’Sons and Servants’: A case study in religious conditioning

Episode 76: Shane Meyer-Holt returns to the podcast, and this time he brings his church notebook from the nineties! One of the things we’ve heard a lot over the past year is “how can people stay in these toxic communities for so long?” or even more troubling can be the question “why did I stay so long?”.  We explore an old sermon by a charismatic American preacher we both heard when we were young and use it as a case study in how religious language can be used to condition people to a coercive system. This sermon - titled “Sons and Servants” - is a perfect microcosm of the journey over time for many folks; from a seemingly admirable desire to “do something for God”, through to a loss of boundaries, a dissolving of the self and an internalisation of authoritative voices that become the internal critic that we carry with us everywhere.

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