I wish it could shock me anymore, seeing a family ripped apart by religion. It happens constantly in this modern age–and will probably get worse, really. But this story touched me particularly today because it hit a few all-too-familiar notes in that discordant jangle that is the Cult of Before Stories.
A while ago, Kirk Cameron popularized a fairly-new evangelism technique: claiming that he knows all about atheism because he, himself, was once an (gasp! Shock! OMG!) atheist. He thought it gave him some kind of leg up on authority and credibility to say that he’d once been an atheist, and Read more
Way back in the 1970s, a British Christian named Doreen Irvine wrote From Witchcraft to Christ. It was supposedly her “sensational true story of a woman rescued from Satan’s grasp by the power of God,” according to its tagline. And I’m sure you are already thinking about how accurate that Read more
One of my earliest blog entries, A Cult of “Before” Stories, remains one of the most-often-viewed pages on the entire blog (thanks, RationalWiki readers!). It was about how my preacher ex-husband Biff, as well as other Christians including the very well-known-at-the-time Mike Warnke, lied constantly while telling his “testimony” (for Read more
The Christian love of bombastic testimonies creates a ‘cult of before stories’ full of believers who richly reward their biggest liars.
Now that I wasn’t involved in weird evangelical churches anymore, I blossomed at last in the late 80s. I discovered the Drama Club at school, slowly made normal friends, and tried to fit in. I got involved with a historical re-enactment group called the Society for Creative Anachronism and found Read more