I am a Christian who "got saved" as a very young adult. Prior to my conversion, I was a disinterested Catholic. (Raised Catholic, went to Catholic school, etc). I believed in God for sure, but God wasn't the all-consuming center of my life.
Then when I "got saved" (I am using the quotation marks not in mockery but to at least let the reader know that I am aware it's just an expression whose truth is deemed dubious by other people) it was in one of those little country churches. My church had old ladies and hymnals and a senior pastor who spoke with a mild Mid-Western twang (even though we were in New England--he came from Nebraska to pastor that church). I was in a totally new world when I converted to this new religion--the American form of Evangelical Christianity. And I embraced this world completely.
Let me tell you about this world of the American Evangelical Christian sub-culture(at least about MY perceptions of it) and about how it is that many of the people in that world view THE REST of the world. But let me first stipulate two very very pertinent caveats before I go into the details: a) not everyone from this world believes this way (I am going to speak in generalizations only) and b) I no longer subscribe to many of the "harsher" elements of this world, but I promise that I did once.
1) Christianity is (according to Christians) the only true religion. All other belief systems are sadly deluded. There is only one God, he is NOT Allah or Brahman or Bhuda (or a volcano or a tree or the sun, etc). Anyone who thinks he IS Allah or Brahman or Bhuda (or a volcano or the sun or anything else) is in danger of the fires of Hell, and therefore it is the responsibility of those of us (those of us who are Christians) who know the truth to tell them that truth. Otherwise those deluded people are going to die in an unsaved state and will be cast into Hell for all of eternity. So they are as good as dead right now. It's our duty to help them. This is a matter of life and death --but it is ETERNAL life and death, so the stakes are that much higher and far more permanent than mere physical death.
2) Adam and Eve sinned the first human sin and passed their sin on to the rest of humanity. (I'm not saying I believe in a LITERAL Adam and Eve, just that this is the prevailing concept, whether it's taken literally or figuratively.) That bit of inherited sin from them --in addition to all our own personal sins during the course of a normal lifetime-- induced a state of spiritual death into all of us. We are all walking around in spiritual darkness and blindness and death. We are physically alive with physical bodies here on the temporal plain of the Earth, but in the spiritual realm we are all just the dry bones of death: walking skeletons. The only thing that can make the dry bones of a spiritually dead person come to life is Jesus. Different symbols such as Jesus being "living water" are alluded to in the Bible, and how he is "the water of life." So if any man drinks from that water, he will be made alive. Jesus is also called "the bread of life." If any man eats of the bread of life he will be made alive (implying such a man was once dead).
3) We have a lot of songs we sing in church with words derrived from the Bible. These songs mention being "alive in Christ" and having "life more abundantly." We view our lives in a "before" and "after" kind of way. BEFORE CHRIST came into my life, I was dead. AFTER CHRIST came into my life, I was alive.
[I don't know if anyone else ever does this, but I imagine in my head a timeline --like the timeline strewn across the top of the page in a 4th grade history book-- depicting my entire life. The far left end is the day of my birth. The far right end is today (February 22, 2008) and then the "arrow" continues off the page toward the right to indicate that I'm not yet deceased and therefore more is yet to come. And the entire length of that line in between the birth and today has various key life landmarks notated on it, some more significant than others. But the really really big landmark is the day I got saved. Everything before that date (everything to the left of it) is painted in darkness. Everything after that is depicted in sunshine. (Rather like the 4th grade history book that shows the stretch of time covering the Dark Ages, my life before Christ was a life of darkness.)]
4) There is mention in the Bible of "high" and "low." There are poetic allusions to being "cast down" and to being "raised up." We speak of the miraculous journey involved in coming up out of the "valley" of sin and death, and of ascending up to the "mountain top" of life and of victory over sin. We sing a song about "standing on higher ground."
5) The view of the universe is that it is all just a temporary, passing thing. ALL of it will one day be destroyed: the sun, the planets, the stars are all to be cast into the fires of destruction and there's nothing we can do to stop that. Physical objects --even our bodies-- are not important. The true goal to keep one's eyes fixed upon thorughout life is the reward of the afterlife: an eternity in Heaven. Materialism is looked down upon and deemd a form of lust and pride (which of course are both sins). When we die and go to Heaven, there is nothing from the Earth that we will be able to take with us except for other people. Thus are "things" to be disregarded as utterly unimportant. The true focus should be upon people.
6) Hate is a sin. Snubbery is a sin. Discrimination is a sin. But pity is a virtue. People who do not know the truth of God are NOT to be hated but pitied. And we are to help them see the truth. And once they learn and embrace the truth, they are to be welcomed into the fold and nurtured into the deeper truths of God like small children nurtured at school. And one of the first things they are taught is that they were once dead, but are now alive. Everything before the day of their conversion was all just darkness and death.
7) "Fellowship" (socializing with other believers) is of critical importance. "Fellowship" can include overtly religious activites, or else just having fun together. Many many opportunities for fellowship must be afforded to believers: Sunday morning church services, Sunday evening church services, mid-week Bible studies, meal fellowships, neighborhood clean-up efforts, car washes, singles night, youth group, etc etc. Without these activities, church members would be left to socialize on their own, and that can often involve going out to bars, maybe getting drunk, maybe using drugs, maybe sleeping with someone who is not their spouse, etc. This deliberately insulated social life of lots and lots of fellowshipping with just believers is very reinforcing of the moral standards of the church community. On another level, lots of church fellowshipping can help low-income members of a church avoid spending too much money on socializing (like the high-priced undertakings of going to the movies or going out to a restaurant, etc).
