Inside Jerry Falwell's Reality Challenged Church

The Houston Chronicle has a piece that looks at the late Jerry Falwell's ultra-far right Thomas Road Baptist Church from the inside via a covert view by a journalist who attended the church for roughly two years prior to Falwell's death in 2007. Her experience and reflections in many ways confirm the need one needs to remain a "true believer" in such a congregation: intellectual laziness and a willingness to let go of objective reality. Indeed a willingness to close one's mind to anything that might challenge the dogma/snake oil often peddled. It is a mindset that I truly do not understand and find very disturbing in terms of its anti-intellectualism and anti-knowledge attitude in general. It is the mindset that leads to societal ignorance as exemplified by the gutting of history curriculum in Texas. Here are some highlights:
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Evangelical Christians were a mystery to Gina Welch. . . . So she decided to undertake an audacious experiment in the fall of 2005. She would go undercover and pretend to be one of them. And she would do it in — of all places — Jerry Falwell's church in Lynchburg, Va.
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One of the things she found troubling was what she calls “intellectual passivity.” The people she met were generally “uncritical of the institutions they subscribe to,” she said. “They toe the party line. They accept the mythology about gay people, about the environment, about the outside world without testing its truthfulness.”
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Welch also was bothered by what she saw as the church's emphasis on spreading the gospel over serving human needs. “What about poverty? What about discrimination? What about human-rights abuses?” she writes. “Where was the Christian outrage at so much heinousness in the world?”
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[I]t's hard to say I would undo what I did. I feel like what came out of it is something of value. It holds the possibility of a more authentic understanding of evangelicals. It's something that could potentially humanize a population that people who share my background have thought of as this mob of clones.”