Again, I’m sorry that this has been your experience. This hasn’t been mine.
I came to Christianity at an age when most people leave religion. I went from having nothing and no one to having a steady family who love and support me and give me others to love and support in kind. My church family is open and welcoming. We just removed a minister who began an opening prayer admonishing gays because when he was told “we don’t do that here” he got mad about it.
I wholly recognize that there is a set of people who scream about un-Christian things in the name of Christianity, but I reject the notion that these people are representative of the majority of Christians.
I went from having nothing and no one to having a steady family who love and support me
So. Let me tell you a little not-so-secret. That is precisely how I used to get people to convert to Mormonism, when I was a Mormon missionary. The people most vulnerable to conversion were people that were in the middle of shitty life circumstances, and had no social support network. We would love-carpet-bomb them shit out of them; we would talk to them several times a week, we would make sure that member in the local ward–which is the basic congregation for Mormons is called–reached out to them, invite them to church activities to meet people, and would inundate them with religious nonsense. All the while, we were implying that if they were just willing to believe the nonsense, then this large, ready-made family-slash-social-support-network could be theirs. But if they didn’t convert, we were going to leave them, and they’d be alone again. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t work for shit with people that had large networks and strong families, because they didn’t have any need for what we could offer. The people without support would mistake the good feelings about the community for being god telling them that the religious nonsense was true.
And it goes the other way too; the Mormon church keeps people so busy doing church things that Mormons probably won’t have any non-Mormon confidants. That, in turn, makes leaving very, very hard.
So, ask yourself, and be honest: would you have converted if you had had strong friends that already loved and supported you? If you had met similarly supportive people that were Muslim, Jewish, or members of the Satanic Temple (and my local TST groups has some pretty great people that are genuinely kind, loving, and open), would you have chosen to convert to Christianity?
Again, I’m sorry that this has been your experience. This hasn’t been mine.
I came to Christianity at an age when most people leave religion. I went from having nothing and no one to having a steady family who love and support me and give me others to love and support in kind. My church family is open and welcoming. We just removed a minister who began an opening prayer admonishing gays because when he was told “we don’t do that here” he got mad about it.
I wholly recognize that there is a set of people who scream about un-Christian things in the name of Christianity, but I reject the notion that these people are representative of the majority of Christians.
So. Let me tell you a little not-so-secret. That is precisely how I used to get people to convert to Mormonism, when I was a Mormon missionary. The people most vulnerable to conversion were people that were in the middle of shitty life circumstances, and had no social support network. We would love-carpet-bomb them shit out of them; we would talk to them several times a week, we would make sure that member in the local ward–which is the basic congregation for Mormons is called–reached out to them, invite them to church activities to meet people, and would inundate them with religious nonsense. All the while, we were implying that if they were just willing to believe the nonsense, then this large, ready-made family-slash-social-support-network could be theirs. But if they didn’t convert, we were going to leave them, and they’d be alone again. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t work for shit with people that had large networks and strong families, because they didn’t have any need for what we could offer. The people without support would mistake the good feelings about the community for being god telling them that the religious nonsense was true.
And it goes the other way too; the Mormon church keeps people so busy doing church things that Mormons probably won’t have any non-Mormon confidants. That, in turn, makes leaving very, very hard.
So, ask yourself, and be honest: would you have converted if you had had strong friends that already loved and supported you? If you had met similarly supportive people that were Muslim, Jewish, or members of the Satanic Temple (and my local TST groups has some pretty great people that are genuinely kind, loving, and open), would you have chosen to convert to Christianity?