I grew up in a cult, so my whole life.
Does that affect how you feel when people refer to now as the end days?
I feel equal parts pity and exasperation that they’re ignoring critical crises like global climate change to focus on superstitious nonsense.
Can we hear more about this?
Well, I grew up in what is known as the non-institutional church of Christ. There are different branches of the coC, ranging from the relatively liberal to the downright draconian.
What made this particular branch of the coC “non-institutional” is that they are independent of each other congregation, so the leadership of each group is separate from every other.
The way it actually shakes out is that every congregation gets super deep into the weeds about arcane interpretations of an ancient text about which they are unqualified to explain while making overconfident proclamations of certainty. Other congregations disagree with a fairly minor point in this reading, and they will become effectively dead to each other. Ultimately, the different churches (they would hate me calling them that) would form a loose confederation across the region with various groups they could live in uneasy peace with.
Within the congregation itself was a religion that taught that the world is a wicked place from which we should set ourselves apart. Evolution was a lie spread by the devil to make us doubt God’s power. Women were not allowed to speak or wear pants during the church service. We did not use instruments to make music during the service, as that was not mentioned in the Bible. Any disagreement with doctrine could get one removed from good standing, and we left two churches (forced out, really) based on the Elders’ strict views on baptism and musical instruments: my father would not agree that immersion was strictly necessary to save one’s soul, or that it was sinful to exceed the Bible’s authority and use instruments.
It is a bit of a weird duck as a cult, but they’re extremely controlling, patriarchal, and reactionary. They’re in most towns, but people usually think they’re an offshoot of the Baptists (of which certain types also dip into cult status in my opinion). I’d place them between the Baptists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses on a fundamentalist belief scale. I think the BITE model is a useful one (but not perfect) for defining cults:
- Behavioral control
- Information control
- Thought control
- Emotional control
The coC did all of these things: they wanted members to live apart from society where only those in the church were acceptable social peers, to limit exposure with “subversive” ideas and science, to make people so afraid of going to hell that you’ll blindly accept the teachings. You were expected to attend every service: Sunday morning & night and Wednesday night.
In short, they wanted to control people’s lives by love-bombing newcomers and then suffocating them until they fit into their assigned tiny little box.
And yes, we were in the end times. Even though nobody knows when Jesus will return. Wink.
Thank you for sharing! I have a friend who grew up in Amarillo and she’s told me about the big church split there over instruments. It’s crazy how these cult-like religious groups are able to exist in plain view with so much control over the followers. That’s the kind of stuff that makes people think all religion is crazy. They create an us-them situation and either don’t know or don’t care that they’re on the wrong side of that.
the big church split there over instruments
I’m suddenly now coming to grips with the sheer cinematic realism of the film Footloose.
This. Every word. I couldn’t agree more.
Oh yeah, Amarillo is a big city for the NI-coC. Abilene, too.
The us-or-them situation is exactly what they’re aiming for: isolated people are easier to control. But yeah, I’m not sure if it’s an intentional strategy or just what happened to work out for their purposes.
Quite a lot, feels like over a majority of my life.
Heard it when Y2K was a thing.
Heard it when 9/11 happened.
Heard it when Bush got re-elected.
Heard it when 2012 came.
Heard it when Trump got elected first time.
Seems to be a recurring thing.
If you were raised by Christian fundamentalists (the kind who believed that church was evil), then you also heard it in 1994, and twice in 2011. Two straight years of world-ending predictions. It was fatiguing.
I like to pull this list up whenever someone starts talking about how the signs are clear that the end is near: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events
Pretty much none of these are based in any sort of evidence though. This time we have concrete evidence that our environment is in a runaway loop past the point of repair. We have guaranteed proof that we have already destroyed our planet’s biosphere. The melting ice caps by themselves are already a self-sustaining heat loop even without additional help.
This is not “I declare that Jesus will return in 184 months and then the rapture will happen” like pretty much every other prediction of apocalypse. This is not “the Mayan calendar runs out this year so the world is going to end”. This is not “the Bible said we’re going to have Revelations this year”. This is known fact.
Every time an event reminds us nukes exist.
Christian apocalyptic belief has been poisoning right wing politics in the US for ages now. Things like relations with Israel have been heavily warped by it.
*laughs in evangelical upbringing
No kidding.
I remember dad making me read some book proving the end times were here because Saddam was Nebuchadnezzar reborn (the proof was their silhouettes looking similar). So much “whore of Babylon” stuff.
He recently sent me a YouTube video of a guy talking about the valley of Jehoshaphat and Trump heralding the end times.
It never ends.
I grew up with all of these idiotic Nostradamus shows and books that claimed he was foretelling the end of the world in our times. Of course his predictions were so vaguely worded you could slap them anywhere in history.
The book of Revelations is a feast for people who love to interpret symbolism.
People who say this is the worst of times (US) and I have to remind them of things like the civil war, ww1, the great depression, ww2, the red scare…
People have been saying this shit in the 500s and before
People have been saying the world is ending through all recorded history. At best, it’s more credible now that we have scientific ways, but mostly it’s bellyaching not based in reality.
I suspect old people and their rose-tinted memories might be the reason. If you’re trying to decide if things are worse, better or the same as they used to be, and you just go by hearsay, it’s always going to be skewed towards things getting worse. Then, just extrapolate forward, and the end is neigh.
Empirically things have gotten so much better over living memory in the West it’s not even funny, and things have been more of a random walk over the rest of human history.
Since my parents said it the day I was born.
Every time I start a new game in Zomboid.
Even the ancient Greeks used to complain that society was devolving. They talked about earlier generations being gold and now they’ve devolved to iron.
Since I got my first taste of the Hittites battle formations. 0/10, would not do again.
Since I was a child. Religious nutjobs in and around my family. Then I became an adult and it’s all I see from people in response to news.
It gets old so I try to tune out, remove toxic people, and focus on enjoying my life.
Some 25 years at least, that I can remember. Been there for 1999 Nostradamus, 2012 Mayan Calendar, Nibiru or some other rogue planet colliding with the Earth in
2014201520162017Hell, I’ve been waiting for 99942 Apophis to swing by us since Stargate was still on the air. Still got five years left on that one, but 2004 when that was first called out as a concern was the first time I really started contemplating the idea of the actual end of the world, in a bang not a whimper.
Sure, Y2K was supposed to cause some chaos, and 2012 was fun from a “what if magic is real” sort of angle, but everything else has been a gradual dawning realization that the world as we know it is probably going to be gone in my children’s lifetimes – not over yet, but profoundly changed, more difficult, the slow closing of the book on a golden age for humanity we didn’t fully appreciate while we were in it.
If you think back carefully, you will notice that the world ( > “as we knew it”) did end in 2012. All your memories since then share a certain quality of confusion, lack of concensus about meaning or purpose, post-truth. These are just the dying dreams - flagellations of our consciousness, as it complicatedly decays towards nothingness after the end of the world. Hugs :-)
