The Cult of Before Stories: Glenn Hobbs, Totally An Ex-Satanist
How Glenn Hobbs, a young man in the late 1980s, tried to get into the Satanic Panic game—but failed.
How Glenn Hobbs, a young man in the late 1980s, tried to get into the Satanic Panic game—but failed.
As usual, Christians have totally gotten the whole matter wrong about these stories–and they’ve revealed a few very unpleasant aspects of their own tribe in the doing. So here, at last, is the real skinny: here’s what an ex-timony actually is, who tells them and why, and how they differ from Christians’ testimonies.
Halloween is that magical time of year when Christians can dial up to 11 their Happy Pretendy Fun Time Games. It is their everything.
A long time ago, I wrote a post called “A Cult of “Before” Stories” in which I described what it was like as a young Christian to realize that my then-husband had constructed a testimony full of lies–and how I realized that pretty much all of the really dramatic testimonies I heard from other Christians were largely untrue as well. On the heels of realizing that these stories were untrue, I also began to perceive the unbelievably rich rewards Christians get for concocting and sharing these dramatic testimonies. I began to see my tribe as one that was simply obsessed with these “before” stories–thus, my name for the mindset.
Way back in the 1970s, a British Christian named Doreen Irvine wrote From Witchcraft to Christ. According to its tagline, it was supposedly her “sensational true story of a woman rescued from Satan’s grasp by the power of God.” And I’m sure you are already wondering how accurate that tagline 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
(Before we get started, a bit of housekeeping–one of those Breatharians I mentioned a few posts ago decided to stop trying to photosynthesize and go back to semi-normal food. I’m sure we’re all shocked, given that her decision to starve herself to try to force her body to live on Read more
The Christian love of bombastic testimonies creates a ‘cult of before stories’ full of believers who richly reward their biggest liars.