Public Life, Standards

A Measure Of Success

112 Comments

How do you measure success? In fundyland it’s almost always done in terms of standards kept and appearances maintained. Looking righteous is an end in itself.

So often we hear the glorious claims of wonderful outcomes for people who follow the fundy path. Never mind if they are happy or well-adjusted. Don’t ask if they are honest or decent to their fellow man. Do they appear to conform? Do they seem to obey? This is all that matters.

“They practiced courtship instead of dating and they were married for 53 years.” And they made each others lives a living hell. He cheated. She secretly drank. When he died she only felt relief. “God truly blesses us when we try to follow his plan for marriage!”

“This wonderful family hasn’t missed a single church service in the last 10 years!” The children sit petrified of being hit and screamed at when they get home if they put a foot out of line. As we speak the little girl has a 101 temperature but she was dragged here anyway. “Surely God honors their faithfulness.”

“Every single one of his six children and eighteen grandchildren are now in full-time ministry!” One will be indicted this week for fraud for embezzling from his church. Another is an atheist who just can’t get up the courage to admit it that he doesn’t believe his own sermons. A third regrets every day of his life that he didn’t follow his dreams away from fundamentalism. “This man is a shining example of how to train up a child!”

The devil is in the details.

112 thoughts on “A Measure Of Success”

    1. Whoa. I don’t know what to do with myself now.
      It’s amazing how little Jesus cared about outside appearances. How much, in fact, he lambasted those whose priority was what other “sinners” thought about how they acted. It just goes to show how many churches Jesus would get kicked out of today if he tried to show up some Sunday morning (or Sunday night, or Wednesday night, or if you’re REALLY holy, Monday-Saturday night).

  2. All too familiar, and smacking of the pavement of the road to hell. :\ When will we learn that good intentions != good actions? And that good appearances often hide the truth? And isn’t it the truth that will set us free, not this lie of perfection? Ugh.

  4. My pastor use to say that you should beat your children into submission so that they would obey you to the extent of licking your spit up off the floor. My children have been ” striped” many times for things that now seem so trivial. I’m praying they wont follow in my footsteps and do the same to their children.

    1. I grew up in a similarly abusive home. The difference between you and my parents is that they still insist that everything they did to us was okay. Thus, all of their seven children except for me and my brother have expressed their intent to raise their children in the same way that we were raised. In fact, now that four of us are adults, it is sickening that two of my sisters still call my mother and egg her on her in abuse of the kids that are still at home, always telling her that they need more spankings, shamings, and other punishments.

      If you are serious about not wanting your children to repeat your mistakes, it is SO IMPORTANT to admit where you were wrong and seek forgiveness. I am sure you probably have done that, but I know quite a few parents with the “I don’t want my children to repeat my mistakes but I’ll be damned if I admit that to my kids” attitude. It’s sad because the kids grow up thinking their parents will expect them to parent the same way they were raised.

      Sorry for the rant, but the spanking issue is one that really makes my blood boil.

      1. Yes. Once we left the fundyland and came to our senses we talked with our children about how wrong we were and how sorry we were. My eldest said that he wasn’t sorry because it kept him straight when at times he wanted to go astray. Still, much regret for the unrealistic expectation i put upon my children. God forbid that they would even fidgit during a two hour service!

        1. Just last night I saw a mom drag a 2 year old into the bathroom with a foot long glue stick in hand! If DSS were called would that be child abuse? I know they do it even to their infants!!!

        2. Well, it depends on state law but if you suspect abuse you have a duty in a lot of states to report to DHS/CPS and let them make the final determination. Glue sticks and two year olds indeed! Would we be okay with her doing that to ANYONE elses’s child? Then why is it okay to do it to her own kid?

        3. I had a Sunday School teacher tell me I should take my 3 year old into the bathroom and spank her b/c she wouldn’t stay in her class. My daughter was scared and there was no way I was going to make her stay in a place where she was uncomfortable.

