May 2, 2014

• Growing up Christian: Surviving Indoctrination

  When I was little, my grandmother was my heroine. She was a 5 foot nothing bundle of energy with a pretty blonde up-do, and she was on fire for God. While she had her faults, she was a good woman; she kept the house clean, had dinner ready and waiting for my grandfather when he got home from work, and she loved me with all of her heart, and it showed. She taught me many valuable lessons, encouraged me, gave ample praise when I did well at something. She made my childhood magical and steeped it in imagination, adventure and interactive learning; she was a wonderful grandmother. Her intentions were always good, even her intentions of indoctrinating me into her Christian belief system, but the road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions.

  One afternoon, a long, long time ago, I was watching Disney’s “Fantasia,” and “Night on Bald Mountain” came on (http://vimeo.com/7753129), and there were demons, and fire on the television screen. Being that I was only a little girl of maybe 6 or 7, it scared me. I asked my grandmother if that was a real place, and she told me that it was, it was called Hell, and the big scary demon was named Satan, and then she told me, “But you don’t ever have to go there. Do you know who Jesus is?” That was the beginning of my indoctrination into the Christian faith as my grandmother lead me through the sinners prayer, afterward celebrating my new salvation with ice cream.

  It wasn’t long before I was attending church and Sunday School, learning about Jesus and all of the famous children stories from the Bible. In class we memorized songs and scriptures and drew pictures of Biblical things. It was interactive and fun, but the older I became the more I began to question the validity of what I was being told, causing tangible friction between myself and my Sunday School teacher. That’s when I decided I was ready to skip Sunday School, and start sitting in the big pews with my mother and grandparents; this was where my “walk with God” became personal, instead of just merely a story told in Sunday School. The preacher spoke with passion, conviction, and in raised tones that made you want to shout “hallelujah,” and “Praise Jesus,” and the praise music charged the room with an enthusiasm comparable to an all out revival. People got up out of their seats and danced, and others became “slain in the spirit,” dozens of people shouting in “tongues”, praising the lord. The first time was a little scary, these people looked like they were on drugs, and I didn’t understand, but the longer you’re around it, and the more people tell you that this is right, this is normal, you begin to believe it. Shortly after my introduction to the adult world of Charismatic Christianity, I was baptized in the name of “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” and from what I was told, “sealed by the blood of Jesus.”

  If I wasn’t hungry for God before, I was now. I studied the Bible as much as I could, and every day if I could I would set aside some time and my grandmother would help me study and learn about God’s promises and how to be a good Christian, a good woman, and a good wife. This “Jesus” and “God” person was so wonderful, he filled a necessary void within my life at the time as well, growing up without a father, and suffering abuse by my step fathers, I desperately needed hope, and a friend, I was told that God was “Father to the fatherless” and would take care of me and protect me, where everyone else had abandoned me, I always had a father with God, and someone to be there for me when I needed someone, no matter what, and that’s what I held on to the tightest. With my abandonment issues aside, and my desperate need to fill that void, even though I clung to it so tightly, I still couldn’t make sense out of all of it, and frequently questioned my beliefs, for various reasons, which I will try to explain shortly.

  I found out fairly early on in life that I was attracted to women, which I was told was a sin and an abomination to God. That deeply upset me. I loved the Lord with all of my heart, I prayed to him every morning and every night, I praised him and thanked him and worshiped him, I showed kindness to people, I was a good person with love in my heart, why would he hate me because of this? This caused a lot of turmoil inside of me. I was taught that you have to make the decision to obey the Lord, and deny the “sins of the flesh,” and that if you choose to lay with a same-sex partner, and aren’t willing to repent, then you were going to burn in hell. I tried to “pray the gay away.” I can’t tell you how many times I asked the Lord to forgive me for my horribly lusty, and sinful thoughts, not just towards women, but men as well, and to sanctify my mind and cleanse it of those impurities. I felt so ashamed of my sexuality, of who I was, and no matter how hard I tried, and no matter how hard I prayed, no matter how hard I wished it away, I couldn’t get rid of my thoughts about other women. When I saw a beautiful woman, I would imagine what it would be like to kiss her lips, and make love to her, much like I fantasized about the attractive men I would encounter. To me, this didn’t feel wrong, it felt natural, but that feeling went against everything I had been brought up to believe, and I didn’t know what to do. I spent many hours and many days, months, just searching my “heart” for answers. This perplexing dilemma led me to my belief that mainstream Christianity is wrong, if I can’t change who I am, that means that I was made this way, and how could a loving God, hate his creation? A seed of truth had sprouted in my soul; a seed that would eventually grow into the vantage point I needed to see the forest beyond the trees.

