identical in both cases.

THIS IS not a study of theology. It is an investigation of tendencies exhibited by a group of people. Theology is relevant only to the extent that it produces behavior. That is to say that in evangelicalism, it is seldom relevant.

THE HOLDING high of emotion as evidence of the supernatural is a constant in evangelicalism.

ONLY CHURCHES with cult tendencies need to have seminars entitled “How to Tell a Cult.” Cults are a problem for evangelicals; they are ignored by most of the rest of society as irrelevant.

Because evangelicals are keenly aware that their temperament makes them vulnerable to cults, they spend much time and energy combatting cults. Although the two are birds of a feather, they can be distinguished: Evangelicals manage to fit into society and function on a daily basis. Cult members do not.

You will find that where you haven’t heard of a cult in the news for months, years, or even decades, you can step into a fundamentalist church and find pamphlets denouncing the cults on the tract rack near the door.

FOR THOSE to whom the basic questions of life are unbearably irritating, evangelicalism provides anesthesia.

ACTUAL evangelicals are not that many, but thanks to their zeal they wield disproportionate influence.

Just as the alcoholic seeks drama as proof of existence, so many evangelicals see the need for crisis, cleave to crisis, seek crisis. Indeed, it is a bit strange if an evangelical is not in crisis. Crisis is what brings emotion, and emotion is evidence of God. Lack of crisis, therefore, is sometimes viewed as a lack of godliness.

DARBY’s complicated schemes have trapped many evangelicals within the movement by giving pre-millenial dispensationalism the appearance of almost impenetrable complexity.

Stable thinking people who stumble into evangelicalism, or who inherited it, are ripe for the killing, ready to be beaten around by the psychopaths who have the gall to take the reigns of the movement. Bright people are forced to shut down their intellect.

Evangelicals are particularly prone to consumer anxiety. The anxiety created by advertising in consumer culture is similar to the anxiety and the vacuum created by advertising and promotion of consumer products.

Both tendencies can destroy psychological health and sense of identity for those who might have an identity which is secure apart from spiritual emotionalism. Inevitably, such secure people will be encircled by the evangelicals, if they are unfortunate enough to be placed in an evangelical setting, and have their psychological health hacked to bits. It is a rare person who can maintain a sense of identity in an evangelical group. That very sense of identity inspires jealousy, curiousity and envy at first, anger and hatred later. It is “self,” and therefore evil. It must be broken because it is a threat to the entire group.

All kinds of Bible verses are used to pummel the person with a solid identity, the person who seems “spiritually cold,” who sees no need for constant humiliation and crisis.

Within evangelicalism, certain people earn the right to eccentricity. The leaders have full leeway, and sometimes cultivate strange dress, strange speech mannerisms, odd habits. Laity can be eccentric, too, if they are merely quaint, or if their sense of identity is abjectly connected to something irrelevant like baseball cards. They are the lovable losers of evangelicalism.

PETER at camp had identity. He was attacked. Mercilessly. And the counselors didn’t intervene.

EVANGELICAL religion is methadone for alcoholics.

Why can evangelicals and alcoholics and sex addicts so easily understand each other? Because the structure of their psychology is so similar.

OBSERVATIONS after listening to an evangelical minister on the radio: he described six ways, six ingredients to a loving family. First, the parents must show affection for each other. In the context of this point, the pastor discussed a counselor. An incest victim--he emphasized here that the sex (with her real father, not a step-father) began at age 4, and although the girl was once powerless, now she and the mother were co-conspirators. This charge was leveled in an off-the-cuff-just-covering all the bases tone.

The pastor was antagonistic towards the girl. He mocked her scars on her wrist, saying if she really meant to kill herself, why didn’t she do it right? The girl told a story about a counselor who she had seen showing affection towards his wife, and how strange this was. The preacher said, “I am thinking, what does this have to do with incest?” Laughter.

The minister, the leader, is free to talk freely about sex. He gives it an air of complete seriousness when in fact it is completely gratuitous. The sex in evangelical sermons is no less gratuitous than the sex in the movies against which evangelical ministers preach.

Very few evangelicals rail against violence in movies. They don’t get violence in their sermons, just sex. They need it in their television and movies. Violence is only brought up when it can be reduced to graphic descriptions of the crucifixion.

The pernicious tendencies so flamboyantly exhibited in the less literate forms of evangelicalism are latent in the intellectualized, more mainstream evangelicalism.

Intellectualized evangelicalism is a shell. it is the dogmas without the life. If actual thought seeps into intellectualized evangelicalism, it becomes intolerable to the leaders. The leaders then seek to discredit the intellectuals.

The intellectual element usually discredits itself. By becoming an ordained Episcopal priest, by supporting community based movements in San Salvador, or by dabbling in liberation theology--they set themselves up to be evicted.

Intellectual exploration is extremely frightening to both evangelical leaders and followers. However, some leaders enjoy a certain amount of intellectual waywardness from equals, or from those they percieve to be superiors, as long as those intellectuals don’t start meddling with the flock.

The followers are unprepared to deal with intellectual deviance and find it far more frightening than the sins of drinking, smoking and illicit sex. To drift into drunkeness is to set one’s self up for a dramatic reconversion. To drift intellectually is to flirt with the flames of hell.

Evangelical leaders are more worldly than the followers, and all while they admonish their follows against worldliness, they never hesitate to use their worldy knowledge to gain the respect of the followers. The implication is that the leader is able to handle worldliness while the followers might be swayed by exposure to the world. Falwell loves country music, even though it is banned in the dormitories at his Liberty University, an obvious double-standard which nobody seemed to think unusual.

Up close, the leaders fall apart. Berntsen yelling at his wife. Roy Hope beating his son. Indeed, there is a fundamental, brazen dishonest required to lead an evangelical movement. Their must be a basic hypocricy given the impossible demands of the gospels literally interpreted. In order to lead an evangelical movement, one must not be bound by its tenets, and yet must be willing to enforce them--without the obvious dissonance driving one nuts.

The followers expect their leaders to be worldly and glamorous, and do not mind them exercising perogatives unavailable to them. The flaunting of those perogatives is, for some reason, only enjoyed by the followers. Rarely are perks questioned.

The worldliness of the leaders serves a valuable function for the followers: Ever vigilant, ever monitoring for evidence of their acceptability or evidence of their inferiority, followers view the material and worldly accoutrements of the leaders as verification of the correctness of the movement. This crude materialism is more brazen in lower forms of evangelicalism, but it is subtly evident in the higher forms as well. Followers vicariously share in the ostentation of the leaders, and they only bring up the matter in the most giggly, self-deprecating terms.

To the followers, humility in the leaders is surprising--even troubling, and smacks of the weaker forms of mainstream Protestantism.

The leader epitomizes what many of the followers want. The leader’s kitchen, his wife, is carefully scrutinized--when followers are actually allowed in the house--and its construction takes on an almost mystical importance to female followers. Or, they will use any material lack in the leader’s kitchen to dismiss their own material lack. Even the leader....

THEOLOGY and spirituality have little to do with evangelicalism much of the time. Consumerism often takes it over, and the same role is played by the leader in both--the idealized leader plays the role of the beautiful model in Calvin Klein ads-- the object of romantic longings, jealousy, the distant ideal, representing the ideal of unlimited savoir faire.

