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Among the Baptists

Thread ID: 11164 | Posts: 17 | Started: 2003-11-20

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madrussian [OP]

2003-11-20 01:28 | User Profile

[URL=http://www.exile.ru/178/178022402.html]http://www.exile.ru/178/178022402.html[/URL]

By John Dolan ( [email]dolan@exile.ru[/email] )

I went to a Baptist service in Moscow last Sunday. It’s not that I’m getting religion. My attitude to Protestantism is summed up by the old joke about the ex-Catholic who, when approached by a Presbyterian missionary, says haughtily, “I, sir, am an apostate from the TRUE Church.”

Look up “John Dolan” on Amazon and you’ll find that authors with my name (and there are a lot) mainly write histories of Catholic doctrine. We were that kind of family. Among my father’s ten brothers and sisters were two Jesuits and a teaching nun. Not a happy-go-lucky barfly among us; nothing but studious four-eyed Catholics, a teetolaling, non-cute subspecies.

California in the hippie days rescued me from a life in the chilly bosom of the Church—who needs God when the hippie girls, so much more worthy of worship, are right there in school with you? Even describing myself as an “atheist” seemed excessive, a word for Victorian cranks who actually took the issue seriously. My view, a typical one in CA, is that serious interest in any religion on the part of anyone born in the developed world after 1945 is a symptom of intellectual disability.

But the problem is that America turns out to be a very Christian country. A Protestant, Cromwellian country, to be exact. I’ve been trying to understand what turned my country into a thrashing autistic monster in the past few years, and unfortunately, if you want to understand America, you’ve got to learn a little about radical Protestantism. Bush got the Southern Baptist vote by a stunning 68% to a miserable 38% for Gore. And the polls say that this same core of crazed Baptists intends to vote for the little freak again, after he’s absolutely destroyed everything in America except Mexican food. And I hear Cheney’s hired a consultant to figure out how to wreck Mexican food too. These people are mad, but their madness comes straight out of the real America, whose pure products go crazy.

And when a culture goes crazy, it falls back on its deepest, oldest delusions. So when America stopped taking its medication and started raving, sometime in the early 80s, it fell back on devout frenzies from the other Civil War, the Roundheads who considered Cromwell a squeamish moderate. They didn’t die, they just moved west. They live now in Atlanta and Sacramento, everywhere the born-again majority tends its lawns. They gladly serve as the sucker base of the American pyramid scheme, happy martyrs to a half-million conmen.

And their purest expression is the Baptists. The Methodists are too kindly, the Presbyterians softpedal Predestination, the Episcopals are little more than a gay dating service. If you want to understand why Americans act like such suckers—why dead GIs’ mothers don’t curse Bush’s name, why Enron employees don’t climb over their former bosses’ fences with combat knives between their teeth—you have to go see the Baptists. God knows they’re easy to find. They’re everywhere, even in countries like Mongolia. And naturally they’re here in Moscow, listed online as the IBF, “International Baptist Fellowship.”

So I set out for their rites on a cold Sunday morning, ending up at a drafty school building near Ul. 1905 Goda station, right behind a McDonald’s. I’d rehearsed a fake name, “Tom Giffney,” and a cover-story. I didn’t really expect to need them—but I did. Because the Baptists, I discovered, want to get to know you right from the start. They weren’t going to let me into the service anonymously. When I tried to sidle past the guard, he led me to an American lady with a scared grin who asked my name and wrote it on a green nametag. With that ridiculous “Tom Giffney” badge pinned on my sportcoat disguise, I was at last allowed into the service.

But that was just the start of the interrogation. The minute I sat down, a tall American who seemed to be running the service asked all “newcomers” to stand up and introduce themselves. It’s moments like this that make you realize spies have it pretty tough. Was I “Tom Giffney”…or was it “Gaffney”? I couldn’t even remember my alias.

Luckily lots of other “newcomers” stood up, enabling me to slide by unchallenged. But the interrogation still wasn’t over. No sooner had the MC ended the “newcomers” phase than he ordered us to “get to know” the people sitting next to us.

I scrunched a scared grin, the quintessential American expression, on my face and tried to chat with the cardigan-clad fellow next to me. He said he was from North Carolina, so, suave as ever, I made some idiot comment about the Andy Griffith show. He switched the subject back to me, though, asking me where I was from. I started to see why this cult is booming in the appalling, unreported loneliness of the American suburbs: they’ll let you talk! At first, anyway.

