How Christianity Failed Me for Most of My Life
Why and how evangelical fundamentalist Christianity of the dogmatic turn or burn gospel and unending conscious torment in hell for unbelievers variety ended up not working for me and wasted one hell of a lot of time in my life and gave me a prolonged experience of hell on Earth.
True Christianity might be something more like this. All will ultimately be saved through Christ 1 Cor 15:22 even [insert any name here] The gospel is 100% good news.
[What exactly “saved” means is an issue in itself. Most often evangelicals seem to view “saved” as being saved from eternal punishment in hell.]
I started blogging in late 2017 and some of my views on these things did get expressed among several of my blog posts. But I feel motivated to try to express some of these things again in a single shorter writing. Some of what I say likely will apply to other religions besides Christianity, but I will only speak to Christianity because that has been my experience.
I now see the whole of Christianity as a mishmash of conflicting views and theories and with the prospect of unending torture in hell for those who don't get it right in this life thrown into the mix, it makes for a very fertile ground for gaslighting, fear based mind control, emotional abuse, narcissistic abuse, and the destruction and subjugation of the human spirit, truly a hell on Earth.
My family came from the evangelical fundamentalist Christian culture and I was raised in it. It certainly had within it the view that if you are not right with God when you die you will be tortured in hell for time without end with no hope of rescue. Although when I was growing up I feel I was positive toward God and bought into this stuff, I really didn't understand it all that well. I had memorized scripture in Sunday school with versus like John 3:16 and 1 John 1:9 prominent among those I learned and also the Christmas story.
As a young boy of elementary school age I was influenced by a friend's older brother to throw some dirt clods onto the backyard patio awning of a neighbor's property. Later that night a policeman came to the front door of our house to make inquiry about what I was reported to have done. The neighbor I wronged did not press charges so I did not get into actual legal trouble, but I do remember my dad having me confess my sin to God kneeling down on the family sofa where we sometimes had family Bible study and devotions, likely in conformance with 1 John 1:9 although I don't recall a specific reference to that verse.
Later on in my life when I was in high school with a troubled life and searching for answers and meaning in life and perhaps God, a good friend of mine said I should talk to his mom. So I did. She was an avid follower of a Bible teaching pastor of the same evangelical fundamentalist Christian variety like I was raised in, but much more authoritative and dogmatic. I swallowed everything hook line and sinker and became a follower of R. B. Thieme Jr. of Berachah Church in Houston Texas and his Bible teaching audio tape ministry. Just for some reference, later in life I learned that vice president Quayle and his wife Marilyn were avid followers of R. B. Thieme Jr.’s tape ministry.
So in 1974 when I started following Thieme’s teachings, I then knew “the truth” and I was so thankful. Those who followed him made a big thing about how he teaches the true Word of God from the original languages (Hebrew in Greek) and therefore his teaching is very accurate and precisely correct. And the reason you were likely not doing well and thriving in the previous teaching you might have been exposed to was that it was not accurate enough and dogmatic enough to be effective.
Thieme made a big deal about his interpretation of 1 John 1:9 and the confession of sins. He taught that once you believed in or accepted Jesus Christ as your Savior you could never lose your salvation, but you could lose fellowship with God through sin and he called this fellowship with God the filling of the Holy Spirit. The confession of sin according to 1 John 1:9 was the way of regaining fellowship with God, the filling of the Holy Spirit after you sin. He made a big deal about how confessing your sin was simply naming or citing your sin(s) to God, and that whether or not you felt sorry for your sin did not mean anything to God. According to Thieme Bible Doctrine the only way to grow spiritually as a Christian was to take in the teaching of the Word of God (Bible Doctrine) regularly, preferably every day while in fellowship with God through the filling of the Holy Spirit. Thieme called the confession of sin to regain the filling of the Holy Spirit the rebound technique. In Thieme’s booklets and books he would state at the beginning how important it was to confess any sins before you begin your study of the Word of God as a believer in Jesus Christ to make sure you are in fellowship with God so you will benefit from the teaching, but if you were not a believer you needed to believe in Jesus Christ to be saved rather than confess your sin(s).
