By fire and the sword: Christians and coercion

Earlier today, I saw a story about religious coercion from Religion News that just sent chills through me. A pair of sheriff’s deputies baptized a Tennessee woman against her will. As she put it, the officer who pulled her over told her that she had to allow him to baptize her, or he’d arrest her and take her to jail for possession of marijuana. So she did it, but she wasn’t happy about it. Then, right when she got permission to sue those two men, she turned up dead.

Y’all, when I talk about Christianity as a religion that needs to hold coercive power to survive, this is exactly what I mean.

As Christians get desperate in their decline, we can expect more stories of coercion to emerge. Today’s Christians are simply learning the same lesson that the earliest Christians did–and for the same reasons they had to learn ’em.

A clear-cut case of Christian coercion

One evening in February 2019, a sheriff’s deputy, Daniel Wilkey, pulled 42-year-old Shandele Marie Riley over during a traffic stop. She admitted to having some pot on her, and Wilkey found it in the car. So, he offered her a choice.

If she let him baptize her, he’d write her a citation and let her go.If she refused, however, he’d arrest her for possession and take her to jail.

By the way, forcing women to do things they didn’t want to do was kind of Wilkey’s thing. His victims, who seem to be almost all women, have accused him of all kinds of physical and sexual assaults, stalking incidents, extortion, and coercive behavior — all occurring between 2018 and 2019. By December 2019, he had 44 charges stacked against him!

And it sounds like he conducted most of his dark deeds while on-duty. Indeed, he chose his victims from among the women he stopped for minor offenses.This time, the coercion had an overtly Christian flavor, but it wasn’t much different from his usual methods.

And now, a mysterious death

Reluctantly, Riley went along with the baptism. While she went to an ex’s mother’s house to get a towel, Wilkey called a second sheriff’s deputy, Jacob Goforth, to witness the baptism. When Goforth learned about the circumstances of this impromptu baptism, he saw nothing objectionable about it. Nope! Nothing wrong with this scenario at all! Nope!

However, the incident completely grossed out their victim. In the fall that year, she filed a lawsuit against the two men for a whole bunch of offenses, including violating her freedom of religion and inflicting emotional distress on her. Last week, a judge finally gave the go-ahead for the lawsuit.

And then, just last night, she was found dead.

We don’t know yet how she died. The authorities have ordered an autopsy. But it sure doesn’t look good.

Who even thinks about coercion as a valid evangelism tool? Oh yeah. Toxic Christians.

Most Christians are live-and-let-live. Not so, toxic Christians. They tend to be deeply authoritarian, and many of them love the power they think their tribal affiliation grants them. For some reason, all that lovey-dovey “buddy Jesus” bullshit goes right out the window when toxic Christians get desperate for new recruits. When push comes to shove, the most toxic Christians are more than willing to pull whatever rank they can to force those under them to attend church and do Christian things against their will.

Thankfully, most toxic Christians don’t have complete power over very many people. Unfortunately, that number includes their own children. Toxic Christian parents literally believe that they literally own their children. And thus, most sites talking about forcing people to attend church are toxic Christian in nature, almost always evangelical.

I’m sure this won’t surprise many people, but I found very few overtly evangelical sites that took any other position on this topic besides YES DO IT.

In the wild: Force those little darlings to church!

• FaithIt: “This is a matter of life or death for your child. Eternity is at stake. In our family, church is a non-negotiable.” In fact, the writer compared forcing children to attend church to forcing them to go to school and eat three meals a day. Another writer concurs, saying that forcing his children to attend church makes him “a good parent.”
• Grand Canyon University: “Forcing our children to attend church is not a guarantee that they will follow the Lord as adults; however, it does provide them with a strong Christian foundation with which to build their life upon. There is no better gift that a parent can give.” They even quote R.C. Sproul saying it’s totally not abusive to do that.
• Cross Examined: Inept mommy-blogger-turned-apologist Natasha Crain tells parents, “By classifying church attendance as a law and not a freedom, we are making a statement that God’s priority is a core value in our home.” If children don’t like that, she suggests blasting them with apologetics–like what she sells!–to turn them around.

For every source I saw that took a more even-handed view of things, like Father Resource and even Christian Today, a dozen more demand parents force children to go to church.Now, of course, we know that Christian churches are absolutely hemorrhaging members–especially young adults, who bolt as soon as they physically can. I’m sure this stance on forced church attendance has nothing at all to do with it, though!

And now, consider the kind of parents who’d do this to a child, and then consider what happens when those people want that kind of power over other people.