          The church was Calvary Baptist in Watertown, WI which is a big MBBC staff church. We left that day and we never went back.

    2. What a terrible thing to preach! It’s also very contrary to the character I try to develop in my kids. To run with the analogy, I want them to be humble enought that they would CLEAN the spit off the floor, but strong enough that no matter what happens, nobody can make the LICK it off the floor.

      I commend you for breaking free from such a person. It can’t be easy to escape that kind of mental abuse.

    3. Dear ellen:

      There are places where people who council others to break laws [in this case, child abuse] become accomplices where laws are broken.

      Christian Socialist

  5. “As we speak the little girl has a 101 temperature but she was dragged here anyway.”

    That’s why I never put my babies in the nursery. There were too many sick babies in there!

    Fundy women were also required to come to church only a few days after giving birth. I saw one lady who home-birthed her fifth child and came to church four days later! That’s just crazy!

    I got flack for missing church for a month after my first baby was born. Our pastor made sure I knew how he felt about that when he made this announcement in front of the Sunday morning service when I was walking in a little late …”it’s about time you bring that baby to church!”

    1. This used to infuriate me. My mom had a weakened immune system due to her blood cancer, and my sister had type one diabetes. Still, they were regularly exposed to all these idiots’ children because people didn’t have the sense to keep their kids home.

      My own kids would get sick by Tuesday every week because of Sunday school. Funny thing is, when we started doing home school co-ops, we were just positive our kids would be sick ALL the time due to the hundreds of kids they’d now be around. Didn’t happen. Why? Because the home schooling parents had the sense the fundy parents didn’t — they kept their sick kids home.

    2. AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGH!!! 😥

      Oh my goodness. Our childcare won’t let kids come back if they’re running a fever or have colored junk coming out of their noses or have a suspicious cough or have vomited in the last 24 hours. Most of my mama friends stay home from church for at least a month postpartum, to protect their little one’s new immune system.

      It breaks my heart that people are laboring under that kind of bondage. I was out running last week and saw a Muslim couple and another lady with them. The wife was wearing a hijab, and although she was speaking Arabic I could easily tell by her gestures that she was lecturing the other woman (who was modestly dressed but didn’t have her head covered) on her clothes. She pointed and gestured and shouted and got in the woman’s face, and I almost had to stop running so I could sob or vomit or both. It was such a stark reminder of what living under the law looks like. Fundamentalists are having the exact same experience — no joy. No grace. No peace of heart. No freedom. Just fear, shame, retribution, anger, and law, LAW, LAW!!!

      Thanks be to God for leading me away from that attitude.

      1. The level of similarity between how women are treated in fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity was one of the things that started me questioning the system.

        Another was my approbation of it.

  6. I’ve always cared more about my kids’ attitudes, or hearts, than I have their behavior. I guess this is because of the way I was raised, where my parents really only cared about the end result, and would do whatever it took to get the behavior to stop. My kids’ behavior is really only a symptom, after all. Fixing the symptoms won’t do anything at all if I never get at the root of the problem.

    Fundies never get at the root of the problem because they’re too busy slapping white paint on it and spritzing cologne on it. Just because it looks good doesn’t mean it IS good, though, and a child who is flawless on the outside could be, and very likely is, seething with anger and hurt, on the inside.

    1. I agree about the root of the problem!!!

      (Except that for fundies, the “root of the problem” is always that you are either unsaved or saved but “rebellious.”)

    3. I did this just the other day! My son said something cruel to his sister (a persistant problem), and I grounded him from something for it. A few minutes later, I heard him quietly apologize to his sister in what he thought was a private conversation. I told him that because he apologized, I would revoke his grounding. He was genuinely sorry which is a better result than simply curbing behavoir.

      Of course, his mother later regrounded him because he hit his sister with a giant mat, but hey, can’t win them all right?

