Holy shit. It suddenly seems obvious. The evangelical kids in, say, Jesus Camp seem so brainwashed I had no problem imagining them lacking—or transcending, or whatever—such a basic human drive as postadolescent rebellion. But kids bucking parents is as old as Eden, and as this new study suggests, there's a reasonable chance that many of those raised in the fundamentalist/Evangelical faith will grow up to have nothing but scorn for the movement.

In the hands of the right lawyer, Jesus Camp could follow Martin Bashir's Living with Michael Jackson into the pantheon of documentaries that become evidence in child-abuse trials...

ok, i read the whole thing and it was interesting and all. but it isn't 6:00 am on friday...

Unfortunately, if you read all the way to the end of the article it turns out to be a big head-fake. The numbers they're working themselves up about aren't any more reality-based than any of the other topics they tend to get worked up about.

It would have been a more interesting piece of writing if it had put the falsity of the crisis front and center, and tried to address why evangelicals are so prone to freaking out over bad data.

If you want to ensure that your kid won't grow up to be Christian, send them to church 3 times plus a week.

I agree with Daranee. I was raised very Catholic (in a nice way - no abuse ;-) and it was Mass every Sunday, with CCD (religious school for public school kids) every Wednesday night.

During Lent, it was really out of control: Mass every day, and "Stations of the Cross" (long story) every Friday night (along wit the CCD, etc)

I left all that behind as soon as I went away to college.

I'm not bitter about Catholicism (and I find that people who call themselves "recovering Catholics" are almost always the most tedious of bores) but I just don't see what the point of all that churchiness is. I'd rather live a good life just to live a good life, and be remembered as someone who wasn't an asshole.

Shit, I could have told you this. In my high school, 4H, Future Farmers of America, and Fellowship of Christian Athletes were the largest clubs, and the wacky ass Christians were in the vanguard with the virginity pledges. Naturally, they all fucked and drank like crazy. Hell, in CCD, people brought plastic party cups filled with booze. Of course they don't stay fundies. I doubt it's 96% that leave, but it's damn sure more than 80%.

See, if these fundies had just WATCHED "Family Ties" all this would have been made crystal clear to them:

Hippie Parents=Alex Keaton

And now of course, they're experiencing the simple, but quite self-evident reverse corollary.

TV - it can explain everything.

Don't get too excited, you guys. Like Nat says, fundies tend to freak out at slight data. Plus, as eveidenced by almost any sermon including the words 'sheep' or 'fish', they looove to seem like victims. A single fundie kid in a big, bad, secular public high shcool is going to feel tiny and put upon even if his bible group is the most popular group on campus.

As much as I would like to believe this...somehow I don't.

Everyone quoted in the article, at least in this clip is from within the faith. I'd like to see actual secular scientists or sociologiest say these same things. Until I do it smells like a spin on the old (actually new) conservative trick of loudly lying in order to achieve their ends, kind of like their myth of the "liberal media."

Even the writer seems skeptical when he writes, "Their alarm has been stoked by a highly suspect claim that if current trends continue.."

Well, obviously lots of the children of very religious parents leave the flock. Swing a cat around the Stranger office and I'll bet you hit three ex-believers. So there is hope that some of these kids will grow up to question their parents' weird beliefs.

But it does seem like there's a lot of hyperbole in those claims about losing teenagers in droves. Probably they are using the "crisis" to motivate their base, to make their demands for more special considerations seem more reasonable to the general public (they must, after all, always depict themselves as underdogs fighting a noble battle) and of course to justify the ruthless indoctrination of children. And, from their point of view, losing even one child to eternal hellfire is a big deal, so they tend to practice a "zero tolerance" approach to that sort of thing.

In fact "zero tolerance" seems to sum up the fundamentalist evangelical approach to just about everything when you get right down to it.

re: faulty data

of course christians are prone to buying faulty data. we're talking about people who believe in intelligent design because of "irreducible complexity."

re: ex-believers

you can't swing a cock in my apartment without hitting three ex-believers - at least on a good night.

re: flamingbanjo

kisses.

Exactly. I grew up going to stuff much like the Jesus Camp docu every summer, out in eastern Kentucky, and I always heard shit like "Christianity is ONE GENERATION FROM EXTINCTION!" And then everyone would freak out about how imperiled they are. Like Jesus is going to come back and it's all just going to be pot-smokin' hippie love and nobody left to rapture.

Fundies love to feel like everyone's out to get them.

I'm taking bets on Dave Meinert's spin on this.

I'll give you 5:2 he says "THESE NUMBERS ARE LIES AND MARS HILL IS SUCKING UP SEATTLE'S STUPID UNTHINKING TEENS THROUGH THE PARADOX BY THE DOZEN EVERY WEEK."

Still waiting for actual interviews with actual teens who have been converted to Mars Hill via The Paradox, Dave. Not holding my breath.

There are people who worry that the 4-5% figure for "bible-believing teens" is predicated on an extreme definition of "bible-believing." On that note, I would ask what the problem is with non-fundamentalist, non-bible-literalist Christianity?

If only 4-5% of teens subscribe to the kind of Christianity that damns the homos to hell and sics bears on kids who make fun of bald guys, well, those are the kind of christians we're concerned about, isn't it? And the low numbers are a good thing in that case, are they not?

Or are we also fighting against the Christians who believe in humility and the righteousness of the poor and turning the other cheek and all that jazz?