A different kind of coercion for someone well-used to using it

Obviously, the sheriff’s deputies involved in Shandele Marie Riley’s baptism had serious issues. The first guy in particular clearly just liked exerting power over women, whom he viewed as helpless and beneath him. The ways he expressed his power varied, and this time the expression happened to center around a religious demand.

But it’s still interesting to me that this was the way it worked out. More importantly, I notice that his pal, the second sheriff’s deputy, saw nothing wrong at all with this situation. It doesn’t sound like anything else Wilkey did to women had him calling for a witness–just this time.

That fact tells me that Wilkey perceived this situation as fundamentally different from all the other times he victimized women.

Sidebar: Impromptu baptisms in Low Christianity

Impromptu baptisms (in bathtubs, pools, lakes, and similar such bodies of water) are a mainstay of evangelical Low Christian folklore. At least one is even mentioned in the New Testament, in Acts 8. It’s the famous line that recruitment-focused evangelicals all know:

As they traveled along the road and came to some water, the eunuch said, “Look, here is water! What is there to prevent me from being baptized?”

As Pentecostals said back when I was one, “What hinders you?” In modern days, it ain’t hard to find a sufficient-sized body of water for a quick baptism. Even Carl Lentz, the now-disgraced ex-pastor of Hillsong NYC, baptized Justin Bieber that way in a friend’s bathtub one night.

Always. Be. Closing!

Thus, it doesn’t surprise me too much that the second sheriff’s deputy saw this surprise baptism as just part of life for a recruitment-focused evangelical. Even on duty, even in uniform, such Christians see themselves as 24/7 salespeople for their groups.

Fire of the sword: where sales fail, go for coercion

As Christianity declines further and further in popular culture, toxic Christians are seeking more and more political and legal power over non-members. And unfortunately, they’re largely getting it. Christianity dominates our judicial, legal, legislative, and military spheres.

I’ve heard military friends in particular lament how the very worst, most toxic forms of right-wing fundagelicalism now completely dominate enlisted ranks. It’s been a recognized thing since at least 2007, according to a paper I found. A 2013 Mic.com article even accuses military leaders of trying to convert soldiers to this flavor of Christianity. And a couple of years ago, someone wrote an excellent essay about it on Reddit.

We’ve also seen judges use religious coercion on the people they sentence in their courts: In 2008, Christine Dalton sentenced a violent criminal to an evangelical church’s counseling program–and ordered him to attend 8 consecutive Sunday morning services as well. I’m sure the congregation loved seeing him there! In 2013, Mike Norman sentenced a 17-year-old to ten years of church attendance. Back in the 1990s, a judge in Louisiana, Thomas Quirk, loved sentencing people convicted of minor crimes to church attendance.

Coercion doesn’t stop until someone makes the powerful stop doing it. In the cases of these judges, constitutional experts and judiciary committees did their job and stopped this abusive overreach.

But sometimes, that overreach feels like it’s coming from a mythical Hydra. Chop off one head, a bunch more sprout to do damage. When it’s coming from the military or law enforcement generally, it’s harder to stop because the rot goes much further than anyone can perceive.

Law enforcement officers are not above religious coercion

We’re starting, it seems, to recognize the religious coercion of law enforcement. A 2021 review of a book called God’s Law and Order discusses the matter in stark terms:

[Author] Aaron Griffith,assistant professor of modern American history at Whitworth University, offers a ‘religious history of mass incarceration’. This entails ‘chart[ing] the influence of evangelicals in American criminal justice’ and ‘attempt[ing] to make sense of the overlapping American evangelical and penal cultures’ and their concurrent and intertwined expansions in terms of social and political influence (6). [. . .]

Religion must be understood as a key feature in the longer history of mass incarcerationWhite evangelicals in particular do love their law enforcement. And they tend overwhelmingly to favor strict, harsh, even cruel punishment of even nonviolent offenders.

The Gospel Coalition, a site catering to extremist, right-wing white male evangelicals, has a major hard-on for law enforcement, as one would expect. Last fall, almost on the anniversary of 9/11, they ran a story about a law enforcement officer (LEO) that made his career sound like a blockbuster action movie!

(If you read the story, peep the moral leveling. Dude describes an absolutely depraved murderer, then goes all wide-eyed. Gosh, y’all, he declares, we’re all that bad without Jesus! It’s just sickening. This guy illustrates exactly why Christianity is in decline. This, right here, this is why.)

And don’t get me started about teachers. Toxic Christian teachers are doing more to torpedo their religion’s cultural dominance than just about any other source. The more they try to sneak indoctrination into children without parental consent, the faster everyone realizes that we must hold Christians accountable to the law and force them to show respect for others’ rights.

