Over the past thirteen years, I have received thousands of emails, social media messages, and blog comments from Evangelical Christians. Most of these interactions have been negative, argumentative, judgmental, mean-spirited, or hateful. Rare is the Evangelical who is kind, thoughtful, or self-aware.
One Evangelical group stands above all the rest: Independent Fundamentalist Baptists (IFB). I can count on one hand the interactions I have had with IFB adherents that I would describe as kind, thoughtful, and self-aware. Why are IFB Christians the nastiest of believers, going so far as threatening to murder me or harm my family? I came of age in the IFB church movement, attended an IFB collage, married an IFB preacher’s daughter, and pastored several IFB churches in the late 1970s and 1980s. While I was a hardcore Fundamentalist, I never treated people as IFB Christians have treated me since I left Christianity in 2008. What is it in my writing that brings the worst out of these people? Is it because I dare to talk out of school, sharing behind-the-scenes secrets? Is it because I am willing to be open and honest about my experiences in the IFB church movement? Is it because I dare to continue to shine a bright light on the movement, refusing, despite their threats, to go away?
Here’s what I know for sure: this kind of behavior is modeled to IFB Christians by their pastors and the evangelists who visit their churches. Thinking that such behavior is “normal” or even Christian, IFB Christians attack and attempt to neutralize or destroy anyone they see as a threat to their beliefs, churches, or pastors. It should come as no surprise, then, that many, perhaps most, IFB Christians voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 and oppose COVID vaccinations and masks. Some IFB Christians were front and center when insurrectionists stormed the capitol on January 6, 2021. Stormtroopers in the modern culture war, IFB Christians are violently against abortion, same-sex marriage, LGBTQ people, atheists, Democrats, and perceived liberalism. Many Evangelical groups are counter-cultural. IFB groups are, instead, anti-cultural. IFB preachers rail against the “world,” calling on church members to withdraw from society. Thus, such people see me as a “threat” to their way of life, someone who must be silenced.
Over the weekend, I received several emails from a IFB man who lives in the South named Tom. He has emailed numerous times before, using different names and email addresses. Typically, after he emails me, he blocks my email address so I can’t respond. Either that or he deletes his email address altogether. That’s right, he goes through the effort of establishing a new email address so he can send me an email or two and then he deletes his account.
What follows is a transcript of our latest interaction:
Tom
Faggotry is disgusting and demonic!
Satan will have his way with anyone that supports this sickness
I thought Bruce passed away?
Bruce
Tom,
You sound like a man who secretly wants to have anal sex with a man. Sorry, I’m not available; not that I would ever fuck an asshole like you.
I am very much alive. Your prayers have failed yet again.
Bruce
Carolyn
Bigotry is an illness worse than faggotry!! There is no Satan, so the only one around here with a sickness is you.
Bruce’s social media persona died a few months ago, but his real self is still hanging on, at least today.
Carolyn Patrick, editor for Bruce Gerencser
Tom
You had best watch who you are calling an asshole buddy. 😡
No I pray for homos to be saved out of the demonic trap they are in.
And you homo supporting baby killer you will not have a nice time in eternity
www.chick.com THIS WAS YOUR LIFE. that’s a tract that represents your future
Tom
Apologies for being harsh.
The evangelists that you tear down love you and don’t want you or anyone else on the blog to go to hell.
Have a blessed day and merry Christmas
Vile, nasty, hateful, and then an apology and Merry Christmas wish? What gives? While such schizophrenic behavior seems bizarre to people outside of the IFB church movement, I assure you that it is quite normal. I spent most of my sixty-four years of life attending or pastoring Fundamentalist churches. I heard countless preachers (including myself) scream and rail against sin and the world, calling names, stomping on toes, and reducing church members to tears of repentance. Realizing how violent their words (and bodily machinations: pulpit-pounding, foot-stomping, pacing the platform, pointing fingers, waving arms/hands, coming down to where people are sitting, shouting, screaming, hollering, spitting) may seem to church members cowering in fear before them, IFB preachers remind congregants that they “love” them and only want God’s best for them. Much like a man beating the Hell out of his wife while telling her how much he loves her, these preachers week-after-week abuse their flocks. Tom is just doing what has been modeled to him by IFB preachers over the years (and he may be a preacher himself). We know parents who were abused as children tend to abuse their own children, so it should come as no surprise that IFB Christians abused by pastors and evangelists would do the same to people they come in contact with.
Is there any hope for people such as Tom? Maybe. Many of the readers of this blog are former IFB Christians. Some of us are former IFB pastors, evangelists, missionaries, deacons, and Christian school teachers. We changed, so change is possible. However, such change requires deconstructing and dismantling every aspect of our lives. For many of us, this process required years of intense therapy. Coming to terms with our IFB pasts is a painful, exhausting process. That process begins with doubt. If Tom has any doubt, he has likely tamped it down and put a lid on it so he doesn’t have to deal with it.
My “prayer” is that something will poke a small hole in Tom’s bubble, allowing reason and skepticism to seep in. While Tom is most certainly a Christian Asshole®, I genuinely hope truth can somehow reach his shuttered, hardened mind. No matter how personal the attacks of the Toms of the world become for me, I must always remember that I was once like them. If I can escape, anyone can.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Tom worships a God who torments and kills innocent people for the sins of others because he “loves” them. No wonder he behaves as he does.
Bruce, even as an IFB pastor I have a hard time imagining you being just like Tom.
Theologically, but not personality-wise, character-wise. My sermons could be brutal — just preaching “God’s” word, I told people — but outside of the pulpit I was a thoughtful, kind, decent person. Quite schizophrenic. 😢😢 I NEVER would have sent an email/snail mail message like Tom sent me. Ugly stuff, to be sure.
Your kindness and decency are the most important things that shine through your writing. I imagine you were able to comfort many, many people back then as a pastor. Tom, on the other hand, seems bereft of those qualities. But the IFB movement has certainly produced a lot of assholes.
‘Tom’ seems like a complete coward. It’s typical of anonymous assholes to throw insults and threats around, because they lack the guts to make a reasoned argument, and are afraid to be held accountable.
Exactly, Ben. Exactly.
Is there any hope for Tom?
Not yet. He’s invested a lot in his current worldview, and as long as it give him the emotional battery-charge that he craves he’s going to hang onto it. Judging from his mood swings, first hateful spewing and then an apology, his emotions seem to play an inordinately large role in his life.
Tom needs a hobby that doesn’t involve attacking people he sees on the internet.
Oh, Tom IS from the South, and culturally, he’s acting normally, in that culture. You have the ” redneck culture” that the settlers brought with them, and the Fundy culture that came up with the ” redneck” version. I saw such things up in Northern California, when I lived there. They DO think differently. One reason I returned to Southern California. The cost of living was a lot cheaper up there, not so much nowadays though.
Yulya—You understand something many people don’t:: Even the “bluest” states, like California and New York (where I live) have their redneck/fundie colonies.
Some years back, a family friend moved to far northern California after her husband died. As I recall, she moved there mainly because that’s where her daughter was. Ironically, the daughter’s marriage–which brought her there–had broken up and she was alone. She got the house– in the woods, about an hour from Arcata–in the settlement. While not liberals (or, at least, not as liberal as I am these days), she and her mother were as out of place there as I would have been.
The one time I visited, I was still living as a man and was usually “read” as straight or bisexual-trending-toward-straight. (The latter was, and is, true of me.) But I think people knew that I wasn’t one of them, even though I was more conservative (at least politically) than I now am. I remember talking with someone who expressed the belief that the county, and a few around it, should secede from California if for no other reason than to dissociate themselves from “San Fran-pit-so.”