A Video of What Primitive Paganism Pretending to Be Christianity Looks Like
Why Some Forms of the Faith Look So Horrifying and Disgusting They've Scared Me Away from Primarily Identifying as a Christian Even Though I Still Am One.
I was planning to write this evening about a vivid nightmare I had this afternoon after falling into a sudden nap, likely in reaction to some combination of the new medications I’m trying for the PTSD. I usually don’t remember my dreams, but this one was so striking, its details so present, that I told my family all about it over dinner and they encouraged me to write about it - which I will - because the premise could make for a great thriller or horror movie.
But alas, I still remain drawn more to real-world nightmares and nonfiction horrors instead of entertaining fantasies which we make up to distract ourselves from the darkness all around us. So when my buddy Matt sent me the above video this evening - as part of our ongoing dialogue about Christian fundamentalism and our own diverse experiences coming out of it - I was so shaken by it, and in some ways reminded of my own journey through the faith, that I had to share it with you all.
For those not able or wanting to watch it at the moment, the video-maker, “an environmental scientist and humanist organizer” who goes by Bo Gardiner describes the contents:
Evangelical Christians around the globe are increasingly holding large children's revivals where they practice a disturbing ritual called "anointing by the holy spirit," "being slain by the holy spirit," "catching the holy ghost," or "falling out."
It is intimidating, physically coercive, deeply stressful, and emotionally manipulative. Children are under tremendous pressure to cooperate, to mimic the adults' bizarre behaviors, and to avoid being judged unworthy, disappointing, or worse, under satan's spell.
The older children and teens are under great peer pressure to fit in. The youngest simply don't understand they're supposed to fall over. Their purity and honesty shines through.
…
What kind of belief system must force itself on children, long before they are able to understand and decide for themselves?
It is child abuse and should not be permitted.
On this last point I agree part of the way - yes, this is a form of child abuse, but no, it does not rise to a level of severity in which government can or should get involved. Indoctrinating one’s children with emotionally-crippling ideologies and horrendous fundamentalist religious beliefs falls pretty squarely within the protections of the First Amendment. It's simply been going on for so long that it’s largely ingrained within Western civilization and Christianity as a whole.
The videos depict children and teenagers shaking and writhing around, with the adult preachers speaking in tongues, touching them, and acting like exorcists casting out demonic spirits.
The video is about eight and a half minutes long, and it’s worth watching the whole thing, especially because of what the ending depicts: when these sorts of rituals are attempted on especially young children - toddlers - often they have no emotional reaction whatsoever, so the preacher just moves on to another child to see if he can get his little emotional-manipulation magic spell to work again on another young, unsuspecting, naïve victim.
Now, while variations of this happen with Evangelicalism, I think by and large Gardiner would be more accurate to characterize the practices compiled in his video more as Pentecostal than Evangelical. The kind of speaking in tongues and this high level of emotionalism is much more characteristic of Pentecostalism than run-of-the-mill Evangelicalism. Dr. Donald Miller, a professor of religion, explained this to Pew in 2006:
Many people around the world are celebrating this year the 100th anniversary of the birth of modern pentecostalism. What exactly is pentecostalism?
It is a movement within Protestant Christianity that emphasizes the gifts of the Holy Spirit — specifically, speaking in tongues, or what scholars call glossolalia, as well as supernatural healing and other manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Historically, it evolved out of the 19th century Holiness movement associated with the Wesleyan revivals.
Where did pentecostalism actually start?
Historians trace the movement back to Topeka, Kansas, in 1901, when student Agnes Ozman received the gift of tongues during a prayer meeting at Charles Fox Parham’s Bethel Bible College. Parham, who had been raised in the Methodist movement, then traveled to Houston, Texas, where William J. Seymour, an African-American, heard Parham speak in 1905 — although Seymour had to sit outside the room because of his race.
Miller also notes the differences between Pentecostalism and more traditional Evangelicalism:
The core beliefs of evangelicals and pentecostals are very similar, except that evangelicals tend to think that speaking in tongues, healing and other first century manifestations of the Holy Spirit were unique to the early Christian church and are no longer appropriate elements of Christian practice. Fundamentalism was originally a protest against theological liberalism and reasserted the importance of specific beliefs, such as the divinity of Christ and the bodily resurrection of Jesus.
Now, it’s this evangelical Christianity that I experienced and embraced as a young teenager for many years as I wrote about in this essay here, this Substack’s most popular piece:
Since I did not experience the speaking in tongues, faith healing, hyper-emotionalism of Pentecostalism, why, then, does the video above still anger me and resonate so deeply with me? It's because what the broader, more conventional Evangelical movement does to gain and maintain converts is largely the same thing, just to a slightly more constrained, often more sophisticated and refined degree: emotional manipulation.
In this previous essay here, the last in my first volume of the “Antisemitism and Culture” series, I explained two of the main reasons why I still consider myself a Christian even though Jewish and hippie mystic beliefs have also come to shape me deeply:
I explained:
All it really takes to be a Christian is to like Jesus a lot and to then self-identify as such.
And I still do. I still choose to take the leap of faith - unprovable assertions, you apologetics-obsessives - that Jesus was God, performed miracles, was crucified to make amends for the sins of humanity, and then was resurrected on the third day.
So why do I them embrace “mystic” as my primary religious tradition and descriptor? Why “Christian” merely as a secondary descriptor and specifier?
Simple: as I’ve been fairly loud about, I utterly detest “institutional Christianity” and most of the “Christian theology” that men have built on top of the New Testament in the centuries since its assembly. I think most churches are terrible for the simple reason that most people are terrible.
Further, by remaining with a foot in the door in the Christian tradition then that gives me license to be a gadfly within it. I can say to my fellow Christians: abandon churches which have failed you, interpret the Bible for yourself, learn as much as you can from our Jewish family, and engage with God directly.
I’m sorry, but videos like the one above and knowing just how common less extreme practices are throughout Protestant Christianity as a whole make me very angry. Why? Because I feel like I was a victim of such practices myself. I can see now how experiences that I had at youth group “retreats” as a teenager that seemed like such profound “spiritual experiences” at the time, were in fact simple fucking emotional manipulation. My identity, my beliefs, and my fears were, for years, shaped by a con artist posing as a “youth pastor” who simply knew the right emotional buttons to push in naïve, uneducated, emotional teenagers to dupe them into his theology.
For years as a teenager I lived in a kind of horror movie, fearing that most of humanity would be tortured forever in hell: fearing that my agnostic mother would go to hell if she died in a car accident; not understanding why Jews murdered in the Holocaust would go to hell but the Christianity-professing Nazi soldiers who slaughtered them would spend eternity basking in God’s love in heaven. For many years of my life I had planned to go to seminary and become an Evangelist myself. Why? All because of emotional manipulation passed off as an authentic spiritual experience.
That should make people angry. Lies should make people angry. The kind of borderline child abuse in the video above should make people angry. Me using the word “fuck” to express the depths of my own anger about it should not make people angry, but I know it does - much more so than the con artistry that I use the word to condemn.
For many years now, I’ve been talking about how so many forms of Christianity aren’t actually Christian: that, in fact, they’re simply primitive Paganism masquerading as monotheism. What you see in the video above and what you can see to a lesser degree on any number of religious Evangelical broadcasts perfectly demonstrates what I mean. The worship of emotions, and the emphasizing of emotions as the primacy of religious experience, is primitivism. It is an idolatry - a worship of a false god. And I don’t think I’m ever going to get over my anger at it and stop screaming against it out here in this desert wilderness of our world.
