Born Again Christianity’s Jihad on America

Throughout my teenage years I was a born-again Christian. Now in my twenties, I’m not. Without getting overly dramatic or focusing on every detail, the primary reason for this change was an extinguishing of the belief that everyone but me was going to hell. Make no mistake about it, the people of this faith believe that they are in store for an afterlife of bliss in heaven and non-believers will toil in hell for all eternity. This dynamic caused me to live through most of my teenage years in fear of what would happen if I were to question it, as to do so could mean I was volunteering for damnation. It was fear that stunted my natural inclination to question the world around me in terms of religion.

Christian faith can be the most rewarding thing in a person’s life, on par with their family, work and country, but how many of the world’s religions ask for more of us than either of those three things? The leaders at our Air Force Academy instruct cadets that God comes before country, and couple this with warnings that should they die not having been ‘saved’, hell is where they’re going to end up. You and I provide them their money, training and prestige, but God gets his before we taxpayers get ours. While this may sound as wrong to you as it does to me now, to a born-again Christian it’s always been this way and always will be this way. The government can lock you up and throw away the key, but it’s only for a lifetime. It’s only what happens when this life is over that they’re concerned with.

This is the crux of the religious teachings, and the bait that goes on the hook as souls are fished for every day in this country and abroad. Everything is about the good that God represents, the sin that Satan represents and all the poor souls out there who need to hear your voice to lead them away from the darkness and towards the light. The daily exercise of ‘spreading the Gospel’ is each of their responsibilities, and when the potential recruit is upset or down about the way life is treating them, the comfort and love you provide can work as a beacon to guide their way to happiness. When it works, you then inform them that for the small price of a lifetime of devotion and sales, they won’t burn in hell forever. The vulnerable are given a chance for redemption, regardless of what they’ve done in the past. To escape damnation all you have to do is give your soul to Jesus Christ through a ceremony known as being ‘saved’.

Having been someone who has lived this, been a ‘witness’ and played an intregal part in several healings and miracles – it’s impossible to describe the sensation or the incredible feeling of joy this brand of Christianity is capable of providing. The most amazing revelation I came out of it with was the enormous potential of human beings when bonded by a collective faith in something. When hearts and minds are connected and focused on a common goal, nature adapts to accommodate their will. Wounds heal, spirits come and go, people change. Why it happens is the question I felt compelled to answer as I encountered adulthood on my own, as a soldier in the US Army. The answer I’ve believed in for years now is that ‘why’ has everything to do with faith and nothing to do with heaven, hell or the respective texts that govern any of the world’s religions.

Faith in what you might ask? Well, in love and passion and goodness and most importantly the sense that whatever you’re doing with your life is being done for the right reasons. This prerequisite of faith can be satisfied in more ways than any of us could imagine. Human beings are provided free will and spend this capital for the sake of galvanizing their faith in whatever allows for the perception of wholeness. Most of us make mistakes in how we spend this capital early in life, and when disillusionment from this mistake or a series of such life gobbling mistakes cause us to perceive an unfulfillable void, religion steps in and provides us the direction we so long for.

It is in this way that religion has provided meaning and direction for billions of lives since the dawn of time. This is what non-religious people fail to understand about those who are religious, and for those who do understand it, often times it will create an association in their mind with weakness of some sort. That a religious person is unable to attain fulfillment in the natural world surrounding them, so they use religion as a crutch. I’ve always felt that this couldn’t be further from the truth. People strive for goodness and whether one goes about obtaining it through art, philanthropy or religion is inconsequential. There is no leveling effect in how a person goes about leading a good, positive life as long as it’s rooted in honesty and fueled by a genuine longing to do better today than you did yesterday.

Born again Christianity taps into this brilliantly. First with the initiation ceremony of being ‘saved’ by accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior, as by doing so all prior sins are washed away. You start again with a clean slate, reborn in the eyes of the Lord. From there the mission of retention takes precedent, and this goal is what requires most of what I perceive to be the dishonesty that drove me away from it. First is how the concept of being ‘saved’ is described to the convert. You are told that because of having done this, you will be allowed in heaven whereas those who are not ‘saved’ will toil in hell for eternity. So once you’re in, should you chose to leave, you will burn in hell for it.

Aside from this, the daily life of a born again is described by its preachers as a battle of good versus evil. Secular society represents Satan’s influence, and those who profit from it are therefore under Satan’s control. I was shown many times a video entitled ‘Hell’s Bells’ that scrutinized secular music and instructed it’s viewers that the motivating force behind most, if not all non-Christian music, was Satan. The production was done in a way that instilled a great sense of fear within me, and the subsequent effect was the perception of bogeymen around every corner. Your one guiding light of hope is Christ. A performer named Carmen has produced several albums of songs and theatrical pieces that pit the Christian against Satan. The dramatic stories within, further managed the development my perception towards the existence of a daily struggle within America of good versus evil. It galvanized my belief in the fact that I was God’s soldier.

