Just What Do You Mean ... Church Culture?
One of the things
that’s desperately sick about the COGs is the culture. It is a deeply
dysfunctional culture that fosters and facilitates abuse. Everyone
in the world grows up around other people who are users and abusers. We
have to put up with our dysfunctional families, fair-weather friends,
and governments
that rob you blind. But not everyone has a church abusing them on top
of all that. Armstrongites are gluttons for punishment.
It’s one
thing to recognize that the COGs have abusive tendencies, but it’s
another thing to
define it in such a way that you can see the pattern, understand what
those tendencies are, and where they’re coming from. I find it necessary
to do this so I can get the tentacles unwrapped from around my mind and
heal.
So, where did the culture of the COGs come from? I think
that many leaders would haul out the phrase “God’s government” and start
declaring the culture of the church is 100% biblical. Well, if it’s so
biblical, then why is it so dysfunctional and abusive? Why are the COGs
so full of hypocrisy? While the COGs might PREACH out of the bible, the
CULTURE of the church has little to do with the bible.
So then
where does it come from? The culture of the Armstrongist churches was
not woven from the fabric of the bible. It came from Herbert Armstrong
and from the society of his times.
Herbert Armstrong was born in
middle America (Des Moines, Iowa) in 1892. His family was of Quaker
background,
known today as the Friends Church. The Quaker movement began in the
1600’s with the express intention of restoring the original faith and
practices of the first century apostolic church. (Sound familiar?) In a
sense, when HWA decided to get religion and found the Radio Church of
God, he was returning to his Quaker roots. But this is the obvious
theology, which is just the decorative window dressing, not the form and
structure. Where did the steel undergirders come from that hold the
structure up?
The power structure of the church, the government
hierarchy, if you will, was always stated as being Jesus Christ, and
then Armstrong, and then ministers and then regular members in a
government where power and authority flowed from the top down, just like
a monarchy. Apologists today will point toward the bible, and Jesus
Christ as a king to argue that HWA was trying to create the “’government
of God’ here on earth”
within the church. However, if you suppose that Jesus Christ is not the
head of the Armstrongist churches, then suddenly it’s not a benevolent
monarchy anymore, it’s a fascist state.
But there’s a better
viewpoint on Armstrongist churches that sheds much more light on the
dynamics driving them: the nuclear family. The family is also a top-down
structure, but borne of natural necessity, not fear. HWA preached that
God is in the process of creating a family, and he claimed that the
church was “the bride of Christ” or a part of “’God’s spiritual nuclear
family’ here on earth.” I don't dispute that there is biblical support
for the idea that God is making a family. However, unless God is making a
horrendously dysfunctional “family,” as HWA created within his church,
the culture of Armstrongism has nothing to do with God or bible
necessarily, regardless of the theory.
In Victorian society, into
which
HWA was born, until the cultural revolution of the sixties, children
were expected to be respectful of their parents, women were expected to
be submissive, and the husband was expected to be the dominant head of
the family. These were times when the media presented the father figure
as someone who knew what was best. To be fair, these values are rooted
in the bible and come from a religiously-centered society. But since
people are people, there’s a darker side, too.
For thousands of
years, within the context of society, men have had a lot more power than
women did, and this created an environment in which women were very
dependent upon their husbands. During most of HWA’s lifetime, there was a
stigma attached to being a single parent, or being a divorced woman,
and the prevailing sentiment was that women should not earn a living
outside the home. There was a paternalistic view that men go off to work
and do important “men things,” while
adult women were not very intelligent, little more than glorified
children, really. Women were expected to be subservient and children
were expected to be “seen and not heard.” In reality, some men were
dictators who were not so benevolent and wives and children were easy
targets for abuse. If a wife was abused, most people would assume she
had done something wrong, and that she somehow deserved it. For the wife
who HAD to escape, she wouldn’t usually have a lot of options to
support herself. Overlaid on top of all this was a hypocritical
whitewash as everyone pretended to be happy and that there were no
serious problems. But the façade of “Leave It To Beaver” was never
anything more than a flimsy fiction. Who believed that crap even when it
was new?
