Cults and community
Cults and community are on my mind after:
*Watching a few TikTok videos by a woman who is leaving her controlling, rules-enforcing church.
*Pondering the aftermath and reactions to the murder of Charlie Kirk.
*Missing the feeling that being a US citizen was a shared connection across the aisle.
*Wondering how hate can be nurtured so strongly in extended family members (along with the peculiar blindness that lets ‘Christians’ vote for a vulgar, selfish, serial-adulterer/con-man with no decency or principles.)
TikTok lady was very active in her Baptist church for 10 years. Sunday school, potlucks, midweek prayer meetings. She subscribed to the submissive wife role, etc., etc., but you can tell she is ‘a handful’ with a lot of energy. But in ditching the church for telling her she couldn’t put certain views in her videos, she found out that:
1) the church says she can’t just quit, they have to vote her out (which they did), and
2) the people she counted as friends for 10 years didn’t call her to see how she was doing (blah,blah) because the higher-ups at the church didn’t tell them to. They only know to do as they are told, she said.
I treasure my freedom as a modern American woman. My career, my choices, my loves, my education…but also, just as importantly, my family, my son. In my old age now, my tree cathedral in the backyard where the birds sing and the pond glistens; and the spirituality that has grown like an old ficus tree around the original Catholicism my parents implanted, which feels richer and more grateful every year. To hand my daily free will over to authoritarian humans in order to be controlled not by conscience or by “love of God and neighbor” is bizarre to me.
Rightwing churches use community as a weapon to be withheld or granted; and as walls around the group to keep outsiders at bay. They use hierarchy and submission of women as a gift to the many men who feel powerless in America’s confusing and challenging society.. They use a cocoon of repetitive messaging to fill a void of clarity, where a cacophony of internet noise (and a lot of garbage) is overwhelming the brains of most of us. They tell their members clearly how to be, what to think..who to vote for.
Personally I don’t feel a need of a church community. But I have seen the pain of family with difficult cancer, difficult teenagers, difficult divorce; and the loneliness and confusion of young men especially not knowing what is expected of them as they evolve from teenager to adults. I see neighbors who need support, direction, or who seem to need a rulebook on how to cope with a Darwinian society where it is easy to fall.
If the left has a rulebook, it seems oriented around a very long list of what NOT to do to avoid hurting others. Do we have a rulebook for life to share with others?
How can we create community, at a human scale, that meets people where they are, and provides a “better bargain” to them than the religious cults? Instead of support centers for support, and interest clubs, and activist groups, all separate, would there be an advantage to connecting them together somehow, to build a shared identity of ‘tolerant community’?
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