EVANGELICALISM breaks down in the countryside. It is more suited to the suburbs. There is too much reality in the countryside. Segregation is impossible. Roots run too deep for there to be rootless people. The roots are as strong as the roots of evangelicalism, or stronger, and those roots are intolerant of evangelical enchroachment. Evangelicalism loathes moribund small town churches, which it sees as works based social clubs. Crusaders come through and stir up momentary enthusiasm, but statis wins out in the end, for better or for worse.

Small town churches are service oriented, not entrepreneurial like suburban churches.

Ad hominem arguments are infallible to evangelicals. Likewise, they lend unlimited credibility to people who they see as co-religionists.

Forgiveness allows the forgiver to feel morally superior to the forgiven.

THE SINNER AS CELEBRITY: many get mileage out of the spectacular nature of their sins. The lurid description of past sins is a vital part of evangelical culture.

Examples:
--homosexual confessions I overheard at a retreat in CA
--Pastor John
--Tom Lee
--the boys in my cabin
--TEC--my inability to come up with a confession
--Tearful confessions in chapel at Northwestern

The need for lurid confessions lays the groundwork for quick forgiveness which has little regard for the victims of sexual sin.

Evangelicals are relieved when another sins badly. It alleviates their own guilt. Plus, they are overjoyed at the opportunity to exhibit forgiveness. They can forgive because the sinner has been, once again, just as he or she was at conversion, reduced to zero.

Evangelical forgiveness embraces the sinner readily and tightly. Soon the sinner learns that continued sinning is necessary to continue the attention.

Those who have been good evangelicals from birth envy the freedom of the serial backsliders.

Would it be too much of an act of imagination to ascribe habits of thought as diverse as consumerism, gay rights, animal rights, and fundamentalism, to a single evangelical root? Is not anxiety at the core of all of them? Shame? Perhaps the root cause is our rootlessness and our recent vintage as an immigrant nation.

Need I get to the root, or should I simply adopt evangelicalism as the model because it seems to be the most visceral? Is the evangelical impulse related to immigration? The instant acceptance is intoxicating.

APRIL 2 NEWSWEEK 1993--Article on three new books about evangelicalism.

Is evangelicalism influenced by hucksterism, or visa versa? Did Amway come first, or Swaggart? Or do they sprout from a third root?

There could be something in the immigrant experience which makes Americans more vulnerable to both hucksters and evangelicalism.

The trip over was a conversion, a seduction by posters and hucksters, a willingness by the immigrants to strip themselves clean, to begin new.

In search of a panacea: Evangelicalism, immigration, and advertising. The hazy, idealized picture in the distance is paramount, whether it is of heaven, or the land of milk and honey, or the perfectly satisfied consumer paradise.

Evangelicalism is a religion which provides continual new beginnings without having to move, as the restless immigrants did. Witness: The writings in the TRF history seminar which showed that people were just plain restless. That same restlessness is now expressed ideologically, spiritually.

The fourth generation, for whom immigration and religion hold no particular sway, looks instead to business plans and wonder health products, alcohol, movements which aren’t stale--to satisfy their longing to move towards new plateaus, new unattainable nivranas. Drawn in by a mirage.

The psychotic strain, the dissonance in the minds of fundamentalists, is intense. The need to maintain a facade is paramount.

I would argue that evangelicalism is not a mere religious choice, but a religious choice which masquerades as a legitimate path by which to reconcile ourselves with the random and eternal while in fact it is destructive, damaging and hurtful.

All humanist endeavors--from music to literature--are viewed with suspicion by evangelicals. Just as Nazi Germany found it necessary to neuter art, so evangelicals must tame and surround every expression of the human spirit.

Even the old hymns are too powerful and must be squelched.

The more I think and write about fundamentalism and evangelicalism, the less funny it becomes.

Just as alcohol can produce alcoholism, so religion tends to produce fundamentalism, the willful desire to impose ideals of faith on others.

Personality sketches of various evangelicals:

--the engineer. Admires evangelicalism for its simple truths. Is in turn revered for his knowledge and exempted from the requirement that he has to show emotion to be spiritual. His presence is an important validation of the creed.

--the wheeler dealer: more emotional, completely able to divorce business ethics from religion. Admired for doing so.

--The hip non-leaders, probably in evangelicalism for the great sex. His vitality is a turn-on for the women.

--the purists. Tend to be loners. The least respected. Here is where the lies get deep: “He really knows the scriptures.” He is infuriatingly right, and the hip often confess their contempt of him. They may repent, and then confess jealousy and admiration for the pure, but they soon return to contempt.

--the leader
--the tag-along

MANY evangelical sermons seem to only thinly mask a hatred and an anger at the God who doesn’t conform to the willful expectations of his own people.

Prayer is an act of power and of will, not an act of meditation. A great frustration for evangelicals is unanswered prayer, meaning they didn’t get what they wanted.

The anger of evangelicals at their god shows up in the violence of the anecdotes which illustrate the “all things work together for good” principle. Before the anecdote twists to the inevitable conclusion that God knew what he was doing all along (a conclusion which is left pitifully unsupported, probably because the conclusion wasn’t the purpose of the anecdote), the body of the anecdote is the anger section where the believer expresses his incredulity at the ridiculousness of what God is doing. This anger is temporary; the angry believer will eventually be proven wrong--not by reason, but by God’s mere force of will. This is just plain what God wanted.

THE SAME THING that makes people uncomfortable with gays is what makes them uncomfortable with evangelicals: The stripping of dignity, the fast digging into personal matters, the faux instant intimacy.

THE evangelical male is permitted no sexual outlets but marriage. Masturbation is forbidden, as is homosexuality and extra-marital sex of any sort.

Since it is assumed that evangelical males abide by these precepts, and many of them do their best, with those in the higher evangelical churches succeeded more often and failing more discretely, it follows that evangelical males are sexually deprived, and they are viewed as such by the movement.

The more fundamentalist the church, the more curious its members are about the relationship status of single males. The more fundamentalist the church, the sooner the topic of marriage arises.

Once a single male’s salvation is established, sexual status is the next most pressing matter on every evangelical mind. If he is not married, why?

One Baptist minister friend sent me clippings which argued that single males are a danger to society.

Indeed, single evangelical males are a sorry lot. Their married perrs club them mercilessly over the head with their marriedness, and the evangelical male more or less assents to his inferior status.

Evangelicals see males as being pulled along by irresistible sexual urges, urges so strong that evangelical males are easily forgiven for even the most egregious sexual transgressions. If possible, incest will be blamed on a seductive daughter or a cold wife. It might seem at first that a pastor telling an incest anecdote is painting the male as the aggressor, but not for long. All the criticism of the male comes quickly, in passing, and with justifications. The blame is then shifted to the female who “became a willing accomplice.”

It is up to women not to provoke male urges through lewd dress or through the unspoken assent to sex one gives by agreeing to get in a car alone with a male.

Evangelicalism is misogynist; yet its views of males are not complimentary either. Evangelicalism insists upon animalistic roles for each: The male the breeding stallion, the female the passive accomodator. These social dogmas are reinforced in evangelical sermons.

The Gay movement essentially glorifies the evangelical view of males as sexual incontinents, choosing instead to revel in male sexuality rather than repress it.

NOTHING is more exciting for the evangelical than the opportunity to express righteous indignation.

SIMPLICITY is of higher value for the evangelical than justice. The beauty of a simple rule is so alluring that it blinds the evangelical mind to injustices which might stem for the rule.

The evangelical mind responds with fury to attempts to introduce mral ambiguity. The battle of absolutes vs. relativism is at the heart of the evangelical psyche.

