Typically a dumb person, used as a insult like “idiot”
Oh ok so what’s an evangelist
People who think that is a “church”
Isn’t that a football stadium?
No that’s Joel Osteen’s “church”
…I don’t buy it. Not a single icon or stained glass window in the place.
If you hate the designs of protestant mega churches, you’re REALLY gonna hate their idea of communion
….okay so I can resign myself to the stadium church. It’s not my god to start with so whatever.
But I can HEAR MY GRANDFATHER BEING UPSET IN HIS AFTERLIFE ABOUT THAT COMMUNION.
What the fuck is with the American syncretic folk Xtianity. What is wrong with these people.
*scrubs face* This is the tail end of a process that started in the late 80s/early 90s.
First, there was the dismantling of any reliable information on what defined a cult. You can thank Scientology for that part; they bought up or sued into nonexistence support networks designed to tell people when they were getting involved with a cult and not a legitimate expression of religious faith. I think I’d stopped seeing reliable sources on the ‘net by about 1995 or so. Those support networks had existed since…the fifties or sixties, I think, because one of the side effects of all those free love hippie communes and what not was that every charsimatic psychopath out there had a fair chance at acquiring a following too.
So that was the first step. The second was slower. Because the psychopaths who’d worked out that religion is a great way to gain followers, gain funds, and get away with just about anything – first witness, Scientology, second witness, televangelists.
The second step was entrepreneurial psychopaths finding (largely rural) churches and slowly taking them over, making them “nondenomenational” or “assemblies of god”. (If you think I’m whaling on AoG here, go look them up – they are basically a franchise operation where individual ministers can do more or less what they like with minimal oversight.) This is important. Denominations have structures. They have rules. Individual ministers/preachers/etc can be held to account by people higher up the ladder. If there is no oversight, there is no responsibility.
There are also no taxes. Religious institution, remember? This is why this kind of operation looks so tantalizing to a particular type of psychopath. All the religious authority of a minister, freedom from taxes, and no one to hold you accountable but God, who never calls the cops on anybody.
These nondenominational/AoG churches have been slowly spreading/increasing across the rural US for decades. They spread because operational costs rise and traditional denominations pull out, and sometimes they spread because a charismatic psychopath in the area realizes he can totally sway the parishoners better than the local minister can, and drives that minister out. In a lot of rural areas the church is and has always been the center of community life, and not going to church (and the same church as the important people in town) can get you in trouble. So taking over the local church is taking on a lot of local authority.
This has been going on long enough now that entire generations of people have grown up with a local cult leader in charge of their area, and it is normal, and there is nothing anymore to tell them it isn’t. On the contrary, it’s now reinforced, as these are the churches that send the GOP funds and keep them in power, and the rhetoric of the local minister is now echoed on Fox News. You want to know why the red states are so red? It’s a lot to do with these churches. You want to know why “pro-life” and “anti-gay” are so much the heart of these supposedly christian churches? Because they’re cults, and one of the defining characteristics of a cult is defining the out-groups, and vilification of the out-groups. Another is absolute control over the sex lives of cult members. The pro-life movement, as many have noted, isn’t ‘pro life’ at all – it’s anti-woman. It’s about keeping women under control. That’s not an accident.
Televangelists are broader reach but not particularly different in scope. Their goal is money rather than control – con men rather than cult leaders. However, their roles are complementary enough that you wind up with a lot of the same rhetoric. This isnt’ about reaching people or helping people. This is about making money and accruing power, and stadium sized megachurches and prepackaged minicommunions are just one facet of the whole.
This doesn’t really cover the pockets of fiercely-defended cult that actually pre-existed all this, as those do operate somewhat differently, but this is still… a really, really good summation of what the fuck even happened and how we got to the modern mega-church/televangelist phenomenons in the US.
It should come as no surprise that the shift* in the Republican party towards the modern iteration of the GOP and all its awful batshittery, identifiably got started in the 80s and progressed through the 90s simmering away towards a slow boil. Eventually it got super-heated; in the late 2000s and 2010s, the pot flash-boiled over in response to being inexorably and undeniably disturbed on a number of fronts.
*Look, Goldwater-style Republicans were no saints and I’m definitely not here to paint them as folk-heroes or whatever, but there WAS an identifiable shift – one that Barry Goldwater himself identified and was genuinely concerned about its implications for functional government, which should tell you everything really. If you want to say it was a shift only in magnitude, that pre-existing ugly currents got amplified and given center stage, I don’t disagree; but, sometimes a shift in magnitude is sufficient that it constitutes a shift in kind as well. But honestly it doesn’t matter how, precisely, we characterise the shift: it still was a shift.
Zynn's Exodus 