Drifting Away

[stickmaker]

I was brought up Southern Baptist. I am still a Christian. But what the public figures in that and other Christian religious organizations are preaching today is not what I was taught. I didn't leave the church. The church left me.

I'm not the only one saying this. People are pointing out how modern evangelicals are speaking words and taking actions which are the opposite of what evangelicals historically have said and done. Yet these revisionists are espousing their fanatical ideas, before only held by a fringe few, not only as the voice of the majority and the divine revelation of God but as the way things have always been. Among the most outrageous are those "Christians" who cite Old Testament dictates which were amended or even nullified by Christ, who said, flat out, that he was the New Covenant, here to replace the old one.

So when someone claims to be defending "traditional family values" ask "Whose tradition? Whose family?"

Comments

[cathyr19355.livejournal.com]

You have my sympathy; I went through some similar questions when I left Catholicism, decades ago.

It seems to me there are now two types of modern evangelicals: the ones who try to be modern by packing their message with feel-good sentiment and washing all real meaning out of it, and the ones who are attempting to buck the trend by trying to return to a more "fire-and-brimstone" based religion. Neither is doing their would-be flocks any favors, IMHO.

Coming from the tradition that you do, I'm not surprised that you're seeing, and despising, the second flavor of bad modern evangelism. Though Catholicism has some of the same too--look who's part of the current mainstay of the modern "right to life" movement. And to top it off, the Catholic mainstream has a heavy flavor of sexual hypocrisy to enliven the mix.

Ugh. I'd rather stay a lapsed neopagan--it's more honest.

[purpleranger.livejournal.com]

This is just a theory, but I think what we have is that some people have over-reacted to what was once called the "permissive society" of the 1960s and 1970s. those people have felt that they have to be even more conservative than they were before just to bring the pendulum back to somewhere around center.

As I said, this is just a theory. Feel free to tear it apart as you see fit.