I married in 1974 in my senior year of high school. I was not pregnant. It was my way of trying to escape a dysfunctional home—obviously, in hindsight, not a smart move. So I was already into a bad marriage when I joined the church. I should have left this extremely abusive relationship but didn’t. I was taught that God hates divorce, with scriptural backing of course.

When I was pregnant with our second child I caught my husband with another woman. I was crushed (this wasn’t the first time, or the last). I took our 2 year old daughter and went to my parents’ home to stay. I went to see my pastor and get his counsel and prayer for my situation. He told me I should go back home and apologize to my husband for leaving. Being the dumb, 23 year old brainwashed cult member that I was, and thinking this man really had God’s word and wisdom on everything spiritual, I did just that. I basically made myself a doormat. My husband was a sociopath, so he didn’t see the love and virtue in this. He just took full advantage of it for 21 years.

One pastor told me that if my husband wasn’t “saved” it was my fault, because if I were truly a “Godly woman” that he would have come around. In reality, my husband just disrespected me more every year for acting like an idiot and letting him get by with murder with no accountability to our relationship whatsoever.

One of my pastors over the years taught that babies who were aborted went to hell. To his thinking, obviously if a person had an abortion, they were not a Christian. And the biblical reference he tied to this judgment was from the Old Testament, where when God would send his people in to take a heathen (non-believing) city, he would have them slaughter the men, women AND children. So there. That proves it! I would have to write a book to recite all the stories of judgment, hatred, stupidity, fear, ignorance and emotional abuse I endured over that 25 years. But it was the eternal hell thing that finally got me.

After I divorced my husband of 21 years, I was poor. Since I had no money for entertainment, I would go to Barnes and Noble and sit for hours and read books. (Sorry B&N. I’ve bought plenty from you before that time and since then!) One of the books I read was If God is Love by Phillip Mulholland. It explained that it is God’s job to save us. Because if we have to ‘save ourselves’ even by just having to choose him rather than him choosing us, then we are not saved by grace. I discussed it with some friends and they convinced me I was dabbling with fire. So I put it down. But over and over I kept coming across this message when I wasn’t looking for it. I saw it as God leading me to a more enlightened understanding of him. And I began to trust my own heart and mind. Like Forrest Gump said to Jenny, “I am not a smart man, but I know what love is.” A god who would give a person (like my brother, who had a heart of gold, who I was told went to hell) 20 years on this earth, and then send them to an eternal torture chamber, no repentance accepted after physical death, no exit, because they didn’t choose Jesus yet before they went, is not a god of love.

Over time I lost my belief in Professional Christians (anyone who makes their living from preaching the bible), the Institutional Church/Corporate Jesus (all the various social clubs where people who agree on a particular doctrine get together to pat each other on the back and say, yep, yep, we’re right, and everybody else is wrong; also known as The Mutual Admiration Society), and I lost my belief in a god who eternally torments the people he loves. Sounds like a psychopath to me.

I still struggle with who or what God is. I do tend to believe that enlightened men have walked the earth as teachers of a higher way and that most people didn’t get it (Jesus for example) and always end up turning it into religion rather than a way of life. I’m not an atheist, but more of an agnostic. I believe in a benevolent presence, I think because I believe that where love and beauty exist in the world it couldn’t have been an accident. I’ve always felt insecure, not much confidence in myself, and sure don’t put a lot of faith and trust in humanity in general, so I need there to be something greater than myself, greater than the people on this planet, to believe in. Superstition? Maybe. But if that being exists, and I hope it/he/she does, I know that I don’t know very much about it. And at long last, I’m okay with that.

Watch Shane explain why he made the “It Could Happen to You” video to the WFAA news team.

]]> http://recoveringfundamentalists.com/shane-bitney-crone-on-wfaa-news.html/feed 0 http://recoveringfundamentalists.com/equal-love-equal-rights.html http://recoveringfundamentalists.com/equal-love-equal-rights.html#comments Tue, 08 May 2012 18:36:02 +0000 Rob Steiner http://recoveringfundamentalists.com/?p=5583

When I first moved to California from Ohio 6 years ago, I had never known a gay couple. Tom and Shane were the first. They were two of the most genuine, honest, hard working and generally likable people I had ever met, too. Their love for each other was crystal clear. After 2 minutes of knowing them, I no longer saw a gay couple; all I could see was a young couple in love.