I'd chalk this one up to wishful thinking. And believe me, I DO wish for Christianity to die out in my lifetime. Or at least to have all the religious element stripped out of it and have the sectarian crap stripped out of it. But let's be realistic...it's been around for over 2,000 years, it's not going to die out just because we're disproving all the superstition left and right. Hopefully some of these kids discover Savage Love on the 'Net and find out that all these feelings they have are normal, acceptable, and not worth beating themselves up.

With apologies to Harvey Keitel, Let's not start sucking each other's dicks quite yet. These little christians go through their rebellious stage, screw and drink like crazy, get married, have tons of kids and go right back to the church. Then, most importantly, they vote republican to protect their intrests.

The few of us that broke out of that mind fuck are the exceptions.

I agree with the above posts. This article plays right into the paranoia and intense delusions of persecution that are endemic to xtian fundamentalists.
My father forced me to go to a Southern Baptist church as a child (shudder), where they were simply obsessed with the "end times" that were certain to happen any day - it was 1986. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING was a sign that the Rapture was here and the unbelieving heretics were soon to fry in hell on earth - especially those who left the church or tithed less than 10% and that's gross, people, not net. For example, did you know that the TV show "Moonlighting" was written and produced by Satan himself? He won a lot of Emmys that year.
Point is, these churches are the height of lunacy and should be churning out atheists by the truckload.

I found the following post from the PI's site to be especially enlightening:

"Religious passion has tremendous power to inspire good and evil. At Mars Hill Church it does both. In my own experience as an ex-evangelical, the beauty and the ugliness that have been articulated by witnesses on one side or the other are very real ---- with one exception:

If outsiders were listening, what they would hear is that on the inside, it doesn't feel hateful. The accusations simply don't ring true. When a dogma takes hold of you and shapes your moral priorities, you can do all kinds of things, good or evil, and they come from a place of love. Encouraging women to pump out babies, telling gays and Jews they are going to hell, dismissing the moral wisdom of non-believers – these are minor compared to other things that have been done in service to the God of Love. The Spanish Conquistadors who baptized native infants and then ran them through with swords may have been feeling genuinely benevolent. The young men who drove those planes into the Twin Towers may very well have acted out of love—love of God and love of their fellow Muslims. When we see ourselves as servants of a higher good, and when we pair that attitude of service with certitude, we become capable of the selflessness of Mother Teresa or the horrors of the Inquisition.

If you are listening, the Mars Hill members who have written here are telling you quite honestly what it feels like to be a fundamentalist or any other kind of cultist. Ex-Moonies, Ex-Scientologists, Ex-Pentacostals, and other ex-Evangelicals have written about this with thoughtful and sometimes painful candor on FactNet and other websites for "walkaways." It feels beautiful. It feels like being part of a loving community with a higher calling--because, in fact, it is.

We should not be surprised that when fundamentalism came to urban Seattle it came wearing hip clothes and playing rock music, and tossing frisbees. How could it succeed any other way? We should not be surprised that it evidences some of the very same beauty of spirit that characterizes our community so broadly. In fact, we must not be surprised, because if we assume that Mars Hill is all good or evil, then our discovery of the goodness may blind us to the dark side of Mark Driscoll's teachings specifically and Christian fundamentalism in general."
-V. Tarico

And then there's this story today from AP:

NEW YORK - A new 10-nation survey of Pentecostal and charismatic Christians, considered the fastest-growing stream of Christianity worldwide, shows they are deeply influencing the Roman Catholic and mainstream Protestant churches and are poised to make a big impact on global affairs.

The poll released Thursday by the Washington-based Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that "spirit-filled" Christians, who speak in tongues and believe in healing through prayer, comprise at least 10 percent of the population in nine of the 10 surveyed countries.

The study also found that followers are more willing than previously thought to bring their traditional values into public debates, potentially shaping government policies in the years ahead.

---

The snake handlers are coming! The snake handlers are coming!

The stupid thing is, these Mars Hill Christians are going to be destroying America for generations, but then they're STILL all going to hell when they die. They're covered with tattoos. Bible says no. So it's all for naught, but we have to suffer them anyways.

Mike in Mo (#15):

You are right. Those who stray from the flock often return as soon as they begin to experience the mysteries of life, like heartbreak, death, and disease, that they can't explain. They are called "Born Agains," and they are a particularly devilish species.

I have never felt as liberated as when I finally realized that religion is fiction and God is not constantly fucking with my life.

As regards the snake-handlers coming: will they be bringing their snakes here on a plane?

Faith?

Give me a break.

They have no faith.

Pay attention to what they DO.

Not what they SAY.

God commanded them - not a suggestion - not to LIE. Jesus was against those who profit by religion.

They have NO faith.

I have a number of close friends - including my husband - who were brought up snake-handlin', speakin'-in-tongues, holy-rollin', total lunatic-fringe Pentecostals. Not a one of them stayed in the church. One or two are still Christians, but they're either non-churchgoers or they're members of fairly liberal mainstream churches.

I think the heavy-duty immersion of after-school Bible reading, Wednesday night prayer meeting, and 8-hour Sunday services, interspersed with the occasional all-weekend revival (which my husband swears always happens on the nicest weekend in summer) tends to become aversion therapy after awhile.

It's no great surprise to me that the more Dark Ages the attitudes of some of the extremist churches become, the less relevant they make themselves.

God bless you, Nat, for taking out Dan & Geni with the trash.

Kids are smarter than they were a generation ago. I figured the whole religion game out back in junior high, and so had all my friends. And we lived in a right-wing, predominately Christian neighborhood.

With more information and perspectives available to them than ever before, many kids today are DEFINITELY gonna call the Christian churches on their shit and take a hike.