is it going to be a source of profound pain for the rest of my life that ""real"" cult survivors continually reach for the church that broke me as an example of milquetoast mainstream liberal-centrist harmlessness?
what no one seems to grasp, what took me years upon years of scrabbling for any scholarship i could get my hands on to understand: the power & danger of (white) methodism is precisely in its cultural hegemony, its setting the standards of normalcy & middle-class decency, its obscured political network.
i'm not saying george w. bush & hillary clinton & dick cheney had the same relationship to their denomination as, say, mitt romney who had to swear blood oaths to do whatever the lds church wanted — but methodism is usamerican culture & politics, which is what makes it so difficult (especially for centrist creators & scholars) to identify the culted & culting aspects of it.
