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Final Exit

Lauren

This post by a long-time friend of mine details her experience going to a fundamentalist Christian church for their “haunted house.” The local White Horse (heh) Christian Center makes very clear why liberal and progessive thinking makes the baby Jesus cry. It’s all about “choice.”

A ghoul steps out of the shadows and proceeds to lecture/preach at us for a couple minutes. He walks around the scene, picking up beer cans, warning us about “these dangerous” effects of alcohol, drugs, and premarital sex. He walked over to Sarah’s body, plays with the fake blood and licks his fingers. Some condoms are on the coffee table and he picks one up, holding it in front of the shocked audience.

“You thought you were protected. They tell you you’re protected. HA! These are the choices you make. Now get out of my house! MOVE IT!” More ghouls appeared and screamed at us again.

What would Jesus do? Certainly not this.

20 thoughts on Final Exit

  1. More letters to the editor keep coming in. This one in particular is from local clergy/religious leaders:

    We the undersigned local clergy and religious leaders write to call attention to and share concerns about the presence in our community of “Final Exit,” now playing in West Lafayette.

    Final Exit is directed toward young people in particular, and we offer warnings to parents. The content of the experience far exceeds anything that we could endorse sending youth through. It is an experience in intimidation, verbal assault, violence and terror that young people unwittingly enter, thinking it to be a Halloween-type haunted house. A number of youth have warned that they were approached afterward and pressured for confessions of sin and of faith in Jesus — a fact not advertised as being a part of the “extreme reality.”

  2. Their advertising campaign is so disingenous and elusive that there’s no wonder so many are pissed off. I’m glad you made it clear what you thought at the end. Thanks for that.

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  7. A number of youth have warned that they were approached afterward and pressured for confessions of sin and of faith in Jesus — a fact not advertised as being a part of the “extreme reality.

    I got invited to one of these once. Good thing I didn’t go; I probably would’ve reacted by walking out, through anyone who got in my way. i.e. making use of the fact that however scary, they are only human, and as vulnerable to a hard left hook as anyone else.

    Fear = fight or flight. I prefer fight, but am not particularly opposed to doing both. And anyone who attempts to make me stay somewhere against my will is asking for a couple hard hits. Their choice, their bruises.

    Hence, I avoid places such as this.

  10. A friend of mine saw a show or movie about one of these “Hell Houses.” There was a Satan room that was supposed to have the anarchy star/circle symbol painted on the floor but instead had the Star of David.

  12. I have to agree… I’m a Christian, so I went to read the whole post. The Jesus I believe in would never, ever act like, or condone that. I wish I could apologize 8 million times over for my religion when I read stuff like that. My skin crawled, literally, while reading that. And honestly, kudos to your friend for standing up for herself. I can’t tell you how many youth rallies I’ve attended where they try to scare the shit out of you with scary descriptions of hell, and that’s really not how I choose to live my life. I believe what I believe, simply because I do. Not because I’m scared to death of going to hell.

  13. When I found out about this, I thought it sounded similar to the 2001 documentary ‘Hell House’, which you may know is a haunted house designed by a Pentecostal church in Texas to “scare the devil” out of teenagers. Reading your friends review is proof positive that this company saw how successful this “haunted house” could be, and decided to cash in, by fueling people’s fears and weaknesses, with lies and propaganda.

  14. Tried to post this comment right after the original post, but something was going screwy somewhere…

    I honestly can’t agree with you more, Lauren.

    Part of the problem comes from “progressive” churches thinking they absolutely MUST have a “Christian” counterpart to everything secular, from rap music to haunted houses.

    The other side is an overemotionalization of Christianity that has gutted the basic purposes of the Church. It mostly started with the “Second Great Awakening” (which was also responsible for prohibition, btw), but it’s culminated in modern Christianity, which has been accurately described by some Christian scholars as “a million miles wide and one inch deep.”

    I’m truly sickened at such antics, and saddened that such has become the rule, rather than the exception, amongst American Christian churches. I personally like giving a nod to “reformation day,” celebrating the anniversary of the day that Martin Luther took the biggest step towards breaking the power over society that the Catholic church exerted.

    I love an honest-to-goodness haunted house, as well.

