In my experience, churches are filled with the nicest people. Even though I'm not religious I go with my wife sometimes and everyone is very welcoming.
Seems like you had a bad experience at a church or maybe you've never been in one and you're judging them based on the media you view.
Either way, not a good reason to make wide blanket statements like that.
Church is so judgmental and limiting of the types of activities you can enjoy and you have to be so careful you follow the church norms. I’ll call up one of my friends and say - “hey. Let’s go out and drink, cuss, and tell lies”. I can’t very well do that with church folks. Let alone argue against church doctrine when it comes to drinking, premarital sex (I am married now), homosexuality, etc.
I grew up going to what would now be considered an “evangelical church” and going to a Christian school. Even the non crazy ones that I see on Facebook are still way too straight laced for me.
The 'badness' in people is supposed to be tempered or mitigated by these 'good communities' though. That's their whole point.
If they can't even manage to better people as part of their church than the average person is then what good is it other than creating cliques and an 'us versus them' mentality?
There's undoubtedly bad churches out there. Maybe even a lot. But I think blanket demagoguery of any group, include churches, shows a lack of curiosity, and maybe too, tolerance of others who think differently than you.
The church I went in as kid was pretty tight socially and people in it were wery like minded. And by all I heard or read about, it is pretty much standard.
> Being in a church includes you in a fantastic community.
That rather strongly depends on the church (and you; communities aren't objectively fantastic, the same community can be fantastic for one person and a nightmare for another; this is definitely as true of church communities as communities in general.)
Not OP, and I can only speak for the circles I grew up in, but some churches are full of deeply traumatized people. I think some of the authoritarian tendencies have roots in a deep desire/need to regain some kind of feeling of control in their lives, and here’s this group of people that meets every week who provides a level of comfort and community while offering a gospel that can both satisfy that need while making people feel righteous in the process.
I don’t want to doxx myself so I’ll keep the details vague, but both of my parents came from disturbing environments and were subject to things that would universally be understood as deeply traumatic. I think they’re good people, but very very confused, and their fundamentalism was a product of the degree of unresolved trauma/dysfunction in their lives and their need to impose some kind of order on their circumstances.
Not all churches look this way. Mine sure did. Almost everyone had a story. Thankfully I escaped the bubble. But not without consequence. Through no fault of my own, I was indoctrinated into a belief system that I then had to spend decades and counting unwinding and unlearning. I mention this because a lot of people want to focus on other people’s lives because that’s what they were taught to do. People were born into beliefs they didn’t choose.
None of which is to excuse the behavior. But I’ve seen up close where it comes from.
Churchs are organizations of people. Those people live and experience life just like people in unions, political parties, companies, social clubs and sports teams. Why do they get singled out and not allowed to express their opinions based on their experiences?
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