The Managed Faith is Irrational

The Managed Faith is Irrational

If you grew up in the 80’s to 90’s in a religious home, you were presented with constant representations of religion through media, preaching, teaching, and conferences. Each form of religion presented to you with was about your behavior. The first behavior was belief. I remember visiting a friend and sitting in a pew. The Pastor was selling Christianity like it was an Amway product. He was telling these poor kids they needed to bow their head, pray exactly like him in unison, and say the words. Dozens of kids around me prayed the prayer. They lifted their heads and walked up to the front of the church where they were handing out gifts to those that accepted Christ. I sat there in shock. I was seven, precocious, and rebellious. More to the point, I had already come to salvation through a process of rebellion. While all these other kids were sitting in the pew, following directions, listening to the pastor, I had found my salvation under a pew disobeying my mom month’s earlier. I had earned my salvation by recognizing I was a sinner. The other kids around me were the perfectly behaved, looking for another reward for their perfect behavior. Somewhere along the way, they had accepted the management by the church, their parents, or their educators. It was easier to get along for them.

People would remind my mom to buy Dr. Dobson’s videos and books about the Strong-Willed child so they could break my spirit. Christian teachers would tell my mother my writings were full of horror in 1st grade. I was seen as the misbehaving cousin by my perfectly behaved cousins.
As I grew older, I found myself at a divide against these types of Christian children and youth. I remember how many would look at me with near horror when I would break another rule, defy the teacher, or demand to know why something was true about the Bible. By the time I was five, my mother was being told I understood the Bible stories better than the adults. And yet, I found myself uninvited to many of the activities of other Christian kids. When I did go, I was ridiculed for asking questions about what we were learning. On the way, I had a few good Christian mentors. A leader at Fellowship Baptist Church in Hanua, Germany wasn’t afraid of my questions. A man who later took me, when no one else would, on World Changer mission trips to build homes for the poor despite my less than stellar behavior. A undergraduate college professor who saw my questions as seeking rather than confrontational.
I was poorly managed. Leaders in my father’s church sought to keep me from graduating from high school using their authority on the school board. Leaders in my father’s church who kicked me out for wearing a hat after I had rode my bike fourteen miles to get to church when my car had broken down. Leaders in my father’s church who told my girlfriend’s parents lies about me. I missed out on the Christianity where everyone obeyed and followed directions and managed their behaviors. Instead I wanted us to talk about Paul’s thorn in his side. I wanted my Saints to be human because I knew how human I was.

In college, I was confronted with the same bureaucratic and irrational faith I had my whole life. Students had fully bought in now. I was ambushed and ridiculed in the college cafeteria because I’m not completely sold on my 2A rights. No one had told me that Christians could be pacifists, but instinctively I knew it was a possibility. However, not in the USA. I distrusted the Republican Party and the Democrat Party, but especially the Republican Party at that age. Now we see how true that has been with the GOP managers in charge for 34 years who have managed our politics like they managed our faith. At that time, I was wrong of course.

My personal beliefs were Marxism seemed to be a moral way to govern and God could certainly use evolution to bring us about. I abandoned Marxism though when I went to the former Yugoslavia. However, I have never really abandoned Deistic Evolution, or God-directed change of species. I don’t see it as theologically incongruent with a God who is creative and the greatest Gardener. Yet, it’s not the right managed faith.

I started to see rationalism was the enemy to a managed faith. I went to Seminary where I experienced even deeper wounds. I had already learned early in life not to trust deacons, pastors, or Sunday School teachers. They were rarely my friends, but often were my enemies. I thought Seminary was protected against such violence against the rational mind because they had a deeper understanding of history, theology, and philosophy. Well I was naive. I didn’t really understand the Southern Baptist Schism which started in 1978, but I would become a casualty of it in 2003. I found myself constantly defending my beliefs. Seminary professors would push their favorite students (the most manageable) to attack me. And when I started to develop the skills to defeat their students, the professors came after me directly. Seminaries were being managed. This management would go forth with the pastors into the local churches.

Gone were the days of independent churches belonging to the same Convention. We were all one. Christianity had turned into a management system. They managed the behaviors without explaining the way of the beliefs. They did this through the parents by teaching them to feel guilty if their children didn’t fall in line. Further, this wasn’t a Southern Baptist problem. This was a western church problem. I think this was a problem which goes right back to men like Voltaire who were starting to see the problems with the religion. It was irrational and a folly. It controlling behaviors which allowed it to manage the faith. Voltaire was the wedge which created the crack. Marx was the hammer hitting the wedge. Nietzsche was the axe which split the church wide open. And Freud became the blaze to set the church on fire.

The conservatives thought they were safe and that the problems of progressivism in the church were problems for the mainline denominations. However, the conservatives were just as fragile. Their inability to allow faith to be rational and teaching their children faith was about their behaviors infused the church with millions of fragile and weak supports.

Conservatives baptized their children, but held their children’s heads under the water instead of letting them come up for air. Their children were safe under the water of baptism; they wouldn’t need to ask the tough questions they could no longer answer. They wouldn’t need to teach history, theology, philosophy or rational thought in the faith. They wouldn’t need to teach about suffering and pain.
Their adult children had been so well managed and had had so few temptations. They went to Christian colleges. They had gone to Christian schools. If the parents had managed them well, they had spent their childhood at Hobby Lobby or Chick-Fil-A. Nothing had ever happened to them, barring the abuses from their own parents or from the leaders in the church. But like John MacArthur did when abuse occurred in his staff in 1979, he ignored it even until this day.