  If the fundamental Christian belief that “homosexuality is a sin and abomination” is wrong, then what else are they wrong about? I began to question everything, after all, if I have questions, shouldn’t there be answers? Certainly, someone must have proof to substantiate at least SOME of the these fundamental things I had been led to believe for so many years, or at least someone had to have a good explanation. I got a similar answers from everyone I spoke to, “Oh trust me, He’s there, and He loves you, have faith… the Lord works in mysterious ways… trust in Him and let His will be done in your life… we’re not meant to know some things… it’s impossible for us to understand… there must be a good reason… It says so in the Bible… The Bible is the infallible Word of God, because the Bible says so.” These responses didn’t satisfy me, so I began seeking answers for myself, starting with “The Infallible Word of God.”

  I started with the history and origins of “The Bible” as we now know it, and the more I began to read and research, the more I began to realize that the evidence AGAINST the Bible being the infallible word of God, outweighed the grandiosity of that claim itself. The foundation of the mainstream Christian belief system was the direct result of The First Council of Nacaea, in June, 325 AD, Emperor Constantine I, invited 250-318 Bishops from across the empire to convene and try to come to an agreement to finally end the controversy and dissent between opposing Christian beliefs and come to a compromise, and what historians now refer to as the Arian Controversy, and was the first worldwide gathering of the “Church.”

  “In a savvy move that would put today’s shrewd politicians to shame, the compromise proffered by Constantine was vague, but blandly pleasing: Jesus and God were of the same “substance,” he suggested, without delving too much into the nature of that relationship. A majority of the bishops agreed on the compromise and voted to pass the language into doctrine.

  Their statement of compromise, which would come to be known as ‘The Nicene Creed,’ formed the basis for Christian ideology. The bishops also used the Council of Nicea to set in stone some church rules that needed clarification, and those canons were the reference point after which all future laws were modeled.

  As a final order of business, the bishops decided upon a date for the holiest of Christian celebrations, Easter, which was being observed at different times around the empire. Previously linked with the timing of Passover, the council settled on a moveable day that would never coincide again with the Jewish holiday — the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox.”

  The First Council of Nicaea was the beginning of what is now known as the First seven Ecumenical Councils. These seven ecumenical councils are:

  First Council of Nicaea (325)
  First Council of Constantinople (381)
  Council of Ephesus (431)
  Council of Chalcedon (451)
  Second Council of Constantinople (553)
  Third Council of Constantinople (680)
  Second Council of Nicaea (787)

  Over the course of 462 years, the Christian faith was pruned, molded, and shaped to fit our own ideas of what religion meant, what “God” was. Christianity of today is the compilation of acceptable beliefs among a gathering of men, men who were separated by centuries from the people who supposedly wrote the “divinely inspired gospels,” men who had their own agendas. That, for me, was enough to validate my fears and suspicions, but it was still difficult for me to let go.