LGBT rights was a big reason why I began to question my faith. Tom and Shane were the first to remove the boundaries placed on my understanding of love by my fundamentalist upbringing. I owe them both a sincere debt of gratitude.

Last year Shane lost Tom in a accident. Tom’s mother, Martha Bridegroom, came to California from Knox, Indiana to retrieve Tom’s body. While Shane was at home resting, she left with Tom for Indiana without allowing Shane to say goodbye. Tom’s father, Norman Bridegroom, then threatened violence against Shane if he were to attend the funeral Indiana. Shane was shut out.

I don’t need to go on a rant about the damage caused by Martha and Norman Bridegroom’s bigotry and intolerance. Shane expresses more than I ever could with his tears in his “It Could Happen To You” video.

Watch Shane on WFAA news »

“The day after Mr. Grenell was hired, Bryan Fischer, a Romney critic with the American Family Association, told nearly 1,400 followers on Twitter: “If personnel is policy, his message to the pro-family community: drop dead.” The next day, the conservative Daily Caller published an online column that summed up the anger of the Christian right, linking Mr. Grenell’s hiring to the appointment of gay judges to the New Jersey Supreme Court.”

… which brings up the context of the Romney punch-the-token-gay fiasco…

If you came to earth from another planet right now as the proverbial “visitor from Mars” and tried to figure out what most religions all seem agree on and care about most you’d conclude that it was about keeping women down and bashing gays. Call this the “ecumenism of oppression.”

From the pope slapping down American nuns for being too tolerant to the rise of the incidence of woman abuse by Islamist fundamentalists in Turkey, to Orthodox Jews in Israel spitting on young female children who are wearing dresses that are “too short” to the American Roman Catholic bishops working with far right evangelicals (like the late Chuck Colson) to redefine depriving women of access to contraception and depriving gays of rights to marry as “religious liberty” issues… one message is loud and clear: Fundamentalist religion of all kinds fears women and gays.

(By the way ever wonder how anything can be called a civil rights issue when it is about depriving someone else of their civil rights?)

The worldwide practice mostly in Islamic “conservative” countries of mutilating women by slicing off their clitoris’ so they may be “protected” from sexual pleasure, the hubris of the Roman Catholic Church that has wrapped up a fifty year period of presiding over a network of pedophiles only to make the pope that protected the institution rather than the children – John Paul II – a “saint,” the bashing of gays in the anti-gay marriage surge of activity…. none of this would be believed unless it actually happened.

It did happen. It is happening. It is politics raw and naked power politics at that masquerading as religion.

It just seems so ludicrous that religion of all things should be the leading voice to deprive people of human rights. And that the people leading the charge are the same people that have also been fighting of legal suits over decades of child abuse and other multitudes of hypocrisy only makes the situation all the more tragic.

Frederick Douglass writes in “An American Slave” (Chapter 9) a good example of everything that is wrong with relying on religion instead of on your heart. When it comes to justifying bad behavior Captain Auld reminds me of today’s Roman Catholic bishops, the evangelical anti-gay activists and the women haters in Islamic countries:
“In August, 1832, my master [Captain Auld] attended a Methodist camp-meeting held in the Bay-side, Talbot county, and there experienced religion. I indulged a faint hope that his conversion would lead him to emancipate his slaves, and that, if he did not do this, it would, at any rate, make him more kind and humane. I was disappointed in both these respects. It neither made him to be humane to his slaves, nor to emancipate them. If it had any effect on his character, it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways; for I believe him to have been a much worse man after his conversion than before.”

If you asked the visitor from Mars who this Jesus was that these misogynists from Captain Auld to today’s bishops were “following” based on the evidence of their actions he’d conclude that Jesus must have founded an anti-woman child abuse cult to replace (or augment) the cult of racism and slavery that similar white men propagated before them. The Martian visitor might also note that these child-abusers and women haters and gay-bashers have an odd habit of telling everyone else what to do while they seem to have no ethical rules at all.

How odd it is that if you read about what the actual Jesus said and who his friends were (powerless women and outcasts) you’d conclude that he was a revolutionary in his patriarchal times and a pro-woman and pro-child leader in every instance.

Can you really picture Jesus defining religious liberty as the right to deprive women and gay men and women of their basic rights to employment, marriage equality and family planning?

