It was the height of election season, and I was at a post-service lunch at the Baptist church. The conversation was getting too political too quickly, and I’d accidentally outed myself as a Democratic supporter. I had to escape. Someone at the table asked why I was so adamant about not voting for the Republican nominee.
I quietly gathered the remains of my lunch, rose from the cafeteria table, and replied, “Because if I were alone in a room with him, I wouldn’t feel safe.”
It was the last time I talked politics. Not even when we traveled to Israel together that November, when a tour bus full of Evangelicals celebrated the victory of the Republican party. I kept my mouth shut.
It was another year before I gathered the courage to leave the church, and even then I quietly slipped out the back. I never formally forfeited my membership. I simply stopped showing up. Then I relocated for work, which gave me a good—albeit dishonest—excuse not to return.
My sister recently shared this article The Evangelical Temptation, which took me all day to read in its entirety between breaks at work. How could staunch conservatives support a candidate like that? The article does a great job at explaining how it happened, how Evangelicalism has declined both in numbers and in morals.
It’s not brainwashing. But there is a certain moral high ground they take, that when you’re submersed in that culture you’re lead to believe everyone else is wrong. The Episcopals are wrong. The Presbyterians are wrong. And most definitely the Catholics are wrong. Only the Fundamentalist Evangelicals know the real truth. You get wrapped up in it, and you stay in that church for too long, because part of you fears that they’re right.
I wrote a letter to my church when I’d decided to leave, with the intent to read it before the congregation. That never happened. Not only because I feared their reaction, but because I couldn’t stand up there and tell these people who had become my friends that they were wrong. Nothing in the letter says that—I’d only eluded to everyone worshiping God in different ways—but any viewpoint not theirs is the “other,” and I was about to descend into the darkest depths of that other. The letter didn’t even use the word “Catholic.” It wasn’t something I wanted to explain, nor could I, because they’d been taught for so long of Catholicism’s inherent evilness.
There’s a radio program on EWTN for non-Catholics, to call in with questions about the Church. I listened to it nearly every day when I was questioning, and still tune in occasionally. The host, a convert himself, provided a fabulous answer recently regarding what Fundamentalists believe. I saved the entire answer in video form, because he does a much better job of explaining their beliefs than I ever could—and I grew up with this.
“When one is saved more or less by assenting to certain religious doctrines, or through the performance of a particular individual religious formula like the sinner’s prayer… that makes you a Christian. And that’s all she wrote. Once you’ve had that experience, your salvation is guaranteed. Now, if that’s your view of Christian life, naturally the institutional Church becomes almost irrelevant to that whole procedure.”
The Catholic Church isn’t simply “incorrect.” It’s irrelevant. The only thing you ever need is the KJV Bible, which you’re encourage to read and interpret in the way you’re taught to interpret it. Don’t question it, because these words came straight from God. (But that part about baptizing families and men having the power to forgive sins? That’s not really what those verses mean.)
It’s only been six months, but it feels like my being part of that church was so long ago. At the same time, I read articles like the one above and feel like I’m still sitting in those pews. To this day, there is still an instinctive trust that I have to consciously remind myself isn’t there anymore. Not only was this something I was taught but something I believed, because this is God, and I respected the men of God. But even in the depths of it, I was always at the periphery. I never felt like I truly belonged, that I was somehow broken or “not saved” because I didn’t completely act and think the way they did.
When I told my mother I was joining the Church, she replied, “I’m not worried, because I know you’re saved.” I can’t say anything to that, as I had the same gut reaction when I first decided to convert. Because even in the midst of leaving, as you start to realize how skewed their perspective of Christianity and morality is, there is still that small voice in your head that asks, “But what if they are right?”
