Rebecca Grant had lived a hard life in the hot desert town of Barstow, California. Her father died when she was very young and her mother struggled to keep her and her sister in clothes. During the day, her mother sold tickets at the Greyhound bus depot; at night she sold tickets at the theater. On her days off she cleaned their small, rented house and did chores. It wasn’t a wonderful existence, but her persevering spirit kept the family going.
Rebecca loved her mother and knew how hard she worked to provide the basics. Some of Rebecca’s friends teased her because she didn’t have a dad and her mother had to work so much. Their comments stung, but they also caused her to respect her mother all the more.
At fourteen, Rebecca began to work. All the money she earned went into a bowl, along with her mother’s money. They took out only what they needed for the essentials. Rebecca’s mother put the rest in a passbook account at the savings and loan for the days when Rebecca and her sister would need help with college fees.
Rebecca’s mother was a woman of faith, a Christian who believed that God had a plan for her life. If she remained faithful, she believed she would see that plan and God would bless her faithfulness. She didn’t waver from her beliefs. In the toughest of times she didn’t doubt God’s love for her. She trusted him to take care of her and her two daughters. She would do all she could do to provide for her family, and she would leave the rest up to God. She never worked on Sunday and always took the girls to church where they prayed and sang together.
Rebecca was close to her mother, but not to her mother’s God. She enjoyed going to church because of the people there; it was something out of the ordinary routine of the week. She liked it, but she didn’t become a Christian. She doubted there was a God, and if he did exist, she felt distant from him. He had never spoken to her or shown himself to her, and he certainly hadn’t made life easy for her. She wanted to believe, but she rejected what she heard in church.
Rebecca heard a contorted gospel that continues to be preached from many pulpits—a distortion of truth, oftentimes manipulative. She heard that if a person becomes a Christian, life will become easy. God will take care of everything. Miracles will occur and all problems will vanish. She was told that true believers in Christ are protected from the evil of the world. Faith in Christ was presented as an insurance policy against any pain in the present.
But Rebecca had a question: If God is so loving, then why does he allow my life to be so hard, and why does he force my mother to struggle so much? If there really were a God, he would help us.
The expectation of a problem-free life brought about by trust in God led Rebecca into a toxic faith. Her distorted view of what God should and should not do caused her to abandon the search for truth and latch on to anything that would bring relief from her misery and pain. She turned first to alcohol. Then it was drugs. Finally, she became promiscuous and contracted incurable genital herpes. Her suffering seemed to provide more proof that God either did not exist or was not interested in her. Her toxic faith pushed her behavior to become increasingly destructive.
I wish I could say Rebecca’s faith experience is uncommon, but it isn’t. More agnostics and atheists have been created by a false expectation of an easy life from God than from any other false belief. When many men and women find that a faithful life does not free them from pain and discomfort, they turn from God.
Preachers who don’t fully explain the life of faith are partly to blame for these spiritual defections. They ought to make it plain that a biblical faith in God changes the believer’s perspective so much that the pains of life hit with less impact. God can use each hardship to bring greater faith and deeper peace from trusting that he is in control.
It simply is not true that acceptance of Christ or belief in God will cause all problems to vanish. All difficulties do not go away simply because you turn your life over to God. In fact, just the opposite may occur!
When I first turned my life over to God, problems that I never knew existed seemed to cling to me like leeches. If I had been motivated to live for God by the promise of an easy life, I would have made a serious error! If I didn’t believe God had set a standard for my life, I could have given in to every temptation without guilt or shame. But because I believed in God, I had a strong desire to fight the lure of sin that tempted me to stray from the will of God. At times it seemed as if some new temptations had been developed just to taunt me! It didn’t take me long to discover that the life of faith is not sugarcoated or pain free.
Although Rebecca heard of an easy life through faith in God, like everyone else, believer and nonbeliever alike, she was forced to endure tragedies and hardships. False expectations of God frequently lead to a toxic faith—or the extermination of faith entirely.