      1. Ahh sisters. They exist to drive brothers CRAZY!!!

        (Of course, fundies also adhere to this sentiment. Although they mean something else entirely by it. 😕 )

    4. … never get at the root of the problem because they’re too busy slapping white paint on it and spritzing cologne on it.

      This is a quotable quote! Great analogy! I’ve seen this so many times in the HAC-taught church where I spend the early years of my Christian life.

  7. “This couple is the ideal of what we want our students to be.” They were put front and center on the college’s promo video. They got married when they graduated and within a year he had walked out on her and they got divorced.

      1. My old fundy church had my funeral last night. Apparently my fundy death was so bad that all they could say is “I as the pastor know what is going on but lets just leave it at that, just remember to pray for them”.

        I went to visit a pastor of a potential new church today, he took a drink of water and I jumped up and hollered AMEN. He told me I’m going to need some time to de-programmed.

        1. De-programming can take a while, but it is so worth it. One of the first things to drop is the belief that God is just waiting for you to step over the line so he can whack you. That is totally false. God loves you!

    2. Yes indeed! You get a new start on life and even the opportunity to replace all your old friends. If you move far away from the old ones it’s even easier to enjoy that new life. 😉

      Freedom comes with a price you know.

  9. *Sigh* The part about the kids being petrified is so true. Within the last year or so we’ve changed how we discipline our child. I don’t care that all my friends follow the Pearls and other crazy advice — I want to have a loving relationship with my child. It’s a little tough, too, because, compared to our friends’ kids, he doesn’t obey as quickly as they do. He also doesn’t look at us with fear, and when something bothers him he tells us instead of bottling it up (he’s fairly young, but I plan to do all I can to keep the lines of communication open as he grows). I think some of them might look down their noses at us, but I just think about how I felt as a Fundy kid (I have a freakishly good memory and remember being treated in ways that totally sucked when I was a kid – and not usually by my parents either, but other adults) and how well Fundy kids I knew from growing up turned out. I have to break the cycle.

    1. Oh, this is so true. But it’s true — your relationship with your kids will be better. They’ll try their limits more, but they learn INTERNAL control, self-control. It’s harder in the short-term, but because they aren’t relying on externals to control their behavior, it’s better in the long run. Your kids learn WHY to behave appropriately rather than just blind obedience.

      My kids are still young, but I’m already watching them make good choices simply because they’re good choices, not because “mom said so.” I love that! I always obeyed out of fear. And even obedience wasn’t enough to protect me most days. 🙁

      1. You hit the nail on the head again: kids who are controlled never learn SELF control. You have to let them fall down, look foolish, and downright fail sometimes.
        That ain’t permission to let them run wild, because that’s not loving either, but it does free you from having to spank them for twitching an eyebrow at you! :mrgreen:

        1. You are soooo right about this. One of my sisters WOULD NOT sit still in church. She would flop around and wiggle and kick. My parents spanked and spanked her. Then one day, a lady in the choir said to my sister, “You know, we can all see your underwear when you roll around in the pew like that.” My sister was MORTIFIED and there was barely a wiggle from her after that! 😳

        2. There is a whole lot of room between the pearls way of dicipline and not controlling your kids at all. I happen to be exposed daily to some extremely not controlled kids and their behavior is horrific! I am talking just turned five and not quite three the parents think they are “letting the kids express themselves” a knee jerk reaction perhaps to what they thought was too much control in their own childhoods but what they actually have is completely disobedient and disrespectful unhappy whiny children who are dreadful to be around. 😥

    3. And it’s nice that once you are out of the crazy schedule of always being busy with church, you have time for a relationship with your kiddos.

  10. Speaking of trophies, is anyone else as sick as I am of how many friggin’ awards and award ceremonies (and plaques, and trophies, and certificates) there are now?

    Maybe I’m just old, but I have the feeling that awards used to mean something. Now people think they should get an award just for getting up in the morning. And every time a church or any organization wants some attention or wants to do a fundraising banquet, they come up with another award to present.