Jesus healed on the Sabbath just to piss off the “bishops” of his time. He took the side of the woman adulteress against the “popes” of his day. He hung out with whores when “good men” didn’t do that and in a time when treating women as equals was as unlikely then as it would be now for conservatives to accept the fact that to be born gay or female is as normal as to be heterosexual or male and as God-blessed too. I don’t see Jesus telling Richard Grenell to shut up in order to keep the religious leaders and other bigots happy!

Between the Roman Catholic anti-contraception, anti gay marriage bishops, the Islamic fundamentalists mutilating their daughters and the American evangelicals trying to force women to have children they don’t want (and trying to force Romney to join the religious right) our visitor from Mars will fly home with the news that religion of the bishops’, pope, Islamists, and evangelicals is really a misogyny/homophobic cult. He might also report that this cult of hate and fear is also a practitioner of politics masquerading as religion.

They say: In the world it is considered right to “follow your heart” but the bible says that the heart will lead you into temptation.
I say: The heart pumps blood, it leads you nowhere.

They say: In the world, finding happiness in the things you love is considered success, but the bible tells us that this is wrong. The only true success comes from serving God.
I say: This religion obviously brings you happiness, which means you are seeking success in the thing you love. No one is knocking on your door to tell you that is wrong. Please don’t judge me for doing the same.

They say: We are unfit and unqualified to make choices for ourselves. We need a guide to make it through this life. Imagine there were two of us lost in the forest, we may both think we have the way out, but God is the only one who really knows.
I say: Oh, just like you and every single faith on the planet who think the others are going the wrong way? Tell me for the seven hundredth time how you managed to figure this out all on you own.
Oh yeah, and didn’t God give us free will so we COULD make our own choices?

They say: This won’t make sense to you unless you ask it to and really want it to. When you ask for Jehovah’s holy spirit to make you follow the right path, then it will all start to make sense.
I say: Oh, so I have to brainwash myself to believe in it, and that makes it real?

They say: Why live a short, successful life in the eyes of the world, when you can live a long successful life in the eyes of God?
I say: Why spend this short life outpouring ideas you cannot prove, when there may be no reward on the other side? Why do you need a reward? Why isn’t this enough? Why can’t you be happy with what you’ve been given?

Except, out loud, I actually say nothing.
Against a lifetime of convincing one’s self, as they have done, all arguments are futile.
They always have their perfect answer… and I exit the room looking a little more bewitched, confused and stubborn.
Last time I tried to explain why I was satisfied with my current spiritual outlook I was met with, “Please remember, Satan is the master deceiver.”
So now Satan is fooling me into thinking I am happy…
I am born into a family where good choices come from a cookie cutter and what is right for one must be right for all.
I am born into a family where critical thinking is a flaw.
I am born into a family where asking for proof is a flaw.
I am born into a family where all of my relatives believe they will live forever in a beautiful garden without me.
I am born into a family who believe that they have failed me by giving me free thought.
I am born into a family that prays I will wake up soon and return to their truth.
And in this moment of frustration, the only thing I thank god for is my ability to understand my truth.

My experience of religion is one that tears families apart, creates tension in honest, truthful relationships, alienates me from the people I love, and blinds those with the best intentions.
I am still maneuvering to keep my family… I worry that they will give up on me when I finally succeed in convincing them that I have found my own way.
Once they cannot save me, they no longer have a virtuous justification for having contact with me.
How do I deal with a family that puts the idea of love above the actual practice of it?

Listen to music and “Like” Drew Stedman on Facebook!

Of all of the negative aspects of religion, I have found none of them to be more profoundly damaging to human dignity and self-respect than the threat of Hell for non-believers. This belief had an extremely negative impact on my life when I believed it and I think it is about time humanity starts pushing back against this doctrine of fear and manipulation. Recently, I have taken to boldly making the assertion that Hell isn’t real. It didn’t take long for the objections to start rolling in:

“Can you prove that Hell isn’t real? Do you have evidence?”

“Are you really willing to stake your life on it?”

“Can you really risk not believing it is real?”