I said I was from Concord, a larger suburb north of mine; he hadn’t heard of it. His wife burst upon us, chatting explosively, and the chat seemed to go on for too long when the MC broke in, leading us in several hymns.

The singing was another surprise—because it was very bad, yet done with vast confidence. The congregation stomped through the verses, unashamedly honking and bleating.

My capital-C Church had a very different attitude. My father and his brothers and sisters took singing very seriously, studying from childhood, until their singing careers were aborted by the rigors of the great, grim Church. My Uncle Jim, a Jesuit, had the greatest voice of all and could have had a career in opera, but—a typical denouement--“the Order wouldn’t let him.” Singing, self-abnegation and the Church were always mixed up together. My father, who had a magnificent voice, sang every week, at every mass from 8:00 to 12:15, for a decade—in which time Monsignor Wade never bothered to learn his name, much less thank him. That was the attitude of the Church in its prime: “You owe the Church everything, the Church owes you nothing.”

These Baptists, I realized, were full of what Catholics used to call “spiritual pride.” It suffused not only their singing, but their very posture and bearing. They were “plain,” an adjective I always associate with Protestants, and dressed in clothes that were drab and cheap by Moscow standards--and remember, Moscow takes clothes very seriously. Plain Muscovites usually hunch through town in shame.

Yet these plain folk were shameless.So this cult gives its followers social warmth, and pride…and I was about to learn, a third, even more vital gift: drama. The drama started with “special prayers.” A mixed couple, American man and Russian woman, came up carrying their baby. The MC explained that the baby was very sick and would need kidney surgery immediately. The Russian woman, though obviously terrified for her child, seemed moved by the crowd’s interest—which wasn’t difficult to understand, if you compared it to the scant notice she’d get in an Orthodox parish.

There was pampering for the mild, sandy-haired American dad, too, as the Pastor explained that “the father’s job is to serve as the image of God.” It was impossible to imagine any child seeing this harried officeworker as God, but seeing his glory reflected in the proud smiles of the congregation, the Dad could probably believe it for a little while—and what a blast of glory that must be in the dull round of chores and eating which is the average American’s week.

The real dramatic climax came next, in the form of “testimony” by a small, nervous blonde woman introduced as “Lisa Marie” (a name that seemed even less convincing than “Tom Giffney”). The MC told us Lisa was “very shy,” and she seemed it, until she started talking. She was a master orator, starting quietly: “My faith was strong all through college,” she said, listing her stats: president of the Campus Fellowship, chosen to come to Russia in ’92…then she paused and let the crisis build: “I found many fine Christians in Russia. And I also found someone I should have run away from. But I didn’t. I ran to him. And shortly thereafter I found myself in a place I never thought I’d be in…[long dramatic pause]…and after that I found myself pregnant.”

It was much more shocking than anything Jerry Springer’s transvestites could produce, this agonized description of a perfectly healthy, harmless college affair. For Lisa Marie this was a tale of monstrous sin. She was trembling, but she also seemed somehow ecstatic.

As a born ham, I could understand the feeling: she was the center of hushed attention—and doing God’s work at the same time. This was serious pleasure, a sophisticated, decadent performance oozing masochistic delight.

The S&M got explicit fast: “…and soon after that, I had a miscarriage. No matter how illegitimately it was conceived, I loved that baby dearly,” she said, letting her voice hold a long quaver on “dearly,” before continuing: “and God took him away from me to teach me His power. I grieved deeply, but I was not alone; God was gentle and patient with me even while He disciplined me.” I’d heard this Jesus-as-boyfriend stuff in the odd Christian pop song, but this was much more explicit, rough stuff. The congregation was inhaling it as deeply as they could.

Nobody seemed inclined to quibble about the notion that God had personally killed Lisa Marie’s baby. I mean, jeez, we’d just met another baby who’d been born with a severe kidney disorder; from the sound of it, this baby might soon die too. But his affliction was apparently a mere medical disorder, while Lisa Marie’s baby had been killed to teach her the wages of sin.

Lisa Marie ended her tale by moving to the recent birth of her second child, “my little baby, my Nadezhda, my Nadya, my hope…” Nadya was being held by the MC, who was apparently Lisa’s husband-on-the-rebound.

What was HE feeling as she told her story? For these people, a non-virgin bride is apparently scandalous; then did the MC mind being exposed as a cuckold?

