it also depends on the church and with time. the southern baptist church i went to when young didn't have much if any extreme fundamentalism. the one i attended for a bit as a teenager (not by choice) was a little more fundamentalist, but not extreme. i stopped going to church after that.
but really, teasing apart the strains doesn't matter in the long run. our gods are changing, just as they always have.
I'd definitely not agree with the "protects the most vulnerable against marginalization and oppression"
Perhaps if you are a member of the church, but definitely not if you don't abide by the exact, often conservative , rules of a given church.
Look at slavery, equal rights for lgbtq and people of color, abortion etc. Not only do people in power use the churches to hide their personal beliefs behind, many churches use their power to oppress others.
I mean the crusades were a thing...
I'll agree churches provide social cohesion but often at the cost of tribalism against people outside that given churches norms.
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.
Sadly, depending on the pastor, not everyone can go, especially introverts who do not have much friends or relations within the community.
But some communities are very welcoming and open minded, and everyone can leave or join (temporarily at first). It really depends, I only know one community, influenced by the 70s pacifists movements, i really like them, but I know they aren't the majority.
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.
I was raised by fundamentalists, and that was not my experience. Wrong kind of opinions got me surrounded by elders who would attempt to brow beat me in to submission. Towards my late teens I'd spend the entire hour and a half of every Sunday hiding out in the kitchen/dining hall in the back of the building, tending to the pot of coffee, until I was old enough to leave and strike out on my own. I still get panic attacks at the idea of stepping foot in to a religious building. Basically, your experience is far from universal, in my experience.
If you join a fundamentalist cult, then yes. Lots of modern churches are non-denominational and quite relaxed. In fact, they are surprisingly similar to the entity being described in the article.
I think this depends on the country. In mine, young people who go to church tend to be a bit intense. But readers will know the scene in their own area.
"Any Self-Righteous Anonymous groups out there?" - Yes, a close reading of the christian bible will tell you that's the indented function of the church. Unfortunately there's a propensity for the opposite.
Absolutely, but the difference is that no one church is dominant in the United States. Even if we were to claim that Catholicism (the largest faction, although not a majority by any means) were the dominant one, within that church there is also a lot of diversity of thought. As an adult, you can realistically pick and choose with whom to associate at these churches, unlike say Twitter or Facebook where are beholden to whatever religion they follow.
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