The White Peril 白禍

There really is nothing you can't find on the Internet nowadays. I think I've mentioned, albeit only glancingly, that I was brought up in a super-conservative sabbatarian Christian sect that some viewed as a cult...yeah? Well, if not, I was. I figured out that I no longer believed in God's existence about the same time I figured out that I no longer believed in Sean's heterosexuality. The initial transition was rough, but I got things together, stopped going to church, was up-front with my parents, and really haven't thought much about it since. One or two people I knew from my abortive semester at the affiliated Bible college contacted me a while ago--they comment here occasionally--but otherwise, the whole experience felt like a distant relic of childhood.

Then a few days ago, someone I grew up with in church found my blog while Googling for something..."cynical Japan bitch postrel kylie libertarian," presumably. She wrote very politely to say she'd like to get back in touch and indicated that there's a website (of quite long standing, it turns out) for people who used to belong to the Worldwide Church of God and left. Who knew?

I followed her link and was struck by a few things. For one thing, a lot of these people are really, really bitter about the effects of church teachings on their lives. I'm not sure what to make of that. My parents had financial difficulties at times--the '80s weren't kind to the families of PA steelworkers--and my little brother and I could be something of a handful. But they handled life fine without calling the ministers or elders in to put them on a budget or tell them point-by-point how to bring us up. Those writing in to The Painful Truth with horror stories about idiotic counsel that broke up families, turned parents into undemonstrative martinets, and destroyed relationships with non-believing family members are surely expressing bias. How could they not? But even if what they write is somewhat embellished, it's plenty bad in the essentials.

People in the church certainly noticed Herbert W. Armstrong's (even all these years later, I feel bizarrely disrespectful for not typing "Mr. Armstrong's") naked social-climb-y streak and preference for a tacky, rube-ishly ostentatious version of the good life. My parents and their friends were all very devout, but they had a healthy sense of mischief and would joke about the Gulf Stream and the Mercedes at times. Their view of things was that even the highest living servant of God was only human, that he worked hard flying all over the place trying to get the gospel out, and that he'd earned a little understanding from laymembers about his creature comforts. (Having been reared Catholic, my mother found those working in the higher echelons at headquarters to be relatively abstemious.) There seem to be a lot of charges out there that Armstrong was not a mere pious fraud but a thoroughgoing huckster. I don't know how true that is. Frankly, it doesn't interest me much at this late date.

But maybe it would still interest me, even twenty-odd years after his death, if my parents had gotten divorced or hit me with a belt or forbidden me to have friends at school under the orders of ministers in the church he ran. My first instinct, when reading some of these accounts, is to say that some people need to get a life and move on. After all, no one was coerced into buying into the cult of personality of Herbert W. Armstrong the way people were coerced into buying into the cult of Kim Il-sung. Maybe that's too harsh, though. I recognize that my happy life has been enabled to a degree by unearned good fortune rather than by my own strong-mindedness. Having a homosexual atheist who lives in Tokyo as an elder son is not what my parents would have chosen, but they love me and have always recognized that adults are free to make their own way in life. When I got to college, my friends were mostly from comfortable, intact families (like mine, only far more prosperous). We all did our age-appropriate chafing against our parents' expectations, and despite the occasionally major difficulties, we all got through fine. I don't remember feeling that the religious-ness of some of my adjustment problems made them special. Everyone had things to work out with the family.

The guy who runs this site (and this more current blog), who apparently ended up an atheist like me, says he feels a special kinship with people who went through the experience of being brought up in the church. Do I? To a degree, I guess I must. I attended services from ages three to twenty-three. That's a long time. I just wonder whether the church was seriously screwing up the lives of people we knew closely in our congregation and I just didn't recognize it.