Any opportunity to club others over the head with an irrefutable truth is relished. It is an opportunity to vent anger at an uncooperative world. Grandpa measured people by the extent to which they “cooperated” with him.

Dissonance: An evangelical’s fury with the world is tempered by his gnawing sense of inferiority. It leaks out in unsightly bursts and in convoluted ways.

Debauchery and other forms of sin can, when exhibited by individuals, be tolerated. But give an evangelical the opportunity for protest and he will sieze it.

“See, even they know what’s right.” Ede finds encouragement from the debauched if they occasionally agree with her basic truths--she isn’t aware that the debauched usually aren’t opposites of evangelicals, but rather share the same mind.

A truly dramatic conversion might be not from alcoholism to evangelicalism, but from gentle agnosticism to evangelicalism.

Agnostics are most vulnerable at times of crisis. They are also the most confused once they get inside evangelicalism, once the crisis which got them there subsides. The intellectual truths will continue to grip them, but the emotional truths no longer hold sway. It is a one-way ratchet, evangelicalism, easy and exhilirating to enter, excruciating to leave.

The existence of former evangelicals is not acknowledged within evangelicalism. The “missing” people are those who have worked their way free of evangelicalism not by falling into sinful behavior, but by intellectually denying it. It is impossible to explain to an evangelical one’s movement away from the faith, especially if they are convinced you were saved. Talking about backsliding into drinking or promiscuous sex is permissible. Intellectual straying, however, frightens the intellectual to the core.

At Bible college, I was mystified when students I knew to be breaking all the moral rules would grow uncomfortable when I mistook their behavior as a sign that they might be interested in questioning the faith with me. But by chipping at the foundation of evangelicalism rather than simply rebelling, I placed myself outside the fold while they were still firmly ensconced.

REBELLION SERVES TO:

Provide an opportunity for a public emasculation of the rebel. It is secretly relished by other evangelicals, and can be a key to the “life” of the church. It works for both parties: The rebel gets to enjoy the rebellion, and the non-rebels get to enjoy a sense of superiority.

The cords which tie the rebel to evangelicalism are infinitely elastic. The farther they are stretched, the more suddenly and violently the rebel will return to his evangelical core.

The dichotomy between saint and rebel is personified in the evangelical leader. The internal division seems necessary for one to rise to the top of the evangelical movement. In fact, former rebels make the most effective evangelical leaders.

ETHICS TOWARDS CHILDREN: Recall the explicit and violent descriptions of the crucifixion at camp, the pornographic violence.

Evangelicalism is an ideology where the weak and dispossessed gather to suckle, as is alcohol. Adherents may switch from one brand of the ideology to another, but they are sucking from the same teat.

Evangelicals are inevitably less human. So, when Dad sees them, he wants them to leave. They smile and then they leave, much to everybody’s relief.

What about the persistence of the “denial of self” theme in evangelicalism?

The fact that forgiveness is granted so easily by evangelical followers is of great advantage to the leaders.

Evangelicals pounce on those who are flirting with the edges of their movement, while regarding with distant admiration those who are obviously immune to the evangelical impulse, those who have the wherewithal to not be affected by its cruel demands, who can view evangelicals with benevolence without looking for their approval in any way.

Prayer is the impotent willfulness of an evangelical.

Despite the appearance of moral uprightness, evangelicals have a propensity for petty dishonesty. They admire speeding. They love pranks that push the edge.

Evangelicals thus operate at a childlike moral level, even Bible professors. It is in the smaller moral questions that evangelicals find the thrill of moral relativism and ambiguity. It is allowed them there. Eating too much chocolate, watching soaps, reading the Inquirer. Having shut off their inquiry on a higher plane, the lower plane--masturbation, for example--can become a field of passionate inquiry.

The evangelical phrase “to become a Christian” emphasizes essence over acts. It is built upon a belief that what one does springs from some single internal cause, just as gay ideologists postulate a single deep cause.

Emphasis on essense makes it possible to dismiss acts of good by people who aren’t evangelical.

Emphasis on essence makes it easier to accept one’s faults as abberations rather than as essential.

Empasis on essence provides an eternal, morally powerful black and white outlook.

Sanctioned intimacy between men is one of the great attractions of evangelicalism. The intense opposition to homosexuality creates breathing space for intimacy between males to become intense in some evangelical circles. Sometimes it is misogynist. With such a disregard for women, sexual contact with them becomes spiritually and emotionally unrewarding. The fellowship of men becomes more intimate and intense the more misogynist and homophobic the reality.

NOVEMBER 17th transcribing of notes:

It is best to view evangelicalism as a mild form of totalitarianism, a fragmented mass movement with an imagined Jehovah at its head.

Why are canned prayers anathema to evangelicals? They seem more meant for the audience than for God. They are impersonal. Spontaneous prayers are an affirmation that God is personal and near. Any treatment of the diety as less than a knowable and immediate quantity, anything less than friendly, is frightening.

As authoritarianism goes, evangelicalism is not bad. Its impulses, however, are undemocratic, and it views institutions of democracy with contempt. Principles of “Liberty” and “Freedom” are held high; the institutions put in place in the name of those concepts are usually loathed. Civil court. The Bill of Rights. Civil Rights. Rights of the Accused.

Evangelicalism has a totalitarian temperament which is learning to use democracy for its own ends, but holds the system in comtempt.

The root premise of parliamentary democracy--pluralism--runs counter to the the impulses of evangelicalism. Compromises, the notion that the implementation of any single idea in its undiluted form is unhealthy, those thoughts do not occur to the evangelical.

Some evangelicals stay in a child-like state of ethical development, still rebelling against an invisible authority they imagine to be very large.

Evangelicals and gays use the discovery of the shared ideology to justify instant (and false) rapport which is seen to transcend the rapport of those not sharing in the secret. The rapport is insisted upon. It is sexual, our dirty little secret. It places everybody else outside the know.

Idea: Advertisers and fundamentalists have slipped into the general consciousness of the public to fulfill the roles the philosophers once played: To define the ideals and archetypes. The need for consumption in our economy dovetails with the archetypes created by the media and by fundamentalism--which create anxiety, the same sort of anxiety which Kierkegaard links to the tension between man’s essence and his existence.

The media has hijacked our notion of essence by slipping us new archetypes--the hip.

HAVE you ever watched a batch of evangelicals at a restaurant set up the waitress in a postion of authority, then goad her, torment her, beg for her approval, in the manner of children? She is puzzled to become an incarnation of their God, and is relieved when they leave.

FUNDAMENTALISTS at least have a sense of humor about their own beliefs, as much as they lack humor in other areas. Liberals, however, are excruciatingly righteous and humorless.

Evangelicals no longer bother to argue the fine points of faith--their response to modernism and to criticism is to backpedal, backpedal, backpedal from specific theologies--and to take refuge in emotion, which is invulnerable to refutation. How can you doubt another’s emotion? The retreat from facts to emotion is religion’s strategic response to an onslaught of unfriendly evidence.

Evangelicals fear that they may be wrong, like the child who must lie to save his skin or his perception of himself.

Necessary, agreed upon and vital lies lie at the core of the fundamentalist’s faith. He is engaged in a sometimes genial conspiracy against the truth--and legions will come to his aid if the truth threatens to come through.