Clearly not. He was basking in the attention, and that attention seemed by far the most powerful reward this crazy church offers. I understood why Mark Twain said bitterly that “rapscallions is what Christian folks loves best,” and what that weird verse about “more joy in Heaven over one sinner who repents than 99 of the faithful” really means.

And I saw why these crazy amateur dramatists love their worthless President so much: he sinned like Tom Sawyer, then became upright--the sort of bipolar biography they savor.

Lisa Marie sat down to applause, the first actual applause I’d ever heard in a church—another touch of the drama club. And the Pastor (or minister, or whatever these cultists call their married, worldly quasi-priests) stood up to do his stuff.

He wasn’t the caricature of a Baptist preacher, “Brother Archie” preaching Hellfire and segregation. This was a dapper, controlled greybeard, who read us the story of Saul of Tarsus, the unbeliever and tormentor of God’s chosen, who was struck down on the road to Damascus, blinded, blasted off his horse by a great voice asking, “Saul, why do you persecute me?” (I was sure the Pastor was looking at me when he said that line.)

It was a perfect story of the innocent murderousness of America’s state religion. God blasts this poor little loony off his horse, blinds him, terrorizes him with roaring from the sky—and then has the gall to ask, “Why do you persecute me?” No wonder Bush can still play the victim while blasting his enemies anywhere on the globe by remote-control drones: it’s in the Bible!

Best of all, this story of the persecutor who comes to God played on that slobbering love of “rapscallions” and their lurid pasts. Saul the persecutor turns into Paul the Christian CEO—never a dull moment in this manic-depressive’s dreamworld.

The sermon went on flattering the congregation shamelessly, to the point of telling them they were “saints.” Yup: every petty office slave in the place was a saint. “If you accept Jesus, you are a saint; you don’t need to wait for some fol-de-rol to ‘beatify’ you in some fancy ceremony…” The congregation laughed appreciatively at the oblique slap at my dead Church.

Simple, childish vanity, the vanity of nobodies eager for a grand title; that was the big secret of their silly cult, whose spread has destroyed my homeland and is spreading over the rest of the world like those stigmata starfish that ate the reefs. Nothing more than this: a silly weekly lodge meeting, like the ones Fred and Barney attended, where clerks strut home, assured from the pulpit that they, their anemic spouses, and their plegmatic, doughy sons are the equal of Elizabeth of Hungary.

So I suppose my visit to the Baptists did explain a lot about America’s current bout of sanguine delusion. But contrary to the proverb, to understand is not to forgive--not this time. When Bush appeared on the news that night he seemed more loathsome than ever. I could place him in cultural context now: apotheosis of a nation of vain, pompous suckers, wearing unearned martyrs’ robes while they burn the last forests and thrash around the world rolling over warmer, more humorous people.

wild_bill

2003-11-23 00:11 | User Profile

Why aren't you in the Orthodox Church?

--Wild Bill

Okiereddust

2003-11-23 08:18 | User Profile

[QUOTE=wild_bill]Why aren't you in the Orthodox Church?

--Wild Bill[/QUOTE]Madrussian if I'm not mistaken is a fellow apostate from the true church.

wild_bill

2003-11-23 13:45 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Okiereddust]Madrussian if I'm not mistaken is a fellow apostate from the true church.[/QUOTE]

That's interesting. I'm an American Orthodox and I find it a refershing change from the typical US churches. Compared to them and the Roman Catholics, I find Orthodoxy to be the most politically incorrect Christian branch that exists. If nothing else, they are the only Christians who devote the vast majority of their relief and charity efforts to white folks.

I just had to ask why he was getting involved with the Baptists.

Regards, Wild Bill

Bardamu

2003-11-23 17:33 | User Profile

I don't get the impression this author cares much for Americans! I wonder why he bothered to change his name to attend a Baptist church in Russia? Presumably he thinks John Dolan is so Irish that everyone will know that he is not [I]really[/I] Protestant. Surely there are Dolans in Northern Ireland and even if there aren't your typical [I]scrunched a scared grinning[/I] church-going American in Russia wouldn't know it.

Stanley

2003-11-23 19:16 | User Profile

I don't believe in God, but I'd rather have a Baptist for a neighbor than Dolan. People like him are one of the reasons I left the SF Bay Area.

