Thread by @mcjulie

This is is a really true & important point that #exvangelicals might have some useful (or at least interesting) thoughts on.

https://twitter.com/pervocracy/status/1446436689946320897

One crucial and very weird aspect of it, is that it is a distinct change that happened to the church within my lifetime. When I was a kid in the 1970s our church celebrated Halloween just like other people but by the 1990s, after I left, it was a “harvest carnival”

It wasn’t the same church, but it was representative of what had happened in the west coast evangelical mainstream. Regular evangelicals like the ones in my family had changed their views & had a lot more concerns about direct satanic influence, spiritual warfare, etc.

My sense is that the Satanic Panic was the key pivot point, although the end-of-the-world Late, Great Planet Earth stuff was a crucial precursor.

I remember the Satanic panic being presented in a somewhat confused fashion, where it was never clear if we were supposed to be afraid of Satanic cults because they were fully human murderous weirdos, or because they had real supernatural powers of evil.

“They put backwards Satanic hymns in rock and roll music!” Was not only not TRUE, even if it HAD been true, so what? Were we, as Christians, supposed to believe that you could summon actual literal demons like that?

And it seemed like, after a period of debate, the church settled on “yes, spiritual warfare, territorial demons, direct satanic attacks, we believe in all that stuff now”

It became like creationism, where not every evangelical as an individual believed in it, but it was a standard view in the church — you didn’t have to believe it but you couldn’t fully reject it either.

The evangelical church — maybe all Christian churches — always had a fair number of what I’ll call “shadow doctrines” — these ideas that were rarely preached in a direct fashion from the pulpit, and weren’t a formal requirement of faith, but you couldn’t go against them.

These shadow doctrines are weird because they can be adopted VERY rapidly, which is what we’re seeing with the anti-vax/anti-maskers who are claiming their views as a teaching of Christian faith.

Because on the one hand they are straight-up lying — there’s simply no traditional Christian teachings against vaccines or covering your face — but on the other hand, the church has an established mechanism for rapid adoption of weird, extreme, technically sincere beliefs.

What’s going on here is partly trump-related — he really emboldened white American evangelicals to not even pretend to be normal anymore, which is how you get them going to school board meetings & ranting about how masks are infested with literal demons.

But also, the pandemic is the first time wacked-out evangelical beliefs have been this important of a disruption to the running of our country. The Satanic Panic ruined lives but on a fairly small scale. It didn’t kill a million people.

And, ugh, this just hit me — that’s part of why they’re doing it. Evangelicals are DESPERATE to feel important. It’s a palpable deep-down longing within the culture.

It’s a normal human need to want to feel like you matter to the world, but there are healthy ways (friends, art, good works) and unhealthy ways (cults, conspiracy theories, anti-social behavior) and evangelicals are big into the unhealthy ways.

So, in a way, this pandemic was made for them — they get to do stupid shit like meeting in person for choir practice & spreading covid, which gets them attention, and also gives them a chance to feel brave & persecuted.

Anyway, I would be really interested to see a book similar to Jesus and John Wayne analyzing the shift toward spiritual warfare beliefs in evangelical culture. Does such a book exist?