Gullibility is a high virtue to an evangelical. Because so much of it is required to remain a member of the faith, it is cultivated throughout their lives-in medical matters, a fundamentalist is much more likely to follow quacks who claim to have a simple answer to complex questions. They will ignore all evidence to the contrary and view doubters with anger and suspicion. Why? Not because they actually believe in the cure, but because they doubt--they doubt the medical quack cure as much as they doubt their faith, and their reflexive response is to seek evidence from the outside to butress what they wish to be true. Those who don’t provide that evidence are a threat to the fundamentalist’s core.

The fundamentalist and the alcoholic respond to an identical anxiety: They seek refuge in ideology or chemical stupor from a vast should be.

The fundamentalist, by escaping into what appears to be a simple imperative, an elemental faith, hopes to pin down and formulate what is imperative for him, his should be, should do. But what he is addicted to, what is inherent in him, is frustration with himself, which now is expressed in frustration with the world as it is. Fundamentalism promises to place him in the right and most of the rest of the world in the wrong. This sense of frustration, which has been with him for his entire life, now is at least aimed outwards.

Yet, the impossible demands of the faith insure that in his darker moments he will realize his abject inadequacy--in rare moments of honesty, he will see the chasm between his life and the demands of the Sermon on the Mount, and he will turn away, turn back to railing against the ugly world, if only to divert his gaze from his sorry self.

The more a fundamentalist rails against hypocricy, the more passionatley he is devoted to it as a first principle. Nobody with an appreciation for the difficulty of living the faith would dare lash out against those who faile to fulfill it--they would immediatly realize the impossibility of fulfilling it themselves and would be appropriately humble.

IS THERE not a theme in evangelicalism of arrested personal development?

Evangelicals fear dignity; a dignified, self-assured person will have the respect of individual evangelicals--until, much to their delight, he is torn apart by a talented minister, his sin of self-sufficiency made evident, and his dignity stripped--then the evangelical becomes intoxicated by a sense of adequacy, even superiority. What a relief not to have to respect, to be permitted to despise who one fears! How exhilirating to taste equality!

PART of the pathology of evangelicalism is the need to be the best--the need to have a unique corner on the truth and gather others with you in that corner.

THE EVANGELICAL yearning for a past, and the contempt for the present--is really a frustration at the stubborn refusal of the present world to acknowledge their truths. For if they were to really look at the past, they would find precious little evidence that their truths ever held sway amongst any save a few equally frustrated clergy. But it is usually safe to claim historical evidence because most people are too lazy to look it up!

Evangelical humor is the humor of a lech. It is a humor of the obvious and the uncomfortable.

The earnest Chinese are perfect victims for evangelicals: Self-abasing, literal, devoted, obedient.

An evangelical moves with an exaggerated jauntiness, each movement stage, as in a stage whisper, each step, each expression. In the quiet of their home, they have none of these movements, for their movements in public are a complete reaction to others. In the absence of others, there is the absence of expression.

GRANDPA grasped fundamentalism as a route to intimacy, since intimacy eluded him on all other fronts. It is an intimacy which requires agreement. It is an over-verbalized form of intimacy.

CHRISTIANS fear death like grooms fear a wedding: At bottom, they know that the fantasy far exceeds the reality. Perhaps they sense that it has all been a delusion. What they fear most is the death of their most cherished delusion: heaven.

EVANGELICAL spinster women.

When one moves the center of gravity from this life to a hypothetical next life, the vitality is sucked out of this life. To many, this is a relief.

The roots of the fundamentalist rage against evolution has nothing to do with the truth of the matter. At is roots, the rage arises from the worry that man might be dethroned from his pedestal and might not be the center of the world.

SECOND GENERATION FUNDAMENTALISTS: It is the curse of the second generation of fundamentalists to become the ministers of an ideology which was merely expedient to the first generation. As the need for the ideology falls away, the first generation, which, if it ever believed the ideology, at leasts remembers pre-ideological times, sometimes becomes heretical in the eyes of the second generation, which has known the ideology since birth.

Thus, the second generation exhibits zeal beyond the first generation--which was so busy making ends meet it had little time for philosophizing. The first generation only knew that a personal God, a conviction that hard work would see one through, and a solid nuclear family best addressed their needs at the time.

The conversions of the second generation fundamentalists lack the drama of the first, but they are more dependent upon the ideology for their security.

IS THERE a difference between evangelicalism and fundamentalism? For those who are familiar with neither, the differences might seem slight. The two share an emphasis on a personal salvation experience.

Yet, many evangelicals would object to being called fundamentalist, and many fundamentalists would object to being labeled evangelical.

The difference between fundamentalism and evangelicalism is largely a matter of degree. Evangelicals have more flexibility and are more likely to be involved with the world. Evangelicals place less emphasis on separation from the world. Evangelicals are less likely to insist upon complete ideological conformity in theology and politics.

Jimmy Carter is an evangelical, but cannot be considered a fundamentalist.

For all practical purposes, without regard for what they prefer to be called themselves, all fundamentalist Christians are evangelical, but not all evangelical Christians are fundamentalist.

Fundamentalism, as the term’s meaning has evolved, has come to include reactionary elements within faiths other than protestant Christianity. Evangelicalism always refers to people within the Christian faith.

It is possible to find evangelicals who are politically liberal. It is virtually impossible to find fundamentalists who are politically liberal.

The characteristics of the evangelical mind outlined here are not limited to those who have conservative political views. As we shall see, the evangelical mind is restless. Conformity is rare. The basic commonality of all evangelicals is simple: They believe a conversion experience is necessary. Beyond that simple but dominant requirement, evangelicals have little theological unity and even less political unity.

Fundamentalists are more unified in their beliefs than are evangelicals. Despite that unity, the passion of fundamentalists for splitting theological and political hairs in the name of purity leads them into endless factional battles, battles which keep most of their churches and educational institutions quite small. The larger the evangelical church, the less likely it is to be fundamentalist.

To confuse the issue, some fundamentalists have taken to consider the term evangelical to be an insult, and some evangelicals object to being thrown in the same bin with fundamentalists.

Just because a church has the word “evangelical” in its title doesn’t mean it is evangelical. The theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, for example, is sacramental and doesn’t require people to have a conversion experience. Even its own theologians wouldn’t describe the ELCA as evangelical in the current popular sense of the word.

Fundamentalists take appearances seriously. Long hair in men and sleazy dress in women are openly denounced in fundamentalist churches as certain evidence of one’s need for conversion. Evangelicals, meanwhile, are less likely to make a large issue out of appearance, and can go so far as to pride themselves in their acceptance of almost any external appearance as long as one has undergone the required conversion experience.

Fundamentalists make an effort to separate from popular culture. Evangelicals are more prone to immerse themselves in popular culture, and not always just to influence it for their ends.

One of the foremost scholars of fundamentalism, George Marsden, differentiates fundamentalism from evangelicalism by saying that a fundamentalist is “an evangelical who is mad about something.”

For the purposes of this work, it will be assumed that fundamentalists are a small faction within evangelicalism marked off primarily by their devotion to doctinal purity and separation from the world.

This work argues that, beyond the basic requirement of a conversion experience, evangelicals are characterized by a particular temperament and a culture which transcends theology. In fact, familiarity with evangelical culture may be more important to understanding evangelicalism than understanding evangelical theology.

The basic imperative: The definition of an evangelical is one who believes that one “becomes a Christian” through a conversion experience. That conversion can be public, as in going forward at a Billy Graham crusade; a private contemplative decision; or, a sudden flash of insight as one is stuck in traffic. What distinguishes evangelicals from all other stripes of Christianity is their belief that every person is either saved or unsaved, either heaven-bound or doomed to hell, and that there is a particular moment when a person converts from one to the other.