    1. Yeah, I think the people who come up with the awards are mediocre. They know that if you only awarded excellence then the leaders, themselves, would never be recognized. It’s better for them to award everyone and feel recognized than actually urge others on to excellence.

      1. Yes, giving an award implies that you are qualified to give an award, and that makes most people just sort of automatically accept that you must be an expert in that field (whether your field is soul-winning, bus ministry, or being/giving doctorates of divinity).

  11. The Formula for Fundie success:

    Multiply the dollars given to the church by the husband (including tithe, missions, offerings, building fund, and giving) by the number of hours that the husband spends doing ministry work for the church.

    Add the wife’s length of hemline, length of hair, length of sleeves, and inches of “ease.”

    Add 100 for each child (with a 50 point bonus for each child that has been saved AND baptized and another 50 point bonus for each child that has surrendered to full time Christian service) multiplied by average number of spanks given daily to said children. If the children are home-schooled, multiply this number by 2. If instead they attend the church’s school, multiply this number by 5 if the curriculum is ACE Pace, 4 if the curriculum is A Beka, and 3 if the curriculum is Bob Jones.

    Multiply the total by the sum of all lost souls brought to church by the family (but lost family members are only worth 0.5 while souls that get saved are worth 2).

    If the father has a Bible College degree, add 5,000 points. (Who cares if the mother has one.) If the father is in full-time Christian service, add 50,000 points. If the father is a MOG add 500,000 points multiplied by the number of his church members.

    In addition, award 2,500 point bonuses for all children who are enrolled in Bible College. Award 2,500 extra points for children who are RAs, on travelling team, or have their pictures on the website.

    DEDUCTIONS:

    100,000 points for every degree earned by a child at a non-Bible College institution. (Degrees earned by the father are OK because they allow him to be a “giver.”)

    10,000 points for every Bible owned by the family that is not KJV.

    1,000 points for every bit of non-KJV text found in the home, including on greeting cards, calendars, etc.

    1,000 points for every deck of playing cards the family possesses.

    1,000 points for every Christmas decoration that says “X-mas.”

    I think that’s it, but I am sure we can fine-tune this Biblical formula easily enough when needed.

    1. An excellent formula. My family may well be in the negatives from the non-Biblical college degrees alone.

    2. Deduct:
      50,000 points if the kids drink alcholic beverages after they grow up.
      50,000 points if the parents now drink.
      25,000 points if the kids no longer are part of a Baptist church.

      Our family is so far in the negative that it’s not even worth going on. 😀

    3. How about deduct:

      1,000 points if you have every visited SFL
      10,000 points if you visited SFL more than once
      200,000 points if you ever commented on SFL
      500,000 points if you hit that pay-pal button and contributed to the cause.

      1. Dang Scorpio, I guess you, me and all the other reguars had better go ahead and get fitted with our asbestos underwear, as much as we hang out here. 😯 😉

        1. hey george? What’s reguars?
          You’ve been watching too much “Firefly” again george.
          “Regulars” not reguars or reavers. *sigh* 🙄

  12. Powerful words Darrell! This site makes me more glad each day that I finally left fundyland for good! Leaving everything and almost everyone I ever knew was really hard, but I did it for my kids. And of course my husband and I are reaping the benefits as well 🙂 We were just saying yesterday, that there seems to be 2 main outcomes for children raised my strict fundies… mindless (and somewhat heartless) robot, or self-destructive rebel. I want neither of those things for my children. So goodbye fundystan, hello freedom 😀

