I wish to open this to a possible interesting discussion.
After many of us have been out of Pentecostalism for a considerable length of time, when we look back on our experiences we notice one glaring thing about the entire experience. Pentecostalism promotes Bad Character. It has a problem with basic morality. It attracts people of low morals and the leadership seems to be infested with scoundrels. Once inside Pentecostalism, we learn terrible interpersonal habits like backstabbing, gossip, stretching the truth, making outlandish statements with no proof or support, and many other things. It is like Pentecostals are experts at shady dealings and shady promotion. We all learn the techniques, and it eventually becomes a part of us. We believed things that were really not true – like miraculous healings – but we could not admit our doubts, so we lied and kept on lying. We hurt those around us by telling them they were going to hell, but we could not apologize because then we would have to question the religion that would make us do that in the first place. Preachers repeated lies, but we never checked out the facts, because we were told to “obey the pastor.” There was a rule that whatever the pastor said was good right and moral. Thus, Morality was not a universal principle of Natural Law shared by all peoples at all times, but it was what the pastor said. Thus, we did things that were immoral because we were obeying the pastor – recall Hitler’s generals – obeying the leader. This is why as Ex-Pentecostals we must regain a sense of universal, natural morality of everyday life, apart from obedience to some freak who claims to be the “man of God.” We all learned these bad habits because the system itself was a defective model equating morality with obedience. We modeled ourselves after corrupt preachers because they were our leaders, and all people look up to leaders for models, and thus, you have entire churches and organizations mimicking their corrupt leaders. The leaders use fear, intimidation, and other forms of abuse to keep people in line, and Pentecostals take their cues from the leaders, becoming little by little, less moral over time just like the evil leaders of the churches. We were under the impression that the right thing to do was that which benefited the “church” or the pastor. We failed to realize that true morality looks for the good of the entire community as a whole. True morality asks if something benefits himself and his church for sure, but also the family, the community, the nation and the world. True morality is organic and takes into consideration things as a WHOLE – possibly this is where the true meaning of “Holy” comes from – to have a “whole” perspective, balancing everything out in their proper proportions – whole – holy. Is Pentecostalism “Holy” in this sense of the term? No. Why? Because the benefit is off-balanced – it is skewed toward the pastor and his church – and does not account for society as a whole – it is not “holy” so to speak.
So, we learned bad habits as Pentecostals. The task we have ahead of us is to recognize the immorality of a skewed, unbalanced, “unholy” system, and begin to look for the habits of a proper, healthy, and good person. We were good at criticizing people and making them feel guilty. We were good at preaching things without proof and support because the preacher told us it was so. We were emotionally unstable and prone to bouts of explosive anger because emotionalism was our religion. We tended to obey our leaders without question, and we should remember that the real world does not operate this way – we should never obey anyone blindly, if we should obey anyone at all. We should always ask “Why?” of our current leaders, and we should not take things at face value, but ask, “Is this really the right thing to do, taking everything into consideration?” How many times we lied to others and told them we were healed because we wanted to believe it so bad? Well, do we still practice this in our lives if we want to believe something so badly? How many times we wrote other people off as nothing because they were not in the same church? Well, how many people we do the same thing to nowadays when they disagree with us? Are we holding on to old Pentecostal habits? Again, these are questions for the soul that we must all ask, because we picked up some really bad, nasty habits as Pentecostals, and these things can linger with us for years unless we recognize the after effects of the evil of Pentecostalism within our hearts.
I think that Pentecostalism has a corrosive effect upon the character of a person, turning good people over time into defective moral agents with a skewed sense of right and wrong to the point that wrong is right and right is wrong. I think that good families get sucked into this system, turning them into seriously dysfunctional families because they are picking up bad habits of defective character and morality. People, instead of working through problems rationally, develop the “fight or flight” mentality which can be very destructive to personal growth and human relations.
I think that we all have a lot to learn and relearn as Ex-Pentecostals. We have to rebuild an entire life based on something completely different from Pentecostalism. We have to pick up the pieces and build upon the ruins of a life we never lived. Sometimes it takes groping in the dark to find the answers, but find them we must, because we must live life, and live it to the fullest. We must look deep into our hearts and try to bring out the best within ourselves in every situation. We must look beyond the immediate anger and frustration of the moment and consider the whole – the long-term effects of our actions, and the effects upon those around us. We must become “holy” or “whole” in the proper sense of the term – whole people making whole decisions – doing the right thing as best as we can. We must rediscover, and relearn the universal principles of humanity that make life worth living and make the order of life more pleasant. And, we must seek peace within our hearts, and find the strength to carry on.
We are Ex-Pentecostals. Let us make the prefix “ex” really mean something and try to get rid of those old nasty habits.
Any comments on this perspective?
derkrash-at-earthlink-dot-net
JP Istre
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