I’m going to turn all of these questions back around. It is not intellectually honest to claim something is true in the first place without evidence to back it up. Show me evidence of Hell first and then we’ll talk. I spent much of my life floating around in Churches that preach Hell, and I have yet to see something that would qualify as real evidence for its existence to any self-respecting skeptic. That it is often further claimed that a non-believer’s disbelief is actually them CHOOSING to spend an eternity in Hell further exacerbates this problem. I will not accept some cosmic or eternal responsibility for not believing in something for which there is no evidence. If a God exists and my eternal fate depends solely on me believing in him, then I would have to expect that, if he is a good and just God, he would not fault me for not believing in things for which there is no evidence.

When I am asked if I have evidence that Hell doesn’t exist, I respond that I am under no obligation to provide evidence for its non-existence. This is not the way evidence works. This is a logical fallacy known as an appeal to ignorance. This is where the burden of proof is placed on the wrong side of a claim. The burden of proof rests with the positive claim. In this case, the claim is that Hell exists. This is an extraordinary claim, and the burden of proof lies purely with those who would claim that Hell is real. Because there is no evidence in favor of the positive claim that Hell is real, I feel perfectly comfortable in making the positive claim that Hell isn’t real because I never had reason to assume its existence in the first place.

It is irrelevant that there are profound consequences attached to not believing. I can assert an infinite number of things which would have profound consequences, if true, but without evidence there is no reason anyone should lose any sleep over any of them. For instance, I could say that in the afterlife there is a land where all of your dreams will come true forever, and that you can go there provided you take special care to believe that unicorns are real, while living this life. If you don’t believe this, you will be forced to watch re-runs of The Andy Griffith Show for all of eternity without ceasing. No one would take this claim seriously because there is no evidence for it.

It is hard to imagine anyone getting on my case for asserting that unicorns aren’t real. This is because, “That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” Fundamentally, there is no difference between asserting that Hell is a real consequence for not believing in God and that being forced to watch an eternal Andy Griffith marathon is a real consequence for not believing in unicorns (other than that, I would say, my example isn’t as mean-spirited).

I dismiss Hell freely and without concern because there is no evidence for it. In absence of such evidence I am left with the obvious conclusion that it arose as a method of invoking the cruelest kind of fear in order to manipulate people of good faith into accepting harsh doctrines which have empowered institutions of religion with enormous amounts of wealth and power for centuries. I refuse to be manipulated by such emotional violence.

I am truly sorry, and have great compassion for those who are obligated to accept such doctrines based on their faith commitments. It saddens me deeply that so many people must believe that such cruelty awaits their loved ones who don’t believe such nonsense. There is freedom from this mental oppression. That is the good news. I will spread the good news that Hell isn’t real because life is so much better when it is lived without that kind of fear.

I have found happiness and personal fulfillment through the relationships I have with my friends and family, through the exploration of science and our ever-increasing knowledge of the universe, through art, literature, nature, and music. This is something that all people can experience. But many have been severely emotionally damaged by their belief in, and fear of Hell. I want to help those people. Our lives are worth living before death. We should not compromise our lives because someone thousands of years ago said we would burn forever if we don’t listen to what he had to say.

My name is Drew Stedman. I am a recovering fundamentalist. I am a pastor’s son and I was raised as a conservative evangelical Christian in The Christian and Missionary Alliance. I was taught to respect the authority of the Bible as the inspired word of God. As a child, I prayed with my mother to accept Jesus as my personal savior. Throughout my childhood I must have prayed the sinner’s prayer over 100 times. I was so afraid of what would happen if I didn’t know Jesus that I prayed to accept him into my heart every time I was given the opportunity in Sunday school or in church, just to make sure. I went through evangelical children’s programs such as AWANA and Vacation Bible School. Later I was part of a Bible quizzing program in which my church’s team would compete against other churches teams over our knowledge of the scriptures. We would study the Bible constantly, often memorizing lengthy passages or even entire books.

Later, I attended Worthington Christian High School, an extremely right wing evangelical school run by Grace Brethren Church in Worthington, Ohio. It was here where I really became fanatical about God. I attended a revival at a youth summer camp that was similar to, but somewhat less extreme than the camp featured in the documentary, Jesus Camp. I had finally “experienced” God for myself. I returned to school my sophomore year “on fire” for God. I read through the entire Bible word for word as quickly as I could, often skipping class to do so. I started a Bible Study and prayer group in my home that was called “The Love Club”. I would prepare bible studies and teachings with the help of my Father. We would pray earnestly for the requests and concerns of the group. We sang worship songs. I became the worship leader for our high school chapels, which often featured messages of fear that would inspire guilt. We were warned of the evils of masturbation and pre-marital sex. We were shown graphic images of sexually transmitted diseases. The message was clear. This was what happened when you stepped outside of God’s will.

