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Comment by spamizbad | Hacker News Reader

Lots of people mocking the “God commanded me to do X” but if you’re familiar with evangelical Christian culture, this line gets used to justify all sorts of behavior and life decisions that might go against what one would traditionally expect a devout Christian to avoid. Obviously fraud and financial crimes are an extreme version of this, but it’s a line I’ve heard to justify all sorts of legal albeit self-destructive behavior.

“I know I should be saving money for a house but god spoke to me and I spent the downpayment on <fancy car that’ll get repo’d in a year>”

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>... but if you're familiar with evangelical Christian culture, this line gets used to justify all sorts of behavior and life decisions that might go against what one would traditionally expect a devour Christian to avoid.

Religion being used that way isn't limited to evangelicals nor Christianity. In fact, it's basically the reason people are mocking the phrase.

I'd rather say that such conduct is mostly confined to evangelicals. Mainstream Christianity teaches that prophecy ceased with Maleachi, and form then onwards we have only the traditions of the Church to go by. That would include a sober ("chaste") lifestyle.

Literally every Christian denomination believes in communication from God, whether that counts as "prophecy" or not.

Well, yes, Marian apparitions are a thing, but the Virgin isn't going to tell anyone to go out and buy a Porsche.

The way this understanding is generally formulated is that "public revelation ended with the death of the last Apostle", but I have not actually encountered this as a formally defined teaching or doctrine.

Cessationism.

It's been a big part of the modernistic bent of the dominant Calvinistic protestant denominations. It was also drove the focus on literacy and certainly influenced the trend towards academic and textual rigor.

Widely abandoned in the U.S. only quite recently by low and high protestant calvanistic conservative groups alike.

Pentecostal and charismatic groups have been around obviously but weren't taken too seriously and were even warned against by dominant evangelicalism, but that has relatively recently changed in conservative Presbyterian circles and influential groups in baptist circles like Sovereign Grace Churches (though they aren't baptist, they've become heavily culturally entwined via southern seminary and other places).

This has basically reintroduced miracles and promoted an embrace of magical thinking in laity's daily life that was long absent from those bookish, stuffy, severe, and practical protestants.

No, cessationism is about charismatic gifts, but the GP mentioned "prophecy" and I'm referring to "public revelation" so now we've got a thread with three different concepts being bandied about and debated as if they're central to a single controversy.

Prophecy is explicitly one of the charismatic gifts.

This actually depends on your denomination quite a bit. What you're outlining is a fairly conservative approach. There's a decent sized amount of "charismatic" Christians who firmly believe in prophecy here and now. What qualifies as prophecy, and how to handle it can differ quite a bit from congregation to congregation.

Is charismatic christianity not entirely under the evangelical umbrella?

Those are evangelicals. It goes back to the problem of Protestantism’s sola scriptura philosophy, rejecting 1500 years of theological inquiry and study - something that didn’t happen with Orthodoxy or Catholicism.

There are non Protestant charismatics.

I would say you are probably simplifying this a lot. It's extremely standard to believe God will lead you to, call you to, arrange for you to, etc. move in a given direction. (Pastors, at least in protestant denominations I am familiar with, are "called" to their new jobs, in church parlance, and are "led" to seek new roles.)

I would say most people do not expect God to set a bush ablaze and speak verbally to them, but make it obvious they should do this or that thing.

Of course, one would hope that a pastor would realize feeling called to scam money from his congregation to renovate his house and buy a car to come from Satan, not God. But temptation is strong. :P

One of the cessationists criticisms of prohecy was that it leads to man/self aggrandizing and away from written truthes. It's a positioned that is a poisoned well that naturally creates scammy behavior and fosters a spiritual hierarchy and gnostic heresies.

That's why many conservative evangelicals did mock and accuse charismatic tv preachers of being grifters, unrepresentive and false teachers. Though that public tension and conflict seems to be abandoned for the sake of political unity nowadays.

I've known calvinistic missionaries (all dead now) from these groups, they speak of being burdened, and "feeling" called, but they're clear that a personal burden is not a revelation or prophecy, it's just a personal conviction from the text combined with circumstances and an affinity of where to go, not the voice of god. No different than a person feeling convicted to become vegetarian because of something they read. They cited some passages from paul about going where "he choose" (I've no interest in looking that passage up at this point) and the use of casting of lots to show it's internally driven conviction and pragmatism and not a revelatory special calling. Being explicit that anyone hearing the voice of God probably needed medical help, personal prophecy wasn't a source of inspiration and truth but were warned against.

You're right. I grew up in an independent evangelical church so I've been attuned to all this since I got out in my teens. To emphasize - American Evangelical Christianity is especially insidious about this on multiple levels. In contrast to Mainline Protestantism, the entire movement is based on two particularly pernicious things that map to cultlike methods.

They are taught to blindly follow and never question authority. The pastor is the "shepherd" of the "flock" and they openly talk about it in terms echoing the way that the Disciples followed Jesus. And there's a reason you hear about what seem to be so many nasty stories of evangelical religious leaders abusing their power than mainline ones. And there's a reason authoritarian politics are so closely identifiable with evangelism in America.

Second, they work HARD TO create an in-group and out-group. There are the "saved" and everyone else. If you're "unsaved" and attend the church, the pressure is INTENSE to commit. RELENTLESS. And once you're in, you're on the inside of an "us against the world" mentality. I'll give an example. You know the current "War On Christmas?" People walking around like NPC's saying "I don't care, I'm going to say Merry Christmas - since when did that become a crime, none of this 'Happy Holidays' stuff!"

