by Bruce Bawer
That religion in America has spawned such a phenomenon as megachurches should hardly be surprising. Americans have always been drawn to the outsized; we want to be part of something big, successful, "happening." As one man told a New York Times reporter, in explaining why he attends a large, fast-growing fundamentalist church in rural Ohio, "I like being around successful people on Sunday." We are a people in search of meaning and definition; but we also have developed in the Television Age a terrifying passivity, an insatiable desire to be entertained, and a discomfort with experiences that disturb the surfaces of our lives. Americans flock to megachurches to find a home, and to be less alone, and yet there seems nothing more lonely and less like a home—and nothing more dramatically removed from the earthly ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, who soiled his feet treading from village to village—than these immense, bland, antiseptic, impersonal structures that have nothing about them to suggest transcendence or immanence, but that speak only of efficiency, material security, and the insidious ability of modern popular culture to deflect our attentions incessantly from the things of God.
For legalistic Protestants, the only fully legitimate way of relating to nonbelievers is by evangelizing. Even when you are not explicitly evangelizing, you are "witnessing"—that is, providing an example of Christian righteousness and of the peace and joy that Christ brings to his people. This emphasis on witnessing encourages the tendency to put up a false front. For millions of legalistic families, the need to present the world with a phony facade is so deeply ingrained that the facade can come to seem more real than the reality. Whether because legalism forces people to develop their gifts for self-deception, or because it draws into its ranks people who are already masters of self-deception, legalists are notorious for their often crippling inability to confront, discuss, and deal honestly and productively with family problems. This is a running theme in Ulstein's book Growing Up Fundamentalist; one after another, his interviewees describe families that "stressed the appearance of perfection," that were "never interested in getting intimate and honest," that "lived in a world of denial and appearances," that "don't know how to ask for help" because "they have to appear like they're in charge." One women speaks of how her mother "can't consider the possibility that she made mistakes. It threatens her whole world." Another says: "Everything they do is for show, or, as they would say, a good witness. . . . No one asks for help, because it would blow their cover." One element of the psychology here is that God is believed to protect his "saved" children from problems; so if you want to be seen as saved, you pretend not to have problems.
For legalistic Christians, some of the dirtiest words are those that suggest generosity of spirit toward other people. One such word is broad-minded; another is tolerant. One legalistic ministry's home page contains the following jeremiad on broad-mindedness:
There is no room for broadmindedness in the chemical laboratory. Water is composed of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. The slightest deviation from the formula is forbidden.
There is no room for broadmindedness in music. The skilled director mil not permit his first violin to play even so much as one-half note off the written note, chord, and key.
And so on: There is no room for broad-mindedness in mathematics, biology, athletics, car repair. "How then shall we expect that broad-mindedness shall rule in the realm of Christianity and morals? He that forsakes the truth of God, forsakes the God of truth." The home page for Charles Stanley's In Touch magazine strikes a similar note:
Are you a person who considers himself to be broad-minded, open to various points of view? If so, consider several examples of decision-making. . . . Suppose your doctor said: "You have a heart disease that requires bypass surgery." Would you say "Well, any doctor will do. Give me a pediatrician, maybe a general practitioner. Any physician is acceptable"? Of course not. You are very narrow-minded when it comes to your health. You want the finest cardiologist available.
The same holds, we are told, when we are picking out a wife or a new suit. "In truth, none of us are as broad-minded as we think we are. We are broad-minded about some things, but we are very narrow-minded about some other things. The greater the importance or the more serious the consequences of our decisions, the more narrow-minded we become."
The ways in which legalistic narrow-mindedness works to stifle life, love, and honest communication were strikingly demonstrated by a series of messages posted on an Internet message board maintained by Campus Life, a magazine for evangelical youth. The author of the messages was a twenty-four-year-old man who did not identify himself. In the first of these messages, posted in June 1996, he asked, "Should Christian young people be dying of loneliness?" He explained that "legalism . . . sometimes makes it hard to meet people. In a church where everyplace is a sin (dance clubs, other churches' activities, even Christian concerts!) you sometimes end up scared out of knowing anyone. ... I am scared to say this, but I myself am considering leaving my church for a different congregation. Where I attend, this is unequivocably considered backsliding. If we leave our congregation, it is said it's because we're worldly, or fleshly, and really don't care about the Lord." He said that he
could call up the one or two young people from my church and ask them what they're doing, but I usually feel nervous when around them, like I'm under a microscope being examined for sinfulness. I don't feel I can talk to them about my weaknesses, struggles, or that I can even talk the way I normally do.
Because of the isolation I've gone through for the last year, I actually got to where I attended a service at a big local church close to where I live. My church considers every member of this group deceived, worldly, ungodly, unreligious, and fake, and that none of them are going to heaven. . . .
I now fear that God will be angry with me for what I did, and for writing this. But, I cannot go on in life being this lonely. I need to find someplace where there's a young singles group, not just so I can find a girlfriend, but so I can have a new set of friends who I can be around. Legalism makes freindship /sic/ hard, and it makes us look at our brothers and sisters instead as "cops." It's like, we think when they're talking to us, they're looking for sins to catch us in. I still run and hide in malls or stores if I think I see someone who knows me from church, I don't know why, except that I'm afraid.
