shindotvwelcome to shindo's world

I feel like I’m often in the closet about being an ex-Christian. I don’t feel I have to hide this from my family or my friends. I think my family is actually quite relieved I don’t practice Christianity anymore. It freaked out my mother and I was mean to my brother at times. I regret that very much. And I regret getting messed up on Jesus in the first place.

I know a couple of people who are Christians and I don’t discuss my Christian history with them. My building manager, whom I get along with very well, is a devout Christian. She never proselytizes her tenants but she is vocal about things she believes and her involvment in her church. There is the professor I worked with at City College. He and his wife (who just graduated from the MFA program last year) are Evangelical Christians. I haven’t said anything about my “former life” because I don’t want to open up a whole can of worms. It’s easier to be seen as simply heathen than it is as an apostate.

A buddy of mine and his girlfriend had some discussions with the professor and his then fiancee a couple of years ago at a party. My friend’s girlfriend was raised Christian and went to Point Loma Nazarene for for undergraduate degree but she no longer practices Christianity. She’s more interested in Buddhism now. When she mentioned this to the professor’s fiancee, my friend told me she was very mean to his girlfriend. He told me that this woman made comments that Buddhism was a pagan belief and some kind of reproving comment about my friend’s girlfriend not practicing the faith she grew up with. I’ve never dealt with this from the professor or his wife but they may just tone it down for their colleages. Or they are not as severe Christians as they were a few years ago.

Every once in a while, I run into people I knew as a Christian. I tend to keep the conversation pretty banal, hoping they never bring up Jesus or what Church I’m going to now. When the question comes up, it’s just more comfortable to say I’m not going to church. I don’t feel like hearing “It’s not too late to come back to the Lord.”

Posting on the ex-Assembly BB has been interesting but “outing” oneself in an online medium is much different than “coming out” in real life. It has been interesting what kind of insecurity an ex-believer can evoke in some people, hence the really offensive posts from some die-hard Christians. From my perspective, I find it amazing people can leave the Assembly and remain unchanged in their beliefs and the way they treat others. The only thing for them that has changed is Brother George is wrong. Yeah, he was wrong but so were his cronies and everyone else under them that perpetuated or enabled the abuses within that “church.”

I wonder what is it about Orange and San Diego that cults and Christian fundamentalism flourish? It is scary to think the Assembly got started in Fullerton and then spread out through the entire nation and some cities in Canada. Even scarier was that it found its way to the UK, France, China, and Africa. Then there is Calvary Chapel, which also seems to have a fundamentalist influnce nationwide in a more mainstream sense. There’s some of these churches (and similar ones) in San Diego and they are always full of people. And then they produce bands like Switchfoot, which I wish would just go off the air radio-wise.

Several years ago, when I was losing my faith, it seems like every Christian I knew just got too damn nosy and they had something proselytizing to say. It made me wonder if I should move to Stockholm or Japan, anywhere where this type of mentality is not prevelant.

This is just a rant.

This is something I usually don’t share with my friends–I used to be in a cult. It’s much easier to share with people that I’m gay than it is to tell them I was in a cult. Religion is not a comfortable topic for a lot of people, especially when it is meant to proselytize. And I hated proselytizing when I was in this group, which was known as The Assembly. Like the Boston Church of Christ, this was a Christian fundamentalist based fringe group. They often recruited people from college campuses and this is how I got into it. I was a born-again Christian at the time (I was 21 then) and these people seemed really serious about their beliefs. Plus, my faith really messed me up about being gay and joining the Assembly really didn’t help things.

It was several years of Bible Studies, prayer meetings, Sunday worship meetings, and campus Bible studies along with various convocations and seminars in Fullerton. The central figure of the Assembly was a sixty-ish man named George Geftakys, whose secret adulteries would be the Assembly’s downfall. Though many of the members lived together in “brother’s homes” or “sister’s homes,” I never moved in with any of them.

I left the group early in 1997. I read a write-up about them in cult expert Ronald Enroth’s Churches That Abuse (his bias is very Christian) and decided to leave. I tried fitting in another church but I would soon lose my faith within a year and a half after leaving the Assembly. I also came to terms with being gay and I decided I didn’t want to be in a religion that would exclude me. Plus, I was fed up with a lot of things Christian, cultish or not.

The Assembly fell apart last year. “Brother George’s” adulteries became known and he was excommunicated from the group he founded. I heard about this from a member I would occasionally run into at the SDSU campus. It was news that simultaneously makes you gleeful and sad at the time. I felt like there was justice and that perhaps there was a God; however, I felt sorry for the people who were duped until the very end.

So this brings me to what I wanted to talk about. Several months ago, I found a BB for ex-members of this group. I joined, I posted, and I mentioned in passing that I was now an agnostic. Most of the people welcomed me even though a majority of the posters on the board were still hardcore fundamentalists. I would post things on various threads but very few of the posts would get responses. One person started a thread about Governor Schwartzenegger’s “girlie men” comment, the poster’s tone being very anti-gay. Several other people spoke up with similar comments and then two of the BB’s resident non-Christians spoke up against the derogatory posts. I decided to speak up as well, saying these posts bothered me, and then I came out several posts later. This, of course, invited some of these people to bait me into arguments or go on the offensive with attacking me or the other non-Christians in their posts. The discussion soon took a really stupid turn. Maybe I feel it’s stupid because I’ve heard these anti-gay arguments so many times before and these people have said nothing new. The positive thing is that I have developed correspondences with one of my non-Christian allies and someone else who is very open-minded.

I wonder what a “Survivors/Escapees” reunion would be like. I would imagine that the fundamentalists would take up most of the tables and there would be the corner for the agnostics, atheists, liberals, gays, etc. Hopefully us heathens would be able to get some food (I think we’d certainly be the ones with good drinks).

I envy my friends who will never know what it’s like to have gotten sucked into a system like that. I guess it makes for an interesting past but it took away a good part of my twenties that I will never get back. At least I’m not 50 and feeling I lost several decades due to this.