I remember being inside the movement in the eighties, and the thing they were completely up in arms about then was that businesses were co-opting Jesus's name by using "Christmas" to sell stuff. So the move to "Happy Holidays" by corporate America wasn't just an inclusive, religiously-neutral way to put it. I distinctly remember listening to christian radio at the time and the conversation being about pressure campaigns to get "Merry Christmas" out of businesses. I'm sure businesses were happy to oblige to stop the PR onslaught. It was the "War on Christmas" of its day. And twenty years later when it fits their agenda to creating division between believers and non-believers? The entire thing reversed directions.

It's been used to justify all sorts of child abuse, also. Going back to Abraham's abuse of his son Isaac and Lot and his Daughters.

Christianity isn't the only religion abused by flawed people to do bad things. Its more of a reflection of the people involved and not the religion. It's sad.

Modern american evangelical christianity suffers from a particular moral rot that isn't unique to it but is also not common to other branches of the faith. Specifically, there's a firm conviction that once you're saved you remain saved, and you can find lots of people who behave as if as a result, nothing they do really matters. They can be selfish, they can be rude, they can be cruel, they can be unfaithful, and it's all fine in the end because they're still safe. They'll tell you of course that everyone should do their best, and they might even tell you that they're doing their best, but the basic tenets of their specific flavor of faith are essentially that Nothing Really Matters. The most extreme evangelical/nondenominational Christians take this especially far like the pastor in the article, and I feel bad for people of faith who have to share the same label with them.

(for context, I worked in evangelical christian ministry for multiple years when I was younger)

Sadly, I agree. The "always saved" and "faith without fear" motto's give most the idea that humility doesn't matter anymore. Pastor's fill them up with their being special and elect, which is in the heavenly realm, not here on earth. The concept of servant-believers, for most, isn't even on their radar.

2015 was a sort of tipping point, IMO, that has caused a sort of paradigm shift in Christianity. (sorry, a little vague, but I'm still trying to understand all the changes.) My hope is that all Christianity will go back to basic tenets of faith, biblically taught.

> biblically taught

And there’s the key. If only people would read the Bible. If they would read even just Philippians 3:12 or Hebrews 10:26 or any of a number of other passages, they would see at once what heresy “once saved, always saved” is.

But no, Christianity is too often just a club. Most people have no actual interest in the Bible. God has ever worked with minorities and remnants. Christianity strongly Bible-based will always be small by comparison.

I rather like the way Dickens framed it in A Christmas Carol:

> “There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us, and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”

People we're talking about sending missionaries into the church in the late 90s for this reason, people railed against this rise of the influence of para-church organizations and multi-denominational initiatives.

But the people who wanted to keep the definition of the american church a "small c" lost pretty thoroughly to the political action clubs.

The SBC boycotts/cancelation of Disney in 1997 and the memetic cancelation of General Mills cereal was all outworkings from Jerry Falwells take over of american christian expression using Francis Schaeffers films to provide emotional impact and introduce new political reasoning and adopt what was previously "the roman catholic" issue of abortion as a primary political, religious and social wedge issue. That was the core "ratchet" issue.

With Lamar Alexander, Alan Keyes and a few others politicians campaigning with extremely heavy religious strategies in republican primaries in 96 you see a turning point and culmination of the political work of Falwell and others through the 80s. It showed that there was effectively no pushback left among evangelicals to messaging that conflated Republican & Christian, the assimilation was sufficiently complete.

Idk, there's almost an infinite amount of causes and drivers but there were a lot of bad turning points along the way.

In what feels like a past life I actually went to a influential seminary in the early 00s, the few older professors we're academic and rigorous, the rest of the younger professors and the students themselves we're... bad, just really awful people with odd pathological relationships and furtive self serving behaviors, the amount of extremely insular "christian celebrity" worship was shocking to me at that age.

Your viewpoint is very American and very Protestant. A lot of these things you call changes I saw as a regular feature in the evangelical south in the early 00s.

Going to “basic tenets” and doubling down on sola scriptura is just fundamentalism and is why evangelicals and the like are the way that they are. And they’re (relatively) modern inventions!

I call it moral rot specifically because I don't think it's a problem you can solve purely through biblical teaching or faith doctrine alone - you need to confront the mindset and the behavior, because ultimately a person's relationship with the god of their choice is a personal thing and not something we can exert control over. No matter how robust your biblical teaching is a person can still decide "it's between me and God, though" and choose to live in a morally flawed way because the bible gives them enough latitude to interpret it in a supportive way, as many people do.

And in this context I think confronting the mindset is a valuable thing to do even if you are speaking with an atheist. Essentially, questions like:

* If everyone adopted your mindset, what kind of world would we live in?

* Do you think your friends and family would be proud of you if they knew you were acting this way?

* Would you feel good if you knew all your friends and family were acting like you?

* Are you acting in a way you might regret later in life?

Given my experiences with Catholics, I have a hard time believing it isn’t just as common across Christianity as a whole, at least in the US. And in that sense I would sooner say it is a failing of teaching and faith in The Lord, that atheist (and thus hedonistic) thoughts are more pervasive and people believe they can “trick the system” in the future.

The problem is a world view based on appeals to authority and nothing claimed about said authority can be proven or disproven.

I’m an atheist and frequent places where men have anonymous gay sex and the majority of the men are “devout” Christians for me it’s a kink, I don’t feel a lot of guilt, and neither do they, lies are their choice and it shows.

> I don’t feel a lot of guilt, and neither do they

I can tell you haven't tried to date such guys. They may not feel enough guilt to keep them from engaging in casual sex, but many of them absolutely feel guilt. Indeed, sometimes it's a complex of immovable guilt and shame, in the style of classic Freud, with the entire panoply of coping mechanisms deployed to deal with the dissonance (projection, affect isolation, displacement, dissociation, reaction formation, etc.)

This is how we incubate various diseases. Monkey pox being a good example (but it’s origin story doesn’t get mentioned because it goes against the current zeitgeist).

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