Growth is a Virtue
TW: this post involves violence including torture, murder, genocide, slavery, and religious trauma.
I was taught to be afraid of growth.
The narrative within Christianity is that Christians are targeted for being Christians. It seeps into the dominant cultures of colonizers, where rich white Christians in the US think they’re in the same boat as persecuted Christians around the world. I could say so much about the falsehoods within this narrative. It obfuscates other factors, like racism, genocide, war, and resource extraction. It makes Christianity the most important element in any conflict. It gives Christians in Christian-dominated regions an excuse to claim they are being persecuted whenever someone responds appropriately to their bigotry.
Growing up, I read a lot of stories about Christian martyrs, and how they refused to give up their faith in Jesus despite being tortured. One major book on the subject is “Tortured for Christ” by Richard Wurmbrand. In retrospect, I think this man was deeply traumatized from being imprisoned and tortured for years. Because I’ve extensively studied trauma and PTSD, I recognize that traumatized people may interpret the source of their trauma in many ways. I don’t know the exact circumstances of Wurmbrand’s imprisonment, but I know his interpretation is that of a Christian with a specific narrative. “Hurt people hurt people,” as they say. It’s a tragedy that he uses his trauma to spread this narrative about Christian persecution.
One particular story that still haunts me is about an underground church gathering in “a communist country,” as these books so often depicted them. In this story, a small group of people is meeting to study the bible, and soldiers break in. They tell everyone to spit on the bible at gunpoint. After a few people comply, a young woman bravely says, “what have they done to your word?” and she wipes the spit off the bible and holds it to her chest. Then she is shot at point-blank range. The story ends there.
I don’t know who in this story would have relayed these details, much less how it might be fact-checked. I think what matters is the shock value, not whether it’s true. However, the book it’s from insists that all these stories are true. The book is called “Jesus Freaks,” a book by Voice of the Martyrs, the organization founded by Wurmbrand. It’s coauthored by DC Talk, the band that popularized a song called “Jesus Freak” in the 90s. I knew almost every DC Talk song by heart as a kid. The music and the narrative resonated deeply with me.
I have a distinct memory of hearing that song while I was in a children’s car seat of my family’s Suburban. I was three years old when it started getting played on Christian radio stations. The bridge asked, “People say I’m strange/does it make me a stranger/that my best friend was born in a manger?” I was an isolated young child, and I wanted Jesus to be my best friend, too.
Christians imagine themselves as persecuted because that’s the whole narrative. We don’t actually know if the man named Jesus ever said any of the words attributed to him in the bible. He didn’t write anything himself. Allegedly, he said that the world hated him, and the world will also hate his followers. There’s the line “Take up your cross and follow me,” implying that just as he died by torture, his followers should expect to do the same. This narrative continues throughout the rest of the New Testament, from the first Christian martyr being stoned to death to the imprisonment and torture of the disciples and apostles. It’s considered a great honor to suffer for the gospel.
I used to think that being steadfast was important. Now I look back on that and see a stubborn refusal to grow. There are so many ways that life demands leaving behind old ways of being. How I think and what I believe has changed drastically. I used to think that because I was raised conservative Christian, I had to stay a conservative Christian. If I had too many doubts and “abandoned my faith,” that meant I was giving up on everything that matters. I would lose out on heaven and go to hell. I would be giving up on god and Jesus.
Whenever I’m invited to imagine my younger self meeting me today, I realize I would be unrecognizable. The chasm between us would make it nearly impossible to communicate. My younger self would be confused and enraged. I did not have the skills to accept who I would become, much less the capacity to grow into myself. I did not understand the simple concept that growth is a virtue.
I have a post saved that talks about how science changes with the facts, but dogma insists on never changing. I don’t love science just for what it reveals, but for the process of the scientific method itself. Science tests and measures and carefully observes everything. If what we know now is more than we knew yesterday, the facts are updated. It can admit it was wrong before, and our knowledge of things has improved.
Growth is being able to admit I was wrong.
Christianity doesn’t allow for that kind of growth. It insists that if you lose your grip on god, if you aren’t steadfast and rigid, that’s a tragedy. Those of us who have grown out of the dogmatic teachings of our childhoods are referred to as “lost souls.” We “turned our backs on the truth.” There is no room to wonder whether truth is bigger than dogma. There is no room for the idea that oppression happens to many groups of people, including and not limited to Christians. The Christian narrative insists that Christians are the original and most persecuted martyrs.
This narrative is also weaponized against other groups. Christians broadly supported the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany. Not only that, but a majority of them were Christians themselves. This fact is quickly refuted by many Christians today with the claim that they weren’t “real” Christians, but this is a well-known logical fallacy called No True Scotsman. Just as Christians were among Nazis, Christians were among slaveowners in the US, and Christians are among modern Nazis all over the world.
To target Jewish people in Nazi Germany, Christians promoted the myths of blood libel and deicide libel. That’s where the line “Jesus was killed by the Jews” comes from. This line remains today, and I myself used it years ago. I didn’t know it was a hateful statement against a truly persecuted group, a group persecuted and targeted by Christians for genocide. Today, a very small portion of the global population is Jewish as a direct result of the Holocaust.
In the year 1930, the global population was about 2 billion. In less than a century, more than four times that number of people populate the world. Back then, there were about 15 million Jewish people in the world. Today, the Jewish population is just now reaching about 15 million again. The Holocaust directly impacted how many Jewish people are alive today, generations later. How many people are missing after a genocide? The repercussions are virtually endless.
I say all this because there are serious consequences to being rigid instead of embracing growth. The rigidity of conservatism insists that we should all go back to a simpler time, or “make America great again.” The rigidity of fascism demands total conformity. The rigidity of bigotry goes hand in hand with fascism. By this thought process, anyone who doesn’t fit into specific boxes deserves elimination. If you’re not white, cis, het, rich, able-bodied, etc., you will face violent persecution.
In retrospect, that story of the girl being shot because she revered the bible seems ridiculous. Who told that story, if she didn’t survive to tell the tale? It’s like that time Jesus was praying alone and someone who wasn’t there wrote down what he said. Science and logic allows me to question these narratives. Christianity demands fearful belief. It says everyone outside of Christians is a villain, trying to convince you to stop believing. It says anyone who disagrees doesn’t know the truth. It weaponizes this narrative and does significant harm.
When I say I was taught to be afraid of growth, I mean I couldn’t even identify what I was taught in those terms. In hindsight, I realize I could not adopt new ideas of how life is. I thought I had the ultimate truth, and I had to be wary of anyone who might try to take it away from me. Now I know this was harmful bigotry. As a child, I was a target of this group, too. My young mind was more malleable and willing to accept these ideas. To this day, the group of people that is most vulnerable to the indoctrination of Christianity is children. That is by design. Christianity is harmful because it entraps the mind, and makes people into unquestioning weapons of war against minorities.
Growth is a virtue that I live by now. I am willing to grow and change and update my perspective when I learn new information. I am learning and growing all the time. I am not the person I was, and that’s a good thing. When I realize I was wrong about something, I can admit it, even if I learned I was wrong just a moment ago. That’s how growth works.
