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comment by ilex
ilex  ·  1618 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: “Is that your Bible?”

So, I too grew up in a fundamentalist christian family, going to church, learning to evangelize from the likes of Ray Comfort, believing in a literal six day creation about 6-10 thousand years ago, etc. etc. I get it. My parents and siblings are still there; the reason I'm not is my parents made the mistake of letting me go to a state university instead of a christian one.

It seems to me that the negativity you're expressing here requires you to buy their "false christians" argument. You see christians who equate "being christian" and "supporting Trump" as the ones who matter to you; the rest are less significant. I see a bunch of christians realizing that maybe Trump has been pulling the wool over their eyes and that they don't actually want four more years of this guy.

And from my outsider's perspective, that's good news. I'm interested in christianity as a social, economic, and political structure. If christians are starting to question their politics, that means a slow shift in what those church structures support. If Trump is inadvertently starting to fracture the Religious Right, even if that just means a depressed conservative vote rather than votes for progressives, that's a good thing.

That all said, November is months away, and this very well might all be rearranging the deck chairs on H.S.S. Four More Years.





b_b  ·  1618 days ago  ·  link  ·  

If you ever feel like sharing about what, if anything, caused your conversion away from that lifestyle, I think you'd find a very interested audience here. It's so fascinating the assumptions we all grow up with. I think most Americans share 90% the same assumptions about how the world works, which comes from the stories we're told, the education we receive, all the other collective institutions we interact with, etc. So it's fascinating to me to learn about people who grew up with completely different assumptions about the nature of the world, and even more fascinating to learn how one can have a change in their basic, supposedly unalterable world view as an adult. Definitely not asking you to share any personal details you're uninterested in or uncomfortable with sharing.

ilex  ·  1618 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'm going to start working on a longer post on this because I've recently started a conversation with one of my sisters and it's drawn out some memories I hadn't seen in a while and it would be good to have those saved while I can still recall them.

It's a lot to talk about because, as you said, it's a whole worldview, and unwinding one of those that you were exclusively exposed to as a kid is not a short process. It's been a decade and I'm still not really done. And it touches on some quite personal details, so there will be parts you'll just have to take me at my word for.

But, the really short version is: I moved away to college, which gave me a social and institutional structure that wasn't tied to church and family. My parents had heavily tied the truth of young earth creationism with the truth of christianity, and learning physics and biology disabused me of the former, so I felt that the latter was maybe suspect too. By dint of making woman, queer, and non-white friends I narrowly avoided falling into New Atheism or alt-lite libertarianism (although it certainly did help that those groups tended to fall for some of the same conservative fallacies I was by that point quite allergic to).

Ironically, the christian groups I grew up in pay lip service to a lot of good ideals; perhaps my saving grace was that I took those ideals a bit more seriously than everyone around me.