  13. Wow this is a powerful post Darrell has created. In our fundyland, it was as almost all others. As long as everything appears normal on the outside, all is well in the kingdom. It did not matter that when people left the morning service, we kids knew who’s parents were going to beat the tar our of the wife and kids and that was “ok”, because “thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me..”. Some comfort. Then there was the ACE school coordinator who was a chiId molester who liked little boys. And somehow that was ok too with the pastor “because he was a good tither” as we were told. I was one of the lucky ones, my parents were on the fringe of fundyland and thought for themselves and after 8 years, we got out. But the comments from the church leaders still haunt me. I was always my own person and thought I never cared what others thought of me and this attitude brought many comments like: “you need to be more Danny” (the school pothead) or “you need to be more like Jason who is going to be somebody” (except he dropped acid every day for 2 years right after high school and still is working at Wendy’s 20 years later) but when they were around the “people who mattered” they put on a good show..

  16. Ah the Genie Lamp awards. I remember being so proud of my children for winning so much at the “Awards Ceremony” for the IFB school they attended. Three or four tables filled with Christian Bling waiting to be handed out. *sigh* Sort of, “Honey Boo Boo hosts the IFB Oscars.” (at least here in NC)

    Now I am just so proud of my children. They could have embraced the cult of IFB and stayed in the bunker mentality but God is merciful and they have shaken the dust of the IFB off their shoes and are walking in Christian Liberty.

    1. I love Honey Boo Boo so much! I knew waaaaay to many families just like theirs growing up in my small East Texas hometown.

    2. At the “nondenominational” Christian school I taught at, the awards night lasted about four hours and culminated with the handing out of what were initially described to me my first year as the “best Christian” awards. One boy and one girl in each grade of 9-12 won one. It was the school’s “highest honor” and was voted on by the teachers. My first year, there was an upset when the senior girl who had won the previous three years didn’t complete the high school sweep. Her parents were devastated.

      The whole time I was there (six years) I could never feel comfortable with awards for being “good Christians” being passed out. It just seemed so wrong.

  19. Wow…I got one of those “Christian Character” awards during my Senior year at our IFB school. I wonder how they feel about selecting me for it now that I’m totally out of the cult. 🙄

    Great post Darrell. Thankfully not everyone makes it their entire life struggling to keep the fundy “standards”…some fail, then wake up and get out.

    1. I got a scholarship for Christian character or some such nonsense to Fairhaven Baptist College.

      *bows deeply*

      1. Mine was a Christian Leadership scholarship for $500 to PCC!

        On a related note – My quite liberal aunt who attended my graduation at fundy high said she could tell during the ceremony how much they disapproved of my decision to attend a secular college…

  22. I would like to offer an alternative viewpoint, which is that I do see a place for rewards like these. Not in the typical fundie “give it to the most physically attractive, a$$-kissing, hypocrite of the bunch” mentality. But in the sense that children really do crave and thrive under praise.

    My parents had a very outspoken “we do NOT praise our kids” mentality. They would tell us that it was for our own good because “in the real world no one ever gets praised for anything. They only get criticized when they do wrong.” (Yeah, I learned soon after leaving home that was a big lie. Also, I always wondered why my hyper-sheltering parents who wanted us to all go to Bible College thought we needed any preparation for the “real world.”) It was incredibly hurtful growing up in their home because they would do anything (literally anything) to find something to criticize about everything we did. No matter how hard we tried and no matter how good of a job we did they would always find SOMETHING. (E.g., I mopped the kitchen floor but I didn’t scrub the floor on my hands and knees.)

    Growing up in that environment was very destructive emotionally and mentally. To this day, I still suffer from depression and insane amounts of self-criticism and feelings of total inadequacy. I have almost no relationship with my parents because they continue their onslaught of “nothing you do is ever good enough” parenting. For example, I recently received a major award in my profession (and yes, it was a real award based on graduating at the top of my graduate school class). My father ignored it and all my mother did was to suggest that I was lying about the award and then to say that was nice and all but how was I going to use my career to serve the Lord.

    Children really do need affirmation and praise and encouragement. It is such an important (and often neglected) part of parenting. I am afraid that when I have kids of my own I will make a lot of mistakes in this area because of how I grew up, but I really hope I can do better. I know where Darrell is coming from with this post, but I also think that there is room for balance here when it comes to real life parenting.