One day, we were led into a revival. We were told that some of us were not true Christians. That we needed to search our hearts to make sure we truly believed in Jesus. Many students, who were emotionally broken by the message, came forward in front of the entire student body and confessed their sins and prayed to God. They cried. I cried. We praised God. We were told that even though we were Christians, many of us had let sin creep into our lives. We were asked to give up our possessions that were holding us back from God. Many of the students felt “led” to go to their cars or lockers to get their “secular” CDs to give up to God. Many of us made commitments to listen to only Christian music. Classes were cancelled. The revival lasted all day.

In addition to this spiritual indoctrination, I was also indoctrinated academically and politically. Prayer and references to scripture were commonplace, even in subjects like math, and especially science. We were presented with a strict Young Earth Creationist model in our science courses. We were taught “evidence” that the Earth was only several thousand years old, that God created every class of animal uniquely, that dinosaurs co-existed with humans, and that the flood of Noah was a literal historical event. In history class we were taught a strictly right-wing Christian view of the formation of America. We were taught that America was founded as a Christian nation and that evil forces were hard at work trying to turn America away from our God. I believed them.

After high school I attended Cedarville University, a fundamentalist Baptist school in the middle-of-nowhere, Ohio. It was here that I first began to question my faith. Although I had taken such care in fostering my relationship with God in High School and had made many strong efforts to proclaim my faith and evangelize others, I still felt guilty. In spite of my efforts and prayers to have the desire to do what God wanted me to do, I still behaved more or less like a typical college student. Sex, alcohol, cigarettes, soft drugs… Why was this? My heart was in the right place. I wanted to follow God, I prayed earnestly and often for the will to do so, but I consistently partook of the forbidden fruits which I was told by the Christian authority figures in my life were contrary to God’s will. At this point my faith changed internally. It no longer made sense why God would condemn so many well-meaning people, over what increasingly seemed to be trivial issues. I remember a key moment at this point in my life when I was in a Bible class that was espousing a strict Calvinist interpretation of the Bible. We were discussing the doctrine of Total Depravity, which is that all humans, because of Adam and Eve’s original sin are born into this world inherently evil and in a state of separation from God. I was troubled by the implications of this. I raised my hand and asked the professor if a child born in a distant country, into a culture who had no knowledge of Jesus Christ would be sent to hell if it were to die before missionaries had been able to tell them about Jesus. The answer to this question was yes. I could not accept this.

I began to form my own opinions about the Bible. It seemed to me that Jesus would have been radically opposed to this type of thinking (although now it seems obvious to me that Jesus becomes whoever the believer wants him to be). I became very enamored with Christ’s teachings of compassion, and what I interpreted in his teachings as non-violence. I became increasingly disgusted by the violent desires I saw prevalent in evangelical culture. Cedarville University has a large rock which students can spray paint with different messages, usually “Happy Birthday” wishes and the like. But in 2003, just before the US invaded Iraq, someone had spray-painted the rock with “Bomb Saddam”. In my newfound liberal Christianity I took offense to this. I spray-painted over it with “Blessed are the peacemakers” from Matthew 5:9. In less than a half hour it was painted over with “Go troops, go! Kill! Kill! Kill!” This became a turning point in my life, a moment when I internally rejected evangelical fundamentalism as politically and morally toxic.

Although I had experienced an ideological shift, I still felt comfortable in the Christian community because it was all I had ever known. I left Cedarville for Nyack College in New York, which was another fundamentalist college, although it featured a more relaxed environment. I coasted along, slowly realizing that I was disconnecting with the evangelical belief system on an almost daily basis. By the time I graduated I had essentially stopped going to church and was doing my best to lead a normal life. I reconnected with a fellow classmate from Worthington Christian High School whom I quickly fell in love with. Along with some of my good college friends, we moved to Los Angeles. A year later, we were married.

