Since some people were so surprised by the stuff I shared about American fundamentalist christianity let me just compile in one list some of the things that don’t seem to be common knowledge (and are especially “wrong” in pop culture)....again I was not raised with these beliefs myself but my extended family all were and you can still find people preaching this stuff on the internet, on their own weird fundamentalist/evangelical websites and blogs:
So there’s the big one I explained already where the antichrist is supposed to end all war and do good saintly things to take over the world, basically making everyone love him so they’ll willingly give their souls to the devil.
By extension as I also went over recently, Fundies believe Satan/demons generally do good things for people, like miraculous healing, because their goal is not to spread ‘evil’ but just to win souls to their side and out-compete the forces of heaven, like a business competitor. You must be “saved” to know the difference.
Likewise they believe God and Angels often cause suffering, pain, destruction and death to punish sin, test faith or teach lessons. These are all still acts of “love” us mortals are just too stupid to understand, like taking a cat to the vet I guess.
There’s the one from those same posts about how “sin” is not determined by the deed itself but by who it was done for; a godless person feeding the homeless is basically committing evil. It must be in the name of the church to be good.
There’s the one I explained in another post about how Satan doesn’t live in or rule Hell but just wanders the Earth and lives in eternal fear of being thrown into Hell by God when the world ends, because it’s torture for him and the other fallen angels as well.
So now we’re hitting new ones to list: Fundamentalists are taught that Catholicism is a guise of Satanism. Praying to anyone other than God/Jesus is considered idol worship, so the fact that Catholics revere Mary, the Saints, and the Pope is all considered demonic. The pope himself is often claimed to be Satanically possessed by Fundamentalist propaganda.
They believe all “supernatural” forces not explicitly from God are automatically from Satan which is why they believe all forms of “magic” are blasphemous. Many extend this to fiction which is why they ban their kids from Pokemon or Superheroes or Tolkien.
They do not consider ghosts or contact with the dead to be possible, full stop; in Fundamentalism your soul is instantaneously in Heaven or Hell the second you die, there’s no limbo, there’s no waiting period, and there are no exits from either realm. Even if you wanted to leave Heaven and explore Earth, you couldn’t, it’s just infinite with no exits.
This doesn’t matter though because they also believe that you will do nothing in Heaven but float around praising God and you will love it no matter what. You won’t think about or care about anything else. You are essentially a completely different entity that hatched out of your old form, but they believe this is your real true self.
The previous point is why you will not care if you go to Heaven and your loved ones go to Hell. In fact, your soul will automatically understand and agree that they deserve it.
Hell is similarly simplistic: they don’t believe it’s like a scary demon world with torture implements and different punishments, they believe it’s an infinite void of pure fire in all direction and you just float there in so much pain you can’t move or think ever again.
Some of them believe that they are the only people who experience true human love or other emotions. They think all other people are experiencing a fake, diluted form of emotion until they accept Jesus, and it is impossible for anyone to understand that until they’ve experienced it, “like describing color to the blind.” This is a huge part of their anti-LGBT propaganda; a gay couple, in their eyes, is not really in love but will only ever know what love feels like when they reject the sin and join the church.
They do not believe God necessarily wants them to help the needy or otherwise help anyone at all. God wants them to win souls for him, and that’s the only reason to do charity or otherwise extend kindness to anyone. They don’t think any suffering on Earth matters, because it’s just a blip next to everyone’s eternal afterlife.
This will sound like a cartoon strawman but they really do believe creativity and imagination are evil. Thinking too much about anything other than God is a sin.
None of the above is really normal or necessarily taken from the bible, this isn’t a bitter atheist anti-religion post or anything, but the denomination that believes this stuff IS the wealthiest and most politically powerful in the USA. This is the stuff those big mall-sized ultrachurches are trying to put in people’s heads every Sunday.
Also as a note already pointed out, different fundamentalist churches mix and match different combinations of these beliefs. Whether they believe that makes the other churches their enemies will also vary.
