One morning last summer, leaving my apartment on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, I noticed there weren’t many people outside. It was a fine June day, but there wasn’t the usual line of cars in front of Starbucks. No commuters schlepping insulated mochas, no dog walkers, no window washers at Cafe Latté, and no one else waiting for the 7:23 bus to downtown Minneapolis.
On the bus there were about a third as many riders as usual, and the kindly woman with the thick black braid was not in her usual seat. I tried to read, but panic was setting in. By the time I reached the skyway, my stomach was a prickly ball. I passed the jewelry store near the U.S. Trust Building and checked my watch. At least two clerks should have been in the display windows, draping necklaces and stabbing rings onto their holders. But the shop was dark and empty.
I knew it had happened: Jesus had fulfilled his prophecy, returned to Earth, and taken the believers. Now the Apocalypse was beginning. My hands were clammy as I dialed my mom’s number; I was certain she would not answer, now or ever again. When she picked up and chirped “Why … good morning!” my shoulders eased, but my heart was still pounding from the adrenaline. “Hi, Mom,” I said weakly.
It’s strange being the kind of person who sees a half-empty bus and thinks “Apocalypse!” In part it’s the result of watching Armageddon-inspired movies like Left Behind, but mainly it comes from being raised in an ultra-conservative church. When I was growing up, our congregation in the hamlet of Phillipsburg, Missouri, interpreted the Bible with the kind of literal fervor with which a non-believer might read IKEA assembly instructions—midway through a construction effort. On the outside, we looked like any other Christians: we dressed up, we sang, we went to Sunday school, we read the Dr. Dobson inserts in the church bulletins. But we also followed rules against women preaching, praying aloud during church, or serving communion; as well as the tenet that the only way to heaven is to make a public testimony and be fully immersed in water. Most of all, we believed that we had the one true way to heaven. In other words, we actually took the Bible at its word—unlike the Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Seventh-day Adventists who were, sad to say, bound for hell.
Given this background, and my family’s continued devotion, I was rather smug during the 2004 election campaign, when national magazines were breathlessly reporting on the huge swaths of the voting public who considered themselves “born-again Christians.” “No shit,” I thought. (I had already left the flock.) After Bush’s win, I read how Karl Rove and the president’s other operatives had used a database of some 5,000 churches, as well as church directories gleaned from across the country, to home in on and court evangelical voters. Some 350,000 “pro-family” conservatives volunteered for the Bush campaign and nearly six million evangelicals—including three and a half million who hadn’t voted in the 2000 election—cast votes for Dubya. As Bush moved into his second term, the power of the religious right seemed palpable. Pundits talked in awe about Dr. James C. Dobson—the one who we read in church bulletins, the so-called Protestant Pope who built Focus on the Family, a $130 million, 1,300-employee media ministry in Colorado Springs, and the venerable National Association of Evangelicals, with thirty million members. It seemed like Rove had indeed established a “permanent majority” of conservative Republicans.
But behind the scenes, in the conservative Protestant capital of Colorado Springs, there was some serious soul-searching over a study released by George Barna, a well-respected evangelical pollster in southern California who had developed a reputation for delivering scientifically sound data on U.S. religious trends. In December 2003, he conducted a telephone poll of 2,033 randomly selected Americans from numerous cross-sections of the population, who were asked a series of questions:
- Would you call yourself a Christian?
- Have you made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important in your life today?
- Do you believe that you will go to heaven when you die because you have confessed your sins and accepted Jesus Christ as your savior?
- Do you believe that you have a personal responsibility to share your religious beliefs about Christ with non-Christians?
- Do you believe that Satan exists?
- Do you believe that eternal salvation is possible through grace, not works?
- Do you believe that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on Earth?
- Do you believe that the Bible is accurate in all that it teaches?
- Do you believe that God is the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity?
- Do you believe that God created the universe and still rules it today?
Barna discovered that a solid thirty-eight percent of the U.S. population could be classified as “born-again” Christians, meaning they answered yes to the first three questions. The part that knocked strict Bible literalists on their heels was how few of those born-again Christians have a “Biblical world view”: only nine percent of them qualified by answering yes to all ten questions.
Worse still, Barna found that the ideological move from being “born again” to having a “Biblical world view” is crucial to developing evangelically “correct” views on divorce, gay sex, pornography, gambling, abortion, and other social issues near and dear to Bible literalists. As it happens, born-agains are not all that statistically different from their heathen counterparts in terms of how they act, or what they believe. For instance, the divorce rate for born-agains is exactly the same as for those who haven’t accepted Jesus Christ as their savior: thirty-five percent. But overall compare those with a Biblical world view to born-agains and there are marked differences down the line. True evangelicals (those who take the Bible literally) are thirty-one times less likely to accept cohabitation, eighteen times less likely to condone drunkenness, fifteen times less likely to condone gay sex, and on and on and on.
“There was a growing sense even before the Barna study that things were bad, that a large number of Christians were not living the Christian life,” says Marc Fey, an evangelical life coach and consultant in Colorado Springs, and director of something called “Christian Worldview” at Focus on the Family. “But what the Barna study really did was galvanize us in our belief that something had to be done.”
The question they faced: How do you convince ninety-one percent of born-again Christians that showing up at church, voting Republican, and putting a Jesus fish on the SUV isn’t enough?
After having sat through lesson 5 - Science - I have lost all respect for Del Tackett and Focus on the Family. They have a specific agenda to push - anti-science! Knowing the examples shows he is ignorant at best and deceptive at worst has me questioning the leadership of so-called Christian organizations. Isn't it in the Bible that is states that all liars are destined for the Lake of Fire.
This is where you are headed if your agenda is to deceive the flock.
Thank you Alyssa for your report and perspective.