My mother grew up with a version of this toxic faith. She believed that dedicating her sons to God would spare them the heartache other children would have to endure. She thought that somehow her prayers and faith vaccinated us against evil and that temptations would not likely come our way—but if they did, we would not succumb.
The first blow to her toxic faith came when her father committed suicide. It hit her much harder than it would most others because she thought she and her family were protected. Even so, she didn’t give up her belief in a God who would prevent the natural course of nature or evil from harming her family.
When my brother contracted AIDS and eventually died,1 my mother was confronted in a most painful way with the fact that her faith, the faith of her family, did not supernaturally vaccinate us from terrible events. She struggled with his illness and with her faith at the same time. She sank into a deep depression, and at times I didn’t know if she would return to being the wonderful lady she had been all her life.
Fortunately, she did return to being that person. She made it out of her depression and back to reality. How? By dealing with her confusing ideas about faith and God. She yelled at God. She told him it wasn’t fair. She admitted she had come to her faith as a way of making life easier. As she shared her anger and frustration with a God who did not do things according to her fondest wishes and expectations, she recovered from the death of her son. In the process she also recovered her faith. It is no longer toxic; it is whole. It has brought her into a new understanding of who God is and how he works. She is more deeply committed to God than ever before and is better equipped to help others looking for someone who understands.
Our fast-paced, push-button society spawns many variations of toxic faith. Men and women traveling the narcissistic roller coaster, searching for the next thrill or quick fix, seem interested only in a God who can make things easier or less painful.
Many members of this generation refuse to cling to a God who allows pain. They don’t walk in faith long enough to discover that God actually lightens the burden and eases the pain. Of course, such a reduction in discomfort doesn’t come overnight; it comes slowly, as a relationship with God grows stronger and deeper. As a person studies the attributes of God and understands how he really works, events that once would have brought disaster now become an opportunity for growth. Character blossoms out of the inconveniences.
Sadly, it’s not hard to find many variations of toxic faith far more bizarre than the concept of a God who makes life easy. Almost every day in newspapers and magazines across our land, tragic stories illustrate poisonous belief. These are true-life examples of toxic faith that degenerate into deadly religious addiction. Consider just a few instances in which toxic faith has destroyed lives, fortunes, and families.
A Baptist pastor and his wife from Bristol, Tennessee, were convicted in early 2000 of kidnapping and abusing a girl they took from an orphanage. The Reverend and Mrs. Joseph Combs of Emmanuel Baptist Church were sentenced in March, while the Reverend Combs has yet to be tried on charges of rape.
The kidnapped child, Esther, now twenty-two years old, was reared as a family servant. She testified at the trial that Mrs. Combs beat her with baseball bats, burned her with a curling iron, and pulled out chunks of her flesh with pliers—leaving more than four hundred scars on her body. Esther said she was denied an education, forced to do all the chores, and required to wear clothing that covered her scars.
The young woman now lives in another state under a different name.2
Two self-professed Pentecostal preachers and eighteen members of their families escaped serious injury in Vinton, Louisiana, after crashing into a tree while attempting to elude police. The chase occurred after officers responded to a call for help at a local campground, but the story begins long before that.
Floydada, Texas, Police Chief James Hale said he had been looking for the Rodriguez family since Tuesday night, when relatives reported them missing. “They made statements like the devil was after them and Floydada was going to be destroyed if they stayed here,” Hale said. Floydada lies in the Texas Panhandle, about 550 miles from Vinton.
The family started out in five cars on August 17, 1993, with whatever they could carry. As the cars broke down or ran out of gas, they were abandoned. One vehicle was left behind in Lubbock and a second in San Angelo. As the group neared San Antonio, Danny Rodriguez said the Lord told him that their clothes had been cursed by the devil. “The word that we had received said that everything we needed would be provided for us as soon as we reached Louisiana,” he said. Police found a third car in Galveston, along with the family’s clothes, pocketbooks, wallets, and other belongings. After the fourth car stopped working, the children climbed into the trunk of the last remaining vehicle, a 1990 Grand Am. Adults propped open the trunk with a hanger to let in air.