    1. Well said. It IS all a matter of balance — parents (or other authorities who praise indiscriminately don’t help either — the praise is just meaningless after a while). In fact, one church authority had the philosophy of “always say something good before criticizing”, so it was kind of funny to watch him strain to find SOMETHING good to say to “get it out of the way” and get on to the criticizing.

      Anyway, as you say, the balance matters. We don’t want our kids to despair (“we can’t do anything right” or “we can never please Mom & Dad”), but we don’t want to praise a sloppy job – if the child did his best, he can be praised for trying, but we don’t want to pretend that the result is great when it isn’t – they’ll only pick up that they shouldn’t believe anything we say.

    3. You got an award for being at the top of your graduate school’s graduating class? Wow. Congratulations! In my experience, and I don’t doubt in yours, grad school was HARD work.

      I don’t think children deserve fulsome praise for mediocre work just because they did something; but they should be praised for doing something well, and recognized if they’re doing they best they can, even if it’s not great.

    4. At the school where I teach, we give merits and demerits, and the goal is to give twice as many merits as demerits, to be on the lookout for “excuses” to give them that tangible “attaboy.” There’s almost nothing my little darlins love better than to march up to their high-school-aged house leader and hand over one of those little blue slips. It’s a totally different situation than giving out trophies for a — I mean, HEINIE-kissing or self-righteousness. 😉

    5. “Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.”- Eph. 6:4

      Why someone would think it’s okay to constantly discourage someone is beyond me.

    6. Likewise, a little singling out for mockery in the right context is okay. The local Baptist Bible camp used to give out an award (called the Boner Award in those more innocent days) for the most creative and bizarre goof-up of the camp session. One year the winner stepped in a cow pie, did not fall down, but somehow managed to get covered in cow poop anyway. Even the people who were watching weren’t sure how he did it. Another year it went to the kitchen helper who decided to test the lasagna for doneness by throwing noodles at the ceiling and forgot to take down the ones that stuck–so they dried out and started falling on people.

      The Boner Award was a chunk of cow skull on a rope and you got to wear it during the last day until it was time to get on the boat. It was a badge of honor because you had a story to tell.

    1. This. I struggle with both, thanks to my perfection-demanding father who swallowed the IFB way of life hook, line, and sinker. He ruined our family. We’re all a mess. My story’s too long but my mom, brother and I are finally getting to the point where that tyrant of a man can’t affect us much anymore.

    1. Dear Disco Dancing Hyles:

      I made myself to endure the loss of 7:17 minutes of my existence. For the life of me, I can’t see why people put up with the likes of this. Why DO they do it?

      How can any senescent being believe that this has anything to do with proclaiming Scripture? In my church, there’d be a line up of people demanding to know what he was doing in ministry.

      Christian Socialist

      1. I’m just shocked that, after hearing one “sermon” after another like this, it still took discovering that he had raped a teenage girl for Schaap’s congregation to realize that he had a sexual fixation. Hello! 👿

      2. In my church, there’d be a lineup of (tattooed, pierced, hair-dyed) people to smack him upside the head. Including a couple of my pastors. 😉

    2. Next time someone comes here to berate us, just point them to this little gem from the cult of personality. What gets me is all the men in the breaks making the “rabble rabble rabble” noises.

    3. The sad thing is HAC still hypes and praises Schaap and vilifies him as a martyr while PCC (which Jack Hyles was not to fond of) has already shamed Schaap as well as Hyles and Hyles Disciple Larry Brown.

  25. Dear Darrell:

    ‘They do ALL their deeds to be seen …’ [Mat 23:5].

    Telling. Isn’t it.

