I first came across Bill’s story quite by chance doing some surfing through Wikipedia. It interested me a little but not enough to research any furhter. Then I came across this post on Anthony Bradley’s blog and got another perspective.
Reading this made me emotional. I was sad as I read Bill’s story. But when I got to his description of his parents’ religion I got angry. Let’s see what you think:
If you’re unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week.
They live in a black and white reality they’ve constructed for themselves. They partition the world into good and evil and survive by hating everything they fear or misunderstand and calling it love. They don’t understand that good and decent people exist all around us, “saved” or not, and that evil and cruel people occupy a large percentage of their church. They take advantage of people looking for hope by teaching them to practice the same hatred they practice.
A random example:
“I am personally convinced that if a Muslim truly believes and obeys the Koran, he will be a terrorist.” – George Zeller, August 24, 2010.
If you choose to follow a religion where, for example, devout Catholics who are trying to be good people are all going to Hell but child molestors go to Heaven (as long as they were “saved” at some point), that’s your choice, but it’s fucked up. Maybe a God who operates by those rules does exist. If so, fuck Him.
Their church was always more important than the members of their family and they happily sacrificed whatever necessary in order to satisfy their contrived beliefs about who they should be.
I grew up in a house where love was proxied through a God I could never believe in. A house where the love of music with any sort of a beat was literally beaten out of me. A house full of hatred and intolerance, run by two people who were experts at appearing kind and warm when others were around. Parents who tell an eight year old that his grandmother is going to Hell because she’s Catholic. Parents who claim not to be racist but then talk about the horrors of miscegenation. I could list hundreds of other examples, but it’s tiring.
What right do these people have in calling themselves followers of Jesus? Then I was reminded of the Pharisees in Jesus’ day who seemed to get it really wrong even though they so badly thought they (and only they) were getting it right. How does the good news get messed up so badly?
Here is the post in full over at Anthony Bradley’s blog:
It does lead me to ask myself, however: How am I getting it wrong in my presentation of the good news? What are you doing right?
Michael J. Fast 
thanks for this post. We’ve heard so many “Bill’s Stories” over the years. Deconversion stories. People brought up in “Christian families” that, by the descriptions given by the Bill’s of the stories, bear so little resemblance to Christ that it is hard (impossible) not to be angry with what we read.
But another thought that I have often had is that whle I know that these kind of churches are out there, and I know of the horrors the inflict on their communities, they in no way represent most churches or most Christians. They give all of us a bad name, worse, they give Christ and the gospel an odorus reputation. That is not to say that these stories should do exactly what you do at the end of the post. We all need to conciously and humbly ask the question every day, “how do I get the Pharisee in me to submit to the will of God?”
Let’s keep at it though. The beauty of Christ and the true gospel is worth everything.
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