Most of the driving wheels in Big Church are not, in fact, believers, but manipulators, sheep shearers. I began learning this at 15, when various ‘pastors’ & ‘ministers’ began grooming me for the ministry….
I was a junior counselor at a fundamentalist summer camp that year. I don’t know if I’d caught anyone’s attention before that…but one night, it was my turn to do evening devotion for my cabin (every cabin did evening Bible-study/prayer/whatever, SOP). All I remember about it now, is that I picked a passage from Isaiah (open the book at random & searched the page, found a thing). I read the passage & started talking about it.
I have no idea how long I talked, but the cabin was silent. Eventually I ran out of things to say, and I had to pee something fierce, so I ended with a short prayer & stepped outside to hit the latrine. Outside the cabin, there were 20? 50? gathered around it - a lot of people, sitting on the ground; turned out, after the other cabins finished theirs, I was still going, and they could hear me & came to listen. All silent as I walked out, still silent when I came back. Freaked me out.
After that, my interactions with the church folks who ran the camp changed significantly. That’s when I remember the grooming beginning…and when I began to notice that these people had a very different take on church, Jesus, and the rest of it. Nothing overt, but their thru-line was off-key or something from my every (frequent) interaction with such folks.
Spent years mulling over what that meant, & correlating with old memories & new experiences. It took me A LONG TIME to realize that churches are run by salesmen more focused on driving attendance, new members, and the bottom line than on the product they were selling - or the people they were selling it to.
That cleared things up for me rather suddenly - in much the same way that I discovered that the republicans weren’t ignorant, or foolish, or trapped in old ways & beliefs: they were doing it all on purpose. I had totally believed for a long time that they ‘just didn’t understand’, but I was wrong. They understood what they were doing, and why they were doing it, and they were hiding it. Again, there were/are ‘true believers’, but they weren’t running the party, the movement, or the show: they had a plan; it was all deliberate, and not done in ignorance or old ways of thinking. Hiding in plain sight.