The bible was my rifle, and preachers identified my targets. Pro-choice advocates, secular culture and those who rejected my beliefs were the primaries. Scriptures were selected to back up whatever stance I was instructed to take on an issue, and with rifle in hand I battled Satan for control of those around me. The end result was often isolation, sometimes a shameful relapse into secular life, and ultimately a belief that I had been chosen by God and was therefore resigned to a life of hardship. The life of a soldier was supposed to be this way, and as long as my suffering was for the sake of spreading the Gospel, it was destined to be so. I was resigned to this reality, as unhappy as it made me, with a belief that everything was predestined and I was playing out the role that God had set out before me.

When money for college became a roadblock in my way, I had faith that God would lead me in the right direction. The Army recruiter and I met by chance the day after I had sat down with my parents to have the conversation about college. At the time I didn’t have any interest in joining the military, but the timing of it convinced me that God wanted me to enlist. Within the matter of a few days I followed through. By my senior year in high school I’d sworn off ‘spreading the Word’, as nothing besides isolation and negativity had come from it for a long time, yet my beliefs remained in tact.

In basic training there was a guy who bunked next to me who went by the nickname ‘preacher man’. He was a born again father of five from North Carolina, and had this ability to captivate an audience with his words of Christ and the bible. By the second month I was so tired of listening to it I could have thrown my boot at him. Other soldiers in the platoon couldn’t get enough of it, but I’d heard it all before. It caused me to realize how I came off to my peers in high school, during a time where I discovered a number of natural leadership skills that had nothing to do with religion at all. During the second month of training I suffered an injury to my ankle, found a born again Christian service on post and was healed on a Sunday. I got there using crutches, and walked back without them. Before graduation and my first assignment I no longer believed that heaven was only for those who were ‘saved’, yet still retained the necessary faith to be healed.

What specifically changed my mind about born again Christians being God’s chosen people, I couldn’t say. The idea though, that I had it all figured out at the age of 17, seemed absurd. There were internal changes that took place within me and as the individual began to emerge, so did a suspicion concerning the intent behind the things I’d been taught to believe about my religion. Book after book, month after month, experience after experience, the fundamental tenants of Jesus’s teachings provided me happiness and many friendships. While the issues I had been consumed with during high school – abortion, homosexuality, Satanic influences in secular society, witnessing – were inconsequential to me. By the time I turned 19, my nightly reading from the devotional bible was replaced with a journal, and my religion consisted of only one thing. Treat others as you’d like to be treated.

Now I’m 26, and this is what I know. Religion is not the wretched source of suffering experienced on 9/11, during the Hundred Years War or the sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Human beings were the catalysts for all of this. Religion was exploited by people, and behind each tragedy one will discover that a leader managed to convince their followers that they were God’s chosen people. The rationale allows for the follower to feel justified in violating the rules of their religion for the sake of a perceived ‘greater good’. It’s the collateral damage that comes about in ways that violate the essence of one’s religion that convinces many atheists that the very idea of religion is wrong. But it’s not religion at all, but instead the decisions made by religious leaders that are responsible for needless suffering, and behind most is a lust for power.

It is this very lust for power that is driving born again Christian leaders in their jihad on America. There are currently 130 members of the House of Representatives who consider themselves to be born again, not to mention the President himself. This newfound political power has emboldened the preachers and their followers. The religion is spreading like wildfire, with mega-churches sprouting up that can seat thousands of members. Services are now accompanied by light shows resembling a rave or rock concert, and the words are politically tuned with a ferocity that trumps anything I was ever exposed to. Quoting more in proportion with the increased power from the book of Revelation where it’s been argued that Jesus endorsed violence, aggression and called for vengeance against nonbelievers. By the same token, portions of the Bible where Jesus teaches us to turn the other cheek and love our enemies are becoming increasingly diminished in terms of focus during sermons.

It’s becoming more about conquering territory than saving lives, as evidenced by the words of Pastor Ted following the tsunami in southeast Asia. He noted that the waves hit the “number-one exporter of radical Islam,” Indonesia. “That’s not a judgment. It’s an opportunity.” A reporter who witnessed this sermon heard a man say that he wished he could “get in there” among the survivors, since their souls were “ripe,” and another said that he was “psyched” about what God was “doing with His ocean.” Pastor Ted presides over the country’s most notorious mega-church in Colorado Springs that seats 7,500, and already it’s not large enough to accommodate the congregation.

