People wonder, how could Barack Obama attend the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church and not notice the kinds of sermons he was preaching?
In a word: denial. I had a similar experience with a church I attended several years ago.
One Sunday morning, my minister abruptly stopped his sermon to publicly reprimand his teenage daughter for some behavior I wasn’t even aware of. It’s human nature for a father to occasionally embarrass his teenage daughter. Usually, it’s unintentional. However, I felt that intentionally humiliating one’s daughter crossed the line from normal father-daughter behavior to abuse.
I was enraged. It took every drop of self control I had to stop myself from marching to the front of the church, shoving that minister away from his pulpit, and publicly reprimanding him as he’d just reprimanded his daughter. Instead, I said to myself, “Thank God, he’s not my father.”
You’d think I would have left my church after that. There’s a reason some churches refer to their leaders as “father.” Common sense says a man who abuses his daughter could also mistreat his church members, not to mention preach an abusive God. But we want to believe the best about people, and thus filter out behavior that doesn’t conform to that belief, no matter how misplaced. I simply forgot the incident.
When I did leave my church, it was for an entirely different reason. As a former charismatic, I’m in the habit of “testing the spirits.” At a certain point, I no longer sensed the presence of the Holy Spirit in my church and figured if God had packed his bags, there was no use in me hanging around.
However, I continued to fellowship with women from the church. These women started behaving like the Stepford Wives, sharing bizarre, abusive and misogynistic doctrines. Initially, I brushed it off.
But a victim of abuse often imitates the behavior of her abuser. At one meeting, several women ganged up on me, humiliating me in the same way as our minister humiliated his daughter years before.
Though hurt, I was grateful that I’d left that church behind.
In a word: denial. I had a similar experience with a church I attended several years ago.
One Sunday morning, my minister abruptly stopped his sermon to publicly reprimand his teenage daughter for some behavior I wasn’t even aware of. It’s human nature for a father to occasionally embarrass his teenage daughter. Usually, it’s unintentional. However, I felt that intentionally humiliating one’s daughter crossed the line from normal father-daughter behavior to abuse.
I was enraged. It took every drop of self control I had to stop myself from marching to the front of the church, shoving that minister away from his pulpit, and publicly reprimanding him as he’d just reprimanded his daughter. Instead, I said to myself, “Thank God, he’s not my father.”
You’d think I would have left my church after that. There’s a reason some churches refer to their leaders as “father.” Common sense says a man who abuses his daughter could also mistreat his church members, not to mention preach an abusive God. But we want to believe the best about people, and thus filter out behavior that doesn’t conform to that belief, no matter how misplaced. I simply forgot the incident.
When I did leave my church, it was for an entirely different reason. As a former charismatic, I’m in the habit of “testing the spirits.” At a certain point, I no longer sensed the presence of the Holy Spirit in my church and figured if God had packed his bags, there was no use in me hanging around.
However, I continued to fellowship with women from the church. These women started behaving like the Stepford Wives, sharing bizarre, abusive and misogynistic doctrines. Initially, I brushed it off.
But a victim of abuse often imitates the behavior of her abuser. At one meeting, several women ganged up on me, humiliating me in the same way as our minister humiliated his daughter years before.
Though hurt, I was grateful that I’d left that church behind.
No comments:
Post a Comment