To spread the gospel:

Free will: Conversion is considered to be a conscious decision. In some evangelical sects, that decision is validated by feelings of well-being or euphoria, in others the decision arrives in a moment of sober reflection. The nature of the conversion can be a metter of doctrine, but it usually more a matter of style. Some sects believe that you were chosen by God at the beginning of time to undergo such a conversion, others believe conversion is an act of utter freedom. All evangelical sects believe that conversion can happen as the result of persuasion by another.

The question of eternal security: In some sects the decision to become a Christian is seen as irrevocable, in others it is not. What if a born-again Christian commits murder? Is he still going to heaven? Some would argue that the murder is proof that the original decision wasn’t authentic. Others argue that even though his original decision might have been authentic, his act of murder invalidated it and he will suffer in hell. Still others would argue that murder, like any other sin, is covered by God’s grace as long as one has accepted Christ, even if the act occurs after the conversion. The question, that of eternal security, is a source of endless debate amongst evangelical sects. Those who oppose the notion of eternal security fear it might give license. Those who defend eternal security do not believe there are limitations upon the power of the blood of Jesus to wipe away one’s sins, no matter how hienous.

All sins are equal: There is a sense in evangelicalism that every sin from stealing bubble gum to murder is equal in the eyes of God. Some evangelicals, usually the younger more idealistic ones, insist that to even think about an act is to commit it. Thus, imagining adultury is just as bad in the eyes of God as committing it.

All are judged on one criteria: Although some evangelicals make room in heaven for those who have never heard the gospel, most evangelical groups are adamant that those who do not undergo an evangelical conversion are going to hell. An exemplary Roman Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist, even a devoted member of a mainline Christian church are all destined for hell if they have not accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior.

A motive for linguistic study: Most evangelicals believe that access to the Bible makes one responsible for one’s own salvation. Since the Bible is readily available in English, not only in bookstores but in the dresser drawers of every motel in this country, evangelicals consider every speaker of English to be responsible to accept or reject the gospel. The same cannot be said for remote tribes in South America or Africa, especially those with no written language. Thus, armies of evangelical missionaries have been trained in the field of linguistics, in the science of breaking down a language, creating an alphabet, a dictionary, and finally, in producing a written translation of the New Testament. Sometimes the Old Testament is translated as well, but it is the New Testament which contains the gospel message, so that is always the top priority. It is also important to teach the people to read in their newly transcribed language.

The need to reach all peoples: It is commonly thought amongst evangelicals that the Second Coming of Christ will not occur until all peoples have had the opportunity to hear the gospel. Thus, although the need to save individual souls is a powerful motivation, the need to fulfill the Bible’s requirements for the Second Coming of Christ is another powerful motive to translate the Bible into every known tongue. Once the Bible is translated and published in a language, then the people who speak that language have been given their chance to accept or reject the gospel. Whether they actually convert or not is their problem. The most important task of the missionary has been fulfilled when the Bible is translated into a language, and the people have been given the ability to read the Bible in that language.

The obligation to persuade: Given the terrible gravity of the choice each human must make to accept or reject the gospel of Jesus, evangelicals have an obvious ethical obligation to convert the unsaved. In fact, consistent evangelicals might be expected to spend every ounce of their energy and every moment of their time attempting to save the unconverted.

Finding ways out: Given the impossibility of fulfilling the demands of the faith without becoming an ostracized zealot, the bulk of evangelicals are forced to find ways around the obvious imperatives of their faith. Most do so through laziness. The thoughtless do so through denial and a benign hypocricy. The more thoughtful avoid the harsh demands of the evangelical imperative by exhibitng a “witness by example,” seeking to live their lives in such an exemplary manner that the unsaved will become insatiably curious about what it is that gives them their goodness and peace. Only a few evangelicals attempt to devote their lives directly to the conversion of others. Those few are viewed with outward admiration, but mostly suppressed irritation by evangelicals who wish not to be reminded of the stringent demands of the faith, as well as their refusal to lift a finger to fulfill those demands.

Hating their own saints: The bulk of evangelicals can be safely considered non-observant of the basic demand of their faith that they work to convert the unsaved. When actual missionaries or zealots show up in their midst, usually asking for money to do their evangelistic work, non-observant evangelicals can barely contain their resentment. Even evangelicals who believe firmly in the evangelical imperative can be heard to groan when it is time for “missionary Sunday,” or a visit to their home by a preacher or a missionary. These missionaries are not so muck lauded for their efforts as they are resented for revealing the bulk of evangelicals as hypocrites. Their slide shows are dreaded, not so much because they are long and dull (they are often neither long nor dull), but because they make evangelicals who have done absolutely nothing to convert others feel guilty.

Converted drunks: Evangelicals point towards converted drunks as evidence of the miraculous transforming power of conversion. But the conversion from drunkeness to evangelicalism is nothing more than a conversion from one form of intoxication to another. The more abject the drunk, the more likely he is to convert to an evangelical sect with an emotional emphasis. Members of such sects openly seek to “become drunk with the spirit,” a new form of inebriation less threatening to the public safety than getting drunk, but intoxication nonetheless.

The cream doesn’t rise: Evangelicalism’s most visible leaders tend to be so obviously unsavory that non-evangelicals excuse the movement as an entertaining side-show. Who would follow such people but rubes? But it isn’t only the uneducated, gullible and dispossessed who fill the pews of evangelical churches in large numbers. It is the middle class. It is the corporate drones. It is the rootless suburbanites. It is professors, doctors, scientists and engineers. Despite the crass appearance of the evangelical leaders, their following is a solid and representative slide of American culture. So compelling are the basic truths of evangelicalism that vast numbers of educated people are enthralled, not repelled, by leaders who, to non-evangelicals, seem palpably fraudulent.

Qualities needed for one to rise: A potential evangelical leader must be able to convince himself that he is able to fulfill the virtually impossible demands of the evangelical faith well enough to be justified in berating his followers for not doing the same. This requires either the unsophisticated, guileless simplicity of a Billy Graham, the snake-like coldness of a Pat Robertson, the macho bluster of a Jerry Falwell, or the brazen showmanship of a Jimmy Swaggart. Thoughtfulness and introspection are powerful impediments to the rise of an evangelical entrepreneur.

Raw numbers matter most: The underlying drive in the evangelical church is for greater and greater numbers of converts, each convert being of equal value. The number of conversions brought about by a ministry, a single preacher, or an individual believers is evidence of the degree of God’s blessing on that person or ministry. Caring for parishoners, caring for the sick, changing society for the better, feeding the hungry, all other aims that one might expect of a Christian believer, fall into a distant second place to the need to convert more and more souls and have them under the roof of your church on Sunday morning.

But all are not equal: Most evangelical ministers would insist that they view all conversions as equal, but some are surprisingly willing to admit that the conversion of a rich person is more to be desired due to that person’s ability to “further the Kingdom of God” by donating lots of money to evangelical Christian ministries. The rich person in personal crisis is low-hanging fruit to an evangelical entrepreneur.

Well aware of the weakness: Evangelical ministers know they are vulnerable to the charge that they are concerned with conversions at the expense of all else. Many ministers respond to such criticisms by repeating that the harsh demands of the evangelical creed demand such an emphasis. A few ministers and evangelists respond by setting up charitable organizations. These organizations lack the convicted support of the laity, however, and when they are supported, the trumpetings of self-congratulation far outweigh the actual good done. Many such ministries are later exposed as shams. Whether or not these evangelical ministries feed the hungry or shelter the homeless, they are viewed with quiet suspicion by those in command of evangelical culture and theology. More often than not, such charitable ministries serve merely to deflect criticism from evangelical movements that are otherwise heartless and unconcerned with human suffering.