In his cloddish way, he does stumble across a serious point. As Nicholas Strakon puts it (The Last Ditch, [url=www.thornwalker.com/ditch/lights120.htm]The Well Tempered Catastrophe[/url])

An even stronger force, however, in molding the popular mind is the inextinguishable American millennialism, which the official schools and media are able to pass along to succeeding generations without difficulty, even as those rising Americans are prevented from knowing whether Ferdinand Columbus came before or after Franklin Washington or George D. Roosevelt. In calculating which is the "senior" influence — Zionism or general American millennialism — it may be useful to remember that the two ideologies are related, or more precisely cognate, in an odd but not irrelevant way. Millennialist ideology in America began with New England Puritans whose imagination was more vividly stirred by the Old Testament than by the New, and who adapted their "New Jerusalem" ideology from Judaic traditions; and it was the secularizing descendents of those very Puritans who populated and shaped the American ruling and mandarin classes. The idea that America is 'holy,' (or 'free' or 'democratic') and the rest of the world is evil is something it took me years to wake up from.

Franco

2003-11-23 20:37 | User Profile

wild bill wrote:

That's interesting. I'm an American Orthodox and I find it a refershing change from the typical US churches. Compared to them and the Roman Catholics, I find Orthodoxy to be the most politically incorrect Christian branch that exists.

Good for you, wild bill. American churches are so P.C. that it is scary. I was a Methodist, I left in about 1990.

It seems that only a few Christians these days embrace nationalism. That is dooming America, if you ask me.

wild_bill

2003-11-23 21:17 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Franco]Good for you, wild bill. American churches are so P.C. that it is scary. I was a Methodist, I left in about 1990.

It seems that only a few Christians these days embrace nationalism. That is dooming America, if you ask me.[/QUOTE]

The liberal churches are off the map, as far as I'm concerned, but many conservative US churches are very double-minded and as the Bible says "unstable in all their ways." For example, I was in a conservative Presbyterian church where the sermon speculated that the 911 attacks may have been God's punishment against America for our immorality and apostasy. Ok, at least its something to think about. Then they turn around and solicit contributions to be sent to Arfrica to fight AIDS. Now anyone not born yesterday knows that the two greatest ways AIDS is spread is through homosexuality and promiscuity - both of which the Bible condemns. So if the 911 attacks were America's punishment for imorality, it follows that AIDS could very well be God's punishment against Africa for immorality and adultery. Yet the Presbyterians still want to send money to Africa where they could be in effect interfering with God's will. Lost on them, I think, is the fact that if more Africans were living a Christian life and avoiding homosexuality and adultery, there would be no AIDS problem.

In our church, we collect money, not to waste on AIDS carriers in Africa, but for poor kids and orphans in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Regards, Wild Bill

Agrippa

2003-11-23 21:37 | User Profile

The baptists often act like mad sects do.

The main problem ist not that such neo-christian groups just existed in the US before 1945, the problem ist that they only dominated the US. Now they dominate f.e. the Catholic Church and the Lutherans too.

Especially the Lutherans of today are mad and a shame for their name!

But this was just possible after the re-education from 1945 on.

Bardamu

2003-11-23 22:30 | User Profile

Wild Bill,

Could you provide a link to your church?

wild_bill

2003-11-23 22:41 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Agrippa]The baptists often act like mad sects do.

The main problem is not that such neo-christian groups just existed in the US before 1945, the problem ist that they only dominated the US. Now they dominate f.e. the Catholic Church and the Lutherans too.

Especially the Lutherans of today are mad and a shame for their name!

But this was just possible after the re-education from 1945 on.[/QUOTE]

Unfortunately, there are so many influences and mindsets operating within US churches today, that it often makes it difficult to find one that actually adheres to traditional Christianity. By that I mean the common teachings as they existed in the 1700 and 1800s.

You cited 1945, but I think the problem, at least in the US, really goes back even farther. At least to the mid-1800s when there arose liberal churches and conservative reactionary movements all over the place, combined with the gradual infiltration of heresies, the most prominant being dispensationalism.

Now we have churches like the Lutherans who still go by the traditional theology, but which have gone liberal on morality and politics. In contrast, we have very conservative groups like the Pentecostals, but which have heretical theology.

The only Christian group I found that is traditional in all respects are the Eastern Orthodox.

