Christian ghost stories

I grew up as an east Tulsa kid. In the 1970's my family lived near 26th & Garnett, just a few minutes' walk from the branch library which opened up at that intersection in 1975, and years before Spanish-speaking newcomers started to colonize the neighborhood, as you can see from what that library offers now.

My maternal grandparents and my mother's two sisters lived in west Tulsa, however. Visiting them required about a half hour drive across town and over the bridge spanning the Arkansas River.

In 1972 my mother let me go with one of my aunts to a youth outing at this aunt's church. We went to a wooded park in west Tulsa (I couldn't point out the location after so many years), which had electrical power so that the church people could set up a screen and show a Dracula movie late at night - one of those Hammer Horror jobs starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing (both of whom years later had parts in the Star Wars films, BTW). During an intermission, the adults served me and a bunch of junior high school-aged kids I didn't know some hot chocolate (not very good, as I remember it), then the preacher or a youth pastor gathered us around and asked us what we would do if Jesus "returned" that very night and caught us unprepared to meet him - with the implication that Jesus would wreak something horrific on us adolescents if we admitted to inadequacy in our preparations, like not having "given our hearts to the lord" or whatever.

This incident resembled the telling of a ghost story, but it seemed scarier than a ghost story in context because our elders had taught us to believe that this dangerous and powerful woo-woo named Jesus really exists and has plans to show up at any moment to "judge" us - or else he'll just wait until we die unshriven, and then he'll have his way with us in the afterlife.

Thinking about this now, I have to wonder how much of the appeal of christianity has depended on its use of the equivalent of ghost stories to manipulate people through irrational fear. The Harold Camping fiasco amounted to one big ghost story which some people actually believed, but I suspect the practice goes back to christianity's earliest days. I can just imagine how the firebrands in this doomsday cult's first few generations would catch low-status people in the Roman world during their off hours, mainly children, servile women, slaves, peasants and the ancient equivalent of blue collar guys, and tell them ghost stories about this recently revealed god named Jesus and how he would do mean things to them some day unless they renounce their traditional gods and accept him as their new alpha deity. Just to show that puny mortals couldn't fuck with this new god, he demonstrated his power by rising from the dead! (They knew better than to deploy this conversion strategy at first on educated, higher status pagans who had studied philosophy and rhetoric and probably had acquired some habits of critical thinking.)

We see the modern versions of that now, and not just in backwards countries where missionaries tell their ghost stories about Jesus to the villagers around the camp fire and hope these tales can frighten them into converting. Sunday school teachers in churches across the country confine children with their parents' consent every week and tell them ghost stories about Jesus, whether the children want to hear these stories or not; many of them would probably prefer to read or hear about Harry Potter instead, just as I could have enjoyed the vampire movie without the spooky sermon.

Fortunately we have a game changer which makes this process harder now for christian zealots: the internet. I suspect that the christian cult programmers who try their ghost stories on adolescents in the U.S. encounter more skepticism and resistance now from the kids who have looked up adverse information about christianity and theism online. Josh McDowell, the famous christian apologist, has even complained about the internet recently:

“The Internet has given atheists, agnostics, skeptics, the people who like to destroy everything that you and I believe, the almost equal access to your kids as your youth pastor and you have... whether you like it or not,” said McDowell, who is author of two books on Christian apologetics, More than a Carpenter and New Evidence that Demands Verdict.

Well, tough shit, Josh. If it makes your job harder when young people have access to information and points of view unfavorable to your side, what does that say about the credibility of your ghost stories about Jesus in the first place?