All posts by Darrell
Feeling Bad
Fundamentalists take a fairly pessimistic view of most things including their own spiritual condition. They tend to look down on those Christians who go to church to sing upbeat music and generally be happy, preferring rather to spend their time in and equal mixture of guilt and grief. Repenting of something each time you go to church is seen as indispensable to the worship experience.
Fundy preachers would claim that other churches without “hard preaching” are just buildings full of people with itching ears who waste a lot of time hearing about how God loves them, when the truth is that He’s actually pretty unhappy with them most of the time. The concept that the itch that some people like to have scratched could just as easily be a craving for a dose of artificial guilt that builds until release during an invitation would be dismissed as just plain crazy talk.
For fundamentalists not only is the glass half empty but it’s also filthy and needs to get right with God.
Alliteration
If you’ve ever heard a sermon entitled “A Plethora of Pentateuch Principles for Preventing Pre-Teen Promiscuity and Potent Punishments for the Perverted Participants” chances are it was in a fundamentalist church.
(I’m out of town traveling on business this week so updates are likely to be a little sparse.)
“Resurrection Sunday”
Because Easter is
1. Pagan
2. Roman Catholic
3. What Everybody Else Calls It.
Sanctified and Seperated Seclusion
There are constant warnings in fundamentalism not to get too close to the world and worldly people. The idea seems to be that sinners will always cause Christians to sin rather than Christians making sinners more holy. For this reason, fundamentalists organize their own schools, sports teams, drama clubs, and social activities lest being in proximity to the unrighteous somehow should soil them. It would seem that sanctification is a very fragile thing indeed that only requires the tiniest of temptations to crumble completely.
This so called “doctrine of separation” has created many illustrations that are familiar to any fundamentalist. Stories of the clean glass and the dirty glass, the canary that learns to sing like the crow, and the drop of poison in the good food are repeated over and over. Evil always triumphs over good. It’s a wonder that anybody ever manages to stay pure.
How exactly we are to be salt and light in the world if we never actually spend any time in the world is unclear. Evidently, Christians are supposed to go out like hunting parties (always two by two, never alone!), club the nearest sinner and drag them back into the haven of the church. After all, that’s what Jesus did. He never spent time with sinners.
If you think that the Amish have the right idea about how to deal with the temptations of the world, then you may very well be a fundamentalist.