Regards, Wild Bill

wild_bill

2003-11-23 23:04 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Bardamu]Wild Bill,

Could you provide a link to your church?[/QUOTE]

My church is very small and typical Orthodox church. But here's some organizational links where maybe you could find a parrish near you. If you are tired of the standard fare at most churches, its worth a look.

All these organizations are in the US. Also one doesn't have to be of the respective ancestry to join any of these churches. Some people mistakenly think that if they are not Greek or of some Slavic ancestry, then the church won't want them as members. No, this is a false assumption. In nearly all cases, the Church is very glad to have new people. In fact, there are many Orthodox Churches in the US in which a large part of the membership are converts.

Antiochian Orthodox [url]http://www.antiochian.org/[/url]

Greek Orthodox [url]http://www.goarch.org/[/url]

Orthodox Church in America [url]http://www.oca.org/[/url]

Romanian Orthodox [url]http://www.roea.org/[/url]

Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (Most conservative) [url]http://www.russianorthodoxchurch.ws/english/[/url]

Serbian Orthodox [url]http://www.oea.serbian-church.net/[/url]

Ukrainian Orthodox [url]http://www.uocofusa.org/[/url]

Regards, Wild Bill

Agrippa

2003-11-23 23:13 | User Profile

[QUOTE]You cited 1945, but I think the problem, at least in the US, really goes back even farther. At least to the mid-1800s when there arose liberal churches and conservative reactionary movements all over the place, combined with the gradual infiltration of heresies, the most prominant being dispensationalism.[/QUOTE]

Thats what I meant. It arose in the US and come to EUROPE after 1945.

The today Lutherans in Europa are the best example of the complete destruction of all good moral and the immense growing of ballast and bad things.

wild_bill

2003-11-23 23:26 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Agrippa]Thats what I meant. It arose in the US and come to EUROPE after 1945.

The today Lutherans in Europa are the best example of the complete destruction of all good moral and the immense growing of ballast and bad things.[/QUOTE]

Unfortunately, I'm not very aware of what's been happening in Europe. I recall that back a while ago, however, that Russia tried to limit the number of American mad man preachers swarming into Russia. I don't know if that worked. IMHO, the last thing Russia needs are American evangelical preachers spreading their crazy dispensationalism, phoney faith healing, and other scams and heresies.

BTW, I wonder if the Lutherans outside of the US are as liberalized as what we have here?

Regards, Wild Bill

Agrippa

2003-11-24 01:26 | User Profile

[QUOTE]BTW, I wonder if the Lutherans outside of the US are as liberalized as what we have here?[/QUOTE]

I would guess its worse here!

Its unbelievable how the Lutherans changed after world war I and especially after WWII and then after the 60's finally.

Theres nothing more here which has real worth on the average if you judge this church. And it was one of the best structures and moral systems on a religious base which ever existed.

Its really a catastrophy and we all know how it came in the last century...

Okiereddust

2003-11-24 04:05 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Agrippa]I would guess its worse here!

Its unbelievable how the Lutherans changed after world war I and especially after WWII and then after the 60's finally.

Theres nothing more here which has real worth on the average if you judge this church. And it was one of the best structures and moral systems on a religious base which ever existed.

Its really a catastrophy and we all know how it came in the last century...[/QUOTE]I'm not sure it really came about in the last century. The basis for it was all completely laid in the previous century, with the creation of the theological liberalism by teachers such as Harnack and Troeltsch.

Once the transcendent foundations of religion are undermined, it becomes nothing more than an open vehicle for the passing tends of sociology and politics.

Agrippa

2003-11-24 23:15 | User Profile

[QUOTE]Once the transcendent foundations of religion are undermined, it becomes nothing more than an open vehicle for the passing tends of sociology and politics.[/QUOTE]

Yup, thats especially true for Lutherans. But normally they blocked bad trends for the communitiy and often helped to develop good things.

That was lost after WWII and the American influence.

Then they CAME BACK to some Ur-christion, fundamental versions of christendom.

And in fact, the European christendom was useful because it didnt care to much about everything what was in the bible but used what was good for community.

Thats what religion is or at least should be really about. It should help the community and the individuals to act FOR the community.

Everything else is a useless religion. Just think about the Talmudian Chassidim. Is there a more useless religion? They couldnt even survive on their own with this rules...

If the majority in Isreal will turn into such ultra-religious people in the same year there cant be any Isreal with massive extern help.

Lutherdom was in its majority a religion for the folk and people, open to things which are good for the community. Before they were re-educated...