When the family rolled into Vinton and saw the KOA Kampground, they drove in, believing the Lord had provided a recreational vehicle filled with all the money, food, and clothes they needed to get to Florida. “We pulled up next to an RV, thinking it was unoccupied and waiting for us, but people were in it,” Danny Rodriguez said.
In an effort to “claim” the RV, the family sent a towel-clad fourteen-year-old male into the vehicle to instruct its occupant to leave, since God had given the RV to his family. When eight adult members of the Rodriguez family started rocking the RV, its frightened owner, who had been taking a shower, laid on the horn. A neighbor saw the disturbance and called the owner of the campground, who phoned police. By that time the Rodriguez clan had piled back in their car and sped away. A Calcasieu Parish deputy stopped their car moments later, and a man wearing only a towel got out.
“When the officer went to ask what was going on, he jumped back in and took off,” said Vinton Police Chief Dennis Drouillard. The Grand Am sped down Vinton’s main street until it hit a tree at the end of town. Five children and fifteen adults—one as old as sixty-three—piled out of the totaled vehicle. None suffered more than minor injuries.
“And they were completely nude,” Drouillard said. “All twenty of them. Didn’t have a stitch of clothes on. I mean, no socks, no underwear, no nothin’.”
Sammy Rodriguez was booked for reckless driving, flight from an officer, property damage, and several minor traffic violations. He pleaded guilty and was allowed to leave town.3
Forty-five-year-old Jerry Upton, a close friend of NFL superstar Reggie White, was sentenced in March 2000 to ten years in federal prison on cocaine trafficking and gun charges. Upton was a minister and key church leader at White’s inner-city church in Tennessee. In his autobiography White described Upton as his pastor and best friend.
Upton ran a multimillion-dollar cocaine ring out of one arm of the church, using a white Mercedes owned by the church to make trips to Florida to complete drug deals.
The church burned in a mysterious arson fire in 1996. Donations and insurance money totaling more than $900,000 poured in from across the country after the blaze was publicized, but no one knows where the money went. Upton claims the funds were spent legitimately but is unable to prove his claim. One federal prosecutor described Upton at his sentencing as a “dangerous, devious manipulator” who hid behind God.
The church no longer exists.4
The Reverend Walter J. Benz, seventy-two years old, died two hours after somebody crept into his room at a Catholic nursing home near Pittsburgh and plucked the oxygen tube catheter from his nose and the IV needle from his arm.
Benz had slipped into a coma just weeks after admitting to police and church officials that he had been living lavishly with a lady friend and amassing six-figure gambling losses in Atlantic City. He also had collected a house in the suburbs, a condo in Florida, a cache of precious coins, a Cadillac, a collection of twenty-seven handguns, stylish Japanese furniture, and a statue of Buddha.
Benz confessed that he began dipping into the offering plate in the early 1970s, estimating that he took a thousand dollars a week for twenty-six years at two churches, for a rough total of $1.35 million. Even the votive light fund at Saint Mary Assumption Church, the parish just north of Pittsburgh where Benz had served since 1992, was being tapped for up to five hundred dollars a month.
Police discovered that for three years prior to his death, Benz had been living with Mary Anne Albaugh, age fifty-one, a parishioner from a former church. When Benz was transferred to Saint Mary, Albaugh joined him on the payroll as driver, cook, and eventually church secretary. The couple often took trips to glitzy gambling places such as the Showboat, the Tropicana, and the Taj Mahal.
Almost as soon as he admitted his embezzlement, Benz was diagnosed with a fatal brain fever that causes rapidly escalating dementia and had to be admitted to a nursing home. The day police arrived at the home to arraign Benz on theft, forgery, and conspiracy felony charges, the priest slipped into a coma. A few days later some unknown person disconnected him from life support and he died.