I had started a new life and a new career, but many of my underlying assumptions about God and Christianity remained unquestioned. My wife and I missed the community of Church and decided to find one that fit our new, non-fundamentalist values. This proved somewhat difficult. LGBT rights were something that we were just coming around on and it seemed that almost every church we went to held official positions against homosexuality. After some searching we finally came across a church that reflected our values. It was encouraging to me to see people who held different beliefs working together to better their community and spread a message of love an acceptance. I became involved with the worship team and eventually became an elder, delivering meditations and occasionally sermons when the pastor was out of town. There were several other young people and couples in the church that had come from similar backgrounds to our own and were seeking a more open, accepting environment. We started a young adult group in our home. Because almost all of us had come from fundamentalist backgrounds, we were all interested in exploring new aspects of faith and belief that had previously been cut off from us during our upbringing. It was obvious at this point that most of us had our doubts about the interpretation of the Bible we were indoctrinated with as children. We began to read a book called The Sins of Scripture by John Shelby Spong, an Episcopal Bishop. For most of us, this book decimated our previous conceptions of Biblical inerrancy, or even divine inspiration. It dealt honestly with the immorality of many of the actions attributed to God in the Bible. I had never heard someone speak so clearly in condemning aspects of Christianity that I had always felt uncomfortable with.

Spong also openly accepted evolution, which gave me pause. Although I had come so far in my journey, I was still a creationist. God had created everything right? I reflected back to a conversation I had had at work when the topic had come up several months prior. Someone was making fun of the fact that so many people believe the earth is only a few thousand years old. This bothered me, so I repeated an argument I had heard as a child from Answers in Genesis. As I recall, it was something about the Grand Canyon being created by a great flood. My co-worker, who explained some basic science about rock formation and stratification, quickly corrected me. This was information I had never been exposed to. I felt stupid. And here was a bishop openly accepting this as well? What else had I been missing?

I became obsessed. I poured over as much information about science as I could get my hands on. As a product of Christian education, I realized that many things I was taught in school did not check out with reality. I began a period of enlightenment in my life where I exposed myself to as much new information as possible. As the last remnants of my fundamentalist indoctrination began to crumble around me it became obvious that much of the other world’s religions depended on the same type of reasoning. Faith, it finally became apparent, was not a source of knowledge but a mechanism for belief in the absence of knowledge. I had discovered reason. I shared many of these ideas with the group. We explored more books, including How We Believe by Michael Shermer, which is a careful, rational examination of the psychology of belief. It was a book that shook my assumptions to their core.

My view of faith and God had fundamentally shifted. I suspected I knew where this would lead me but I wanted to evaluate some further arguments before I could be sure. I picked up a book called The Language of God by Francis Collins and contrasted it with The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Both men are formidable scientists in the field of biology. Both promote modern science and evolution. But they differ radically on the issues of God and religion. I wanted to hear who had the best arguments and if anyone could defend God against atheism, who better than a top-notch scientist? Needless to say, although I rather enjoyed both books, The God Delusion was one of the most powerfully argued books I have ever read. Francis Collins’s arguments in favor of a God seemed almost laughable in comparison (although I really appreciate what he is attempting to do by educating Christians with science).

After years of slowly becoming more and more aware of myself, and the universe around me, and after long and careful consideration, I admitted to myself that I was an atheist. I felt as if a terrible and heavy burden had been lifted from my shoulders. I was free. Free of the yolk of superstition, magical thinking, and dependence upon authority for information. I was free to explore the world around me without the barriers I used to place upon it by faith. I was free to ask any questions I wished without a nagging fear of where they would lead. But most of all I was free to define myself on my own terms.

My close friend and colleague Rob Steiner and I decided to create this website for people like us. People who have escaped from the mental clutches of fundamentalism. If that is you, you are free to define yourself however you wish. Don’t let others do it for you. This is not intended to be an atheist website. It is a website for human beings. If you have left or are in the process of leaving a fundamentalist belief system, we hope you will find this site helpful. Also, if you feel comfortable, please take the time to share your story. There are many out there who may benefit from your experience. We would love to know where you came from, where you are now, and where you are going. You are not alone.