This is not just a description of American society from
a bygone era, and the traditional nuclear family from those days (which
the COGs still advocate today as the
model nuclear family, whitewash and all), but also the culture of the
Radio Church of God, a.k.a. Worldwide Church of God. (The hundreds of
splinters are all daughters with a strong family resemblance.) This
stands to reason, too. It was the culture in which HWA was born and
raised, it is the culture in which the church originally formed, and
there is a biblical interpretation to back it up. What else would you
expect? But while they claim they got these values directly from the
bible, they didn’t. They got them from “the world.” The proof is that
they also incorporated the dark side, wholesale.
From a church
culture standpoint, the ministry are the “husbands,” the children are
the children (obviously), and everyone else is the “housewife.” As the
“housewife” the members are basically the minister’s bitch. This is why
ministers demand an inordinate amount of unearned respect from members.
This is why they expect
subservience and paternalistically look down on them all as glorified
children. Many of them in the past have presumed to tell the membership
that their only access to God is through them, thus preaching a doctrine
of dependence. And all the while, they have the nerve to call
themselves servants. They are merely setting themselves up as the dated
father figures from yesteryear, complete with the paternalistic
mysogeny. The membership has aided and abetted them by buying into the
model and playing their assigned role. The liberating thing from this
understanding comes from recognizing what everyone is really doing and
realizing that you have a choice.
To pretend this is some kind of
righteousness makes my stomach turn. They would have you believe that
they are modeling the “coming government of God” here on earth and thus
preparing everyone to play a role in the real thing when it arrives.
BARF! That is not what is going on at all. In truth,
“ministers” are just a
collection of Willy Lomans: sad sack salesmen with a dwindling client
base who are attempting to repackage something used as though it is new,
and then selling it for more than it’s worth.
If you’re buying
what they’re selling, then I suppose it’s also easy to believe this is
all “godly” and “biblical” too. But all of it is “worldly” albeit a
pre-1960’s world, to which it is possible, if you are foolhardy enough,
to attach a certain amount of nostalgia. There are some places where
this model does agree with biblical principles, but this is accidental,
because the model was taken from a Christian society, not because HWA
got any of it from the bible.
One of the problems with the
culture is that the cultural values are more important than the biblical
ones. If you violate all the commandments in the bible, you’re just a
sinner, like us all. But if you violate cultural values, you are
promptly
disfellowshipped as though you had committed the unpardonable sin.
Obviously I suppose you have, though not in a biblical sense. Which begs
the question, what are these churches teaching? Are they teaching
people not to sin, or are they teaching the opposite? Or perhaps COGs
are just societies dedicated to a particular brand of nostalgia? Or
maybe it’s just whatever keeps the money coming in. However you look at
it, the bottom line is, you can sin all you want, just so long as you
keep the cultural commandments.
In the mean time, American
society has marched on. There have been vast changes to the prevailing
societal values, expectations, and norms, and I would agree, not all for
the better. But Armstrongism has stayed anachronistically fixed in the
past, like a cultural time capsule, as though the hypocritical society
of middle America 100 years ago were somehow the pinnacle of godliness.
It wasn’t then, and it isn’t now.
Just as
surely as so many COGs want to recreate WCG in its heyday, if it were
up to them, I suppose they would also take the whole world back to
recreate Victorian era America. That’s what they’re expecting the
millennium to be like, I guess, where God comes back to Earth and forces
nostalgic American values upon the whole world? If I were given a
choice between that and the lake of fire, I think I’d rather take the
hot bath. Who in their right mind would want to live inside of an
eternal “Leave It To Beaver” marathon?
That makes me curious,
besides Sabbath vs. Sunday and holy days vs. holidays, what else did
Herbert Armstrong have to rail against in 1934, when the cultural values
of the church were identical to the cultural values of America? Perhaps
a better question is what a Quaker preacher would have had to rail
about, seeing they don’t even have the difference of Sabbath and holy
days like the COGs do? Oh, nevermind, the Friends Church, like the
Amish, are probably dedicated to preserving and recreating
the culture of the 1600’s! Get thee hence!
As time continues to
march on, society will continue to change, and, like the Amish, the COGs
will also continue to get further and further out of step with the
world around them. They will seem more and more odd, their solutions
will seem more and more out of touch, and their client base will
continue to dwindle. Meanwhile, they will continue to bicker and argue
and divide. Soon, the last embers of Armstrongism will blink out and
grow cold. Amen.
Andrew