A profound laziness: The emphasis on conversion of others may be a demand which is impossible to fulfill, but it is an article of faith which greatly simplifies the evangelical’s life. Conversion is all that matters, but the obligation to actively seek the conversion of others can easily be farmed out to ministries or missionaries, professionals at that sort of thing, through contributions or, more rarely, time. With the obligation to convert disposed of, the evangelical layperson must only concern himself with being good. Goodness in daily life is no more complicated than upright personal behavior or personal piety, abstinence from vice and a benign, sunny kindness towards all. To indluge in debates on the greater issues of the time, or to get one’s hands dirty with community service, or service to the poor, or service to the handicapped, are not merely unpleasant tasks to the evangelical, but they are utterly peripheral, irrelevant, unnecessary, even counter-productive.

Discovering God the Father: The most potent clues to the role of God the Father in the evangelical mind come not from any particular theology, but from the role God plays in spontaneous evangelical prayer, in popular evangelical literature, and in evangelical sermons.

God the Father as Jehovah: The basic image of God the Father in the evangelical mind comes from the Old Testament vision of God as Jehovah. It is Jehovah who required the shedding of innocent blood in payment for sin throughout the Old Testament. It is Jehovah who demanded that Abraham sacrifice Isaac, only to withdraw his demand when Abraham had the drawn knife over the bound son. it is Jehovah who sent his only son Jesus, a perfect innocent, as a sacrifice for the sins of humans. Although that act of selfless charity shows a softer side of Jehovah towards humans, it also shows an unimaginable ruthlessness towards Jesus, his only son. The mystery of Jehovah’s obvious ruthlessness is not often explored out loud in evangelical circles, but in the evangelical mind, God the Father remains a fearful figure, a tyrant who be either bloody or benevolent according to his whim. He is best approached through Jesus, his martyred son.

God the Father as Ward Cleaver: The tone of spontaneous evangelical prayers directed towards God the Father is friendly, yet fearful, as if one is asking for a higher allowance from a good old Dad who has just come home from the office and is reclining in the living room with his pipe and a newspaper. The requests made in such prayers can be frankly material, and are preceded by blandly perfunctory fawning and flattery.

God the Father as George Washington: The cold, but wise look on George Washington’s face in Gilbert Stuart’s portrait captures vital elements of the evangelical view of God the Father. he is silent. He knows best. He is unapproachable. He is dignified and inscrutable. he casts a quiet gaze over the classroom, ever-present, all-knowing, seemingly benevolent; yet, the more sensitive school children know that underneath the waxen exterior lies the soul of a ruthless warrior. The popular stories of Washington’s gentleness and goodness are fables an omnipotent leader who might show an occasional soft side, but whose benevolence can never be taken for granted. The same can be said for God the Father.

God the Father as head coach: The prayers of lay evangelicals reveal a belief in a God the Father who, like a junior high football coach, puts in the runts when the score gets out of hand, encourages, cajoles, punishes, is distant, but once in a while shows a soft spot. Because his team always wins, and has for centuries, and will continue to win for centuries more, the coaching methods of God the Father, although they may at times be unfathomable or cruel, are never open to question. In fact, the only comments on the coach’s actions the players and their parents allow themselves are quiet, obsequious attempts to prove that each of the coach’s decisions was necessary and wise.

Comrades: Since the fall of communism as a vital ideology and world political power, evangelicals have turned towards homosexuals as scapegoats. The gay community, such as it is, is painted as evil incarnate. But the two movements are of the same mold. “Coming out” is not so different from “getting saved.” Evangelicalism and gay culture both offer a pre-made identity for the disaffected, rootless and shamed. Both movements thrive on a sense of persecution by the outside world. Both offer safety and acceptance to those willing to conform to a set of simple dogmas. The doctrine that one is born gay and that when one “comes out” one is merely acknowledging publically what has been predetermined by genetics, is little more than the doctrine of predestination dressed in drag.

The rapture as revenge: The rapture, when the saved will be swept up to heaven and the unsaved will be left behind to face the Great Tribulation, is not an event evangelicals look forward to with great joy. In fact, they seem as mortified of it as they are of death. What they relish about the rapture is the violent vindication of their beliefs. The mockers, the sophisticated, the intellectuals, the cynics, the ambiguous, the agnostics, the athiests, most liberals, the homosexuals--all will be left behind to suffer plagues and torment. The folk literature of the rapture is a catalog of hatred, a not-so-supressed relishing of the medieval tortures reserved for those left behind. It is only with such revenge firmly in mind that the notion of the rapture is treasured by the evangelical.

Some unexplored topics:
Evangelical hypochondria--arises from an emphasis on personal suffering.
An evangelical faces death
Death’s role in evangelical life
The effects of postponing life until after death
Waiting around for eternal bliss
Fear of the world

Where it is purest: The evangelical faith can be found at its most basic at Bible camps and Bible colleges. Elsewhere, the basic ideology is diluted, or at least concealed.

Funerals for the saved: A funeral for an evangelical has little room for grief. The deceased has gone to heaven and we will be with him soon. Mourning is a sign of a weak faith. In fact, there are evangelical funerals which suceed at denying grief altogether. The only tears shed are those of maudlin women.

It isn’t difficult to see that the smiles at these funerals do not come from the depths of the soul. They are the same wide-eyed, frightened, semi-convinced smiles one sees on the faces of the German masses, recorded in grainy black and white in the mid-thirties, as their Fuhrer speeds by in an open car.

Brazen theft of a term: To the world at large, to be called Christian menas that one identifies with one of the thousands of sects throughout the world which have their historical origins in the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. To the evangelical, however, the word Christian means one thing: That a person has undergone an evangelical conversion. Therefore, an assumption which might seem bizarre to much of the world goes without saying in evangelical circles: Most Roman Catholics are not Christians, nor are most mainstream protestant churhc-goers, nor are Orthodox believers, unless-by some miracle--they have, despite the depravity of their church, undergone an evangelical conversion. All evangelical Christians have at some time accepted Jesus, and therefore, all evangelicals at some time in their life have become a Christian. To an evangelical, there is no such thing as a Christian who is not a convert.

To be raised Christian: To be raised in the evangelical tradition raises the problem of how a person can convert into a religion he was born into. Evangelical ministers emphasize that being born into the church means nothing. You must experience some moment when it all becomes real, when even the lifelong evangelical converts to that which he has been a part of all along. For the evangelical who has never rebelled, the effort to conjure up an authentic conversion can result in years of frustration. Not only must they convince their fellow evangelicals that they converted, but they must convince themselves.
By late middle age, most evangelicals quietly put the struggle to come up with convincing emotional experiences on the shelf. Just as one’s sexual urges might decline with age, so do all but the more feverish evangelical’s needs for perpetual crisis and resolution. One suspects that many of the older evangelicals regard such a decline in the passions with relief.

The role of rebellion: Rebellion, in the form of wicked living is understood to be an invigorating and desirable part of the evangelical life-cycle. Evangelicals are comfortable with rebellion into loose living because such a rebellion concedes the truth of that which is rebelled against. In fact, their is an unofficial rite-of-passage of rebellion in the evangelical. A truly racous rebellion makes one’s eventual conversion more dramatic and convincing.

