Driving along the highway from Kentucky into Tennessee, I was astonished by the redbud trees, which were in peak bloom at the time. I had never seen them in such numbers before, and in this area they grow up as weed trees right along the highway and in other edge habitat. Their deep purple colors are completely unique among all flowering trees, and coupled with the bright greens of new foliage and the more typical white blossoms of other trees and shrubs, they made a spectacular spring show.
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Having had the misfortune to be brought up in the Church of the Nazarene, I can summarize their beliefs very succinctly. They believe that the Christian life must differ radically from the life of the “world.” A Nazarene must live every day the example of Christ, and show by his/her life that God has made a difference in it.
They believe that the Christian must truly leave the world and follow Christ, but they also believe that there must have been a palpable “conversion experience,” a kind of ecstatic event in which the Holy Spirit visibly enters the heart of the supplicant, and transforms his life. But the conversion is not enough: a second major spiritual event must also occur. This event is called “sanctification.” After the person is “saved” (first event) and “sanctified” (second event) he becomes truly sinless, and all desire for sin is removed. (They also allow for “backsliding,” whereby the new Christian, daunted by the requirements of his new life as a Christian, gives up and returns to the life of sin which he had previously renounced.)
They believe firmly in prayer, and in God’s guiding hand in all that they do. And they take literally the command to love one another and to preach the gospel to every creature.
I left the denomination when I realized that much of the profession which I saw and heard was sham, that people had a way of twisting what they wanted so that it appeared to be God’s will. I was also horrified by the extent to which they melded their own ways with the way they felt that God had decreed. Thus they fielded hundreds of missionaries to foreign lands, there to persuade them to become Christians and cultural American Protestants. Native practices and foods which had nothing to do with religion became unclean, and they succeeded in making their converts outcasts from their own society. Far from bringing peace, they often brought social turmoil.
This practice was movingly described by Lafcadio Hearn in one of his essays about Christian missionaries in Japan, who taught the people that they must destroy their family records in order to be good Christians. Naturally, people who did that became social outcasts in Japanese society, and often were unable to live up to the arrogant demands of the missionaries also.
If you don’t know Hearn, I suggest that you read some of his writings; he was a great writer and intuitive cultural anthropologist at the end of the 19th century who left the West and became a citizen of Meiji Japan. He was probably the first American to do this with respect to Japan. A more recent example is Prof Fadenrecht, a Colorado boy who became his true self only after he left America and became culturally Japanese. He is the translator of the Tale of Genji.
I apologize for getting the name of the translator of the Tale of Genji wrong. The correct name is Edward Seidenstecker, who grew up in Castle Rock, Colorado, a small town between Denver and Colorado Springs. He studied Japanese in the navy language school at the University of Colorado before being sent to the Pacific Theater during WW2. He fell in love with Japan and stayed there after the end of the war, eventually becoming a professor of Japanese literature at the University of Tokyo and Harvard University. He was an impressive scholar.