Sadly, many of the nation’s churches have gone in the same direction as secular institutions. From Elizabeth Nickson at elizabethnickson.substack.com:
92% of us believe in a soul, God, an Infinite Eternal Intelligence. Our ruined churches work to destroy that faith.
I remember exactly where I was when someone told me I had a religious heritage. I’m not getting the phrase quite right; she meant a dominating strain in my precious self, important, critical. We were standing outside the house of a woman pastor in the Foursquare church in Eugene, Oregon, where I’d attended a bible study with a dozen women in their 20s. It was a forested neighbourhood, prosperous, and I was researching a story for the Sunday Times Magazine (UK) on Bible Belles, conservative young women of faith who (to the horror of the editors) were anti-abortion. Foursquare, a big, raucous college church, was founded by Aimee Semple Macpherson, an ecstatic Christian from whose rather titanic self – tall, robust, a beauty with bountiful Gibson Girl hair – actual miracles flowed. I loved it. It was fun. It was as unlike mainline Protestantism as possible and, I thought at the time, the next obvious step for the institutional church. The pastors were young, engaged, filled with ideas. I’d gone to black revivals in the south and fallen in love with ecstatic Christianity. Everyone would love this, I thought, it is rock and roll without the hangover. Of course, at the time, I wasn’t aware of the heavy hand of the social justice/cultural prison in which we all live. Lived.
I had been telling this lovely girl about my early American family, both parents’ ancestors landing in the River Colony (Connecticut) in the early 1600’s. My mother a direct descendant of Thomas Hooker, the renegade prelate from the Massachusetts Colony, and my father from a vast unnervingly busy family who crossed the ocean ‘praying and expounding thw word of God the whole way”. Jonathan Edwards’ daughter had married into that family in the midst of the First Great Awakening. I don’t know if anyone still reads Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, but I imagine it bears resemblance to the experience of federal bureaucrats in DC right about now.
According to Rabbi Shais Taub, I fall into the category of spiritual sensitives, which is to say that without a spiritual life, I would not be able to function. My early life, though “privileged”, was hostile and difficult, even dangerous, so unconsciously I came to the conclusion that the only thing that provides stability is a relationship with what Taub calls “the infinite eternal one.” That has set my life on a crazed course, where I followed no advice, and planned my life without reason, following always the path this steady, benign, surprising, magnetic Presence recommended. Often my answers go like this: “What?? Really???? For Real???” Unlike the average bear, I didn’t really have a choice. Occasionally I tried to conform, be normal. It always ended in unhappiness.
