Religious zealots want a fence to keep people in and keep scary ideas out.

There is an aspect of evangelical belief which is not as appreciated as it should be: the doctrine of separation. These Christian hardliners believe that they should be “in the world, but not of the world”. They base this doctrine on a number of scripture passages, especially John. This separation encompasses everything: what people read and believe, their choices in entertainment and clothes, their family life, their friends and career, and of course who they pray with. Fundamentalist parents do all they can to see to it that their families are not infected with what they see as the sicknesses of the modern world, the clothes, the music, the television, the ideas. They have their own neighborhoods and schools, their own churches, their own TV and radio stations, their own bars, their own websites and dating sites. Today’s Baptists and other hard-core Jesus people talk up this separation business, in part as a way to control and punish their own church members (the local Baptist group near me is very explicit about “disciplining” members who stray). The more extreme adherents insist on “second-degree separation”: they should avoid not only the outsiders, but even fellow evangelicals who don’t believe in separation. As though the modern world constitutes contamination.

Folks like the Baptist extremists and evangelicals accept most of the “abominations” in the Bible, the things you can go to hell for. They ignore some of them as inconvenient, such as the bans on ham and shellfish and trimming your beards and wearing blended fibers. But they go along with the bans on many forms of sexual activity and marriage, and so forth. And the evangelicals have even longer lists of go-to-hell offenses, beyond the strictures of the Bible. In fact the hard-core Jesus people have drafted a new, modern list of stuff that can send you to hell:

You can go to hell for fooling around with other forms of worship which are actually less destructive than Christianity: Eastern religions, yoga, Illuminati (18^th century liberals who are now all dead), new age belief, Church of Satan, Scientology, Wicca, earth worship. Also the mostly harmless but silly stuff like astrology, tarot, Ouija, vampirism, lycanthropy, palmistry, voodoo, Kabbala, fire walking, astral-projection, necromancy, divination.

You can go to hell for fooling around with other secret societies, real and imagined. Freemasonry, which is basically the Rotarians or Kiwanis with cooler symbolism. Trilateralism, an idiotic conspiracy theory about a non-existent society that allegedly rules the world economy. Skull and Bones, a silly fraternity at Yale.

You can go to hell for meditation and vegetarianism, which are actually good for you. Fornication, which means you’re having better sex than the Jesus People – also good for you.  Re-birthing, which is vital when Christians do it, but a one-way ticket to hell if anyone else does it. Halloween, candy and costumes for kids.

You can go to hell for fooling around with a long, long list of stuff going on in pop culture: rock music, heavy metal, burning man, cyberpunk, Twilight, alt comix, raves, XTC, Goth culture, LOTR, video games, Harry Potter, Dungeons and Dragons. The more addled extremists go after the Teletubbies, Bert and Ernie, Barney the Dinosaur because they might be gay or deny intelligent design or something. And of course any television show with gay people in it. Also postmodernism, a stupid and meaningless word which people who don’t understand art, use to describe art. Also backmasking, which consists of the Beatles screwing with your heads by recording stuff backwards fifty years ago. So, pretty much anybody who has ever turned on their television or their computer, or a book or a movie, all going to hell.

 
Which brings me to the Amish. The true champs of separation. While today’s evangelical Baptists and the like live lives much like ours, with the internet and cable television and iPhones, the Amish actually walk the walk on separation. They restrict or ban the use of anything connecting them to the big city, electric lines and phones and cars. Although some members are leaving the Amish fold and some Amish communities are loosening the rules a bit, for the most part the Amish community maintains its 19^th-century existence as well as they can; their emphasis on “plain” humility extends to banning “fancy” zippers on clothes.

It must be said that not everything the Amish do is admirable: they make women subordinate to men and rarely send their kids to high school. They fear that if their children get too much education, they are more likely to leave, which is rather a red flag; one consequence is that girls are given almost no information about how their bodies work. But there are some things they do that one can admire. First, they are not the Pennsylvania Taliban: they emphasize community, they let teenagers run a little wild before buckling down to the rules of adult life, they smoke pipes and drink beer. Even the dreaded punishment of shunning is only used as a last resort when the church unanimously decides to impose it, and it can be cancelled once the sinner returns to the church. Intolerance doesn’t seem to be their thing.

