Wednesday, June 1, 2011

the dark underbelly of being a sojrone

So, a writer at Sojo is in a pickle.

The Dark Underbelly of Fundamentalist, Charismatic Christianity

Now, I do believe that there are some serious problems in charismania. Namely, they have for far too long tolerated the 'ministries' of fake-healers and people who claim to be apostles and prophets but are not.

But, those aren't the problems this Sojrone finds appalling. Here is what bugs him.

In my late-20s, I began to notice the poor track record that fundamentalist Christianity produces on a societal level. The first shocker was when I discovered that all those prayer groups I attended to “Bless Israel” in my youth and Bible college years were in fact providing theological cover to justify colonialism and oppression of Arab peoples in the Middle East. Then I started wondering why it never occurred to me that the Vietnam War was immoral, even though I had traveled there as a Bible college student and seen the gruesome pictures of what it looked like from their perspective. Then I learned that the most vehement opponents of civil rights in the 1960’s were Bible-believing fundamentalist Christians. So far, not so good

I’ve noticed that the same loving, happy people that I grew up with are the same people who think of homosexuality as if it were the moral equivalent of pedophilia. I’ve seen people very close to me — people who love Jesus and strive to live a moral life — isolated, shamed, and rejected by the same happy, loving people who believe that if gay people would just pray hard enough and forgive their earthly fathers, then they can be “cured.”


So, he doens't like it that charismatic, as a whole, are pro-Israel and think homosexuality is a sin.

In other words, two aspects of the charismatic movement that could be considered biblically informed are what this man calls the 'dark underbelly'.

I don’t want to pass homophobia along to my children. My heart tells me its wrong, though my head still has a hard time figuring out how to reconcile what my heart is telling me with the way I read Scripture.


What are we in, a Disney movie? Some shloppy Hollywood fairy tale where all is right if you "follow your heart"?

News for you, Sojrone, the Bible does not follow your "My heart tells me it's wrong" thinking. It has little good to say about the heart as a decision-makers; rather, it flatly tells us "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, more than we can know". If your heart is contradicting God's Word, your heart is wrong.

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