  15. Bo, Luther never intended to break the hold of the Church on society, merely to reform some aspects. He did not believe in separation of church and state — in fact, Luther supported a stronger role for secular monarchs in religion, as opposed to the Vatican.

    Nor did the Reformed Protestants support separation of church and state. They, like Luther, believed in what one might call “Christendom”, a community that, with few exceptions, incorporated its whole polity within the established Christian church.

    The first signs of a separate community of Christians expressing their faith in indifference to secular authority were 16th century “anabaptists”, early Protestant radicals who rejected infant baptism and were baptised again as adults — “anabaptist”, originally a term of derision, literally means rebaptizers. (Paging Hugo Schwyzer, who has forgotten more about the early reformation than I will ever know.)

    The idea of a secular state separate from established Christian religion, the way we have now, is really an outgrowth of the failure of the Dutch Reformed Church to overpower the fiercely independant secular burghers in Dutch cities, and later of Cromwell and then the Stuart restoration in England, which left large communities of Protestant dissenters to the right of the Established church, and nobody with the energy to try to suppress them by force.

  16. Thomas, I probably shouldn’t have, but I was “shorthanding” Luther’s actions for the sake of brevity. What he accomplished was significantly different than his intent (an intent that you rightly characterized, as he never even sought to personally withdraw from the Church, simply end what he saw were the Church’s abuses of power, many of which centered upon the sale of indulgences). What he achieved, however, along with the Geneva reformers, was a movement that culminated in the Holy Scripture being accessible to every citizen, and that progression, coupled with the doctrinal teachings of those reformers (and certainly the invention of the printing press such that the new Bibles in the language of the people could be readily reproduced and distributed) certainly led to the demise of the Church’s direct societal powers.

    “The Second Great Awakening,” as I stated above had a lot to do with the direction of Christianity in America through the 20th century. The relationship (in America) between modern Christianity and government was also shaped greatly by The Great War and the subsequent rise of Dispensational (and resurgence of Premillenial) eschatology. From that time to the present, Christians seem to have adopted more of an attitude that matters of government were of little or no importance to their spiritual life, opting instead to work within that spiritual realm while awaiting their rescue at the Second Advent. Only in the last couple of decades have Christians started again to speak out in more areas than one or two “hot topics” in matters of government.

    As a sidebar, while I ascribe to a Postmillenial eschatology, I am only a reconstructionist in the sense that I believe that societal changes will lead to governmental changes, not vice-versa.

    Reformation history and eschatology on a blog devoted to feminism? In Alice’s words…”curioser and curiouser.”

  18. Bo, all that about vernacular Bibles and social change is in part right — but the kernel of what I was trying to convey is this: while the doctrinal fracturing of the Reformation was not accidental, all the major players wished to maintain an established Church the membership of which was coextensive with ethnic Christianity within the Church’s geographic borders. Separation of church and state as we know it started not as even an accidental outgrowth of any doctrinal project; but from the historical accidents of the circumstances in the Netherlands in the mid-1500s and of England between 1640 and 1670.

  19. I am only a reconstructionist in the sense that I believe that societal changes will lead to governmental changes, not vice-versa.

    Isn’t this the opposite of “reconstructionist”? I thought reconstructionist meant one who believed the kingdom was expended by changes imposed by leadership, rather than a grass-roots movement (which would be “pietist” or “revivalist” eschatology). No? If you believe social change predeeds and causes government change, in what sense is your view “reconstructionist” as opposed to revivalist?

  20. Isn’t this the opposite of “reconstructionist”?

    You may be spot-on, but I’ve always heard pietists and revivalists characterized by a belief that the changes would be societal and not governmental (actually in some cases in diametric opposition to the philosophy and/or spirituality of leadership). Your understanding may well be a more accurate representation of those positions. I presented the statement to indicate that I believe the change will be definitive of all facets of society (though not necessarily universal) including government, but that it will not originate in government.

    Semantics are crucial in such matters, but the varied terminology is sometimes coupled with inferences that make things more complicated. What I believe may be aligned perfectly with your understanding of pietist or revivalist eschatologies, but in circles to which I’ve grown accustomed, Postmillenialism and “top-down” reconstructionism are generally mated, thus the need for a “disclaimer.”

    Also, I’m not hung up enough on my eschatology to refuse the rapture if it happens. 🙂

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