Courting Disaster and Emotionalism

I've been a bit dormant over the last few days, as I'm in the middle of a pretty wicked bout with strep throat, but a couple of things I've stumbled across in FB land have prompted me to write a blurb or two about them this morning.


I don't think there's any gray area where I stand on courtship. It's stupid on steroids, immature, and maybe THE single dumbest concept that's come out of the Christian homeschooling movement (in conjunction with the whole idea of "emotional purity").


Here is the courtship, dating, and emotional purity formula of one Christian homeschooling movement mom - not that it's really any different from that of 95% of Christian homeschoolers. It just serves as a good example of the craziness. To be fair, I don't think this lady's intent is to harm her children. I don't think ANY parent (or at least the majority) says, "I wanna screw up my kids bigtime!" Nonetheless, this woman and her husband are establishing a foundation through which they're well on their way to royally effing up their children - emotionally, mentally, spiritually. Sadly, her whole formula is based on a woeful misapplication of Matthew 5:27-28, where Jesus was trying to make a point about humanity in contrast to "biblical law", not trying to replace old biblical law with new, more hardline biblical law. The point of the passage is that ALL of us are human and imperfect. It isn't and wasn't a charge to fight in total futility (because it would absolutely be a futile fight) against our own humanity. That would make Jesus and all Jesus represents more than a little irrelevant. These parents are obviously religious addicts and imbiblers, and as such, a religious threat to the overall well-being of their children. Intent has nothing to do with the eventual outcome.


I can't help but think of just how many of you reading this still carry the baggage and scars of fighting in futility against your own humanity for years, striving to win some kind of favor from God through "purity and holiness" and perfection.

At one point she says, "Courtship means different things to different people", which isn't really true at all. They all look pretty much the same. Most of the article is really spiritually, emotionally, and socially bassackward, but let's look at a couple of her lists...Under the heading "Some ideas before courtship"...

We encourage our children to be friends with people of both genders. [Maybe they do. I don't know.]

From the beginning, we socialize as a family, building friendships and relationships with people of all ages and genders. ["Socialize as a family" is troubling language, given that I know what it really means within this paradigm: Worship of the family unit.]

From the beginning we encourage deeper friendships and relationships with those who will encourage us and our children toward godliness and righteousness and we caution about the damage that poor relationships will cause. (Proverbs 13:20 and 27:17) [More Proverbs worship and religious addiction..."We're crack addicts so we only socialize with dealers at crack houses."]

We discourage ‘particular’ friendship with anyone of the opposite gender. [Why? Fearful that you can't control it?]

We exhort our daughters to guard their hearts. This will  require careful discipline and diligence. [As I light myself on fire.]

We remind our girls of the potential deceitfulness of the human heart and that we want what is best for them. We explain that there may come a time when it seems like we do not want their best, but we want them to trust us through that. [Dear God please help this woman's children.]

We protect our girls by providing supervision. [Supervision=indoctrination, control, needless guilt, and manipulation.]

Unless both the boy and girl are ready for marriage emotionally, physically and financially, it’s not time to even think about courtship, dating, marriage or a ‘particular’ friendship. [Just emotionally and practically naive on a plethora of levels.]

Our girls (and boys) know that everything is forgivable and that we will love them no matter what. [Anyone else smell the BS? I know this woman thinks this is true of her and her husband, but I know what the smart money says will actually happen when the integrity of her statement gets measured someday. Her children will be faced with the prospect of conforming or being shunned. That's all there is to that.]

And then, under the heading "Some courting ideas"...

We hope and pray that both sets of parents will be involved in the process. [Parents shouldn't be meddlers. Even the bible agrees that meddlers are bad. Very bad, in fact.]

We hope that the young man would first approach Mark for permission to pursue a relationship with our daughter. [Why? Your husband doesn't own your daughter, and this isn't Sumerian culture of 4000 years ago.]

In order to enter into this relationship, we would have to believe that it is likely that this man would be a suitable husband for our daughter. [It really isn't any of your business. Stop meddling.]

The girl has the final say-so. If she says, ‘no’ then the answer is ‘no’! [Should I laugh or cry at the level of this BS? Being that she'll be emotionally punished at best, and shunned at worst, if she goes against her parents "counsel", what answer would their daughter give?]

The ‘couple’ should know each other well before entering into this type of relationship because we believe that this is the point that the heart-guarding begins to be let down. [The blind leading the blind, trying to make blind clones. People who have no understanding of human emotion shouldn't build fences around human emotion.]

These parents aren't "protecting their children". They're protecting the indoctrination of their children, trying to create SuperChristian clones, rendering the Holy Spirit useless in trying to shape and control the Christianity of their children in a world where genuine critical thought is the enemy. Their children, like all children in the Christian homeschooling movement, will suffer for it. Their family is, in and of itself, a religious, mind-control cult.


You can't, and shouldn't, answer parents like this with more bible - unless you'd offer more crack to a crack addict. They don't need more of the drug, or a better application of the drug. The drug needs to be cut off, the mind and body needs to detox, and then they can start over.


Her children have NO chance at a healthy, normal emotional life without massive amounts of baggage. They'll have to go through some severe, maybe even brutal, turbulence to get anywhere near anything that could be considered normal or healthy. I pity them. The sooner they "rebel", the better, because maybe then they can begin to detoxify and heal at an earlier age.


Not much more I can say about it.




Earlier this week, a FB friend shared this...

The level of emotionalism and ignorance (as a by-product of emotionalism) in that is extreme. It's a bigoted, misleading, and intellectually dishonest statement in a number of ways. Let's look at a few of those ways...


99.999% of Muslims would never even consider flying a plane into a building. The vast majority have NO desire to harm another individual. Only a handful of radical, fundamentalist Muslims have ever flown planes into buildings - roughly the same number as the number of radical, fundamentalist Christians who've bombed government buildings, abortion clinics, and anything else they've deemed as "ungodly" over the last couple of decades.


The guy who posted it is a fairly new convert to Christianity. About a decade ago, he was touring as a sideman, most likely boozing and smoking a lot of weed, with one of the more popular rock bands in the world. I think his conversion to Christianity has happened in the last couple of years, and with it, there's almost an emotionalistic blowback against anything viewed as "unChristian", an emotionalistic attachment to all things conservative Republican, and a lot of what most rational people would view as "hate" toward, and fear of, anything outside of the newly adopted paradigm. Almost mentally militant.


This kind of emotionalism is fairly common to new converts of ALL faiths, and even to new converts to atheism. When something is new, we're generally more emotional and passionate about it, more irrationally protective of it. To me, it's a sign of a certain level of immaturity, because with time and maturity, although our core views may not change all that much, our ability to see beyond the surface of them - to view them in context, in 3D rather than 2D, becomes more pronounced and nuanced. I look at a guy like Kirk Cameron, for instance. To me, he's an example of someone who's never grown in his faith of choice. He's the same black and white guy he was back when he converted to Christianity and freaked out all of his Growing Pains castmates who loved him by becoming odd and irrational. He even "witnesses" like a new convert...no real context, everything in black and white. It's sad to see that kind of personal stagnation in any dynamic.

People desperately need to grow past emotionalism. While still in the infancy stages of whatever you've converted to, the emotionalism aspect makes you fertile ground to be blown in any emotional or doctrinal/theological direction. It's not very stable, and that's when people can become dangerous because of their beliefs.