I was them once.
It's that simple. I was a patriarchal asshole. A person who looked at the world through black and white religious glasses. Religious glasses that were backed up by religious thought and religious thought alone.
If I had a question about any subject, religious, political, sexual, financial, anything, it didn't matter, I would go to Google or Altavista or Webcrawler and find what other Christians were saying about the matter. Inevitably, I would happen across websites run by the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, Focus on the Family, Desiring God, Institute in Basic Life Principles, Vision Forum, etc. It didn't matter. If they claimed to be Christian, I ate them up. Any written or spoken words that came from a pragmatic point of view or argued anything without a Scripture verse or two attached to it, I would move on.
As a younger boy, I sat, mesmerized, watching and listening to Bill Gothard at his seminars and then read all of his materials that reached into every single area of your life - to get answers for things as trivial as the proper way to run a church service, or the proper way to pray (it was laying on your face, by the way, because, in the Bible, that god answered more prayers when people ate sand than when they stood - and that god never talked about being "on your knees").
I am not unique with respect to my above words. There are thousands, nay, millions of people that only go to religious sources for their beliefs and they usually settle for either the loudest or the most well-funded organizations, the FRC among them.
And these people and organizations are convincing.
These folks parrot popular positions from the Religious Right, sprinkle it with a bit of the Bible, say "God" (extra points for "Jesus" because he's more popular), and then claim that they are "set apart" from the world, which obviously disagrees with them.
There is nothing more convincing than the idea that a Christian is holding to an unpopular position. Jesus was killed for his. Therefore how much more pious is a Christian for being ridiculed for their position. Adversity means correctness in every respect.
This is how those people, like Ted Cruz, Tony Perkins, Ken Ham, JimBob Duggar, Franklin Graham, Pat Robertson, Strawberry Boy Driscoll, John Piper, and everyone else I have written about, gets into the heads of those that listen to them.
Finally, as much as I used to BE them, I was taught to think, and I STOPPED being them. That, my friends, is why I write. I am here to make people think, change minds, and maybe save blokes from a few unnecessary pop knots (thanks to Lewis Wells of Commandments of Men for that phrase) on their heads.
That is all.
