the-transfeminine-mystique:

One of the things that I always forget happened but which I think demonstrates the paranoia of American fundamentalist Christianity was at my school’s retreat one year. Each year, the week before classes started, the entire high school would go to a camp in the woods with strict rules on what we could have (no phones or electronics), strictly monitored activities, and multiple chapel sessions per day, done by a different evangelist each year.

My sophomore year, one of the chapel sessions started off with the evangelist saying “we just heard word that President _______ just signed a law making it illegal to be a Christian.” We were all like “oh yeah that dude’s not actually the president, this is making us think abt when Christians were persecuted.” But as he went on with his narrative about how the United States just banned Christianity, it started to feel weirder and weirder because he seemed to be taking it seriously and was having one of the teachers go around the chapel in the woods and shutter all the windows and lock the door. Remember, we were high school kids cut off from all communication from the outside world, and we weren’t unfamiliar with the narrative that Christians would soon be persecuted again, so who knows what was happening in the outside world. Besides, we were raised to not question anything that an authority figure said from the pulpit.

The sermon was about standing up for Jesus no matter what, with occasional references to how we would need to do that now because being a Christian was now illegal and who knows if the feds would find this chapel. At the end of the chapel service, right before the final prayer one of the teachers, acting on a cue from the evangelist, banged on the doors as hard as he could and yelled “open up!!!” Even though most people would have said consciously that they knew it was all just for effect, in that moment some people were screaming, some people started crying, and everybody was at the very least very much on edge.

This is why every tiny little thing is viewed as an anti-Christian attack, because part of fundamentalist indoctrination is a continuous reinforcement of the belief that Christianity is on the verge of being criminalized and explicitly persecuted, and any little thing might be the avenue through which that criminalization comes or is justified. No matter how minor the doctrinal issue might seem to an outsider, there’s this terror and paranoia that anything they allow through or anything they compromise on will be used to criminalize them. Each little thing, in the fundamentalist mind, triggers anxieties which have been intentionally fostered by the fundamentalist formation process, a formation process bent on convincing the person that true Christianity, or fundamentalist Christianity, is inherently placed in opposition to the world, and the world is just waiting for an excuse or opportunity to destroy it.