The Us Versus Them Mentality
For a number of years I attended a charismatic non-denominational church. I attended quite a few churches, actually. I was attempting to find where I belonged and were I could find a sense of family. Once I found where I thought I belonged, I nestled myself within a group of people whom I first thought were too good to be true at first. Then I got to know some of them. Overall, I met a great deal of loving people who believed they loved God and others with all their hearts, but then there were others who had a different way of thinking about this.
Within this particular church, I learned about the “us versus them” mentality. At first, this was packaged as good versus evil, angels versus demons, and God versus Satan. Later, this mentality registered into becoming about Christians vs non-Christians. Yet, the mentality later blossomed into a full blown their Christianity versus the Christianity of other churches. So underneath all this, there was the pretentiousness of “us versus them”, and “us” was deemed as better, holier, and higher than “them” – a breeding ground for ungodly competition.
To find that a church actually believed this way was outright shocking to me, but at the same time, I was unaware that I was actually conditioned into blindly accepting this mentality. Once I began to notice when such a mentality became part of my thought processes and ways of perception, I was already taking an analysis how other churches simply didn’t measure up to “my” church. For the most part, the language in these types of churches is packaged so neatly and craftily that one becomes blindly delusional in thinking that God loves them so much more than He loves everyone else.
I basically now view my time within this particular church and others like it as a time within a cultish arena. The “us versus them” mentality is a way that many cults condition their members to think and behave in an effort to maintain control over their lives. On the surface, this may not even be how it plays out, but below the surface something wicked exists that invisibly snatches members’ rights and powers of individuality away from them.
If there is an “us against them”, then there is never a time that “we” might reach out to “them”, and that’s the way a cultish church wants things. There is the form of godliness but a total denial of the power and love of God or even for God. There is nothing but competition, rivalry, envy, jealousy, and every other kind of evil work. Most members don’t even realize that their hearts are waxing cold towards others. They don’t even realize that their hearts have become hardened as stone until it’s sometimes too late.
When I began noticing this about the church I was a part of, I remember feeling uneasy. I was bothered, and I didn’t even recognized that being “bothered” was a sign of a huge red flag and more red flags to come. The church leadership was objectifying itself in the place of members’ lives where God should have been, or even where they should have been as individuals in charge of their own lives. Church had become number one and was idolized as such. There was no longer a place for God.
Although I do believe that people have a part to play within the church body as it applies to church, I don’t believe that any one individual should have control over the lives of others. In cults, this is what happens. Someone (or somebodies) in a position of power will always have control over everyone else. They will always have a leading voice on how they belief scripture should be interpreted for their benefit. Even if their interpretation is “off”, they will always be right because they will claim a God-given position of authority over everyone else.
I am not a proponent of blindly giving myself over to someone else to control me. I only think back to the times where I felt my parents controlled my thoughts and actions to the point I could not be myself. I don’t need another mother or father, but that is what these types of cultish churches become in one’s life. The pastor or leaders in the church become the voice of parents. They take on the belief that they know what’s better for everyone else, and they will convince their members that they do know better.
In fact, these types of churches seek to control everything their members do all while using scriptural references for justification. They repackage scripture so that they don’t have to be accountable for the awful things they do to their members. If anything bad happens, it’s usually phrased in terms of what the member did wrong in the eyes of God when, in actuality, they are the ones looking down upon their members with judgmental eyes. In fact, once things get to this point, God is no longer really in the picture. God has been replaced by the church.
Once I began distancing myself from views I found opposing to the truth of scripture regarding the church, my awareness signified that I was an issue for members who wanted me to remain docile and compliant. In essence, the moment my blinders came off was the moment I became marked as a target for destruction. Cultish churches don’t want members who think for themselves. They want compliant, unquestioning and obedient members. That’s the only way their churches can truly survive being cults.
I sat within this particular church week after week only subtly catching on that some things were off in terms of the “us versus them” mentality. I reasoned that sinners were lacking and were essentially the “them” that the pastor was always referring to in biblical teachings. I reasoned that I was better than a sinner because I was somehow saved by God’s grace. All along, though, I was just as wretched, prideful and lacking as the sinners I judgingly pointed fingers at. Then when the comparisons fell upon other churches, I reasoned that something was wrong with the people there and that they were out of touch with God.
This isn’t to say that all of the members thought or believed this way, but a good many of the people did think this way, and it showed in their words and actions. In fact, if a church is guiding the thoughts of its members, it would make sense for members to think, act, and follow the church’s teachings in all life areas. Interestingly, this method of “group think” works well in a church atmosphere, and the bait to reel people in is the use of the bible and certain key scriptures that help these types of churches to gain momentum in the lives of its members.
One particular sermon the pastor preached gave me reason to pause. It was a message on offenses. At the time, a few members that were also good friends of mine had begun making what the pastor called “a stink” in the church about the church’s doctrine. They believed that the church’s doctrine was unsound and not following the truth. They believed the pastor had fallen off into their own ways of leading members, and they tried to make the pastor accountable for this. The pastor didn’t budge and told them if they didn’t like what was going on, they could leave. So they did.
So when the pastor gave their message on “offenses” I knew there was a hidden message. It was a topic meant to warn anyone one else who considered the way of dissent. The idea of the topic was to point out how my dear friends were offended by the truth which the pastor spoke, and it was also to place a point of separation between us versus them. If members stood on the side of truth, then we could not possibly stand with “them” because they were offended by the truth.
Unlike most of the members, I questioned this idea because I saw the points that my friends raised about what was going on in the church behind the scenes as legitimate concerns that I had too. When those friends left the church for good, I began to investigate the same concerns they had about what was happening within the church. My eyes were opened wide to a lot of coverups and deceptions.
The “us versus them” mentality permeated this church to the extent that talking to anyone outside of the church was seen as betrayal. I was cautioned on a number of occasions to keep my contact with “outsiders” to a minimum. I was told that if the person was not a member of the church, then I shouldn’t have much to talk about to an outsider anyway. This didn’t make sense to me as it did not take into account that I worked with people outside of the church and went about my daily life communicating with people outside of the church. So I disregarded the admonition.
The main point was that the pastor of this church made was that we were not the same as “them” and that we had to stand apart. Yet, the overall dogma was about the pastor and other members in higher positions in the church wanting to oversee members’ lives outside of the church. They wanted to have control. They had taken the “us versus them” to equate to something more sinister, and when I realized this and spoke out against it, I became the number one target for annihilation.
Eventually, I came to my senses and ended my time at this church. Prior to leaving, I was subjugated to immense forms of spiritual and emotional abuse. I look back now and realize I underwent a lot of church-place bullying that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. These types of churches are not at all kind and loving to people who don’t keep up the status quo. In fact, they become quite ugly in words and behaviors towards their targets. Instead of God’s love, they feed from the extremities of hatred. This hatred so permeates the church’s atmosphere that I would often sense the presence of demonic spirits.
The day I knew to leave this church, there was a certainty that I needed to run and not look back. Now, I no longer partake of church experiences in the literal sense by going to a physical building at all. In fact, I tend to steer clear of such gatherings when there is even the hint of an “us versus them” mentality. I know that scripturally Christians are not to be of this world in the sense that they partake of evil and sin, but I don’t believe anyone should be so elusive and separate that they forget that in many aspects we are all in this present world together, that we all sin and fall short, and that the same sun that shines on “us” also shines on “them” too.
The sun shines on us all.
My Voice Unchained 