<em>This is the final part in my series about the six reasons why I left the church based off this article by the Barna Group.</em>

<em> Missed the first parts of this series? Read part one, two, three and four.</em>

<strong>Reason #6: “Churches seem overprotective.”</strong>

Sometimes I feel like the evangelical church can be like a controlling boyfriend. Overprotectiveness is what permeates my story the most. All four of the other reasons that I’ve talked about already can be directly tied back to this. If they keep the content light they remind us to be good Christians and avoid conflict. If they keep science at bay, they remind us that scientists are out to get us to trick us out of believing the truth. If they entirely block out other religions and denominations we will never have the chance to be converted to their corrupt ways. If they present sexuality as simplistic, we won’t know anything about it and won’t be tempted to try it. And if they put my questions down, they lower the risk of losing other members to my poisonous doubt.

I was told constantly growing up that the hallmark of the devil was that he made things like secular music, evolution, yoga, other religions, new age philosophies, and non-Christian boys look attractive. “Sin feels good,” they said. So, anything that made me feel good aside from helping the elderly people and reading my Bible was me giving in and made me feel guilty. While I can see where the general principle behind this kind of makes sense, it contorted itself into a skeleton of dark guilt that follows me to this day.

For example: if I enjoy the feeling of a fitted shirt, it’s the devil trying to entice me to bring sexy back and make the boys stumble. Another example: the reason it would “feel good” to go to a mega church is because they are telling people what they want to hear. The only reason they could possibly be growing that fast is by telling thinly-veiled lies that appeared to be a more fun version of Christianity that doesn’t bother with the cold, hard truth. After all, the devil doesn’t want you to think about hell! He wants you to go someplace that makes you feel good and bubbly so you can feel secure in your lukewarm faith.

The guilt that installed itself into the culture became such a part of my identity that it eventually began to suffocate me. Everything was dangerous: cable tv, playing cards, Superbowl commercials, roller rink music, yoga, mega churches, boys, comedians, magazines, The Message, liberals, other teenagers, dancing, beer, movie theatres, backslidden Christians, world religion courses, concerts, non-Christian universities, people like Joel Osteen, and puppies. (Okay, so maybe not the last two.) (It was amazing that I managed to go see King Kong with a group of my friends.) No one could go near any of the above items without being lectured on “the appearance of evil.”

I’ll explain why this became dangerous for a church culture. We have such a drive as humans to right any dissonance in our brains, the Avoidance of Danger became an elaborate game. And as it is with all games except a <a href="http://rackham.artpassions.net/alice3.html">Caucus race</a>, everyone is keeping score. You knew that you were ahead of Jane on the totem pole because she watched that rated R movie last week. You don’t watch R rated movies (they are an abomination to the lord), so you know right there that you’re a better Christian that her.  This becomes a vicious, cannibalistic cycle because everyone becomes a watch dog. We were always watching for someone to trip up.

This is what I liked to call the “Someone is Watching” theory. <em>The</em> reason behind good behavior in my church was that someone is always watching. The implied logic behind this was:
<ul>
	<li>If you do bad things, everyone’s Sin Meters will start going off and they will assign you a mental scarlet letter.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
	<li>If you do a good thing or abstain from certain “bad” things, people will wonder why, and in turn, you get the perfect witnessing opportunity and will glean many souls for The Lord.</li>
</ul>
The only problem: in my experience this kind of system <em>only works inside the church</em>. In most cases, the rest of the world doesn’t operate like this. (Because unless you have a swear jar, the rest of the population isn’t counting.) To test this—at least on an intellectual level—I created a post on the Craigslist forums that said “If I told you I was a Christian and then a few weeks later you saw me in a bar out having some drinks with my friends, would you consider my faith useless?” Aside from the few people that told me my entire problem was being involved in religion in the first place, the overwhelming response was no. Even though, as a good little legalistic girl, I remember going over to a friend’s house and seeing Kahlua in their parent’s pantry and feeling absolute righteous indignation. I even polled my own friends from the church I used to go to see if their results were the same. Most of their responses boiled down to: “It’s just not that simple.”

I found in my own life that not swearing, not drinking, not telling dirty jokes, and not watching bad movies doesn’t mean anything to other people. It only means something to other Christians. The only thing it did for me was make other people uncomfortable. Those things in themselves don’t make you glowy, sparkly (Edward!) or magnetic to “unbelievers”. Those things by themselves will not “bring others to Christ”. And in fact, this type of attitude actually detracts from the goal because you do not create an environment of love, understanding, or compassion, which is what people desperately need in their lives because you create an environment of judgment. Abstaining from bad things does not make you radical and it does not make you transformational; the only thing it does is make you a snob. Now, I’m not suggesting that you just go and live a life of hedonism because otherwise you’ll make people uncomfortable. There is something to be said about being different, and abstaining can be a good thing in some cases. I think along with your convictions about those things you need to pair them with the scandalous love that Jesus came to earth to share. When Jesus came to earth, he showed radical compassion for the people who had been voted off the island, kicked out of the country club, and knocked to the bottom of the totem pole. We need to abandon the scoring system and show people that there is more to life than that. <em>That</em> is freedom.

The other problem with overprotection is that it creates an environment where trust cannot exist. If you treat me like the moment I see a girl in a bikini on TV I’ll go and have mad sex with the next thing with two legs, or if I listen to a group who doesn’t explicitly mention Jesus in their music that I’ll suddenly abandon the faith, it sends me the message that you don’t think that my beliefs are strong enough. It tells me that you think I’m a sponge on a stick and that I’m helpless to defend myself. It’s mothering, but in a bad way. It underestimates the power I have within myself to stand up for what I believe and navigate the waters of life like a competent citizen. Example:
<ul>
	<li>A grandmother of a friend of mine was running a Bible study for a bunch of the seniors. I absolutely loved it, as did my friends who went. My mom mentioned to one of the deacons at the time that she really appreciated the Bible study because of how much I was getting out of it. The response she got was essentially that the church was aware of the Bible study and had not yet decided to shut it down. (What? Never mind the fact that she was a long-time member and a Sunday School teacher.)</li>
</ul>
<ul>
	<li>My friend wanted to get a group together to carpool down to Aquire the Fire when it came to our area. She was told that she could not advertise this to the youth group because they didn’t approve of it and couldn’t sanction anyone going to it. (Really? Aquire the Fire is the threat here? You mean the big emotional conference with Rebecca St. James headlining?)</li>
</ul>
<ul>
	<li>One of my friends in high school got pregnant. She was immediately ostracized and sent off to live with relatives until late in the pregnancy. When she returned my mom suggested the church hold a baby shower for her so that she could get the things she needed and we could provide some of the essentials for her. Leadership refused because they “didn’t want to condone her actions.” (Hmm… They give pregnant girls stuff… Time to get knocked up!)</li>
</ul>
This does not create a culture of trust, information sharing, learning from all different people, different forms of worship, or a culture of love that is there to help pick you up when you fall.

Leaders say that they want to “equip tomorrow’s leaders for Christ.” That does not mean sheltering them from <em>everything</em> to the n-th degree lest the devil kidnap them. This means that you need to give them the tools to use critical thinking in their everyday life so that they can make the right choices when you’re not around. Otherwise, how do you expect them to become informed, educated, competent adults that have the power to navigate whatever will be thrown at them? I’ll use the analogy of a test. As a church, leader, or parent, you don’t want to feed them the right answers to fill in the bubbles (because they’ll just memorize the letter). You want to dialogue and challenge them with the hard and sometimes rhetorical questions so that they have to figure out the answers for themselves (and internalize the information) so they can write the essay in their own situations.