9th
The Texas Taliban
The Feminist Texican linked to a piece in the Texas Observer about a group of militant Christian fundamentalists called Repent Amarillo. While the article focuses on their fight with a local swinger’s club, the group also targets Wiccans Buddhists, Muslims, “compromised” Christian churches, community theatre productions, and even charity events to raise money for breast cancer research (citing the ignorant and detestable belief that breast cancer is linked to abortion). In their self-described battle against “demonic forces,” they have enjoyed tacit cooperation of local government and law enforcement.
Repent Amarillo is nothing short of a Texas version of the Taliban. Like the Taliban, they use a mixture of local law and prejudice to enforce their narrow world view and morality on others. They dress in military fatigues and go on “missions” to intimidate and harass anyone that differs from their narrow beliefs.
What drives this sort of behavior? It isn’t simply religion. A great many people that share Repent Amarillo’s world-view don’t stoop to thuggery to enforce their beliefs on others.
Repent Amarillo is a textbook cult, and like all cults, it recruits from a vulnerable population. Its military trappings are tailor-made to draw in young, disenfranchised males. When you’re young and broke in Amarillo, with few prospects for the future, being told you’re on a mission from God must be incredibly empowering.
At least that’s the way it felt for me.
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I never joined a cult (if you don’t count my collegiate foray into Objectivism), but I remember the religious certainty of my teenage years. The absolute conviction that I was one of a chosen few that knew the truth, and that I was to bring that truth to the world brought a lot of comfort to an overweight teenage boy who couldn’t get a date.
But I had other opportunities. I had friends. I had a job and a little money. I knew I would be going to college. If my only prospects had been, like my classmates, a job in the shrimping industry or at the local factory (which sometimes manufactured blue jeans, and other times low-end desktop computers), I might have sought a higher purpose.
So it isn’t hard for me to imagine the attractions of a militant Christian cult in a relatively small town like Amarillo, Texas, but what can we do about to stop them?
It isn’t enough to simply stand up against a group like Repent Amarillo, though we should do so at every opportunity. It’s fiendishly difficult to kill a cult. They may die off eventually, but the harder you try to stamp them out, the more attractive they become. We need to head them off.
That may mean better education, or a fairer economic system, or just treating everyone we meet with compassion. I don’t think there’s a single right answer, but I know there are a lot of things we can do.
