While I was living in Northern Mexico, I spent one afternoon talking with some leaders of a local Protestant church about their youth program. As we brainstormed about innovative new games for the young people to play at church, Ana Modesta suggested a game that she had heard of which involved teenagers pairing off with the opposite sex in a relay race, holding a playing card between each other's lips and attempting to walk across the sanctuary without the card falling. We considered the game for a few seconds before Baltazar remarked, "I don't know if that would really be an appropriate game for young people to play in church." I was considering his comment, and thinking about the barely-13-year-old, hormone-ravaged teens who would be just a small piece of cardboard away from their first makeout session, when Baltazar finished his comment. "You can't bring something Worldly like a playing card into the House of God. It's just not right."
A young woman is known by her High School French class to be an exceptionally sweet, kind and polite person. Whenever curiosity or interest in imitating her compassion arises in her French class--or her Drama class, or on her sports team, or any other circle of acquaintances, for that matter--her peers discover a fact that causes them to dismiss any relevance her kindness might have to them personally. "Oh, her? Of course she's all nice...she's one of those Christian girls." (This story has repeated itself countless times, the phrase "Christian girls" being replaced by "Mormon girls", "Pentecostal girls", and so on, without the essential story being altered in any way.) Because of the girl's strong involvement in her religion, she is perceived as qualitatively and essentially different from her peers. Her sweet and optimistic personality is dismissed as more of an oddity and a deviance than a positive contribution to those around her. Those who do enjoy her presence, however, do not consider her a "person I would like to be like" or a "person I could become like", but a person who's "nice because she's religious".
Though she would like to be a positive influence on her High School campus, there is always a social awkwardness between her and those who are not members of her religion, retarding any true intimacy between them.
She has no close friends who are not of the same religious persuation as herself.
Three members of the Baptist church in Russia invited me to ride along with them on a drive to a nearby town. Also accompanying us was an acquaintance of the driver's from work who had expressed some interest in spiritual matters. As we drove, one of the Baptists decided to pray for some members of his church. The woman in our group grew relatively distressed because he was about to pray when she had forgotten a handkerchief to cover her head. She would not let him pray until the driver offered her his jacket, draping it over her head as one does when caught in a rainstorm and not removing it until the prayer was over.
The driver's friend politely refused our three companions' invitations to join them at one of their church services.
Chris has plenty of friends from diverse backgrounds, and is well liked at his job and at his University. He is considered a "regular guy, and a good friend" by those who know him. His professors enjoy the same amicable and open relationship with Chris, although they perceive an apparent intellectual short-circuit when discussing certain topics with him. When they discuss his religion's scripture and its origins with him, he appears impervious to the information being presented him. Rather than process the points his professor makes, he seems to ignore or deflect them. (Because this story, as well, has been repeated numerous times, the topic of Chris' scripture is interchangable with a multitude of other discussions, covering scientific, psychological and philosophical questions.)
Walking home late one night with a group of teenagers in Mexico, we came to a dark, abandoned lot. A group of well-meaning men sitting in their front yard warned us that the vacant lot was often frequented by drug dealers and gangs of cholos. Hoping to attract them to his church, the eldest member of our group answered, "well, Jesus is with us; He will protect us."
* * * * *
I have often wondered why human language has so few descriptive words for explaining tastes and smells. Think about it: in English we have our four basic words, "bitter", "sweet", "salty", and "sour", along with plenty versions of the adjectives "good" and "bad". In order to describe a unique taste, however, the only recourse we have is to compare it to something familiar: "that tastes just like chicken", or "these things taste like sweet tomatoes". If you were tasting for the first time in your life, you would be completely incapable of describing the flavor you experienced. The same principle applies to the colors that we see. Have you ever tried to explain what red looks like to a blind person? The Hallelujah Complex is, similarly, a very distinct taste which those who have encountered immediately recognize.
By its very nature, the Hallelujah Complex is misty and ephemeral, avoiding description or definition. If you have every sat down and wondered, "why do church people have to be so weird?" you have been struck by the same question that motivated me to write this work. If you felt that any of the above stories was an exact description of an experience of yours, or a friend of yours, or maybe yourself, then you have had a taste of the Hallelujah Complex. Any feeling of awkwardness between religious people and people not of their religion is a brush with it. If you have ever felt that there was something "strange", "creepy", "weirdo", "cornball", or "just not right" about certain religious people because of their religiosity (or if somebody has thought the same thing about you), then we are on the same page. But if you are anything like me, you have been virtually unable to move beyond the preliminary question, "why does this happen?"
My goal with this website is to rob the Hallelujah Complex of its indescriptness, to subject it to scrutiny and offer a satisfactory definition of it. Maybe you're a pastor, hoping for your church to be some sort of influence in your community, but finding yourself unable to scale an invisible wall, unable to escape your own circle of influence that is itself filled with churchy folk. Maybe you lead a youth group, or Evangelical campus ministry, or parachurch organization, and have realized your students cannot interact with anybody without trying to convert them. Maybe you're one of those people they're trying to convert, and you're sick of it. Maybe you're a die-hard atheist or agnostic, just curious about understanding the freaks who have made you certain that religion's not for you. Or maybe you're just like me...a religious person (of any persuasion) who stumbled on the Hallelujah Complex somewhat by accident; somebody who, somewhere down the road, turned his head around and realized what a bunch of freaks he's been walking with this whole time. We are those who hope beyond hope that faith in God can somehow be done without being a goofball. This website is for anybody who has had a Close Encounter of the Hallelujah Kind.
