This is the fourteenth installment in The Sounds of Fundamentalism series. This is a series that I would like readers to help me with. If you know of a video clip that shows the crazy, cantankerous, or contradictory side of Evangelical Christianity, please send me an email with the name or link to the video. Please do not leave suggestions in the comment section. Let’s have some fun!
Today’s Sound of Fundamentalism is a clip taken from a sermon preached by an unnamed Independent Fundamentalist Baptist preacher. The kind of preaching displayed in this video is quite common in the South.
I’ll say somethin’. “Holy SHIT!!”
Man, he’s gonna wear out his vocal chords if he keeps up with that kind of performance every time he preaches. This is totally not the kind of sermon I ever experienced, either in Catholic churches growing up or in the Evangelical church I attended briefly here in Silicon Valley as a young adult. My idea of a sermon was a riff on some bible reading, explaining the meaning and importance of it. If I’d been exposed to much of what’s in that video, I would have become an atheist a lot quicker.
Normal is whatever you are raised in and around. Children raised in churches where this kind of preaching is the norm, they grow up, marry, have children of their own …all without experiencing any other belief system or practice. Same goes for everyone raised in families with a monocultural worldview. The only way people such as this change is if they are exposed to the wild, wooly, wonderful, dangerous world beyond the walls of their closed off corner of the world. Of course, the gatekeepers–priests, preachers,pastors–do everything in their power to keep this from happening. Homeschooling, private schools…what better place to keep children “safe” from the influences of the so called world.
I don’t know what’s in that red Solo cup he’s drinkin from, but I gotta get me some of that!!
Ah, yes. I remember that kind of preaching.