What the earliest Christians learned about coercion

Today’s toxic Christians are simply learning the same lesson that the first Christians learned:

Christianity itself, on its own, is not that appealing of an ideology. It’s really hard to sell to normies.It doesn’t actually rest on true and valid claims, so it can’t and doesn’t do anything its members claim. It requires an awful lot of self-sacrifice and self-denial for a reward that doesn’t even make logical sense. And it relies heavily on threats, emotional manipulation, and extremely bad arguments to make its case. Worst of all, Christians themselves tend to be hypocrites.

So, Christianity just doesn’t sell well to anybody who doesn’t already mostly believe in its ideas and mostly accept the spin that Christians give those ideas. To everyone else, the religion doesn’t make any sense, much less seem appealing.That’s why Christianity didn’t grow at all like today’s Christians think it did. They almost all think it took off like wildfire cuz Jesus was just sooooo, I dunno, DIFFERENT I guess. But it really didn’t.

In fact, it sold about as well for its first few centuries as it does today. In a climate where people can freely reject this so-called good news, it doesn’t sell.

What those early Christians needed was the power to force people to accept baptism and church-based requirements. When they finally got it, they began using it immediately. They didn’t stop till someone made them stop–and nobody would scrape together that kind of power for many centuries.

Coercion: Authoritarians gonna authoritarian

But whatcha gonna say? Authoritarians are gonna authoritarian. They don’t know any other way to be, and they wouldn’t want any other way even if they understood it. So all they see when they see a career in law enforcement is a way to gain unilateral power over people they already think are beneath themselves.

That’s the same thing an authoritarian evangelical man sees in marriage: a chance to get his own personal Handmaid, a religious version of a bang maid. Or what an aspiring pastor sees in church leadership: his own personal court of admirers, servants, and sycophants.

Authoritarians ache for power. They yearn to be able to exercise coercion over others. But usually, something blocks their access to the level of power they want. Sometimes, it’s just piss-poor social skills. Or maybe, those handing out power in their current group realize they’re dealing with way too much of a stone-cold sociopath, as I think eventually happened with my Evil Ex Biff.

Stopping coercion with knowledge and steadfast resistance

Sometimes, authoritarians need to change groups a few times to find one that allows them into the upper ranks of power. But once they’re there, they go all in–again, as my Evil Ex did for years with Pentecostalism.

To get his power fix, Biff ended up joining the military in the mid-90s–likely as part of the early wave of white evangelicals taking power there, that movement I mentioned earlier.

Others end up in law enforcement–or just play-act and pretend to be in it, like that weird youth pastor Matt Pitt did almost a decade ago. Or education, where they have free access to unattended, largely-unchurched children.

To deal with authoritarians in positions of power, first and foremost we need endless vigilance. Toxic Christians can’t be counted upon to behave ethically or morally–or even honestly. What we can count on is for them to take any advantage they think they can, and for them to do what they want to do any time they can get away with it.

Once we identify Christian overreach, we must then stop it using all lawful measures.

Authoritarians won’t take pushback gently

Authoritarians regard any force impeding their desires or blocking their overreach as an enemy, one that deserves no kindness or ethicality from them. Any transgression against a declared enemy can be fully justified by them and their entire tribe. Whatever they can do to remove that enemy from their path, they will do–even if it’s illegal or considered a seriously low blow.

Only the ends they want matter, and those ends justify any means. That’s why I’m worried about that woman passing, Shandele Marie Riley. I really hope those LEOs had nothing to do with her passing. But part of me dreads how often I’m right when I think toxic Christians were involved in crimes, especially against women. They’ll do anything to get their way.

That’s why I see fundagelicals false-striking YouTube channels all the time. A false DMCA flag is actually a crime, but fundagelicals don’t care. All they see is a simple if-then: “If I do this, then it’s guaranteed: the video is removed and the YouTuber might lose their channel!” And it’s why they false report comments anywhere online as harassing or bullying if they’re at all critical of themselves or their religion.

And they are just errywhere

As we become more aware of Christian coercion from those in power over us, I am really hoping our judicial system does its job instead of treating these criminals and rights violators with kid gloves. As toxic Christians gain more and more power in powerful spheres like that, it feels like the checks and balances of our government don’t always work as effectively or reliably as they should.

And that reminds me that we have Idiocracy coming up tomorrow on movie night! I love this movie, but I’ve not seen it in a few years and I’m kinda worried about what the events of the past 7-8 years will do to my happy memories of it. We’ll see! Hope you’ll join us there too.

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