8) I have heard many sermons and read many books (books that have been written by Christians for Christians) where the following statements have been made. These kinds of statements are meant to be an encouragement for Christians to help them to maintain their faiths in spite of difficult times. The following arguments are predicated upon the notion that Christianity is indeed the only true belief system, and so the ability of such statements to persuade and comfort Christians would have no effect if not for that prerequisite assumption. The following statements are very well-intended when one hears them within the context of the Christian belief system, and therefore they are culturally-specific to the American Christian sub-culture. But when viewed from the outside by a non-believer, they sound downright disturbing. I used to read and/or listen to such words of comfort and exhortation with hope. But I have since learned to filter such words through my what-if-a-non-believer-is-listening sensibilities, and so I have recently (as in the past five years) begun to cautiously edit my own word choices (both written and spoken) in many situations in life. MOST of these are phrased as absolutes simply because absolutes are desperately important to Christians --the very heart of our faith deals with the absoluteness of eternity itself. But absolutes are an utter anathema to most intellectuals, especially those who deal with math and science. And so this right here is where a LOT of the deep, thorny divide between belivers and non-believers comes from:
-- "Even when a Christian is at his lowest point in life, he is still ALWAYS standing on higher ground than a non-believer."
-- "Only Christians have access to the FULL truth. No scholar, no scientist, no politician, no double-domed intellectual with all those years of education crammed into his head can ever claim to be 'enlightened' if he does not have the truth of God hidden in his heart."
-- "The Bible stands apart from any other book ever written because it's the ONLY book written by God. All other books have merely been written by men --books about science and history and math and art and fiction and non-fiction. And they can ALL get piled off to the side in one giant mountain of paper and leather --a mountain that stretches as long and as tall as the Rockies from Canada down to Mexico. And YES --you can scrutinize those many many books and dispute them and debate them and correct them and retract them and rewrite them from now 'til Judgement Day. But the Bible is NOT part of that endless jumble of ink and pulp. The Bible alone stands completely by itself, far removed from the words of men. The Bible is unshakeable and no one can claim to correct it because it's already perfectly correct."
-- "God's word is the only true light. Everything else is darkness. Yes, there is knowledge, but without God there is no true light and thus no true enlightenment."
I've only scratched the surface here. There is so much else to this world. But hopefully, THIS can shed some light on your aunt's outlook. Please understand that it's an outlook of love. This is a religion that is deeply concerned with people on a very human level. It's a religion that espouses that an indisputable equality exists amongst all men (and women). It's one that values people as being eternally important to the very heart of God. So it's a very very well-intended religion. But she most likely doesn't realize that she's coming across as either weird or offensive or arrogant. I can probably guarantee you that she's NOT arrogant and doesn't at all "look down" on you. She's just concerned about you with what is perhaps one of the most pure and altruistic concerns you could ever encounter. It merely (and sadly) comes across as weird.
To draw an analogy (and I realize this is a pretty fierce analogy that some may find downright offensive, but it's the best I can come up with right now): there is currently a raging epidemic of AIDS on the African continent. Part of that epidemic is fueled by the unbudgable persistence of several truly frightening miscoceptions/myths that are deeply entrenched in various African nations. One such myth is that if a man with AIDS sleeps with a virgin, he will be cured. And so there are MANY men in Africa who are willing to pay serious money to the fathers of 5/6/7/8-year-old girls to be able to have sex with these children in the hope that it will cure them. I'm sure you can see what the result of that practice has been (and continues to be): men who continue to have AIDS, little girls who get infected with it at young ages, and sometimes child-pregnancies in which the baby that is born to that child has AIDS. One solution is to embark upon aggressive educational efforts to try and combat these destructive urban legends. Meanwhile, millions of people in Africa continue to die of AIDS and the disease keeps spreading. This is a desperate situation to say the least. As for the aid workers and the nurses and the educators who go to these regions of Africa to try and educate the nationals on the truth of what AIDS is, I don't believe any of those worker (who are usually volunteers)look down on these Africans in a way that is arrogant and condescending (at least I hope they don't). Instead, I would like to believe they are deeply concerned for them and perhaps pity them, but all around there is a desperate urgency and compassion for them. And as these beliefs persist in Arica, the aid workers experience a very understandable frustration and even sorrowful angst over the ongoing battle against this blind ignorance that is needlessly bringing people (especially innocent children and newborn babies) to their graves.
My analogy is that Christians see themselves as the educators trying to enlighten an ignorant world to the truth that will save them from the needless death of Hell. But the ideal attitude for al Christians to have is that when Christians attempt to spread the correct indformation, they do NOT do so in arrogance but in pity and concern and a desperate urgency and compassion. And Christians also face a dire and angst-ridden frustration at times as they watch people continue for many years in a blindness on their path to Hell.
My analogy regrettably breaks down at a certain point because I am comparing the very concrete and medically scientific facts concerning AIDS to the subjective and spiritual concept of sin and its alleged ability to induce a symbolic and unprovable form of "death."
But THIS (IMHO) is what this world of American Evangelicalism is about. And where I believe your aunt is coming from.
