Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church by Lisa Pulitzer, Lauren Drain Page B
Authors: Lisa Pulitzer, Lauren Drain
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the foundation of Calvinism. He was basically a Christian apologist, with an excellent grasp of argument and logic. I could see this same trait in the pastor. There was no argument involving the logic of scripture he could not win.
Luther's and Calvin's biggest grievance against Catholicism was the hierarchical organization of the Catholic Church. They both thought every man had equal access to God through the scriptures. They were also opposed to the sacraments the Catholics insisted were required for salvation, especially since priests had become so corrupted, they were willing to sell indulgences to wealthy people to put them on the path to heaven. But for Calvin, the corruption was only part of the problem. He had the conviction that decisions about eternal life had been predestined by God, who had identified the people who would be saved before they were even born.
According to Calvin, no one could know if he was heaven-bound, because nobody understood God well enough, or was even capable of knowing God that well. However, there was the built-in presumption that if you lived your life like you had been chosen, with day-to-day, hard, honest work and rigorous moral standards, the chances were better that you lived that way because you were chosen. The assumption was that God wasn't going to bother creating people like that just to send them to hell. God's reward for the people he had prechosen was salvation and eternal life. But since there was still lingering doubt and no absolute certainty who was chosen, everyone still had to be decent and upright throughout his or her life.
The majority of the early settlers in New England had been either Calvinists or strongly influenced by the religion, and they didn't believe in God's overwhelming goodness and affection. The pastor preached about it in
"1,001 Reasons Why 'God Loves Everybody' is the Single Greatest Lie Ever Told," available on the church's website. He said, "Before the 20th Century
'God loves everyone' was largely a foreign theology to the United States....The Puritans that stepped off the Mayflower at Plymouth in 1620, and their progeny that inhabited the United States for nearly 300 years, largely did not believe that 'God loves everyone.'...They read the Bible daily and believed in the wrath of God and they feared Him greatly."
A hundred and fifty years later, many of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution were members of those churches. But during the 1800s, Calvinism was on the wane, and by the twentieth century, most people in our country had rejected the fundamentals of the faith outright. A lot of sincere Christians just couldn't accept that they were most likely going to hell despite the lives they led, so they threw out the rest of the Calvinist concepts at the same time.
The pastor was determined to keep the model going, even if he was only preaching it to a handful of us. On the easel beside his pulpit, he had letters from the word TULIP stacked along the left margin of his poster, which was the acronym for the five points of Calvinism. T stood for "total depravity," U
stood for "unconditional election," L was "limited atonement," I was for
"irresistible grace," and P stood for "perseverance of the saints."
"Total depravity" was an easy concept--every single person was born a sinner. Sometimes, it was referred to by the grimmer phrase "infant damnation." The idea was that after Adam and Eve's fall from grace, the rest of us were born innately evil. By no means did it imply we were pathological murderers or criminals, but because of original sin, we were all sinners. In fact, this was why men could not save themselves.
"Unconditional election" was the concept that seemed to rile people up the most. It was hard to buy into the idea that there was no chance you could earn your way into heaven, that you had to be chosen by God before you were even born. No amount of faith or repentance or righteousness would change
Luther's and Calvin's biggest grievance against Catholicism was the hierarchical organization of the Catholic Church. They both thought every man had equal access to God through the scriptures. They were also opposed to the sacraments the Catholics insisted were required for salvation, especially since priests had become so corrupted, they were willing to sell indulgences to wealthy people to put them on the path to heaven. But for Calvin, the corruption was only part of the problem. He had the conviction that decisions about eternal life had been predestined by God, who had identified the people who would be saved before they were even born.
According to Calvin, no one could know if he was heaven-bound, because nobody understood God well enough, or was even capable of knowing God that well. However, there was the built-in presumption that if you lived your life like you had been chosen, with day-to-day, hard, honest work and rigorous moral standards, the chances were better that you lived that way because you were chosen. The assumption was that God wasn't going to bother creating people like that just to send them to hell. God's reward for the people he had prechosen was salvation and eternal life. But since there was still lingering doubt and no absolute certainty who was chosen, everyone still had to be decent and upright throughout his or her life.
The majority of the early settlers in New England had been either Calvinists or strongly influenced by the religion, and they didn't believe in God's overwhelming goodness and affection. The pastor preached about it in
"1,001 Reasons Why 'God Loves Everybody' is the Single Greatest Lie Ever Told," available on the church's website. He said, "Before the 20th Century
'God loves everyone' was largely a foreign theology to the United States....The Puritans that stepped off the Mayflower at Plymouth in 1620, and their progeny that inhabited the United States for nearly 300 years, largely did not believe that 'God loves everyone.'...They read the Bible daily and believed in the wrath of God and they feared Him greatly."
A hundred and fifty years later, many of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution were members of those churches. But during the 1800s, Calvinism was on the wane, and by the twentieth century, most people in our country had rejected the fundamentals of the faith outright. A lot of sincere Christians just couldn't accept that they were most likely going to hell despite the lives they led, so they threw out the rest of the Calvinist concepts at the same time.
The pastor was determined to keep the model going, even if he was only preaching it to a handful of us. On the easel beside his pulpit, he had letters from the word TULIP stacked along the left margin of his poster, which was the acronym for the five points of Calvinism. T stood for "total depravity," U
stood for "unconditional election," L was "limited atonement," I was for
"irresistible grace," and P stood for "perseverance of the saints."
"Total depravity" was an easy concept--every single person was born a sinner. Sometimes, it was referred to by the grimmer phrase "infant damnation." The idea was that after Adam and Eve's fall from grace, the rest of us were born innately evil. By no means did it imply we were pathological murderers or criminals, but because of original sin, we were all sinners. In fact, this was why men could not save themselves.
"Unconditional election" was the concept that seemed to rile people up the most. It was hard to buy into the idea that there was no chance you could earn your way into heaven, that you had to be chosen by God before you were even born. No amount of faith or repentance or righteousness would change
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