We need to do something about religion in America. Specifically I am referring to the evangelical religious conservatives, but I also mean the way we think about what religion is. To give a little personal history, I was raised in the southern baptist church and I was pretty serious about it for the majority of time I spent living with my parents. In my early teens, as many teens do, I started to question everything, but not long after I became for more interested in girls than answers. I’ll get back to that later.

Many American evangelical christians treat their religion as an all-consuming way of life. It’s not a set of rituals, it’s not a set of rules or guidelines. It is a thread that has been woven into the very fabric of a large portion of this country. They will tell you the most important part of Christianity is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, but after living in it and now after a few years seeing it from the outside I no longer think that is true.

American Christianity is very strange. It is obviously rooted in this two thousand year old religion, but it has really only come into existence as it is today within the last hundred and fifty or so years. I think it’s more of a response than it is an idea of its own. It is generation after generation seeing society progress and firmly planting their feet in the ground and shouting “No, progress is evil because an invisible man in the sky told me so”. Most commonly it seems to be the response of the white man losing his sense of security that he will always sit on top of society as a very right of his birth.

I said that it wasn’t about rituals or rules, and I believe that to be true. However, it is about trying to impose rules on all of society to fit their way of life. They believe that the entire country should be subject to their puritanical rule system. They see the world in very black and white terms. Good and evil. Us and them. They refuse to acknowledge all logic that goes against any of their beliefs.

It is a system that cripples its own members. It teaches that knowledge is a bad thing and that faith is more important. It keeps white men in power and grants them control over their towns. They have intertwined themselves politically in this country that holding religious beliefs somehow automatically means that you have to hold a set of political beliefs. But the set of political beliefs should completely contradict their religious beliefs and yet none, or few, of them seem to see it this way. They claim to be a religion focused on Jesus, but they refuse to show love to anyone who is different than them, they shun outsiders. Even though many of them represent some of the poorest parts of this country they continue to politically support a system that benefits the wealthy and keeps them in the lower class.

It is a horribly vicious cycle. Each generation believes it can do better than the previous generation and that they can raise themselves out of poverty and that one day they will be wealthy and they want things to be good for them when that day comes. However, they support no sex education other than abstinence, but they don’t actually follow that and then end up with lots of teen pregnancies which means lack of education, not getting high school degrees, and staying in low wage jobs for the rest of their life. All the while they continue to parrot back that people need to follow the rules thinking that they failed because they were week not because they were born into a system meant to keep them down.

These people are infuriatingly contradictory, and I can say that because most of my close friends and relatives are still very much on the inside. They are absolutely, unequivocally, one hundred percent against abortion. They believe that every single life is precious. Let me back track. They believe that every single American life is precious and a gift from god. Well, I’m not even sure that’s true. They certainly believe that birth is a gift from god, or a punishment for premarital sex. And if you’re unable to provide for your child, both you and your child must be sinners and not worthy of receiving any help.

Christians are unbelievably obsessed with sex. Who can have it and when and what kind. They simultaneously want to have control over what you do in the privacy of your bedroom but freak out whenever the government tries to control far less invasive parts of our lives. They have all these rules about sex that seem to have no basis in religion and don’t serve any clear purpose other than something they can shame others for. There’s lots of shame. I was taught that all sexual thought and action is completely shameful unless it is between two married people. Why religion is so obsessed with this concept of marriage makes no sense whatsoever.

I think that really gets to the heart of the issue here. There is this religion that is running wild in this country, trying to control every facet of it, but their rules don’t make any sense nor provide any value to society. Not only that, but they don’t even follow the rules themselves. It’s no wonder that when you make rules about no sex until marriage that it will lead to lots of very young marriages. Depending on which branch of the religion this might mean staying in a horrible relationship for the rest of your life which just leaves everybody miserable and probably leads to extramarital affairs. Or it leads to lots of broken homes. When you take these things into consideration it makes a lot of sense why most of the Bible-belt is the way it is. This isn’t a mystery. And it certainly isn’t a mystery to the government and corporation who have taken hold of this group of people and turned them into the perfect puppets. Undereducated and taught to blindly follow leadership, quick to engage in an us versus them mentality, and resistant to change. It is a perfect storm to manipulate a huge population into becoming a voting base to support an insane set of selfish, wealthy people who have no regard for the common good or even making things better for their own offspring. This is why we need to do something. Left unchecked this problem will only get worse. Look at where it’s gotten this country already. This system is what got Donald Trump elected president. The political powers can do virtually whatever they want to as long as they fight against abortions.

How do you help a people who fight against their own interests? I have no idea. I would say education, but they’ve pretty well established that won’t help. Even most of the educators in this culture support their belief system over knowledge and logic. I almost think it would be better to split up the country. Let these people run wild within their own borders, but they will have no power outside of them. They will no doubt allow themselves to be co-opted as the new global source of cheap labor working tirelessly in factories for too little pay. They can sleep easy at night because they did it, they protected their country and cast out the nonbelievers. We can have the coasts be their own separate nations, probably united by common goals. I see no other sensible solution when location and population density seem to be the biggest dictators of how someones politics aligns. Then maybe after a few generations they will see the error of their ways, but short of anything that drastic I don’t see them relenting any time soon.

American christianity: do whatever is best for me because I believe that’s what god would want for me, and anyone who disagrees is evil and must be stopped.

I promised I’d get back to my own experience. As a teenager, I found church to be a decent supply of girls that I felt were within my reach, as I’m sure is the case for most of the members of this religion. Then I went to college where I joined a religious student group for the same purpose. All throughout my religious upbringing I was largely taught the main thing a christian could get out of college was a marriage. It certainly seemed to be the case when I was there too. I saw friend after friend couple off, and for the most part they stayed together with the first person they dated in college and then ended up marrying that person afterwards. I even tried to be a part of that, but for some reason I struggled to find anyone willing to join me in that. Looking back I suspect it may have been obvious that I wasn’t a true member of their group and mainly sought out companionship even if I didn’t know that to be the case at the time. Regardless, I exited college alone, feeling emotionally and romantically stunted. Now I’m left with a set of friends who I have very little in common with other than our time together, but I am too afraid to let go of them.

I see the cracks and the lies and the hollow pillars that hold this system in place, and I hope for the sake of the future of this country that it falls soon.