I’m not surprised. Why should I be surprised? Religion does this all the time. I’m just mystified at how people let themselves be taken advantage of.
So, the Ark Park lobbied for all these tax breaks on the promise that it was going to be an economic boon to the region. They lied, of course. Right now they’re in the interesting position of claiming that attendance exceeds expectations (although the gigantic empty parking lot says otherwise) but none of the economic benefits have materialized, for anyone other than Answers in Genesis, that is.
“It’s been a great thing but it’s not brought us any money,” said Grant County Judge-Executive Steve Wood during a break from a budget meeting.
The county is teetering on bankruptcy and is trying to balance the budget. Wood said they were to the point where jobs may have to be cut. He will propose a 2% payroll tax at next week’s fiscal court meeting. He blames prior fiscal courts for the budget crisis, not the Ark. But he said the Ark had not lived up to its promise.
“I was one of those believers that once the Ark was here everything was going to come in. But it’s not done it. It’s not done it. I think the Ark’s done well and I’m glad for them on that. But it’s not done us good at all.”
It’s a “great thing” and it’s “done well”, but it had not lived up to its promise. I suspect that the Ark Park was the biggest development in the entire county, and it’s done nothing for prosperity. All that investment disappeared into a black hole of special exemptions and religious excuses, and now the county is on the edge of bankruptcy, but Wood is still making excuses for it.
If you think that’s bad, though, you should read about this church in North Carolina. Standard practice there was to beat people savagely for even minor transgressions. Smile at the wrong time, and wham, you were smashed to the ground. Teenagers were constantly howled at and abused for lustful thoughts and masturbation.
The ex-members said the violence was ever-present: Minors were taken from their parents and placed in ministers’ homes, where they were beaten and blasted and sometimes completely cut off from their families for up to a decade. Some male congregants were separated from their families and other followers for up to a year and subjected to the same brutal treatment.
Teachers in the church’s K-12 school encouraged students to beat their classmates for daydreaming, smiling and other behavior that leaders said proved they were possessed by devils.
“It wasn’t enough to yell and scream at the devils. You literally had to beat the devils out of people,” said Rick Cooper, 61, a US Navy veteran who spent more than 20 years as a congregant and raised nine children in the church.
Wait. You stayed in this vile ‘church’ for twenty years, and you sent nine children to be tortured in this hell hole?
“We were warned to keep the abuse to ourselves. If we didn’t, we knew we would be targeted. … You lived in total fear,” said Liam Guy, 29, an accountant who fled in 2015 after nearly 25 years in the church.
It took twenty-five years to figure this out? Religion is a hell of a drug.
You won’t be surprised to learn that, like the Catholic church, the place is a haven for sexual abuse cases, too.
There’s something flawed in human psychology that allows grifters to flourish in the guise of the godly. You’d think people would wake up at some point and realize that this stuff is dangerous.
It goes back much further than that. People were complaining about exactly the same things in the Twelfth Century. To pick just two examples, the Gospel According to Mark(s of Silver), a Goliardic poem written in a tradition of clerical satire and rebellion, sends up the church’s hypocritical wealth and luxury in the face of its pious claims to be helping the poor. Meanwhile Guibert of Nogent’s Monodiae (autobiography) sets out quite candidly how awful he thinks the childhood beatings he received from his teachers were, and how pointless and counter-productive they had been.
Eight hundred years on and it seems little has changed in some reaches of the religious establishment.
If he’s 29 now, he was 27 in 2015 — which means that his 25 years in the church started when he was 2.
It’s actually kind of surprising that someone who was terrorized and controlled from that early of an age could even learn to think that not being in the church was even an option.
Yeah. Not to mention having few resources to make a break in some cares — this fellow spent most of his time in this church as a child or a student. He might only have been able to leave and not be on the streets after 20-some years.
Yeah, why don’t people just leave their abusers? [rolls eyes]
I thought, when I was a kid, that all kids went through that, that all good parents beat their kids when it was necessary. Mom said that was daily. Rebellion didn’t achieve anything except more beatings. Mom used the kindling. Dad used a heavy strap.
I was lucky; no broken bones, no teeth knocked out. But it set me up for accepting an abusive marriage, which did include the broken bones and lost teeth.
And it wasn’t until my oldest kid was 4 that I realized that I shouldn’t be hitting him, either. Early training goes deep.
Ark Park prediction: they will be bailed out through the Trump administration. Monies from various religious organizations will be the surface source of funding, but these organizations in turn will get vouchers/ tax breaks, etc. to cover their donations.
Actually, that’s the point: what is it in our psychology that prevents people from leaving abusers at the first sign of abuse? It’s common and not at all surprising, but sometimes it’s these really routine responses that tell us a lot about what’s going in our heads, if we can get away from taking them for granted.
@PZ #7:
Because we all too often think that we’re the ones who must have done something wrong, else a person in a position of power and responsibility wouldn’t be hitting us.
It’s one small step from there to cowering in fear of an eternal torment in Hell.