Second, the Amish are not really obsessed with religion. They don’t let religion dominate their lives like fundamentalists do: instead of building a big church for the preacher and making that the centerpiece of their lives, they hold religious services in each other’s homes. And more importantly, they are consistent about being separated from the world: the Amish believe that running around and quoting the Bible all day in front of other people is a “proud” thing to do, so they don’t beat each other, or outsiders, over the head with their religious beliefs. They keep their Amish stuff separate inside their Amish bubble, rather than trying to sell the Amish way to all their neighbors. The government recognizes that their beliefs about being separate from the outer world are consistent and not “situational”, which is why the government allows them to opt out of military service and the Social Security system.

Which takes me back to the far-right Baptists. They want to be separate from the world when they’re over at their own house, inside their fundamentalist bubble: the Baptist rules himself, his family, his home and his faith his way, and no outside influences are allowed to hold sway. But when he comes over to your house, it’s a completely different story. Not only does he want to win you over to his way of religion, he wants to make you do things his way in other areas that have nothing to do with religion. He wants his views to control not just the Fundamentalists, but everyone else, and not just on religion, but also on science and medicine, law and politics, the works. Abortion, gay marriage, contraception, HPV shots, evolution, stem-cell research.

This problem is rooted in the central hypocrisy of the fundamentalist movement. They believe in the doctrine of separation, but they also believe in the doctrine of evangelism, the notion that true believers are supposed to be going out there in enemy territory, winning over new members. They want the flow of ideas to be a one-way street: no “modern” influences are to enter the fundamentalist bubble, but the evangelicals are supposed to be peddling their brand of medieval snake oil outside the bubble, to the community at large. They are allowed to try to sell their ideas to us, but we’re not allowed to try to sell our ideas to them.

Here’s a perfect example of the hypocrisy. Where I live, down the street there is a Baptist family. They are hard-core evangelicals, ranting about gays and abortion on their website and in every sermon. They were hell-bent on coming down to my house to try to convert my young daughters to their faith. They even sent their pastor and his wife down to my house, to preach at the girls (with the pastor’s beard trimmed at the corners, wearing cotton/polyester blend, all in violation of Biblical law). They also took my daughter to a picnic (beef and cheese on the same plate, ham served, all violations of Biblical law). But when I turned the tables on them – I printed out an article explaining why the Baptist interpretation of gay marriage was fallacious, and sent my daughter to the Baptists’ house with it – they went Absolutely. Totally. Bananas. They determined that my daughter is officially going to hell. And probably took a shower to wash off the Devil Cooties, and burned my article in the fireplace before anyone could see it.

If these evangelical people want to separate themselves, and to not be of the world, then let them do that. Let them wall themselves off from 21^st century civilization. But don’t use those little fundamentalist enclaves as sally ports from which they can launch their little God Raids on their neighbors. Live like the Amish, and stop wreaking havoc in our school boards, our legislatures, our funerals, our Boy Scout troops, our doctor’s offices. If they want to be left alone, they need to leave us alone too.

Just imagine if there was an evangelical atheist movement. Go door to door?

“Howdy! Welcome to the neighborhood, have a cookie! Man is an animal, the earth is a satellite, the Bible is wrong!”


But it gets worse. 

Hard-core religious people don’t just build fences to keep people out. They also build them to keep people in. A number of faiths coerce their members into staying in the flock, by taking emotional hostages – families. These religious leaders warn that if you leave the faith, the church will do all they can to see to it that your family and friends never even talk to you again. It’s called shunning – separating “sinners” from their own families until they get with the program.

A surprising number of faiths do this. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are brutally thorough in banning family members even from emailing wayward relatives – they say that God should come even before the family bond (which actually has roots in Jesus’ preaching in the New Testament).  The Amish use shunning, and so do the Mormons sometimes.