Of his loneliness, he wrote: "I pray that Jesus will change this swiftly, because it hurts. . . . Does anyone relate to any of this????" Writing again in July, the young man noted that "in a harsh, legalistic setting, the 'sinful worldly people' often seem more compassionate than many others." (This is a theme one encounters often in the memories of people who were raised in legalistic churches: their amazement at the generosity of spirit demonstrated by people whom their parents and pastors told them to view as evil.) In legalistic churches, "communication becomes fake, as the 'perfect Christian' masks go up. ... I love these people, and I know God uses them to help me in my life. These people care deeply about the Lord and do a lot more for Him than I do. But, I feel like I just can't tell them what's going on in my life, due to legalism."
September brought another message:
I guess what I'm talking about in legalism is a Christian person creating rules about things around them in the world that aren't found in the Word, then condemning others for not following these regulations. I'm referring to when brothers and sisters in God can't even get together at dinners or flea markets without talking about rules and regulations, and condemning one another, and can't seem to even have love and fellowship one with another, only fear of "getting caught."
I'm referring to Christians being so hung up on rules like exact hair length and style for men and women, whether or not it's sinful to read the sports page, sinful and unsinful brands of blue jeans, sleeve lengths, what types of cars are humble and what aren't, being afraid of accidentally saying slang words like "dude," "man," or "what's up," and on and on. . . .
When people focus more on these rules and how much they follow them, and how much
everybody else doesn't, and how others need to follow them so they can be as right as me (notice—no mention of Jesus Christ, the cross, or forgiveness of sins) that sounds like something that makes it hard to have friends at church.
Two days after this message, the young man's series of self-disclosures concluded abruptly with the following note: "This is important. I want to say here that I have spoken some things which were wrong, because they concern a man of God and his ministry that is ordained of God. ... To speak against a God ordained preacher is a terrible sin, and a big mistake. If anything I have written here in this whole folder (especially about dating) is wrong, I ask God to forgive me. I did not do it being led by God, but by sin. I repent........and I will not post anything here ever again.......may God forgive me."
Many secular people have a lingering sense that being a Christian means "being a good person," or at least trying or aspiring to be, and assume that all Christians also think this way. Legalistic Protestantism strongly rejects the notion, however, that an individual's goodness or lack thereof has any ultimate value or significance. Indeed, according to many legalists, the very idea that individual virtue plays a role in determining whether one will go to heaven is an evil one, deliberately planted in people's minds by Satan. In October 1996, on the day before Halloween, I went into a "Christian" bookstore in a small Georgia town and found on the counter, next to a case of Testamints ("Christian breath mints" with a Bible verse on every page), several stacks of tiny booklets selling for twenty-five cents apiece.
"Most Christian bookstores," says an article on the Christian Broadcasting Network's Web site, "carry small pamphlets about the Lord— designed especially for children on Halloween. These could be taped to candy and dropped into each trick-or-treater's bag." Chick Publications, the California-based company that published the booklets on sale at the Georgia store, appears to be the world's leading supplier of such materials.
The covers of the booklets on sale at that Georgia bookstore were pretty innocuous. Spelled out in white block letters on a black background were the words Happy Halloween; beside them, in orange and white and black, was a cartoon of a witch placing a skull in a cauldron. Inside the booklet was a comic strip telling the story of a boy named Tommy and his two friends, Bobby and Timmy. Scared on Halloween by actors dressed up as demons and witches at a simulated "haunted house," the boys run out into a street, where Timmy is struck by a car and killed. He wakes up in hell, where the Devil tells him he'll be there forever because he died in his sins. The next day, Tommy tells his mother, Mrs. Baxter, that if he'd listened to her, Timmy would still be alive. Bobby speaks up, offering the consolation that at least Timmy is in heaven. No, Mrs. Baxter corrects him. Timmy isn't in heaven. She affirms that she loved Timmy, who was one of her favorite students in her Sunday school class. But Timmy, she informs the boys darkly, made a mistake; he refused to repent. He refused to give himself over to Jesus. When Timmy quit Sunday school recently, she says, she cautioned him that salvation was possible only through Jesus; Timmy s response was to laugh at her and call her a fanatic. As a result of that decision, Mrs. Baxter tells Bobby and Tommy, their friend will spend eternity in hell.
"But that's IMPOSSIBLE!" Bobby says. "Timmy was a good kid."
Mrs. Baxter replies that it's wrong to think that good boys go to heaven and bad boys go to hell. "That's a lie straight from the devil," she insists. We're all sinners, she says, and thus all deserve eternal punishment; the only way any of us gets to heaven is through Jesus' sacrifice on the cross.