@PZ – be careful, looks like you’re in danger of heading into the realms of evo-psych there…! :-)
In that guy’s case, I’m actually not surprised at all. Look at his age: 29. He’s been stuck in it since age 4.
He grew up thinking that awfulness is normal.
Oops, ninja’d.
I think the foundation for that is a combination of what Becca Stareyes and Susannah mentioned. We first think our situations are normal and we accept the bad things until we think we can change them. And if we’re started on this path early enough, we often don’t have the resources to make a change stick. Once we try and fail, it reinforces the idea that this is just something that needs to be accepted because it can’t be changed. Especially when abusers punish their victims for attempting to escape. Later escape attempts must weigh the cost of failure versus how much effort to put into the escape. From there it gets into who to blame. Abusers don’t want to blame themselves so they’ll blame something else, often the victim. As a victim you’re desperate to make some sense of the awful things that happen to you so you can easily latch onto any explanation that seems to fit.
I’m not a psychologist but this is the quick description of the styles of abuse that I’m aware of. It seems bizarre from the outside but I think people stay in abusive relationships precisely because they try and fail to leave them. They weigh the pain they’re in (which one can get used to) against the penalties for failure and then decide what to do. But it’s always moment to moment. Abuse doesn’t happen at the speed of an info dump.
But…but…but..ANGELS!! And Saints!!
And fluffy clouds of Heaven. And God is Love!!
Can’t you see IT’S ALL JUST SO WONDERFUL!!??!!
Of course, can’t make a Heaven omlette without (cracking a few skulls) breaking a few eggs
There should be more psych research on this topic.
One analysis suggests that abusive churches latch on to an aspect of human brains which is designed to allow babies and young children, who are often quite unable to survive on their own, to trust their parents. Honestly parents are not super trustworthy on average, but a baby who didn’t trust its parents would likely die.
It’s probably significant that the Christian Churches often refer to the “mother church” and it’s common to call God “our father”.
It’s probably significant that most religious groups, and *particularly* the really bad ones, put a huge emphasis on getting children “indoctrinated” while they’re young.
There are six “orientations” in Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, which was based on empirical studies (though the analysis of the data has been questioned):
Level 1 (Pre-Conventional)
1. Obedience and punishment orientation
(How can I avoid punishment?)
2. Self-interest orientation
(What’s in it for me?)
(Paying for a benefit)
Level 2 (Conventional)
3. Interpersonal accord and conformity
(Social norms)
(The good boy/girl attitude)
4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation
(Law and order morality)
Level 3 (Post-Conventional)
5. Social contract orientation
6. Universal ethical principles
(Principled conscience)
Kohlberg later added a stage “4.5” where law and order is respected but society is considered to have broken the rules.
Kohlberg theorized that the “orientations” or “stages” had to be traversed in order, but he’s wrong. I definitely jumped from stage 2 to stage 4 and only perceived the value of stage 3 later, but then I’m not neurotypical. Of course I was obsessed with ethical issues as a kid and reached stage 4.5 before becoming an adolescent, so I’m a complete weirdo.
Religions are very consistently trying to catch people before they reach stage 5. The nastiest religions are clearly trying to hold people back to stage 1 — though I suppose they would say that many people are stage 1 and that threatening them with hell is the only way to make them behave. I think we can all name a few which operate with stage 2 (Prosperity Gospel!) But most religons operate with people with stage 3 or 4, under which social conformity is viewed as an inherent good.
People with stage 4.5, 5, or 6 moral reasoning tend to get out of abusive situations as soon as it’s practical — as do people with stage 1 and 2 moral reasoning who figure out that leaving will avoid punishment and don’t believe in threats of punishment in an afterlife. The thing is that it often *isn’t* practical to get out, particularly for children.
But if you’re in a stage 3 or 4 moral development, you are very likely to have tied your definitions of good and bad to the attitude of the abusive organization. So that’s where the religions target.
I’m making some hypotheses here but I think they shouldn’t be terribly controversial. I’m not sure how you’d test ’em though. Applying Kohlberg moral reasoning tests to various cult members and ex-cult members, I suppose, with non-cult members as controls… maybe.
Now, I know there are all kinds of problems with Kohlberg’s theory in general Most notably that people behave inconsistently in which stage of moral reasoning they appear to be in, depending on the problem set. In addition, nearly all reasoning is post-hoc rationalization for decisions already made (I’m sure you know how strong the empirical evidence of *this* is), so frankly any theory of moral reasoning won’t really apply to people’s instant, in-the-moment decisions.
However, when you’re looking at people who are staying in an abusive situation for literally *years*, they will have time to “think slow” (as Kahnemann puts it), and they will apply their conscious moral reasoning at some point. Which makes Kohlberg’s classification more useful for this situation, even if you don’t think the stages happen in order. And if these people are mostly thinking in stage 3 or 4 ways, it may keep sending them right back to the abuse.
How’s this for a first pass at answering PZ’s question? (Thank you Wikipedia for linking me to a hell of a lot of scientific research…)