Except for one thing: it didn’t happen. The photograph is real, but it has nothing to do with religious violence in Nigeria. What you see in the picture is the result of a terrible explosion that happened when a fuel tanker ran off the road, overturned, and ignited near the village of Sange. Sange, for those of you keeping track at home, is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, thousands of miles away from Nigeria. Tensions are indeed very high right now between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, and violence does break out. Like many other countries (including the United States), Nigeria has radical, dangerous groups that twist religious beliefs into excuses for terrible acts. But not even Boko Haram—the Nigerian equivalent of Al-Qaeda—has ever taken to burning Christians alive. The simplest of Google searches easily disproves the “truth” of this story. Yet even as I write this, Facebook posts, email forwards, “Action Alerts,”, Sunday sermons, and other forms of propoganda continue to paint a picture of bloodthirsty Nigerian Muslims setting fire to Christian martyrs. Such outrage raises already-dangerous levels of inter-religious distrust, distrust leads to tension, and tension leads to (more) violence.

I can hear the gasps of (feigned) shock now: “What?! Something I saw on the internet wasn’t true?!?!? Someone get me my smelling salts!” But this fake story is symptomatic of a larger problem that I’ve seen gaining strength lately. Something about the current mindset of many Christians in this country is causing them to throw fact-checking and logical thought entirely out the window. Apparently, the source of a story is more important to these people than the facts of a story—if it comes from Fox News or a conservative leader, it’s unassailably true, no matter how nonsensical or physically impossible. Once one of these “true stories” takes root, nothing from the outside world seems to affect it. For instance, a Christian friend of mine who I otherwise love and respect told me that he “knew” that President Obama is a secret Muslim because he has gold curtains in the White House.

Is this where we’ve fallen to? So many things are wrong with that one sentence—the President has been pretty public about his Christian faith, why would it be terrible if he were Muslim, and what do gold curtains have to do with anything anyway—that it was impossible to even respond. On top of that, a quick fact check told me that gold curtains aren’t even new to the White House. The particular Drapes of Muslim Doom that my friend was talking about were installed by Laura Bush (who is many things, but definitely not a Muslim woman). And check out this photograph of Ronald Reagan, Patron Saint of Conservative Christianity. The curtains may be tacky, but they’re a typical part of White House décor, not a secretly coded shout-out to the worldwide Islamic Brotherhood.

Stories like these make me worry that too many Christians are living in a world of superstition and fear that they mistake for shared reality. I’m sure whole books of folklore could be written about bizarre Obama “facts” believed by somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of the population. In speaking with family and friends, I’ve heard the following

Tales of Our President:

• He’s never seen wearing an American flag pin. (Actual true fact: after failing to wear one at an event during the 2008 campaign, Obama is almost never without a flag on his lapel in public. I’ll do my own speculating and maybe start a rumor that he’s had an American flag tattooed on his chest so that any swimming or vacation photos will also show how much he loves the USA.)
• He doesn’t know (or doesn’t recite, or can’t recite) the Pledge of Allegiance. (Actual true fact: video evidence from the Senate floor shows Obama reciting the Pledge with everyone else. He doesn’t seem to have any problems remembering the words.)
• He arranged to have his mother murdered so that she would never reveal his status as a foreign (Kenyan? Indonesian?) national. (Actual true fact: the “Obama wasn’t born in the US” myth has a million iterations, all of them laughably false. And Stanley Ann Dunham died in 1995 of ovarian cancer.)

I’m sure I’ve missed a lot of these, but the ones I’ve listed here share some troubling features. They all portray the President as some sort of alien “Other” who does not share “our” values. They all state or imply that the President is constantly telegraphing his allegiance to shadowy groups through “hidden” signs. And, of course, they’re all easily disproved with photographic and historical evidence. In other words, they’re superstitions that articulate intense anxiety (about change, about the future) and vestigial racism as the definition of “American” expands to include people with non-Anglo names and non-Caucasian features.

Thanks to gullible Christian congregations and misinformation outlets like Fox News, though, these glaringly false tales get treated as if they were factual events rather than evidence of deep psychological and sociological conflict. And that makes a more divisive and dangerous world for all of us to live in. How are we supposed to have a real, respectful conversation with people who disagree with us if we have to spend the first several hours “debating” the presence or absence of an American flag pin on the duly-elected President of the United States? How are we supposed to be credible advocates for peace between all kinds of people if we can be duped into imagining that Nigerian Muslims were conducting systematic Christian-roastings? The country (and the world) needs more clear-eyed, rational understanding of the world around us, not inflammatory internet memes that get all of their credibility through repetition.

Please, people. Think before you click “Share.”