Do They Still Do That? Ep. 3

Letting Pious Dutchmen Check Up On You Every Year (or How to Survive a Home Visit)

What do you hide when the elders come calling? Secular trophies like your Blu-Ray collection? Your mini bar? The doubt in your heart? 

Did they come to your house? Did they come to your dorm room to the bewilderment of your liberal Hindu roommate? Do Mr. VanThis and Mr. VanThat feel a bit like North Korean State Security?

I remember the dread. I wasn’t going to bring anything major up while I lived under my parents’ roof, but was more than willing to do so while in school or in my own home. But still, the dread. Minute by minute I would pace until they knocked on the door.

Then the glorious work of home visits begins. A moment of greeting. A moment of small talk. A moment of prayer. And then, as the sugar spoons were clicking the inside of the coffee mugs… “So [Name], how is your faith?” (also known as ‘the kickoff’)

It doesn’t matter if you lie and say your faith’s fine or you launch into it, these interactions often follow a similar path. The one about noticing how the world is messed up (exactly like the JW’s with their impromptu home visits) or the one about how the pleasures of the world seem to be calling to us.

Maybe you mention how you don’t see how the whole story ‘adds up’. The funny thing is, you won’t have to bring up the topic of evolution, they’ll likely do it for you. And they come armed with arguments that have been trounced for at least 40 years. In speaking with many ExCRCs, I’ve learned that a lot of them spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about evolution. Do they subconsciously know that they’re on the ass end of an argument and so everything from them is now a Hail Mary? You know how your brain can't stop reliving some calamitous situation that you were just in? Same thing. Or why the people who are the most vocal and vehement homophobes turn out to be gay? Same thing as the whole evolution thing. Wow. What a digression…

Ehem, home visits…

Maybe you mention, more directly, the non sequiturs in the bible. Well, now you’re asking for it. They’ve been training for this fight since they lost the evolution debate. Be prepared for a barrage of verses and references to counter your simple question. These are designed to shut down and overpower the young mind that a) has more going on than just noticing that the bible goes wildly off in two directions, or b) obfuscate by way of volume, the number of times the bible does this. Either way, no argument squares the circle of why the inerrant Book is so frustratingly errant.

Stay calm sister. Stay calm brother. They have to go check up on somebody else in 45 minutes.