The problem with just plain old good people: The congenitally good person, the person who has never felt the need to rebel, is a tormented sould in the evangelical church. He gets no attention. he might struggle to create some sort of emotional conversion experience, but even then, because he was never really that deviant, he is prone to suspicions, even in his own mind, that his conversion was fraudulent. The personality traits those outside evangelicalism might regard as signs of mental health are seen as signs of moribundity by fellow evangelicals. You must fall away to be welcomed back with true enthusiasm. The return of the prodigal son is always more valued than the quiet, long-rendered service of the faithful son.

Keeping alive one’s doubts: It is in the interest of the evangelical church to keep alive the doubts of the converted as to the authenticity of their conversion. Evangelicals have several gimmicks which eventually rob the conversion of the finality it was alleged to have when it occurred. For the thinkers, there is the theological gambit of requiring that one show evidence in one’s life of a conversion. For the backslidden, there is clear evidence that there conversion didn’t stick--or wasn’t authentic in the first place.

Eternal security: Evangelicals have a love-hate relationship with the doctrine of eternal security. They want it to be true because they wish to have the matter of their eternal fate wrapped up. But they resist the notion of eternal security when they see that others who claim to have been converted no longer measure up. Then they realize that without the threat of hell, they have handed over the only club which brings compliance.

Friendship with an evangelical: A friendship with an evangelical is at its peak at the very beginning. Evangelicals can be immediatley open, friendly and seemingly guileless. They are nice. They are eager to meet new people. If their friendliness is returned, especially by a non-evangelical, they are exhilirated. However, the friendliness can only go on so long before a larger issue must either come to the fore, or, through its supression, become an obstacle to a deeper friendship. Are you saved? If not, why not?

Evangelical restaurant behavior: The evangelical is socially anxious, a duck out of water when out of his evangelical confines. He projects his fear of the world onto the world. Notice when a group of evangelicals gathers at a restaurant. They are loud. They are chattery. They pray for their meal conspicuously. They have no sense of dignity, and they are not willing to concede dignity to anybody else in the room. If you listen closely, it will become apparent that their laughter is anxious laughter. They are actually scared of the waiter. They usually don’t have the dignity necessary to politely ignore the wait staff and let them do their job.

Rebellion and reconciliatioin: Some evangelicals so enjoy the exhiliration and praise which comes from coming back into the fold after having lapsed into sin that they repeat the process every so often. meet one of these yo-yo’s on the street and you won’t know where they’re at at the moment. Will they want to go out for a beer, or more likely a dozen beers, or will they be ready to talk intimately about their walk with Christ? You won’t end up talking about Christ over beers, that much is certain. Again, such a chance meeting is time for sending out feelers, plumbing the shallows, picking up clues which might show if this person is in the afterglow of his most recent conversion, or in a state of careening rebellion. It will be one or the other, for the only demant the perpetual convert has from life is that he be intoxicated by something. The process of discovering which intoxicant is in favor at the moment is one of seduction. If the convert’s repeat performance cause him to wear out his welcome at one church, which doesn’t happen often given the vicarious joy evangelicals take in the sins of others, he can easily move onto another church where he can start fresh and even milk new mileage out of old sins.

A secret club: One is evangelical the way others are gay, or members of any secret club. You meet a new person. You have rapport. Your eyes meet. The thought occurs, is this person a Christian? You send out feelers. You throw the name of God into the conversation. You toss out the name of your church. You mention the last conversation you had with the Lord. If the stranger is an evangelical Christian, he will pick up these cues, wink back, and soon both will be swept away by the exhiliration of full disclosure. You feel as if you have known this person all your life. You feel total trust, total ease in this person’s presence. It is a conspiratorial brotherhood, an almost sexual consumation.
Such clandestine intimacy, although it is exhilirating, is based upon a sense of shame, both in gay and evangelical circles. Of what are evangelicals ashamed that causes them to whisper, hint, nudge, send out feelers, speculate, size up, and then, once fear is overcome, dive headlong into a counterfiet intimacy which is at its peak in its first moments, but quickly loses its fizz?

Evangelical lack of faith: What is faith to an evangelical? The complete unquestioning belief of “things not seen.” But faith as a trust in one’s self and others, faith in the future, faith in the goodness of people, faith in the safe nature of the world, faith in the ability of one’s self to unfold, faith as a character trait rather than a belief, of that sort of faith evangelicals know nothing. Indeed, the evangelical finds such a faith to be offensive--if only because the presence of it in a person makes their conversion unlikely.

Effects of the lack of faith on creativity: The dearth of great art, or even of quality art, produced by evangelicals might be explained by their inablity to start a long-term project, a painting, a novel, a piece of music, and see it through without knowing exactly how the project will conclude. Great art is produced by an act of faith, by leaping into the unknown guided only by the powers of one’s subjectivity. A lack of this faith might explain why evangelicalism produces illustrators, but never artists. The most prolific evangelical writers are its theologians, who produce volumes by the dozen, but do so from the safety of their determination to discover nothing contrary. To take a leap of faith into the intellectual or artistic unknown is perversely interpreted by the evangelical mind as a lack of faith.

Show me: Despite arguing that faith is the “evidence of things unseen,” evangelicals seize upon visible possible evidence of their belief with inordinate enthusiasm. Miracles, unlikely conversions, found wallets, healed hernias, vanished tumors, unexplainable gaps in science--the evangelical mind grasps any possible sympathetic supernatural phenomena with tenacity, as if to say “I require evidence from things seen to build my faith in things unseen.” This feverish grasping suggests that the evangelical is desperate to find evidence for what he deep down fears is only hypothetical.

Stability as evil: The evangelical rages against “healthy-mindedness” and other modern, secular notions of psychological health. Healthy-mindedness achieved outside of evangelical conversion is an evil deciet. Instability, loose living, emotional volatility, even a life of crime make one ripe for conversion--a “healthy mind” does not. A stable existence without Christ can only be a deceit. The unstable are miserable enough to convert, but the stable aren’t miserable and easily shrug off evangelical appeals.

Avoid the unscrutable: The evangelical simply cannot understand the peace of mind of the stable non-evangelical. His calm must be a ruse. It must be a lie. Calm without Christ isn’t possible. Such strength in the unsaved is ignored and denied. The evangelical gravitates towards weakness. Alcoholics, addicts, the careening and the compulsive, make more attractive targets for the evangelical than the calm, thinking secularist.

Perpetual pursuit of panacea: The evangelical mind seeks for every little problem in life a solution as simple as his own conversion. This applies to health matters, on down to practical household matters. The evangelical is prone to cure-all solutions and moves from one cure to the next without paying much notice to the failure of the last. It is the act of conversion to the next great hope which is their intoxicant. Aloe vera, vitamin C, garlic, chiropractors, reflexologists, and person or movement claiming to provide a single cure will gain a receptive hearing from the evangelical, whose mind is restlessly and forever searching for the single cause and the single cure. As each panacea wears out its novelty, it is discarded. Even if it had some limited merit, the main purpose of each new panacea is in the placebo effect it has on the perpetual convert: “It has changed my life,” they say of the next new substance, devotional book, oil additive, pill, anything which solves one of life’s problems--and, just as importantly, is undiscovered by the masses. The new item provides a platform for a new conversion. For that reason, even if it fails or is proven to be complete snake oil, discarded panaceas hold a soft spot in the evangelicals heart. No, it didn’t work, but what a joy it was to have hope!

