Tag Archives: Westboro Baptist Church

The Imprisonment of Faith

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Cultic religion offers us occasional example of how a faith system can become bondage.  But, often this phenomenon of “cultism” can subtly creep into faith systems that aren’t readily described as cults.  A faith becomes cultic when he does not trust the spiritual presence that permeates this world we live in and resorts to power, manipulation, and emotional brutality to capture its children and to win converts.  The leaders of this type of faith will be firmly confident of the nobility of their motivations but the behavior of what they are doing will be apparent to anyone looking on from the outside.  One simple example is the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, which btw must have crawled back under the rock from which they came as I haven’t heard of them lately.

This morning a young woman who was raised in a fundamentalist Christian church and culture shared in Huffington Post about her captivity in a family that was involved in the “quiver full movement” which emphasizes the importance of parents producing many children.  This verse comes from the Old Testament where it is written that fathers whose “quiver is full” of many children will have “arrows” with which the world can be captured for Christ. This young woman, Cynthia Jeub, describes the emotional/spiritual brutality that she was subjected to in this family until her late teens when she finally had the courage to escape.

In a closely-knit family, or a closely-knit group, there will always be someone who escapes.  T.S. Eliot described this individual as the dysfunctional family’s “bird sent flying through the purgatorial fire” to find what I would call the redemptive Grace of God which the family had forbidden.  Eliot furthermore, described this individual as the family’s “unhappy consciousness” that has been assigned this torturous task.  For, in any family or group any individual who dares to “think out side of the box” will be venturing toward consciousness as those who spend their life confined to the “box” of group think will never be able to know the delight of exploring the mystery of being a conscious human being.  This brings to my mind the famous line from Martin Luther King, “Free at last, free at last.  Praise God, I’m free at last.”  While King was speaking of escaping from the bondage of racial oppression, Ms. Jeub is now writing about her escape from familial, cultural, and spiritual bondage.  Check the link out and then check her blog out. (http://cynthiajeub.com/}

A caveat is in order.  Those confined to rigid veins of thought, those who are orchestrating this bondage, are not necessarily bad people.  They are people whose good, noble, spiritual intentions have been hijacked for the purpose of ego; and all of us have an ego. This is just the way it is. This is life.  It is easy to heap venom upon them, but we must realize this is how human culture operates.  My remarks here are to commend one individual who has been graced with the courage to break out of the fetters that imprisoned her and speak of what I like to call, “The Grace of God.”  See the Huffington Post article at the following link.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cynthia-jeub-kids-by-the-dozen_n_5c798c1be4b0e5e313ca43e0

Lunacy in Religion Surfaces Again!!!

Christiandom has given Bill Maher and other stand-up comedians more fodder for there routines as a 53 year old former fundamentalist pastor has been arrested in Brazil to face 53 charges of sexual abuse. I will offer a link to the story as it is really creepy, primarily many of the parents willingly “followed God’s leadership” and entrusted their teen daughters into the care of this man’s reclusive and isolated ministry with a promise that he would make these girls God’s women! (http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/01/us/victor-barnard-brazil-caught/index.h)

I see so much lunacy in contemporary religion. And, history has many other stories of additional religious lunacy enough to bring anyone to the point of consideration, “Is all of this just nuts?” And I look at contemporary Christianity and am amazed at how intelligent, educated people can believe some of the things they believe in the name of Christ; and, yes, on the fringe I see many “nut-jobs.”  However, the social context that produced me some six decades ago would label me “nuts” also, or some variation of that term And, in a sense, they would be right for it is the context that gets to define the terms and in reference to the context from which I hailed I certainly merit some disapproving label.

Spirituality deals with the issue of meaning or our quest for meaning. And meaning is always found in a search into the depths of the heart. Unfortunately, the “depths of the heart” are chaotic to say the least and contain good and bad, a veritable Pandora’s box of mischief and worse. Sometimes one’s spiritual quest will take one right into the “Heart of Darkness” and there are times that temptations leads to catastrophic decisions, often “in the name of God.” An equally sordid route is when someone is so fear-bound, so fearful of that dark realm in his heart, they will not allow the Spirit of God that he professes to believe in to lead him in the depths of the heart in the first place. This person will keep it all in the head and become an ideologue, one picture of which we have today is Isis but in Christianity in my country there is Westboro Baptist Church.

