This is the one hundred and thirteenth 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 of a young girl preaching at a charismatic revival meeting. This video was posted by evangelist Rodney Howard-Browne.
That is horrible. A cute child mimicking an adult and being adulated.
For me that amounts to child abuse.
I’m having to skip these child preacher videos for my own sanity. They make me weep for the children.
Nevermind the rain little preacher girl… What I hear you really feeling is,
The abuse won’t stop until you succumb to it…
I know what you have endured and that it never ends. I know that the best survival is survival through mimicking, through doing what they do better than they do it. But finally, after all of it, there is the lie you must choose to join in, the belief in the imaginary father who is more real and better than your own father and mother. You have to say you are bad and believe that you are wrong and helpless. And you are helpless unless you can say the right things, dance the right dance and believe the right belief. I weep for you, child. You never deserved to face this kind of harm. I try not to hope but I do for the children, that they will have the strength to live through what Christians do to them, to have enough left after to heal and to live.
“I know that the best survival is survival through mimicking, through doing what they do better than they do it.”
Hey Brian,
I always resented it when people said to me: you just believe because your parents do. I had chosen God myself and I had chosen to be baptized myself. But really, when I started looking into it, they were right. Like you say: conforming was the safest route. So that’s what I did. And when I finally felt safe enough to look outside the box, I began to see things differently and a part of me wondered if a sliver of those feelings had been there all along but had just been far too afraid to come out and show themselves.
Believing in God out of fear of hell, which is what I did, is like paying protection money to the mob. You apease the people who will otherwise hurt you, and no-one could ever win from an actual God, right? So you do what you’re told. I still appear much more conformistic than I really am. I have strong opinions but I often keep them inside (in real life, not so much online). I’m not convinced yet that if I really am myself I’ll be safe and accepted. It’s a pretty nasty thing to be dealing with. I still have to get used to the idea that my ideas might be worthwile and that I am accepted for myself and not just as an obedient believer, doing everything precisely right.
(To be fair, there are several things in my past that have lead to this, religion being one of them, not the only one)
The same girl preaching in another parody
Little girl speaking in tongues
The preacher Rodney Howard-Browne that uploaded the video “Be a Funnel” in his channel,
and actually appears there at 7:00 praising the little girl,
is so stupid that he doesn’t even realize that this is a parody.
And the people who comment there don’t seem to realize that, either.