Some churches add variations to the theme. Scientologists are particularly brutal: when actress Leah Rimini left the cult, they started making ugly noises to the effect that they could publicly expose the information they got in her private “audits”. Muslims are even harsher: all twenty countries which legally ban “apostasy” (leaving the faith) are Muslim, and nine of those countries prescribe the death penalty, even though the Qur’an forbids religious compulsion.
 
In other words these churches are a cross between Hotel California and that crooked law firm in John Grisham’s “The Firm” – you can get in but it can be awfully problematic to get out, like the Roach Motel. Any entity that forces people to choose between their faith and their family, is absolutely practicing psychological torture. They're holding people as emotional hostages. To the wayward members they say "Obey us in every particular or you lose your family"; to their relatives, “We’re forcing this choice on you, and you must put faith first and family second.” That is why international law bans the use of force or legal action to keep someone in the faith. And any faith which is so obviously flimsy and fraudulent, that the only way to keep people in is by threatening to destroy their family and their social life if they leave....That should be a clue.

You know who else tries to cut you off from all external support systems? Crooked cults, who hate external scrutiny because they are often breaking the law. And wife-beaters: a key factor in domestic violence is the effort by the abuser to make sure that his victim has no friends or family to turn to. Always beware of anyone who wants that much control over your life – it’s for their benefit, not yours.

Individual families are following these kinds of practices too. There are now thousands of teenagers who are homeless because they told their parents that they are gay, or lesbian, or atheist, or agnostic, and then their parents threw them out in the street. In one case, a Pentecostal couple drove their daughter out into the woods and dumped her there, hoping she’d never find her way back.
 
And here is the most telling part. The hard-core American Christian churches – the evangelicals and Pentecostals – already see they are having demographic problems. They know that people are turning more and more to atheism, to agnosticism, and to less intolerant churches. They know that their most fervent believers are the old folks who will be aging off the system soon, and they know that their younger members are less inclined to the fear, hate and intolerance that drive evangelical faith. They know that science is attacking at the gates. They know that America is turning away from anti-gay attitudes.

So now, more and more evangelical churches are using the threat of shunning, to keep people in the pews, and using other tools to enforce discipline in every phase of a member’s life. And that is an even more vivid sign that they know they’re losing the battle. That they’re doomed. They can’t hold their believers by the force of their argument or even their preaching of myths, so they must resort to force. They can’t keep scary ideas out of their world, and they can’t keep the next generation of believers inside the fence, even by force.

I will now return to a topic I’ve addressed before, the notion of religious groups as criminal enterprises.

There is a network of hard-core Baptists that has been inflicting torture, abuse, kidnapping and rape of its members for years. It’s huge, with one to seven million members.

The Independent Fundamental Baptists are so extreme that they even ban their members from contacting other Baptists and evangelicals, for fear of contamination. They insist on a literal word-for-word acceptance of the King James Bible, the six-day creation, the works. Abortion is murder, blacks are cursed, and gays are the same as rapists and child molesters, which is wildly ironic since rape and molestation are rampant within the IFB community.

Women are expected to submit totally to their husbands, produce many children, dress extremely conservatively so as not to provoke lust, and never work outside the home. Look for clumps of women with long long skirts.

The younger girls are often sexually abused and when they complain, they are forced to confess their sin, namely tempting men. The abusers are invariably protected, but the abuse is so epidemic that many have been prosecuted.

The IFB has a facility called Hepzibah House for teenage girls who fall short of IFB standards (i.e. complaining about abuse). It’s essentially a very abusive reform school. The girls are overworked, beaten and starved, sometimes enough to stop menstruation.  All contact with the outside world is cut off. When the authorities investigated, the Baptists tried to coerce the victims to lie to protect them.

Children are beaten regularly as a matter of doctrine, from as young as a few weeks, to “break” the children; some have died. All real-world television and music are banned, to include Christian music. Kids are hit with inch-thick sticks and branches; nursing babies who bite get their hair pulled.

Their entire education process is enclosed, from homeschooling in the early years to IFB colleges later on, which is doubly destructive because not only do students never learn much of what they need to survive in the real world, the degrees they get in this system are so bogus that graduates can’t escape the IFB system by using their college “degrees” to switch to another college.