Pastor Ted engaging his congregation in discussion of an upside to the tsunami tragedy planted a seed in the heads of everyone who was there. It was the kind of exploitation the religious-right has been guilty of in the past. I’m reminded of the statements made by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson following 9/11. Falwell said, “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians…the ACLU…all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.” Robertson backed him up by saying, “I therefore believe that that created an environment which possibly has caused God to lift the veil of protection which has allowed no one to attack America on our soil since 1812.” America roundly rejected their ideas, and since then they’ve both had to apologize. What was learned from this is that the preacher needs to only plant the seed and allow the congregation to draw their own conclusions.

Militant speech from religious leaders is also growing more political by the day. When a compromise was reached between Democrat and Republican Senators in the recent battle over the filibuster of judicial nominees, Focus on the Family chairman Dr. James Dobson reacted by saying, “This Senate agreement represents a complete bailout and betrayal by a cabal of Republicans…we share the disappointment, outrage and sense of abandonment felt by millions of conservative Americans who helped put Republicans in power last November. I am certain that these voters will remember both Democrats and Republicans who betrayed their trust.” Dobson is considered the most influential evangelical minister in the country, and has threatened to take down the GOP if they should fail to push the religious right’s pro-life, anti-gay rights agenda. During an appearance on ABC’s ‘This Week’ in 2004 he was asked whether he felt President Bush would fail evangelicals and replied by saying, “I’m sure he will fail us. He doesn’t dance to our tune.”

Bush’s alcoholism was apparently a driving force behind his conversion to born again Christianity, and his case is much like the conversions of millions in America. This genuine example of personal heroism is behind many of the stories you’d hear in the ‘testimonies’ of born agains. Dobson’s sentiment regarding his sincerity is a perfect example of how power has corrupted the faith, as a religious leader now feels justified in launching a verbal attack at a fellow born again who, by winning the presidency, has undoubtedly helped his cause more than anyone. And here lies the divide between saving souls and a lust for power. If the most influential born again preacher in the country has this to say about his brother, then what is he really fighting for?

I asked myself that very question a long time ago. Why was I giving my life, my soul to Christ if I wasn’t going to embody what he stood for? If Christ taught me not to judge my fellow man, then as a teenager why was I focusing my time and energy on doing just that on issues such as homosexuality and abortion? Did Jesus want me to focus my energy on spreading love and compassion, or was I put on this earth to be a political activist? If the President of the United States is culpable for not pushing the church’s political agenda, what kind of a chance would I have had? The people I knew and still love to this day would have entertained my questions regarding any number of intricate ideas concerning the Bible, but on the politically hot topics it simply wasn’t allowed. There was always a fine line between honest intellectual curiosity and diverting from the platform.

The end result was a teenager proudly wearing pro-life t-shirts to school, while making my way through an entire 365 day devotional bible twice. This seems sadly hypocritical to me now as I think back on it. And without the structure or the title of Christian, today I can read one of the Gospels of Christ and know in my heart that in spite of everything that preceded this day, I got it. I’m not about to break into a verse of ‘My God is an Awesome God’ anytime soon, but can honestly say that it doesn’t matter. I’ll never participate in another healing or experience the thrill of a revival around the campfire, but the absence of these things won’t make a bit of difference. My heart’s not in it, not what’s going on with born again Christians in America today, and it never will be.

It doesn’t matter. Nor would it matter to any born again Christian living in America today who deep down just wants to lead a good life, but has no interest in power. That’s not what it’s all about, and it’s this truth that inspires a sincere hope of mine that in the upcoming years this wave will finally break, and roll back. Before the faithful become convinced that their neighbor only deserves ‘conditional’ love, and the neighbor who doesn’t believe is their enemy. We’re already at the point where a difference of opinion is perceived as oppression, and an embryo constitutes ‘life’. The most militant followers of Christ, a man who made the religion possible through curing the sick and healing the lame, are now attempting to stand in the way of science that could continue Christ’s work in the name of power. It’s time for born again Christianity to ween itself from this destructive vice and get back to the work their savior died for.

Did Jesus live to inspire future marketability of his name for the benefit of false prophets seeking power, or did he live to inspire us to love one another. If everyone in the world were to convert tomorrow, what would the next step be? What’s the first thing Jesus would want us to do if the entire world woke up tomorrow and said a prayer in his name? The answer to this question isn’t represented in the political agenda of the religious-right. His first goal would not be for us to judge a specific group of people who live among us. We need to consider what that first thing would be, and make that priority number one. Until a step in this direction is taken, born again Christianity will continue along it’s current destructively militant path.