The Wartburg Watch has an account of a particularly foul and cultish church located in, of all place, Sterling, Virginia.
When Joe [14-years old] was excommunicated from our church it was because he was not a Christian. Calvary Temple leadership had mandated that all members of the church were to send their children to Calvary Temple School so that they would not be polluted by the public school system. As a result, whenever a child was removed from the church, they were also expelled from the school. There is a verse in Deuteronomy 21 that says if an Israelite family had a rebellious son, they were to take him to the city gates and stone him to death. Calvary Temple’s 21st century interpretation of that verse is to shun their own rebellious children. To have nothing to do with them. To treat them as dead.
It goes downhill from there.
United we stand, divided we fall. They will deny it and swear up-and-down that it isn’t so, but the natural loyalties of healthy families threaten the total ownership that cults demand — and so their teachings aim to undermine those loyalties. This is why fundamentalists, most notably the Southern Baptists, teach that your wedding vows are less important than slavish and unthinking submission to an Invisible Friend, and why other churches tell people to throw away their difficult children.
This is the point, and the evil, of the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac — and the reason Abraham’s obsequious betrayal of his son is celebrated in three different religions. I happily surrender the last word on that odious story to Christopher Hitchens:
Just so: Flee for your life from those idiot preachers who celebrate Abraham — because your life is what those sumbidgs want.