Parishioners said the priest was personally distant, chronically unavailable outside of Mass, and constantly complaining about church finances. He was always putting the pinch on parishioners. “Every time people met him, he said, ‘You have to give more,’ ” said Barbara Hartmann. “Now we know why. Your faith really takes a knock when something like this happens.”5
Forty-nine-year-old Carlos Catalan, a faith healer with no known religious affiliation, in May 2000 was jailed on fifteen counts of rape, two counts of sodomy, and multiple other charges.
Police said Catalan would tell young women that having sex with him would lead to healing for family members. He allegedly told a sixteen-year-old woman that unless she sacrificed her virginity to a saint channeled through him, her father would die.6
By late April 2000, Ugandan police had uncovered 979 mutilated bodies belonging to members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, thus surpassing the 1978 Jonestown tragedy in which 913 individuals died. The Uganda deaths now rank as the worst modern-day cult-related mass killing in history.
Dominic Kataribabo, aged sixty-three, an excommunicated priest who studied theology at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles from 1985 to 1987, is one of six Ugandans wanted in connection with the murders. Kataribabo came to California in the fall of 1985 to enroll in a graduate program at Loyola Marymount as a student priest. He received one of the school’s presidential scholarships for Third World priests, and while living at Saint Anthony parish in El Segundo, he was granted sacramental ministry to celebrate Mass and weddings. After earning a master’s degree in August 1987, he returned to Uganda. Officials believe the cult began in 1991.
Kataribabo is thought to have been third in command of the cult, which preached that the world would end on December 31, 1999. The cult drew largely on disaffected Roman Catholics, encouraging members to give up their land and worldly possessions to take up a strict doctrine of fasting, silence, and prayer. When the December date passed uneventfully, some members began asking for their goods back.
A gasoline-fueled fire on March 17, 2000, inside the cult’s sealed chapel in the town of Kanungu burned to death more than 500 members of the group—perhaps including Kataribabo. At Kataribabo’s home, police found 155 additional bodies. Of those, 81 had been buried beneath the floor, some strangled with knotted cloth, and others poisoned. An additional 74 corpses were found in his garden and another 55, mostly women and children, under a garage he had rented.
Police said they did not have enough investigative resources to exhume any more bodies and appealed to the international community for help. Meanwhile they continued to check for more gravesites, guarding them until a plan could be prepared on a way to proceed.7
The examples cited here are the extremes. Most people do not practice faith in these ways; that is why these tragic stories made headlines. It is the very nature of reporting to find the exceptions and the extremes. Naive critics of faith in God accept these bizarre exceptions as the norm, using them to push people away from God.
Yet these extremes do provide a perspective on more subtle forms of toxic faith. In each experience, whether extreme or closer to the norm, faith becomes toxic when individuals use God or religion for profit, power, pleasure, and/or prestige. These four preoccupations are the foundation of any addiction—and they must be excised from faith. Each time they are allowed to distort or minimize true faith, people are hurt, some are killed, and many are left to suffer alone.
Such headlines shock us with the reality that even the people next door can become involved in strange, addictive practices of faith. And they prompt a question: Shouldn’t rational people be able to spot and steer clear of such shocking activities? It seems impossible for any sane believer to be led away from a powerful God into a faulty ideology of life. But this never happens overnight. The believer gradually drifts into an unreal world of false belief until the victim is completely blinded to the true God and true faith.
And don’t kid yourself! Within us all are poisonous beliefs that need to be neutralized. Our faith cannot help being soiled in a drug-filled, self-obsessed world such as ours. We may never turn our backs on God, join a cult, or handle a snake, but we are all victims of poisonous ideas that distort the image of God and negate our faith. Though we tell ourselves we would certainly be able to escape the most toxic levels of faith, we would do well to remember that the headlines often describe people “just like us” who thought they were in touch with reality—but who ended up with a compulsive addiction to a false and hurtful religion.