They are very active in recruiting new victims, in supporting Republican candidates, and shoving their views down everyone else’s throats on science, medicine and everything else – they’re allowed to dump their nonsense on us, but they go totally insane if we try to introduce our 21^st-century facts to them and their followers. And since their numbers are one to eight million, they can exert huge impact on elections.

They claim they are all independent groups, to mask the fact that they all are affiliated together, use the same torture manuals, and are connected to Bob Jones University. This helps them evade legal scrutiny, a big issue for them. 

The Bob Jones people, incidentally, have a rather wild track record. One Bob Jones official condemned Reagan for picking G.H.W. Bush as his running mate – too liberal! In the 1980s Bob Jones University lost its tax-exempt status because of its blatantly racist policies; they had to pay a million in back taxes. One of their professors spread the rumor that John McCain had fathered a “black bastard”, to help Bush’s 2000 race. Bob Jones leaders think Catholics and Mormons are going to hell.

 

They are all about control. Their pastors are all-powerful and they ensure that the outside world has no oversight over their schools or their treatment of their flock. Contact with the police, child protective services, and other authorities can lead to punishment. They thrive in isolated communities a long way from the state police, and for churches they seem to have a lot of fences and armed guards. Girls who run are hunted down by the men, and people who do manage to escape face retaliation for years. Families are regularly destroyed.

An excellent book on the subject is “I Fired God”, by Jocelyn Zichterman, a woman who was abused and terrorized by the cult for years, and then hounded relentlessly for years, after she escaped and told her story. And here’s the kicker – even people who hate her admit that her story of abuse and terror is true.

Let’s go back to the Amish for a moment, and look at the dark side of their movement: although they are not as annoying or intolerant as your garden-variety evangelical Baptist, things can be rough in their world, for girls. The Amish, a subsect of the Mennonite movement, have rampant problems with child molesting and rape. More and more we are learning that girls are regularly molested by their brothers, fathers, grandfathers. And the way the Amish handle the problem is guaranteed to perpetuate these practices: they “punish” rapists by shunning them for a few weeks and then forgiving them, and women who try to protect their daughters can be shunned or even threatened.  

And no, this isn't hate speech. It is documented fact. 

The larger Mennonite movement has these problems also. The Mennonites and Amish generally follow the same separatist social model: the Mennonites eschew modern technology and have vehicles with steel tires, meaning they can’t go out on the road and leave the community; the girls have identical braids and conservative uniform-like dresses; the girls do all the housework while the men and boys merely watch.  

In this insular, male-ruled world, girls are subjected to incest and rape constantly, by brothers and by older men. The ruling ministers in the community, appointed for life, either ignore the rape cases, or tell rape victims that they should be ashamed and that they can’t go to heaven unless they forgive their rapists. If there is an inquiry, women cannot speak for themselves – male relatives, often related to the rapists, must do it for them. Women who ask for outside counselors are refused. And abusers who are actually caught, merely confess, are briefly kicked out, and then readmitted. Women who try to go to the police find that the police have no jurisdiction unless a murder is involved; if a family goes to the extreme and leaves the community because a member was raped, they lose their property with no compensation. To show how seriously they take rape cases, one community which condoned rape over and over expelled a man for buying a motorcycle.

Things finally came to a head in a Mennonite community in Bolivia. People began to notice that women were awakening in the morning, covered in blood and semen, with rope burns on their wrists. The Mennonites said that demons raped them. It turned out that there was a team of nine rapists who raped at least 130 victims, down to the age of three, who were using an anesthetic to drug the women while they slept, so they could be raped. In this case the Mennonites actually did go to the outside world for justice, because in this case the rapists were not relatives, and the male relatives of the victims were so angry there was the fear of lynchings. In other words, nobody can rape my sister except me and my brothers! And after the rapists were dealt with, the Mennonites imposed a ban on any discussion of the case.

This is the kind of thing that happens, when these communities wall themselves off from the rest of the world. They are not just avoiding modern culture: they are avoiding the law.