[Just to digress for a moment, my impression was that Thieme’s followers would for the most part buy into the idea that in your previous Christian experience where you didn't know and understand and apply the true rebound technique you could never have grown spiritually because you would never be properly filled with the Holy Spirit while being taught Bible Doctrine.]
Even though there were things that I would hear Thieme teach that caused my faith to falter, it was only in the sense that I would doubt whether I was really saved, or how could I know for sure, rather than causing me to question the validity or truthfulness or soundness of Thieme’s teaching. It was as though when I first accepted his teaching as the truth or true Bible Doctrine that a switch was flipped in my brain that would not let me question whether he was a true teacher of the Word of God or not.
Thieme taught that the tiniest bit of faith in Christ secured eternal salvation. This sounded great and encouraging. But later I learned that he taught that you are not saved by inviting Christ into your heart. So this was a specific thing that caused my faith to falter. If you can be surprised that you ended up in heaven, then you can be surprised that you ended up in hell. It seemed that the method of salvation is a specific procedure that if not done correctly can fail to secure salvation. Often you hear these sorts of evangelical preachers say salvation is by “faith alone in Christ alone.” If you add anything at all to faith in Christ you are not saved!
Thieme’s teaching of the confession of sin, and how sins more often than not are mental sins and God is perfect holiness and can't have anything at all to do with sin no matter how small, led me and probably many others into a malady known within Catholicism as scrupulosity, where you are always going around riding roughshod over yourself for every little thing or thought that might be a sin, and that you need to confess it to God to make sure that you are in fellowship with the Holy Spirit. This kind of thinking can lead to mental problems. I did end up having lifelong problems with depression and anxiety, although I think I had these problems even before latching onto Thieme’s teaching, but Thieme’s teaching exacerbated the problems rather than helped them.
I am 64 years old now and one year ago I was diagnosed with ADHD for the first time in my life, and one just doesn't come down with this later in life, and there is much evidence that I had this since childhood from elementary school teachers’ written descriptions of my behavior in class in report cards and also physical health complaints I had in junior high school for which I had my mom take me to see doctors at Kaiser for which they always sent me away saying there was nothing wrong with me. I have also recently learned that people with ADHD tend to be more receptive to getting hooked into following dogmatic religious teachers but that's a whole other area of potential further research. A recent article on Gina Pera’s ADHD web site. “Does ADHD Create Vulnerability to “High-Control” Groups?”
I know there are a lot of things in play here, in the process of where I have been and how I got to where I am now. Becoming free of this mental prison I was in was long and complicated, but if I could perhaps just mention a few things that might help others who are facing a similar problem to mine, then others might be more quickly encouraged in the direction of healing, wholeness and recovery.
There are different layers to this and it is definitely not a one size fits all sort of thing. At one end of the spectrum are those who are so incensed for how they have been abused by the dogmatic religious system they were trapped in that they can't help but say they no longer believe in God. There are a lot of materials and writings out there to help people in this direction.
For others, it can be helpful to learn that the dogmatic teachings of unending torment in hell are really man made teachings to instill fear and control of people, and believe it or not, many early Christian teachers taught that all will ultimately be saved. And there is also religious pluralism where one does not view religions as exclusive systems of belief that condemns as false all others, as much of Christianity does.
Evangelical Christianity has the problem of being like a multi level marketing system. I think it was Michael Shermer of The Skeptics Society where I first learned of this analogy, and I think it is spot on. “Amway with Bibles.” You are encouraged to buy into it, to believe, to join, based on very little information. Then once you join, the indoctrination starts, and you begin seeing the fine print that you apparently agreed to without ever reading it or even knowing that it existed.
Religious belief systems like this tend to have as their foundations many axioms or assumptions that are taken on faith as 100% true even when many or most can really never be claimed to be known for sure.
The Christian belief system that I was trapped in was a control system with many contradictions in it. And I got the sense to whatever extent I might question these discrepancies, I would be accused of being nit picker or overthinking. But I would come back and argue that you are inviting or begging me to treat the belief system this way because you are being so dogmatic and 100% sure about the accuracy of every little thing that you teach.