Evangelical business tendencies
Evangelical farming styles
Sensible evangelical businessmen

Exempt from the rules: The evangelical, having earned the ultimate prize--eternal life--by a simple decision, sometimes comes to expect other of life’s prizes to come his way as effortlessly. Evangelicals seeking adoption of a child, for example, have been heard to ask others to pray to “soften the hearts” of the authorities to waive waiting periods and home studies. Convicted criminals who convert to evangelicalism are often the beneficiaries of efforts by fellow evangelicals to shorten their sentences, regardless of the seriousness of the crime. The assumption is that if God forgives so dramatically and easily, certainly man, represented by “the authorities,” should follow suit and recognize that the convert has been completely rehabilitated. Failure to accept a conversion as evidence of rehabilitation is seen as persecution.

The cure for social anxiety
The cure for the need to belong
the desire to feel superior
Conversion as a stripping of dignity
Conversion as rape
Conversion as seduction
Conversion as validation

Frustration: From the evangelical pulpit there pours a palpable, deep undercurrent of frustration. Frustration with the world, for its refusal to adopt the simple truths of evangelicalism; frustration with the imperfect evangelical church, for its inability to spread the gospel; frustration with the people in the pews, for doing nothing about the imperative to spread the gospel; frustration with the preacher himself, for being so ineffective; and finally, most importantly, and most deeply: Frustration with God for doing nothing when he could so easily wave his wand over all these problems.

Acceptable criticism: The evangelical mind can be ferociously critical of the evangelical world. The frustration most evangelicals feel is easily directed towards the world they know best: The evangelical subculture. One can find more poignant, accurate, and human criticisms from the evangelical world itself than one will hear from secular outsiders, who tend to miss the point. Internal criticisms are an integral part of evangelical life, but are only acceptable coming from people whose devotion to the evangelical faith is unquestioned. Listen to an evangelical preacher. Imagine that he is instead a secular critic of evangelicalism. You will hear devastating indictments of the movement coming from its own pulpits.

Protestants who keep protesting: The more fundamentalist the evangelical church, the more it tends to split into ever smaller groups over theological minutea. Fundamentalist churches are more likely to refuse any uniting central authority, believing instead in the final authority of the local church. Although the outward justifications for church splits generally center on this or that interpretation of scripture, such battles usually stem from intensely personal feuds. Fundamentalist churches can divide themselves into extinction, unless one of the divisions is fortunate enough to give rise to a talented entrepreneurial preacher, in which case they return to vitality and growth, if only for the duration of that preacher’s tenure.

Grow or die: It is assumed that an evangelical church which is not growing is dying. When evangelical ministers compare notes, they first discuss the growth of the church, numbers of converts, additions to the church complex, possibilities of starting a school. The issue of how better to serve a hurting flock seldom comes up.

Where potential converts are few: the evangelical minister condemned to serve in a small town where most people’s allegiances are based on family tradition, is going to be frustrated. he doesn’t have the consolation of the Lutheran minister, whose job it is to comfort the afflicted, bury the dead, confirm and marry the young, and perform the role of benign community father. The evangelical minister, a frustrated soul even in a suburban setting where potential converts are many, is a tormented sould in the countryside where the population is thin, and where those who remain have strong roots which run deep. He may bravely minister to the mundane personal needs of his congregation, but his heart is not in it, for he is haunted by the sense that such ministering does not really matter, and is in no way a fulfillment of the faith. His faith requires that he convert others, and that his church grow.

Suburban religion: Evangelicalism in white America flourishes best in the affluent suburbs where evangelicalism finds a flood of people without tranditional attachments to neighborhood or community. Suburbanites choose a church the way they might shose a health club, or a place to work. What does it do for me? Will it fulfill my needs? Is it a good deal? Their demands are limited. Suburbanites want from a church some sense of limit, some moral compass, somewhere where the children will learn that the consequences for being naughty go beyond the ever more ineffective disapproval of their parents.

The suburban god: The evangelical God as he exists today has been fashioned by suburban needs and ideals. This new God has displaced the rural, more primitive God who went into hiding after the Scopes trial. The new suburban God is vague, not vivid, less Old Testament Jehovah, more Norman Rockwell-like father figure. Above all, he is impotent enough to be ignored most of the time, thus distinguishing him from the more vindictive and vigilant old-time evangelical God.

Wine and grape juice: Some evangelical commentators spend a great deal of time denying that the wine of the New Testament contained alcohol. Perhaps what they are really enraged at is the process of creating wine. It takes too much time! It is too ambiguous, too much an art! Wine can be subtle. The only discussion of wine which makes sense to the evangelical is the wine Jesus made instantly, just as he makes converts and heals the sick. That wine, some evangelicals insist, was merely grape juice. Doesn’t that make the water-into-wine miracle much less notable?

Rival intoxicants: The evangelical preoccupation with the evild of drinking, smoking and other compulsive behaviors may be attributed to their realization that no intoxicants can be permitted which rival the intoxication of conversion, emotional outpouring, and other evangelical opiates. the evangelical mind is keenly aware that euphoria-producing intoxicants are a tempting alternative to the fleeting and unpredictable sensations of an evangelical-style emotional thrall.

Methadone for the mind: Promise of a clean intoxication is what makes evangelicalism so attractive to the addict. Addicts can be eager to substitute a new, less debilitating opiate for the old drug, which they know is costly and destructive. For the addict, conversion to a non-chemical opiate can literally be their salvation. For the evangelical, in turn, a turn to chemicals can become tempting when opiates lose their effect. Thus, evangelicals and addicts not only understand each other, but convert freely back and forth.

The nature of evangelical prayer
Celestial nagging and begging
Evangelical praise
Prayer chains
The prayer paradox: The more popular you are, the more prayers you will get.
Evangelical porn
Mergers and acquisitions vs. schisms

Relief: When one moves one’s center of gravity from this life to a hypothetical next life, the vitality, the blood, is sucked out of this life--too the relief of many.

The urgent impulse behind Creationism: The roots of evangelical rage against evolution has nothing to do with the truth of the mater and everything to do with the fear that evolution might dethrone man from his pedestal at the center of the universe.

The evangelical in politics: Because compromise is sinful, consensus is difficult.

Emaciated intellectuals: Francis Schaeffer died of cancer; C. S. Lewis was an alcoholic.

Jesus as mother.

The simple unambiguous truths of evangelicalism are tempting to those without an anchor in anything else. Their refusal to question the basics of that faith comes from their fear of losing their rock.

Rural evangelicals: Evangelicals in more affluent small communities are relatively easy-going about their faith. Questioning doesn’t send them into a rage. If they are rooted in community, in family, in the land, the need for evangelicalism is not so desperate.

Robbed of the best: For the most part, the evangelical is condemned to sit around waiting for the rapture or death. His faith doesn’t lead to the creation of transcendent art, music or architecture, nor to the enjoyment of the same. The only real urgent mission for the evangelical is the conversion of souls, and that is best left to the professionals. Such a deadening philosophy is an ideal novacaine for suburban drones, who, if they thought that this life was all that there is to their existence might bail out of their jobs.

Older zealots: To remain zealous in one’s evangelical faith at an advancing age requires a child-like intellectual simplicity. Zeal is common in the young of all degrees of intelligence. When it appears in the old, something is missing between the ears.

A heist: The hijacking of god by organized religion is an audacious and unfortunate theft. And who is robbed? Those sensitive enough to sometimes hear a quiet voice, if they hadn’t already been made deaf.