There are in the Christian Church many luke-warm persons who at the very least call themselves Christians. If the Bible is true and is the Inspired Word of God, then we would have to believe what Jesus says as Matthew recorded in the 21st verse of chapter 7, ""Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven." According to Jesus' words, we know that not all those who are religious, nor all those who claim to be Christians will enter the kingdom of heaven. At the same time, one of the persons justly crucified along with Jesus, while in the last few hours of his life and while hanging on the cross, had faith to believe that Jesus was God in the flesh and the Messiah whom the prophets claimed would come to save the world, and he asked Jesus to remember him when Jesus returned to heaven. And Jesus said to him, "Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise." (Luke 23:43) Here we see that the most "unlikely" person was saved from the wages or recompence of his sins because he believed in Jesus (that is, he believed that Jesus is who the Bible says He is, and the man trusted Jesus to save him from his sins). That is what brings us to salvation - our faith in Jesus. The man was not water baptized (sprinkled or dunked), he did not live his life following after Jesus, and instead lived a life in sin from all we can tell. This is the hope we have in the Christ.
Not that we could save ourselves, not that we can work our way into heaven by living a so called "good" life, not by adhering to man's religious ways, but simply by believing in Jesus with faith, or hopeful expectation that Jesus is who the Bible proclaims. (if you were wondering, here's where my response directly ties into the story of The Truth Project...) The Bible declares that when we put our faith in Jesus to save us (which is always preceeded by recognition of and confession of sin to a Holy and just God) that the Spirit of God or the Holy Spirit enters into us and we become born-again (putting our faith in Jesus and being born-again seem to be two separate events, yet they happen at the same exact moment in time). When we are born-again, or born of the Spirit, we have taken on a whole new life; prior to having the Spirit of God inside us, we lived according to our human nature, and according to that nature alone. When the Spirit of God comes to live inside us, we take on a new nature as long as we choose to live according to the will and power of the Holy Spirit instead of choosing to live according to our accustomed human nature. As we begin to live and learn to live according to the Holy Spirit, our perspective, our view of the world and view of all things, begins to change.
The Truth Project helps those who have been born-again to consciously recognize those things around us in a way that the Spirit inside of us is already prompting us to see. Philippians chapter 6 communicates to us that there is a physical world made up of flesh and blood (dirt and trees and everything we can see, touch, etc.), and there is also a spiritual realm (that is made of things that we cannot physically see or touch). This spiritual realm is where battles take place between good and evil, demons and angels, whereby we experience the results of these battles here on earth where all our senses are experienced in the physical realm. Much of what we believe to be "truth" is based on what our experiences are in the physical realm; based on what we see or hear or touch. However, to the woman who saw a mass of something in an x-ray, felt a lump on the upper portion of her left breast, and who heard the doctor say that she had breast cancer - well, the truth for her would be that she has breast cancer. However, when Christians pray for her in the name of Jesus and she has faith to believe God has healed her, which is the truth: 1. She has cancer, or 2. She does not have cancer?
I know that's a challenging question left in that context, so let me share some more detail on this real life historical event... What is the truth when she no longer feels the lump with her fingers and returns to the docter two weeks later to see that the x-ray shows no sign of a mass in her breast and hears the doctor proclaim that she is cancer free, "Somebody must be watching over you"? Which is truth: 1. Does she have cancer, or 2. Does she not have cancer? Certainly number 2 is the correct answer when we look at the details, but when was she cancer free - was it when the Christians prayed and she beleived, or was she not free of cancer until she felt and saw and heard that she did not have cancer? The Truth Project is a tool to help those who have been born of the Spirit to see things in the spiritual realm, or to put it in another way, to see things as God sees them instead of continuing to believe what the world sees.
God is a "Super-natural" God, that is to say that He doesn't see things or do things according to our human nature, but according to His nature, and by being born of the Spirit - the Spirit of God - we have the ability to see things as He sees them, only sometimes we need a little help. The truth Project seeks to provide this help, utilyzing the Bible as the Inspired Word of God to bring to the forefront our senses to the Holy Spirit that we could better recognize and see things as God sees them.
David
I enjoyed the article by my brother's daughter, but disagree with her depiction of the church in Phillipsburg Missouri as "ultra-conservative"...at least while I attended there. Of course, in many ways it was fairly hide-bound, and many of the "Elders", who dictated the general tone, were archly conservative. On the other hand, I can remember a small rock band that played "special music" for a short time in church, and more than one Hallowe'en party held there, replete with witches, goblins, and devils, et al. True, many of the members might have regarded their brand of salvation as the one true way, outside of which a person was considered "lost". However, it was not openly espoused that the farmers and their tired wives attending the Presbyterian Church across the unpaved road from our church were definitely destined for the Lake of Fire in the hereafter, merely because they "sprinkled" instead of "immersed". Religious belief was, and is, considered to be an indelible part of the community, and it was not unusual for a small town to possess several varieties of Baptist church, each with their own take on the proper means of worshipping Him. When I was growing up, Dr Dobson's thoughts were not offered for our collective edification, since the Elders at that time would have considered a mere human's opinions uninspired by the Divine to be sacriligious. Yes, there were times the church fathers would "discourage" the young divorcee in the mini skirt with small children from ever coming back, and opposed padding the pews for fear of making them too comfortable (the Elders already tended to nod off during the sermons). But, I must point out, these "ultra-conservatives" were, and are, warm and generous to a fault, and continue to care about "lost sheep" like Alyssa and me, even if we don't share their devotion to an all-powerful God. All-in-all, an interesting and thought-provoking article...and should the Rapture ever come, Alyssa is welcome to join her heathen uncle and aunt and the rest of the apostates for an End Times Apocalypse Bacchanalia.