  For a long while I kept my doubts and disbeliefs to myself. I was now in my early twenties and my grandmother’s health was declining rapidly, so I stopped burdening her with my “spiritual struggles,” she was struggling physically enough herself. For as long as I can remember, my grandmother had diabetes, and she never did maintain it the way she should have. This led to many health problems, including atherosclerosis and peripheral arterial disease. To complicate the situation, shortly after one of her prolonged recovery sessions, she sustained a bump to the foot that would eventually result in the loss of her leg. It had been a week or so since I had seen my grandmother, and decided to drop by the nursing home where she was temporarily staying to visit. I asked her how she was doing, as I always did, she said “Good, but the nurse rammed my foot in the vent grate on the wall, and it REALLY hurts.” I asked if I could look and I assisted her in removing her sock, and there on here toe, where she claimed the injury happened, was a dark patch of skin; this was the beginning of my grandmother’s own spiritual battle. As the days progressed, the once small patch of dying tissue on her big toe became much bigger, her entire toe was black and the rest of her toes were beginning to follow suit, my grandparents, being deeply rooted in their Christian faith, prayed diligently in the name of Jesus that my grandmother’s foot would be healed, because “blessed are the feet of the preacher,” and “all things work together for good to them that love God.” My grandparents continued to pray, ignoring her doctors suggestion to amputate her toe, before the dry gangrene claimed her foot, and soon, her foot began to die (http://i34.photobucket.com/albums/d115/FarSkies/b215713239_zpsfbaff6d7.jpg), I will never forget my grandmother, bedridden, crying out in pain and tears to her God to help her, rebuking her sickness, casting out the devil, and claiming victory “in the name of Jesus”, but victory never came. The dry gangrene was spreading, and now it was on her shin and an infection was setting in; they had no choice but to amputate. I will never forget how my grandmother screamed and cried when she was told that she would be losing her leg, it was a genuine kind of pain, the kind of pain you see on a bastard child’s face when their father leaves them waiting on a doorstep, and never arrives as promised. “No!” she exclaimed, “that’s not true, that’s impossible! My God promised my victory, blessed are the feet of the preacher, why, please God!” She cried in disbelief for a while. She let out her rage, and then, like the silence she was met with, she too fell silent herself, and for a long time she was silent. I guess rationalizing why God had not answered her prayers and her pleas, but I knew why… there was no one there to answer them, and if there was, they weren’t concerning themselves with such matters.

  Even with having experienced and realized what I had, and even with all of the doubt I held in the Christian faith, Christianity was all I ever knew. I had built my life and marriage around it, I had relied upon it every time I was in need, how could I live without it, what point is there to life if Jesus isn’t the son of God? It was a scary place to be, teetering on the edge of my religion and what I knew to be salvation, and this new found knowledge that everything I had been taught was a lie. My first reaction was to pray, and I did, I asked the Lord to guide me, and if there was ever a time in my life where I needed a sign, it was now, “…reveal yourself to me, Lord, I believe, help my unbelief and shatter my doubts, let me know that I am on the right path, reassure me Lord.” I prayed that prayer and similar forms of it for months on end, hoping that somehow “God” would ease my spirit, and encourage my walk with him. I too, like my grandmother, was met with silence. The deep unrest in my “spirit” was never quenched. With words and blind faith no longer being enough to keep me within the spiritual bubble I had been living in, and with no response from the God that I had loved and worshiped for 20 years, I uttered the words I had once thought would never come out of my mouth, not even by threat of torture or death. With bravery and a new sense of awareness I said, “I renounce my religion, and my belief in Jesus Christ.” Just as I had begun my journey with Jesus with a few words, I ended it with a few words, and simultaneously embarked on a new journey towards self realization and discovery.

  For a while, I was depressed; without God in my life it was hard to find meaning and strength, but then I realized that all of the times I had relied on God, I was really relying on myself. I was really alone, and I had survived and gotten myself through every difficult situation I had endured. It wasn’t God who saved me, it was my own strength. I now had the ability to take my life within my own hands, and determine my own destiny and future, the power and authority within my life was me. Shortly after my renouncement of Christianity, I realized that I, single-handedly, and without the help of a deity, had freed myself from sin, and had delivered myself from eternal damnation, and out of the hands of the true enemy: organized religion. I am now free to be who I am, to love whom I choose to love, and I’m free to do it without shame or fear. Humanity is ugly, we are all testimonies to that, but it is also beautiful; the human experience is beautiful. All of my life I was taught to hate and deny the human part of my being, because it was sinful, for as long as I can remember I have called myself “born again,” but it’s only now, after throwing away my religion, that I truly feel like I have been born again. I survived indoctrination, and for the first time in my life I feel free; and I am free, free to embrace my humanity, to take pleasure in my body and my sexuality, and to be, love, and find interest in whatever my heart desires.

  Sources:
  http://www.livescience.com/2410-council-nicea-changed-world.html
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_seven_Ecumenical_Councils

  • 8:36 pm
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