Reply #113: It took almost 10 years [View All]

[CornField]

for me to help pull my brother, his wife, their two children and my two nephews out of a fundamentalist Christian cult. So, now it is my turn to bring personal experience into this discussion.

I do fight this fight and I do so on a very personal level each and every day. I attend each meeting of the local ministerial alliance even though I'm not allowed to vote because they will not recognize pagans as true members of the religious community -- yet. I've help organize seminars which bring the various religions together (Jewish, Muslim, pagan, Catholic and Christian).

During the course of my helping my relatives sever ties with their cult, I had to take out protective orders against congregational members at a sister church here in my state (three states away from my family).

As I'm out there working to keep religion out of my government and to keep the various religions from once again degrading into violence I watch the Christians within our community. Half of them don't even realize there is a Ministerial Alliance, much less that their money helps to fund it and its projects. The other half know there is one, but are content to simply assume God's work is being done without ever really checking it out for themselves.

But I do want to make something clear: I'm not in this to protect Christianity. I'm in this to protect the American way of life. Whether Christians meet the challenge before them and reclaim their religion or whether the religion goes the way of the zealots is not my primary concern. Protecting Christianity -- bringing it back to the forefront as a religion of peace, tolerance and love -- should be and must be the job of the Christians themselves.