The whole Gay issue didn't seem as important when I was a fundie

[shadowknows69]

I was thinking about this last night. For a short time in the mid to late 80's I was a pretty serious member of an Assemblies of God church. Holy rolling, faith healing, speaking in tongues the whole nine yards, and that was part of its appeal to me. The mystical and supernatural nature of God was embraced, as long as it was in the context of Jesus of course. If you were to have a vision that didn't involve the savior you'd better not speak of it. They got pretty radical too, had us burning rock albums, preaching to fellow kids in school, telling us to stay away from places like bowling alleys because they serve the devil's brew etc. etc.

They never in my memory really went off on gay people though. Maybe it was my church and the area around it. It was small town america and at the time we didn't have a lot of openly gay people in the area so maybe that was part of the ommission. It just seems like its been the anti-gay rhetoric and indeed the violence they seem to wish on others has been ramped up to the extreme in right wing america. To us it was enough to silently know everyone else was going to hell, and we actually wanted to try really hard to prevent that. Some of these folks today seem to revel in it. I'd like to think I was part of a kinder gentler class of batshit crazy fundies. Any other former holy rollers here on DU from that era that can confirm or deny that about your church?

[rhiannon55]

1. I was a fundie for a couple of years in the early 70s

and gays were not an issue. I think in those days, homosexuality wasn't talked about in "polite society." The issue hadn't been politicized yet.

Enter Jerry Falwell. :-(

[JustFiveMoreMinutes]

6. .. and Anita Bryant n/t

[MountainLaurel]

2. That's good to hear

I attended a fundamentalist, independent Baptist church during the 80s from about the age of 9 through high school. (Happily for me, neither of my parents were churchgoers, so I had a balance from that perspective.) Homosexuality wasn't a big focus of things, simply because I think it was assumed that there were none in small-town West Virginia. So, while the pastor would occasionally rail about AIDS being a gift from God (the spirit of Fred Phelps is present in a lot of pretty white-sided churches around this country) and note that homosexuals should be shipped off to an island somewhere, it wasn't a regular focus of sermons and such. Homosexuality was wrapped into a package of "evils of a godless America" along with premarital sex, drug use, psychology, interracial marriage, and feminism. But very rarely was it a focus of attention: That would require acknowledging that some of the parishoners might be gay or know someone who is.

Much more attention was focused on things that were perceived to be a regular issue in our daily lives: sinful music and television, women who acted above their place, disobedient children, and in general, not letting god rule your life.

[xchrom]

3. there has been a sea change --

i'm old enough that there were very, very few ''born again'' christians -- if any.
the crusade that billy graham and others started to get prayer and the ten commandments back into schools morphed over time.

just about the time you're speaking of -- you begin to see the emergence of the more radical elements of the religous right wing.

[MountainLaurel]

4. Just finished "The Hijacking of Jesus"

Which discusses the rise of fundamentalism in the United States compared with the mainline Protestant sects like Methodists, Episcopals, and Presbyterians. Not surprisingly, a lot of it is tied to the rise of the civil rights and social justice movements.

[xchrom]

8. it became a refuge from modernity

for some people.

[MountainLaurel]

15. Absolutely.

:hi:

[Tyo]

5. "...a kinder gentler class of batshit crazy fundies."

:rofl: That is beautiful!

I have never been a member of a class of BCFs but I am gay and I hope you don't mind if I weigh in.

Theocracy and Fascism both require some kind of threat or enemy that they can claim to be fighting. The purpose of the threat is to get people worked up and scared and The Movement whether it's religious or political or a combination gets painted as the knight on the white horse who will save everyone.

Threats from outside are a dime a dozen, but internal threats can be a little more difficult to find. Domestic Communism served as a great internal threat for quite a while but has now totally run out of steam. Race in the form of the "invasion" of undocumented workers who conveniently are mostly Latino is pretty effective these days but that's partially a foreign issue.

The only real homegrown threat they have been able to come up with seems to be the gays. We have been portrayed as working actively to undermine society and corrupt the county. We are also seen as representative of the supposed collapse of morals in general in America.

Coupled with this, lots of good people are understandably ambivalent about the gay "lifestyle" as it is described to them by the Fundies and a lot of people don't really see how gay rights or the lack thereof are something that they need to get too worked up about.

Back when you were batshit crazy the world was a different place. The Right Wing hadn't taken complete control yet and the Republican alliance with the Fundies was still in the building stages. Sounds like your church was all over the morals thing but they had rock music and porn to fight and gays and politics weren't really on their radar.