These children, who had been in the pew, who had bowed their heads had never learned they were sinners. They never learned what it was like to lose something. They had never felt defeated in the important ways which leads to development of one’s character. They were people who had never known how to read Job because they couldn’t imagine what Job was about. As a boss once said to me, “Never trust someone who doesn’t walk with a limp.” These people never walked with a limp.

So when Satan went before God and asked permission to attack them, they had no foundation to stand against Satan. He found them still buried in water and never truly reborn.
Satan started leading them into divorce. He led them into the loss of a child or their child developed a serious illness. He caused them severe and debilitating injuries. He took away wives and husbands and children and parents. He told them they were at fault for their own pain because they didn’t have a good enough faith. He took away their safety and security. He left them with nothing but their irrational, managed faith and their faith shattered.

Or he offered them temptation and they finally broke free of the suffocating faith they had been in and they knew they would never go back to religion. They had no grounding for knowing the difference between Christianity and religion. In their mind, it was the same thing. They didn’t know that true-love waits was religion and forgiveness after abortion, pregnancy, or an STD was Christianity. They were so offended by the idea of anyone managing them again, they ran from one religion right into the hands of the new Toxic Faith of Marxism which pretends to have a morality, but if there is good

in Marxism, it is because they stole and perverted it from Christianity. After all, Marxism is a Christian heresy and not a political theory.

And this generation, finally free from being buried in baptismal waters, left the church in droves. Mainline denominations lost 20-40%. Even the conservative Southern Baptist Convention has lost about 10%. I think the collapse is just the start. This generation may be truly lost. In some ways, they have been inoculated against religion and are unable to distinguish between Christianity and Religion because the church managed their behaviors rather than growing their rational faith.

Worst yet, these parents who were Christians in their irrational faith will make sure their children do not go to church. They will make sure their children know they don’t need faith. We wonder why the world seems to be accelerating towards a decadent social order and it’s because we took very religious people and gave them every reason to jump off the Ark to find another religion. They aren’t atheists, despite their claims. They are nihilists or Marxists or humanists or all three.

This new religion won’t let them go easily. It doesn’t look like a religion in a traditional sense. 1. It’s priests are media and politicians. 2. It’s buildings don’t sit empty across the landscape like tombs. Instead its centers of worship are now libraries, schools, and political schools. 3. It’s moments of religious ecstasy is now found in the behaviors which were forbidden without explanation. It’s now a computer screen, a phone screen, or an orgy. 4. Their community is far more intense. All cults have an intense community. Whether that community is in the LGBTia or the community is a local political party or at a Tran-show for kids, it’s connections feel far deeper than the local church. They are tired of lukewarm friendships like in church.

They want the fellowship of sinners because sinners appear to care about you, even if they only want you sexually.
How do we reach this lost generation? I think some of them will realize before the end what they have done on their own. They will see what they have wrought with their sins and lies and will cry out for mercy. In the meantime, we stop managing the Christian children now in our care and we start treating them like they are capable of dealing with pain, suffering, and recovery. Overcoming pain to find peace even while in pain is one of the things we must help them learn. This means we stop protecting them from every mistake, but swallow our need to protect them and let them fail. We offer forgiveness and mercy when they fail because they will fail. We teach them theology, history, and philosophy. We talk about the early church in a way which doesn’t deify the writers of the New Testament.

I heard Voddie Bauchaum speak about the Chosen. I think he’s a brilliant pastor, but I’m afraid he’s tainted with the management of faith. He said he wouldn’t watch the Chosen because it created a “carven image” of God. This is an example of an irrational faith. God doesn’t tell us to turn off our creativity, our mind, or limit how we share about him as long as we understand that our own representations of God aren’t God. This idea could be taken to the extreme. Good management would not allow people to even read the Bible because it creates images of God that enter into the mind. This limiting the reading of the Bible is common in cults like Jehovah Witnesses and Mormons. It was common in Catholicism before the Second Vatican and every church which is King James only is practicing a version of this because English has changed so much that it is no longer in people’s heart language. Each reader has an idea of what Jesus looks like in their mind. And we know sin begins in the mind, so it would be best to limit people from reading the Bible. We can’t let people sin!

How many of us are tainted with management? How many of us are so afraid of sin that we won’t allow questions about the nature of God or who wrote the Bible? We create idols out of inspiration and inerrancy when we don’t accept there are reasonable criticisms of these beliefs. They are after all, man-made interpretations of what we think God is trying to share with us about the nature of scripture.

What religion are you passing on? When did you stop sharing Christianity? Can you identify the differences between Christianity and religion? Do you know that the harshest criticisms Christ had were almost exclusively for religious leaders? The other extreme criticism was for anyone who would hurt a child. The church is dying because we have hurt generations of children and kept their heads buried under the water until we lost the strength in our arms to do so. If you want to help the next generation, which might help save the current generation, lift these kids out of the baptismal water and let Christ do his work. Leaving them buried in the water shows you don’t trust God. Leaving them buried in the water teaches them to behave, but it doesn’t teach them they are sinners.