But, this issue is ultimately a human issue and not the fault of the religious/spiritual impulse though certainly that impulse goes awry and we see catastrophe. We are complicated little critters because in those hoary depths of our heart monsters do lurk and sometimes our adaptations to them are inadequate, even in our faith. And this realization keeps me a little less rigid than I used to be though often I will find myself relapsing into an arrogance even with my “liberal” and “open-minded” and “all-inclusive” notions of Christianity. And this realization always brings me back to the basic emphasis of spirituality—chopping wood, carrying water. For all of our lofty and noble thoughts, what are we doing to make this world a better place for our kiddies?

 

 

 

“The Bubble” has us all!

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“The bubble” has gotten a lot of attention in the past election year, usually being the Democrat description of the Republican party living in an echo-chamber, turning a deaf ear to any information that did not fit their agenda.  And, I must admit, I think the Republican Party did this past year illustrate this phenomenon perfectly, largely due to the influence of an extremist fringe element which  Karl Rove called the “nutty fringe”.  But, “the bubble” is a temptation for any group, even the liberals as was pointed out in yesterday’s Huffington Post by Joseph A. Palermo.

The “bubble” results from the human need to create a world of meaning and the tendency to then draw the boundaries around that world too narrowly.  The more rigidly they are drawn, the more problematic the group becomes for the world at large.  For example, in our culture Westboro Baptist Church beautifully illustrates this phenomena but their extremism is child’s play compared with, say, the Taliban.

We must have “bubbles” to ensconce ourselves in but ideally we will have leaders who will facilitate a porosity for these boundaries which allows discourse with the outside world.

I now would like to illustrate this problem with a marvelous skit from SNL from the early 1990’s.  I warn you it is course in at times, and subversive in its implications, but overall just incredibly funny.  (If the provided link does not work, please copy and paste it into your browser.  You will find it worth the effort.)

http://www.hulu.com/#!watch/277808

Opiate of the Masses

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Karl Marx famously noted that “Religion is the opiate of the masses.”  O’Bama had this notion in mind four years ago when he was unwittingly heard referring to some people who “cling to their guns and religion.”

Well, I agree but with qualification.  First, re the gun issue, yes there are some whose identity is too wrapped up in gun ownership and they make things look bad for men who own guns but have a life outside of gun ownership.  The latter aren’t nuts. Likewise with religion, there are those who use religion obsessively to cover up an impoverished identity and often they end up as certifiable nuts.

But the problem here is not guns or religion.  The problem is an impoverished identity which often does cross over into mental illness.

But my main focus here is religion.  There is so much insanity that surfaces in religion and it is so easy to throw the baby out with the bath water.  I do think religious people should give Marx’s observation attention for religion…yes, even yours and mine…does have an opiate dimension.  And that is not the fault, necessarily, of the religion we practice or believe in.  It is the fault of our human nature which tends to take ourselves too seriously and tends to interpret religious teachings in a self-serving manner. And when this tendency runs unchecked, lunacy will likely ensue.  Case in point—Westboro Baptist Church and Islamic Extremists.

More on spiritual incest

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Continuing the theme of spiritual incest, an old bromide from my youth was, “He who lives by himself and for himself will be spoiled by the company he keeps.”  This is relevant to groups and certainly to churches and denominations.  A church that overly emphasizes  the “come ye out from among them and be ye separate” theme can find themselves pathologically alone to the extent that they have no relevance to the world at large.  They are suddenly lost in “a world of empty self relatedness.”  (Paul Tillich)  And since mental illness is a reference problem, they technically are mentally ill.  A case in point is the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of our present day world.

I would like to offer a quote from an Ibsen play, Peer Gynt, which so eloquently illustrates this “empty self relatedness” that Tillich mentioned.  This is the superintendent of an insane asylum describing the constituents of his facility:

Its here that men are most themselves, themselves and nothing but themselves sailing with outspread sails of self. Each shuts himself in a cask of self, the cask stopped with the bung of self and seasoned in a well of self. None has a tear for others woes or cares what any other thinks….Now surely you’ll say that he’s himself.  He’s full of himself and nothing else, himself in every word he says himself when he is beside himself…Long live the Emperor of Self.

The language is a bit stilted, being centuries old, and it describes individuals.  But the lunacy portrayed here is also relevant to groups who have so isolated themselves, so turned in upon themselves, so violated the law of exchange with the outside world, that they have essentially sold their soul to the devil.