Skip to content

27 Ridiculous Lies My Church Told Me

Yesterday Christopher Stroop posed this question on the internets: “What are some of the weirdest and/or most pernicious things you were taught as part of your indoctrination into ‘the Biblical worldview’?”

Immediately I began rifling through the dusty archives of my brain in search of ridiculous bullshit that I had once believed to be true because of Christianity. And boy oh boy did I find so many gems!

Haters will say, “O rly? What Church taught you that? Who actually said any of that?”  I’ll tell you: Charity Christian Fellowship. Harvest Bible Church. Colonial Hills Baptist Church. Brand New Church. (Look ’em up.) Bill Gothard. John Piper. Ken Ham. Ray Comfort. Joshua Harris. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. Bob Jones. Abeka.

It wasn’t one person, one seminar, one book, one church. It was an entire world of religious people who created an inescapable circle of fundamentalist thinking. We were the insiders, the true believers, the enlightened few. Anyone outside of our circle was not to be trusted, because they didn’t believe in God. Any fact that challenged the teachings of our circle was not to be believed, because the Bible is the only absolute source of truth. The result was a terribly destructive religion teeming with anti-intellectualism, cultural paranoia, staggering arrogance, and psychological abuse.

As I read these things now, this entire list of bullshit that once comprised my “Christian Worldview”, I am amused and horrified and honestly pretty amazed that all this nonsense was once enmeshed in my brain as indisputable facts. Amazed that grown adults would brainwash a child into believing this. Amazed that I somehow managed to eject this from my skull and find some measure of sanity.

When you start talking about this stuff out loud, you hear the words coming out of your mouth and wonder for a moment if you’ve become completely unmoored from reality. How could this world have existed? How could I have been so deeply lost in it? Was this all just a fucked up artificial memory?

But then your fellow survivors of this Christianity-inspired hell stumble forward and say, “Oh my god me too” and you realize that, yep, it was real. Every last bit of it. And then you laugh. Or cry. Either one is fine, honestly.

So enjoy reading this shit that I believed for the first 20(!) years of my life. If you believed it too, know that you’re not alone. If you think it’s the most wacky thing you’ve ever heard, know that this is the heritage of fundamentalism and American Evangelicalism. And make sure to check out the #ChristianAltFacts hashtag on twitter to see more Bible-based bullshit.

///

1. Christianity has an exclusive claim to objective truth. Everyone else knows this, but they are choosing to embrace postmodern relativism so they can have sex.

 

2. Liberals want to outlaw Christianity and will probably eventually imprison and torture Christians.

 

3. All non-believers are living sad, empty, meaningless lives devoid of any existential purpose or moral compass.

 

4. All non-Evangelicals are going to hell. If you don’t make a solid effort to convert them, they will scream at you from the flames of the afterlife, “Why didn’t you warn me??”

 

 

5. If you feed the hungry and care for the poor but don’t convert ’em, you’re wasting your time because they’ll just go to hell with a full belly

 

6. God literally has a plan for every tiny insignificant decision you make. If you fail to stick to this plan, your life may be ruined. But only your parents know what God’s plan for you is. (read more)

 

7. God is very insecure about how much you like him. If you like sports or videogames or girls or money a bit too much, he’ll destroy whatever it is you like so that you’ll only like him.

 

8. God gets a pass to be jealous, narcissistic, vindictive, self-centered and violent. When he does it, it’s loving. Because he’s God. (Thanks John Piper!)

 

9. If you don’t begin your day by reading your Bible early in the morning, God will be very disappointed in you and will probably not bless you for that day.

 

10. If you don’t give 10% of your income to the church, God will probably cause your vehicle to malfunction — he’ll get his 10% one way or the other.

 

11. If you have cancer, it’s probably because there’s somebody you haven’t forgiven and your bitterness is literally rotting your bones

 

12. If you take communion without confessing all your sins, you might literally die

 

13. Rock music will kill your houseplants and let sex demons into your soul.

 

14. If you find a woman sexually attractive, you are very disappointing to Jesus. You may as well be holding the hammer that pounds the nails into the feet of Jesus.

 

15. You cant help it if you accidentally see an attractive woman. That’s just temptation, not actual lust. But a prolonged look or a second look is what makes it sin. You need to learn to quickly avert your eyes from seeing female bodies. (This includes magazines)

 

16. Braveheart is the greatest movie of all time because it perfectly depicts the epitome of godly masculinity. For this, we excuse its R rating (but still, look away when there’s boobs)

 

17. Environmentalists are bad because they worship the creation more than the Creator, which is pointless anyway because God will keep the earth going until He decides it’s time to burn it all with fire.

 

18. Before Adam and Eve ate the apple, there was no death. Therefore, all animals started out as herbivores. T-rexes were specially designed by God to be really good at eating watermelons. (Thanks Dinosaurs and the Bible!)

 

 

19. Jesus was a fiscal conservative.

 

20. The Lion King is demonic New Age propaganda designed to trick kids into thinking that we can pray to our ancestors instead of Jesus.

 

21. You don’t need college. Employers will trip over themselves to hire you because you have a bright smile and have memorized a lot of Bible verses.

 

22. Catholics are the Whore of Babylon prophesied about in the book of Revelation.

 

23. The United Nations, credit cards, and the internet are how the Anti-Christ will establish his one-world government.

 

24. The poetry in the Book of Job is actually a scientific description of dinosaurs.

 

25. Good shepherds break their sheep’s legs. Then they carry the sheep around on their shoulders until the legs are healed. This forms a special love bond between the shepherd and the sheep, who never disobeys again.

 

26. The resurrection of Jesus is indisputably the single most factual event in all of history.

 

27. After you die, God will replay your whole life on a giant projector screen in the afterlife and all humans ever will see your secret sins. Yay! (source)

 

 

published June 1, 2018

subscribe to updates:

(it's pretty much the only way to stay in touch with me these days)

leaf