Much of my experience of befriending fundamentalists in college could best be described as gaslighting. I had to prove my ritual purity by hating the right people to get on a team I never asked to join. Something about fundamentalism itself encourages this view of relationships.
Gaslighting for Jesus – or How to Make Friends and Manipulate People
Going away to college, I was afraid I wouldn’t make any friends. It’s a common fear, but one that gripped me for about a day. That first week, I made connections with friends I still joke with on Facebook. But it also exposed me to something I didn’t expect: Christian fundamentalism.
While I was simply trying to make new friends, others were trying to win hearts for Jesus.
Some of these new “friends” weren’t so friendly to everybody. They were insulting the sexuality of one of my other new friends who wasn’t out yet. They wanted me to join in their gossip. And when I wouldn’t, they tried to get me to shun him.
They argued with me relentlessly and tried to force me to account for the clobber passages in the Bible. They chased me in the cafeteria and the computer lab and made our friendship dependent on hating gay people.
In other words, they were getting into my head.
I grew up Episcopalian, so no sword drills in youth group and reading the Bible straight through is not something I was doing on my own. But I looked up these seven passages anyway. [Point 1]
To me, none of these passages felt all that clear. I read the context and found them weird—like there are other things going on here beyond human sexuality. Questions of faithfulness, deceit, forcefulness, and intention. It felt like these other things were the source of the condemnation in the text, not so much the sex. [Point 2]
But nagging at me, too, was the explicit condemnations themselves. These seemed hard to explain. I felt like I couldn’t justify them or explain them away. [Point 3]
So I did the only thing that made sense to me. I called my priest. Who is also my Dad. I shared with him my frustrations and fears — what I could grasp and what I couldn’t. And he helped me include the historical context into my analysis. [Point 4]
The most important thing he shared with me was that my intuition was onto something. I could see a bit of the both/and that was always there. But more importantly, it has a much bigger spiritual framework than sex.
Bigger Than Sex
This small handful of passages in thousands of chapters is a speck in the cosmos of Christianity. And to minimize the voice even more, these passages aren’t even specifically about homosexuality or gender expression.
So, if we’re actually looking at the Bible with eyes of faith and love and with an honest heart, we can see this “proof” of condemnation as smoke and mirrors. We’ve got the shape of creation, rape, the holiness code, and cult prostitutes as the big proof from the Hebrew Scripture! And from the Greek Scripture? Paul.
That’s it.
This giant book with all of its commission to love and order society to protect the dignity of every human being and it says virtually nothing about condemning LGBTQ persons—and the few places in which it might, it condemns people for abusive, exploitative, or cultic relationships, not gay sex itself. [Point 5]
I didn’t realize all this while I was on the phone. It took years for me to actually put it all together and recognize the social dynamic I was in.
My Dad listened and responded to my questions. He shared context I didn’t have and was concerned for me. And part of that concern was about these young men and women trying to “save souls.” I didn’t know yet that they were part of Campus Crusade for Christ.
When I got off the phone, I did get a glimpse of this bigger picture as it was starting to reveal itself.
I couldn’t see they were gaslighting me.
This took a long time. Years. I’ve only just now come to realize what was happening.
If this were an honest debate, we would have each given each other our best arguments and then gone off to study the issue some more. And if we wanted to be really good at it, we’d read up on the other side to see how it all works.
They never intended an honest debate. They wanted converts.
And naively, in Point 1, I let them. I let them get into my head.
This makes a certain sense, of course. They wanted to help me see it their way and they came prepared.
The problem is that they weren’t going to be honest, consistent, or share the same hospitality in conversation or community that I do. They weren’t going to reconsider their positions or research my arguments. I gave them more respect than they would give me.
And they knew they could exploit that.
They could overlook all the problems with Point 2 knowing that if I went through with looking up the passages, I’d land on Point 3. And depending on where I go next, they could overwrite my theological convictions and ostracize me from my friends.
Of course, there’s a way this sounds like a normal argument. If you ignore the context and will to manipulate me.
I chose my friends
The trouble with fundamentalist gaslighting is that it depends on breaking relationships for the sake of intellectual certainty. And what’s worse, I could see a catholic character in that. It is a tried and true way to build unity. Built through brute force and manipulation.
But it isn’t the only way. In fact, it isn’t even the easiest, most resourceful way.
The way I chose was to actually make friends. Good friends with people not like me. Friends who challenged me and friends who supported me. Friends who were like the Ethiopian eunuch on the wilderness road and friends like Philip who sat with him.
I chose to make friends who share the challenge of life in common. Friends who are decent to each other and respect our common dignity.
I didn’t have to give up some friends to make other friends. I made friends in every class and every department. From my dorm and from fraternity houses.
The only friends that didn’t remain my friends? Those crusaders. Go figure.