I grew up in an off-the-grid Christian commune. Here's what I know about America's religious beliefs
Classifying American Christians into the imaginary phyla of cults and not-cults is a dangerous mistakeBy SHAWNA KAY RODENBERGThe only time I saw Brother Sam in person, he was marching like a soldier as he preached, with sweat running like tears from his temples and the Bible a heavy brick in his right hand.
It was 1978, I was five, and my family had traveled to Lubbock, Texas, for a Body Convention, which was what we called the semi-annual gatherings of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of members of The Body, or Body of Christ, an expansive network of charismatic communities created almost singlehandedly by Brother Sam.
My family lived on a Body Farm, a mostly off-grid outpost on the northern shore of Lake Superior, where I grew up singing, clapping, hollering and dancing in the Tabernacle aisles as shamelessly as King David. In our insular community, Holy Spirit-led practices like speaking in tongues, visions, prophecies, laying on hands and faith healing, altar calls, mass conversions, river baptisms and even demon deliverance were as commonplace as eating or sleeping or, for us children, playing with smooth stones in the frigid stream at the edge of the woods. Back then, if you had asked me if church scared me, I would have been confused by the question, and I would have said no. In retrospect, I was scared all the time.
If this were a face-to-face conversation, you might stop me here, as many have. "So, you grew up in a cult," you might say, hoping to preface any further conversation with a caveat that my religious experience had to have been uniquely harrowing, an aberration of wholesome, mainstream American Christianity. After all, unlike The Body, most denominations and church networks don't ask parishioners to sell their possessions and tithe half, or even all of their savings. Most pastors don't nudge their congregations as Brother Sam did into the wilderness, and demand that they pare their lives down to the most ascetic essentials — plain clothes, plain food, no TV, no holidays, no toys. Perhaps most importantly, most people in 2021 don't believe in spiritual warfare reminiscent of the Dark Ages; they are not warned by their spiritual leaders that they are under assault by demons and the Devil at every turn. If you're a Christian, you'd probably want to put as much distance as possible between The Body and whatever church you belong to. If not, you'd need reassurance that my experiences with religion are extraordinary — the stuff memoirs are made of.
But, only a couple years ago, Franklin Graham, son of "America's Pastor," Billy Graham, declared ...
https://www.salon.com/2021/06/26/i-grew ... s-beliefs/Lengthy article but worth reading. That said, one sentence jumped out at me:Quote:
...one of the president's closest evangelical advisors, Paula White, publicly commanded "all satanic pregnancies to miscarry."
In other words, she just tried to abort any such pregnancies
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