It took our own increased visibility that came with the gay rights movement coupled with the need of the Right for a domestic threat with broad-based appeal to get us where we are now. It's funny. In a lot of ways we are far better off than we were even ten or fifteen years ago while at the same time more demonized than ever

[shadowknows69]

7. I think I got lucky

becaue it was in the early stages of the AIDs crisis so I'm surprised there wasn't more. "Gay plague/God's judgement" talk. I never gave it much thought. I knew the passages in the Bible against it obviously but it wasn't focused on. In hindsight the preacher we had was a really good man and he truly tried to preach the words of Jesus first. My break from the church was more from seeing things the religion was doing to me that I didn't like. I started taking the "preach to others" thing to extremes. I even got into a huge fight with my mother once telling her that her and my sister would go to hell because they went to the methodist church. That may have been my tipping point.

[Tyo]

9. You got lucky in a couple of ways

I think that people who have gone into some form of extremism either religious or political and managed to come out the other side have insights into themselves and human nature that come only from experiencing that kind of thing firsthand.

[shadowknows69]

10. Absolutely

and my spirituality has continued to evolve into what works and what makes sense to my own heart. "To thine own self be true" is my guiding principal I think. I have never been racist or homophobic except where society or a particular segment of it has tried to and in some cases, I'm embarrased to say, dragged me to that. That is usually when my own conscience alarm goes off and tells me that I'm no longer in the positive realm of the grand scheme of things and that negative energy makes negative things occur. Some people seem to be lacking that switch.

As I said I haven't always been the paragon of justice and virtue and I challenge any hetero white male with slightly bigoted upbringings to say they have never laughed at an off color joke or NOT stood up to a group of peers that were being ignorant in their speech. I have made conscious efforts to atone for any of those small sins and I think that is how we all grow. I think its probably an innate human trait, or at least societal trait to instantly fear the different. The ignorant choose to turn that fear into hate and the evolving choose to realize the beauty of variety and embrace it.

[Zodiak]

11. I know your story very well, because I have lived it, too

I grew up in North Texas, the center of fundie X-tian freakism. My parents were not religious, either, but I had to find out about the religion thing because I didn't want to go to hell. From the age of 9, I attended charismatic, presbytarian, catholic, and soutehrn baptist churches in my quest for the "truth". I tried my level best to be a good christian, even reading the great bulk of the Bible when I was in latter grade school.

By the time I was in high school, I was attending one of the popular baptist churches in my neighborhood and going to youth group (I just switched to that church because I had a girlfriend there). They would hand out a Bible lesson each Sunday with highlighted passages and then little arrows pointing to those passages that would explain what the highlighted text meant. After reading the Bible on my own, I asked a few questions (thinking this like any old "class" where knowledge is the object) and was told to "shut up about what I cannot know". After a few instances of that, I was disinvited from youth group.

I got into heavily music about that time, as well, as all kids do. Heavy metal, mostly. I was decried as an agent of Satan because I enjoyed power chords. At that moment, I had an epiphany. The love and truth in the Bible that people are supposed to "get" is missing from christianity as it was practiced in my hometown. What's more, these people had put prejudices in my head that took years to overcome (and they are not fully overcome to this day, although I try very hard).

I am a pagan, now, borrowing what my conscience tells me is right from the various beautiful religions of the world. I am happy exactly as I am, and I get to continue to rock out, which is way more spiritual than anything organized religion ever gave me.

[shadowknows69]

12. Great to meet you Zodiak

I think I might have been kicked out of a youth group too IIRC lol. One of my friends in that same youth group turned me on to Jethro Tull though and I've definitely had some epiphanies listening to Ian and the boys.

[Tyo]

17. What was is about Fundie Religion that attracted you in the first place?

I know that some people are born into it and that's a different thing, but others seek it out. Why the Fundies as opposed to, say, the Episcopalians?

[Initech]

13. Former fundie here...

I attended an ultra-conservative branch of the Church Of Christ for a couple years. But after September 11th, I had a sudden realization that the church had lost complete touch with reality and I had to get out any way I could.

[LibertyLover]

14. From 1971 to 1976

I attended an Assemblies of God church as well as going to Catholic Charismatic Renewal prayer meetings. I don't recall homosexuality being mentioned at all. The emphasis was on a relationship with God and Jesus, accepting Jesus as your saviour and witnessing to others about the "Good News". Once in a while the preacher at the AOG church might discuss evolution and of course dismiss it as being against God's word. In 1973, with the Roe v. Wade decision, things started to change. The problem was that I had started to change as well, what with going off to university. One of the leaders of the CCR prayer meeting I was attending actually told me that my decision to go to the University of Chicago to study ancient Near Eastern history was not what God wanted for me, that I should stay home, get married and have lots of Catholic babies. I politely thanked him for his opinion and than said that if it were not God's choice, God could have kept the school from accepting me. After that I only went back on occasion when I was home on holidays and a friend wanted to go. Then I discovered Wicca and never looked back. From my own experience I think you are correct.

[lonestarnot]

16. What? They finally figured out they can't legislate their morality?