Having heard this, Bobby tells Mrs. Baxter that he doesn't want to reject Jesus' sacrifice. She instructs him therefore to turn away from his sins and to offer his life to Jesus. Immediately he falls to his knees, lowers his elbows to the floor, places his hands over his eyes, and prays to Jesus. In his prayer he declares his belief in Jesus' sacrifice, repents of his sins, and begs forgiveness. Finally, he asks Jesus to come into his heart and save him. Then he stands up and announces with a broad grin that he feels safe now—for he knows that when he dies, he'll go to heaven, unlike Timmy.
The comic strip concludes with a direct plea to the little boy or girl reader who has presumably found this booklet taped to candy in a trick-or-treat bag. "Make this your greatest Halloween," it says. How? First, you must "REPENT"—be genuinely penitent for your sins and be prepared to repudiate them. Second, you must "RECEIVE"— namely, receive "God's free love by inviting Jesus into your heart to save you." Then, above two pictures of Satan and Jesus: "Don't make the same mistake Tommy did. The choice is yours."
There are two important points to be made about these comic strips. The first is that legalistic Christians who have pilloried children's books like Heather Has Two Mommies as evil and antifamily—and have made such books the subjects of intense controversy—cheerfully purchase Halloween pamphlets like these, which use terror as a tool for evangelizing children, and drop them every year into countless trick-or-treaters' baskets. And this has never become the stuff of controversy.
The second point is that the comic strip about Tommy and his friends is not the product of some mind that has wandered off the beaten track: What it presents is standard legalistic Protestant theology. Let there be no misunderstanding of what the theology reflected in these pamphlets says about God and Satan. Satan strives to convince people that they need not embrace Jesus in order to be saved, but need only be good; thus Satan is, in effect, a force for virtue. To Jesus, by contrast, it is infinitely less important that people be good than that they accept him as their savior; Jesus is, then, effectively not a force for virtue. "We believe," says the "Statement of Faith" of Atlanta's First Baptist Church, "that Satan is a person, the author of sin and the reason for the fall of man, and is destined to the judgement of an eternal punishment in the lake of fire." Author of sin or not, however, the legalistic notion that salvation through goodness is a Satan-inspired doctrine means that the contest with God is, for legalists, not a clash between good and evil, or love and hate, or sinlessness and sin, but is, quite simply, a struggle for raw power between two transcendent entities in which people can choose up sides and take the consequences: end up with Satan in a lake of fire or with Christ at the right hand of God. Millions of legalistic American Protestants cheerfully embrace this theology that condemns "good kids" to everlasting torment because they didn't realize how important it was to accept Jesus as their savior.
Children. As I was reminded in that Georgia church, legalistic pastors often treat their parishioners like children. To be sure, Jesus said that "except ye . . . become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 18:3); but the next words out of his mouth—"Whosoever shall humble himself as this little child, the same is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven"—make it clear that he meant his followers should be like children in their humility, not in their understanding. "Brethren," wrote Paul, "be not children in understanding; howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men" (I Cor. 14:20). Too many legalists choose to be children in understanding, even as they remain all too "adult" in malice, greed, resentment, and cruelty. Indeed, if many nonlegalistic Christians feel that their religion obliges them to be constantly open to growth and discovery, legalistic Christianity can be genuinely infantilizing; at its worst, indeed, it can be nothing more or less than a formula for arrested development—intellectually, aesthetically, and spiritually. What better way to cut off growth, after all, than to lay down the law that any sign of growth is a thing of the Devil?
The flip side of the congregation's childlike role, of course, is the pastor's paternalism. Legalistic pastors insist that God demands obedience and has ordained a hierarchy that must be respected: pastor over flock, husband over wife. A favorite text is Ephesians 5:22—24, which is traditionally (but, most biblical scholars now say, erroneously) attributed to Saint Paul: "Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himse
lf its Saviour. As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands." Wives are told to look to their husbands for spiritual leadership and to obey them without question; husbands, in turn, are expected to submit with equal deference to the church pastor and elders. Though the nature and extent of pastoral authority varies from congregation to congregation, members of legalistic churches as a rule are remarkable for the degree to which they allow—and even invite—their pastors to interfere in their personal lives, ordering them how to handle everything from financial problems to troubles with their children. It doesn't take much for many legalistic pastors to establish themselves as authorities in the minds of their flock: An October 1996 New York Times article profiled an Ohio minister who supplements his Bible lessons "with an impressive knowledge of current events that comes from reading the Wall Street Journal daily, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report." For many legalistic parishioners, such reading habits qualify the pastor as a first-class intellectual.
Parishioners' obligation to obey is absolute. Church members are not to heed the promptings of their own minds, emotions, and consciences, because, they are told, those things can be manipulated by Satan; only by obeying one's God-given superior can one be sure that one is doing what God wishes. A former member of a legalistic church shared with me a nine-page document that she had been given by her pastor and that is typical of the kinds of materials that such men distribute to their female parishioners. Entitled "Seven Basic Needs of a Husband," it is a set of instructions designed to create wives who are perfectly subordinate in every way and to support the idea that such subordination is biblical. Under the heading "A HUSBAND NEEDS A WIFE WHO ACCEPTS HIM AS A LEADER AND BELIEVES IN HIS GOD-GIVEN RESPONSIBILITIES," it lists several points: