Today's Read: Recruiting for Jesus with love bombs & feigned affection

By Diane Silver

Get over to Alternet and read Chris Hedges' The Secret's of the Christian Right's Recruiting Tactics. Here are a few choice bits.

Rules are incorporated slowly and deliberately into the convert's belief system. These include blind obedience to church leaders, the teaching of an exclusive, spiritual elitism that demonizes all other ways of being and believing, and a persecution complex that keeps followers mobilized and distrustful of outsiders.

The rules create a system of total submission to church doctrine. They discourage independent thought and action. And the result is the destruction of old communities and old friendships. Believers are soon enclosed in the church community. They are taught to place an emphasis on personal experience rather than reasoning, and to reject the rational, reality-based world. For those who defy the system, who walk away, there is a collective banishment.

...

With this, the process of deconstructing an individual and building a submissive follower, one who no longer has any allegiance to the values of the open society and the democratic state, begins.