The story: I was raised Catholic in the liberal West Coast church of the 1960s and 1970s. I attended Catholic schools through 12th grade, and was taught my religion by a bunch of wonderful nuns who were determined to raise up a student body of social justice warriors. They tended to slide over the parts of the theology that were disconcerting; the important things in life were to take joy in the gifts of God, be properly grateful for them, and put them to the uses he intended. In college I made friends with Evangelical Christians, and discovered there was a whole other Christian religion out there. They seemed to have a more evidence-based faith, one based on the bible and not the pronouncements of the church hierarchy. I explored that for a few years. Meanwhile I met and married a man who was raised in an Evangelical tradition but was not religious.
I got into serious trouble with the Evangelical message. I couldn’t get my mind around the notion that one could take the entire bible literally. And the constant emphasis on sin, and my worthlessness, fed my depression fiercely. We were attending church regularly, but my husband finally insisted we quit, because the sermon would leave me in tears of despair; not even God could love someone as worthless as I. So I stopped going to church, but the damage was done, and it ate and ate at me for several years.
This comes from a brief compendium of comments by a frequent commenter at Bruce Gerencser’s blog.
I was not raised in the evangelical church, but I now live in Wake Forest, North Carolina, the home of a Southern Baptist seminary, and I am surrounded by bellowing Holy Men whose life’s work is, short version, degrading others in order to later exploit them.
There was no first couple, there was no Fall, there is no such thing as Original Sin — and there is absolutely no educated, intellectually serious debate about that, even if evangelicals do claim to be evidence-based. The unhappy truth is that the people who believe the Bible is ‘inerrant’ lack the intellectual rigor to sort through and weigh the evidence.
If you want to do yourself and your children an easy favor, go to the park on Sunday morning instead of church.