I would love to sit down with those folks and have them explain to me in great detail exactly what their Wal-Mart dramatization of 1984 has to do with Jesus, the Atonement, or the Resurrection.
It has nothing to do with any of those things, it was not a test of faith, it was about experiencing/understanding persecution. Something that occurs daily in all parts of the world for all different kinds of reasons, religion included.
Now I’m wondering if these folks also have guys running around pretending to be gay, yelling stuff like “heterosexuality is a sin! You will burn in Hell for being straight!” – just to let the parishoners know how it feels to be harassed for your sexual orientation, natch.
(Actually, this is a stupid idea; I’m sure the campiness levels from the church’s fake gays would be ludicrous beyond belief 
)
Of course. They would have them all portrayed as, say, gay teachers trying to lure our children into a life of sin and such.
In college I dated a weird but cute girl who was what I would call a fundie “true believer”. One day she told me about a “church event” she had participated in that sounded a lot like this. It was sort of a training exercise for the imagined coming persecution. The idea was to toughen the young Christians up a bit so they would be ready when things got bad at the end times. She explained that her role was that of one of the bad guys and that she had emphasized this by brandishing a shotgun - a real shotgun (unloaded), in the play. You get the idea. I heard other stories from people in various other fundie groups about similar things. I don’t know if this is fundie unban legend or not but I suspect it really happens just judging from some of what I did observe on the periphery of such groups.
The pretty ones are always crazy…
If I had been that girl, I would probably have started hyperventilating. I get panic attacks in times of severe stress and they ain’t fun.
Plus it’s like Scare Tactics-how do you KNOW what that girl is going to do? And I don’t think holding a gun to someone’s head and forcing them to express their faith to the point of death can accurately gain someone’s feelings. Someone might deny it just as a slip of the tongue, out of extreme fear.
Talk about assholes!
Frankly, I think the whole thing smacks of the Milgram experiment.
I’ve had some experiences with the cultists’ mind games, myself. Back in my fundie high school, the Young Life director brought a bunch of white hospital bracelets (the kind that you can’t take off without destroying them) to chapel. (“Chapel” is “assembly” to those of you who went to sane schools.)
He then gave us a big talk about how we could put on a non-removable bracelet to tell the world that we were Christians. He said- with zero irony- that he knows there’s a lot of anti-Christian sentiment in small-town Alabama, but we’ve got to have the courage to stand up and be counted. He told us some stories about kids who had worn the armbands and then tried to lie about what they signified, so that they wouldn’t be scorned for their beliefs by all their non-Christian friends.
For lack of a better word, this was the most bizarre mindfuck you could possibly imagine. It’s as if someone showed up with a bunch of bracelets saying, “I want to ask the heterosexuals to come out of the closet. Now, I know there’s a lot of bigotry against straights, but…” In that kind of circumstance, obviously anyone who didn’t take the mark would be under suspicion. It never occurred to me not to declare that I was a Christian, but if I had been smart enough not to wear the bracelet, I imagine I would have felt very, very uncomfortable doing so. And the thing is, that kind of environment is already so saturated with fundie persecution fantasies that I’m not sure anybody really realized how screwy it was.
Though this may be true, I’ll bet you anything this “exercise” is going to give some people the opportunity to (1) be boastful about their “martyrdom” & steadfastness, or (2) look down on someone they always suspected of being “weak” in the faith and this exercise just sealed the deal.
The whole thing’s disgusting. I hope she wins big time.
Except it really wasn’t. It was about implanting a bogus perception that Christians are somehow being persecuted. If this exercise had any truly noble intent it would have perhaps explored the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany or blacks under Jim Crow. There is a lot of real persecution in human history but they chose to invent a non-existent scenario, not to show Christians what it feels like to be a persecuted minority (which they are emphatically NOT) but to feed a sense of moral superiority and hostility towards non-Christians.
I mean, come on, “Deny Christ or die?” Where the hell is that going on? It’s brainwashing. It’s telling kids “Don’t trust the world. They hate you and want to kill you, you can only trust us.” It’s sick stuff.
I hope that girl takes them to the cleaners.
I don’t know if “Deny Christ or die” per se is going on in other parts of the world, but I agree that it’s not happening in America. (Although apparently lots of people end up on death-row in Pakistan for the de facto “crime” of “disrespecting Mohammed.”)
This kind of thing is part of the reason why I claim that fundamentalist Christianity is, quite simply, a brainwashing cult. I used to think Jim Jones must have some mysterious secret, because otherwise, how could he have convinced all those people to submit to him? When I read a book on his cult, I realized that he really wasn’t doing anything all that differently from the things fundamentalist Christians used to do to me in my high school. The big difference was that the FC’s ask for less.
To wit:
1.) “Don’t trust the world. They hate you and want to kill you, you can only trust us.” I actually wrote a detailed post about this earlier, but it got munched when I tried to post it. In high school we were basically taught that if we read anything that disagreed with their version of Christianity, then it was written by people who secretly are trying to destroy Christianity- even if the writer didn’t draw any explicitly anti-Christian conclusion.
2.) Other religions are not only wrong, they’re stupid, so let’s have organized meetings in which we can mock them. (“The Two Minutes’ Jape”?)
3.) If you don’t believe, you’ll go to hell. Period. So don’t even think about whether our teachings are correct.
4.) The end of the world is nigh, and if you’re not on the boat, it will leave without you.
5.) Obedience is better than critical thought.
6.) Here is photographic proof (insert lame photo) that our religion is correct.
In fact, one of my disappointments with the OCRT is that they really seem to pull some punches in their definition of a “cult”, because otherwise, who knows what will or won’t make the cut?