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The Same Old Lies
Thoughts from someone who left a Christian cult only to see the fundamentalist ideology continue to expand. I dodged through the crowds at Cedar Point hoping to lose the teenage boy following me, but he was persistent and eventually caught up. I’d gotten a cartilage piercing a few weeks earlier at the end of summer camp, and now an old friend was literally chasing me down. When he found me, I got a long lecture about the dangers of worldliness. I was twenty-one years old; he was four or five years younger. If I had to pick one moment when I knew I was done, this is it. I was…
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The Flawed Theology of Christian Nationalism
Families traveled to the nondescript hall each week from across Michigan and even Ontario. Some drove up to two and a half hours one way — my family drove an hour and twenty minutes — to gather on Sunday with like-minded believers. The hall was split into two areas: one lined with tables where families set up their lunch spot, and the other with rows of old metal folding chairs gathered in a semi circle around an electric piano and a black, collapsible podium. In the back of the room near the kitchen, they set up PVC pipes with curtains as a space for the nursing mothers and babies. There…