    Christian Socialist

  26. One trophy Darrell didn’t list was the Soul-Winning Trophy: “This teen led 100 people to Christ last year; I wish our staff would do as well” (chuckles all around). But the teen is contemptuous of the lost and watches porn on his friend’s TV.

    The above case comes from James Spurgeon’s book “Tales from the Temple”; it is so sad to think of those teens with no relationship with Jesus Christ, just “going soul-winning” to get a man’s approval.

    1. Or how about when all the bus work is done by teenagers, and you’re made to feel guilty because frankly, you just don’t want to work on the buses. That is, you feel guilty until you hang out with them after church and realize how vile they are without the adults around.

  27. Fundy church and fundy U leadership is usually the worst about having the most shallow, often backwards knowledge of their own people, I’ve noticed. The people that they are the most likely to hold up as the shining examples/spiritual leaders for us to follow are likely to be the most messed up. I saw it several times with prayer leaders, floor leaders, residence managers and such at PCC.

  28. I won one of those awards in Fundy High. “Most Considerate”. It felt cheap, though. I got a “high award” for just being a decent human being. Looking back on it now, though, I realize how wonderful I must have looked compared to all the other girls in the school. The pastor’s daughter was always making fun of the younger kids for things they couldn’t even help (like coughing or having a “weird voice”) and everyone else either joined in or at least laughed along. I was the only one who tried to stand up for people.

  29. Hey, I still have mine in a box in the closet!
    It was pretty easy to get highest academic in a class of twelve.

    I think academic awards are good. Kids need objectice hierarchy, imho.
    Character awards, maybe not as important as we used to think.
    I’m still a little suspicious of compliments.

  30. Just a slight clarification on the “courtship” thing. I don’t think courtship has been around long enough for anyone to have been married 53 years. I could be wrong, but I think it’s a product of the very late 20th century. And secondly, it’s not a strictly IFB thing. It’s a trend that hit all branches and denominations of evangelical Christendom. I used to have daughters who were single and I forbade them from even thinking about getting involved with any family that even uses “courtship” in their vernacular. I’m sure there are exceptions, but in my experience, anyone who uses “courtship” believes in a big time patriarchal rule where the woman is not even always a person – she’s usually just “the woman.” And she is treated as a piece of property like land, a car, etc. Picking a mate for your child might have been a cool thing to do – in the 2nd century. But mankind has been engages in dating for thousands of years and it’s working out just fine, thank you. I told my daughters to stay as far away from any family that believes in this bizarre “courtship” thing. They all “dated” their husbands before marriage and are all happily married now, so I haven’t kept up much in the practice. Hopefully it’s died down now and is not so much in vogue.

    1. No, I’m afraid it’s still going strong. And they think that because they call it “courtship,” it’s exactly like what courting couples used to do, instead of something so utterly nuts that an old-fashioned hard-shell Baptist would have called the parents involved kooks.

      Any courtship-minded fundies reading here: Google revolutionary times bundling. Go on. I dare you.

  31. We had Sigma club (Pro-Teens) for a few years and it was all about points for reading your Bible, going soulwinning, etc… I got one of these awesome trophies every year.

    1. *twitch* Pro *jerk-halt* Teens *sputter*
      Oy vey! 35 years ago I was a Pro-Teen Blob.

      That sounds so evolutionary now when I say it.

      Today I am and “Ancient Flatuance Blob.” 😯

    1. Making this statement is insinuating that they were once saved an no longer are saved, thus no longer Christians. Another topic for debate perhaps. ” once saved, always saved”

  33. reminds me of the poem “The Unknown Citizen.” http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15549
    “was he happy? was he free?”
    Who freaking cares? He was a warm body sitting in our pew, and he impregnated his wife 13 times, and he gave us money! And he always left Chick tracts in the vegetable bins in the grocery store! And he forced all his womenfolk to avoid crotched garments!

  37. Funny, as a school-age kid, I “won” the “Fruit of the Spirit” award three years in a row. 🙂 I have actual trophy’s. 😀

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