So if any of the above mentioned scenarios looked familiar to you, I invite you to keep reading. Join me in exploring this frustrating, baffling and bizarre side of human religiosity, this peculiar wall that is driven between all brands of religious people and those on the "outside" of their particular group. I will let this first chapter sit on the Internet for a month before posting further chapters, welcoming any feedback to the email address:
hallelujahcomplex@hotmail.com
The extreme irony is that the phenomenon I describe seems to occur most often in those religious groups, denominations and institutions that claim to be quite concerned either with making converts or with having some changing effect on their world. The first place I noticed the Hallelujah Complex was principally in Evangelical and Fundamentalist congregations of Protestant Christians. It is not limited to these groups, however: the basic phenomenon can also be found in several other Christian movements that are in some way peripheral to the religious mainstream of a nation or community, namely, Latter-Day Saints and Jehovah's Witnesses. The Hallelujah Complex in its most basic form is not even limited to Christians, or to religious people at all. I have even seen it surface in various political activist groups in the United States, for example. My own experiences and encounters with it, however, have been mainly focused on the context of Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christianity.
A consideration of this fact begs the question: why even bother thinking about the Hallelujah Complex? By definition, it is limited to religious movements that are, to greater or lesser extent, on the fringe of mainstream Christianity, both within an individual country and in the world at large. By far the largest section of worldwide Christendom is Christianity in the form of established churches: mainstream Protestantism in Europe and the United States, and Catholic and Orthodox Christianity in the rest of the Christian world. So why not focus on these sections of Christendom? The stronger the Hallelujah factor in a congregation is, the more peripheral that group is to the Christian and secular world at large. So why bother with a bunch of fringe wackos? In discussing the largest religion on the Earth, why bother with the smallest and most irrelevent factions of it?
The first reason involves American financial support for churches abroad. Among American Evangelical and Fundamentalist churches (which themselves vary in their own degree of Hallelujah factor), astronomical amounts of money are sent abroad to support churches heavily steeped in the Hallelujah Complex. This same fact applies to American groups considered "sects" in the U.S. as well as abroad, such as Latter-Day Saints and Jehovah's Witnesses. Quite often (I would venture to say, the majority of the time), an American church with a low Hallelujah factor ends up heavily supporting, somewhat innocently, a foreign church that is heavily saturated with it. The most powerful economy on earth, then, is the source of inmeasurable, unilateral support, financial and otherwise, for the worldwide Hallelujah Complex. This alone makes it a more significant vein of Christianity than if it were a mere helter-skelter collection of fringe churches scattered across the Earth.
A second, and more important, reason for the significance of the Hallelujah Complex relates to the Christian world at large. One of the largest faults of Christianity worldwide is the blatant disregard for the mandate to be a transforming force in the world. Disregard for justice and human rights, for the strengthening and nurturing of immediate neighborhoods and communities, and for spiritual transformation and healing love is something that plagues established churches across the world. The mandate to be a potentially changing influence on the world in these ways--politically, locally and personally--is ignored in favor of different petty concerns. Likewise, the Hallelujah Complex in minority Christian movements holds them back from these primary concerns, replacing them with a preoccupation to convert individuals into a particularly distasteful culture and lifestyle.
A final reason for discussing this phenomenon is one I stumbled upon while living here in Russia, and after writing the first draft for this introduction. My basic impressions and disgust with the Hallelujah Complex were directed towards the fringe religious movements I found myself working with in this country, subcultures in their own right that seemed completely out of touch with the national consciousness. The Baptist church in Russia, for instance, is filled with legalistic prohibitions against a variety of cultural behaviors, including card playing, marital sex without reproduction, smoking, cosmetics, kissing before marriage, drinking, dancing, putting your arm around your girlfriend's shoulder, rock music, billiards, and spending too much time around people who do any of the above. I assumed that this was in direct opposition to the open, tolerant, and accepting mainstream culture of the Orthodox church as I began writing about the Hallelujah complex. Then one day I wandered into a hole-in-the-wall Orthodox bookstore, and was shocked by the array of books I formerly would have expected to find only in the Baptists' dusty library. Publications on the sinfulness of smoking and rock music, books about the end of the world or the impending fires of Hell, and one work entitled, "Is it O.K. to Have Friends Who are Unbelievers?" lined the shelves.
Suddenly, my memory was jogged, and I thought back to all the glimpses of the Hallelujah Complex that I had caught in Catholics, Lutherans, Muslims, Jews, and inactive Methodists. A recently published book which focuses on much of the same complex (without using my term) confirms my suspicions. Craig McNair Wilson's autobiographical work, "Raised in Captivity", is a great holistic consideration of religious weirdness, and he confirms throughout it that friends of diverse confessions found the same experience in their own religious environments.
Wilson's book does an excellent job of giving a very first-hand, personal account of the Hallelujah Complex. I recommend it to anybody who feels the need to realize that they aren't alone in realizing how much of their oppressive religious culture does no good for anybody. The goal of this website, on the other hand, will be more systematic: to come up with a working definition of the Hallelujah Complex, and to consider some causes of it.
Some things to look forward to on this website are: an exploration and definition of what the Hallelujah Complex is and isn't, some psychological problems that go along with (and probably cause) the Hallelujah Complex, some of the factors in a society and a culture that can make religions more weird than they have to be, and a consideration of why women have been more active in Christianity than men for the last 900 years.
So stay tuned!
-David
