sullster

I saw a sign saying,"Alpha is here". I suspect this is a front for the fundies. Am I right? Does anyone know about this group?

lisarea

Yep. It appears to be.

<a href="http://www.messiahchurch.org/alpha.htm" target="_blank">Alpha</a>

Man alive, that looks so boring.

Chicken Girl

They serve food! I am so there.

Amos

A keen suspicion like yours is worth a lot and the free meal is just fundy bait. I think they should be charged with pimping Jesus Christ.

galiel

It is an extremely subversive and extremely effective way of using the Tupperware concept, coupled with time-sharing-in-the-Carribean-like spiels, to "sell" evangelical Christianity. Think of it as the way Werner Erhard would structure an EST ministry.

ALPHA started in the UK, and spread around the world. They have several thousand "clubs" in the US, and are backed by all the evangelical/fundy Churches, because they offer a source of cheap new recruits who have already been prequalified as vulnerable to show up to this kind of thing in the first place. Quite scary, actually.

The ALPHA "get-togethers", with the emphasis on "questioning" and "being open", are just a deceptive way of luring people into a casual home-party that is really a socializing device to lower resistance and prepare the marks for injection the Church serum, after plying them with food, playing soothing music and showing a slick propaganda video.

They are everywhere (including right here where I live), and are very savvy at manipulating the media and getting good press.

ALPHA is an acronym. It stands for: A—Anyone interested in finding out more about the Christian faith; L—Learning and Laughter; P—Pasta; H—Helping one another; A—Ask anything.

Their US Web site is <a href="http://www.alphana.org/" target="_blank">http://www.alphana.org/</a>
Their global Web site is <a href="http://alphacourse.org/" target="_blank">http://alphacourse.org/</a>

Read and weep.

Catseye

Done it, survived it, come bearing scars of battle...

Actually, it's not all that bad. They don't actively go out and recruit (or at least, they're not supposed to), and while it does centre around a rather strange speaking-in-tongues, evangelical, 'hey, I'm giving a sermon wearing jeans, how cool am I?' version of Christianity, it could be a lot worse - there's no creationism, no Biblical literalism and no mention of anyone going to hell. I wouldn't consider them fundies.

Standard meetings start off with a video 3/4 of an hour long about whatever that week's topic of discussion is going to be, break for a meal, then split up into small groups to discuss the video. The discussions can be quite interesting (I was the only non-Christian in my small group, and people were genuinely interested in my take on the subject). Occasionally there'll be a few 'praise songs' - modern, poorly-written hymns. I didn't sing. Nobody seemed to mind.

They are, of course, looking to make converts. However, the course seems to be targeted at people who know very little about Christianity and have never really thought about the existence of any kind of deity, but don't have any problems with the concept. If you vaguely believe in some kind of a god, are completely unfamiliar with Christianity, and looking to convert to whatever religion's handy, the arguments they use might have a chance at convincing you, but they're not going to convince anyone else. You don't need an in-depth knowledge of logical fallacies to spot the flaws, either - they're pretty obvious.

I'd consider Alpha harmless. It's getting more popular, and the statistics about how many people have gone on the course do look quite impressive, bear in mind that most of those people are church-goers brushing up on the basics. Out of about twenty people on the course I attended, three of us considered ourselves non-Christian, and we weren't any different at the end of the course. Alpha can convert apathetic Christians into evangelical Christians, but that's about it.

If anyone wants to go for the purpose of discussing subjects like 'Why should we believe the Bible?' (they don't actually debate the existence of God, which I wasn't expecting), I'd advise against it - there won't be any arguments you haven't heard and discussed to death before. If you do go, though, pay attention during the 'praise songs' for the one that uses the tune from 'Paint It Black', just to assure me I'm not going mad

Captain Pedantic

You know, I was thinking of attending one of the courses, just to see if they could convert me or not. Catseye's description above suggests, probably not.

There was an article in the Guardian about eighteen months ago about it, where john Ronson (a Jew) goes to investigate. I'll see if I can find it, possibly.

Edit: I found the link <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,385083,00.html" target="_blank">here</a>, and another one <a href="http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,525516,00.html" target="_blank">here</a> with a slightly different take on the whole deal.

[ October 28, 2002: Message edited by: Captain Pedantic ]</p>

galiel

It's hard to overestimate the gullibility and superstitiousness of people, especially after spending some time on this board...

I think that the whole "converting atheists" line is just a cover. It is precisely about getting the vast majority of people in countries like England and the US, namely moderate or lapsed "Christians", to become active, evangelical and go back to attending a Christian church regularly, where one can be continually conditioned and "supported" by religious cult techniques. Of course, if one experiences and is attracted to the evangelical fundie aspects of ALPHA, such as speaking in tongues and being directly healed by prayer, then one is likely to be bored by the typical liberal Protestant congregation, and to seek out churches that are more ALPHA-esque. I believe that is precisely why the Reconstructionist evangelical religious right in the US has so enthusiastically supported the spread of ALPHA in this country.

I don't believe any of the numbers, though. Every testimonial I have ever read by converts reveals them to be former church-going Christians, not atheists or active members of other faiths. In my town, they keep publishing testimonials of "computer engineers", implying that they are somehow more logical or trustworthy. It's really quite frightening.

From Jon Ronson's article"

Harmless like crack cocaine.

beoba

I AM HERE!!

Catseye

And however ridiculous and unlikely something seems, there's always going to be someone out there who'll believe it. After encountering people on the Internet who honestly, sincerely believe David Icke might have a point about world leaders being shape-changing blood-sucking lizards, I have no delusions about the critical thinking facilities of the human race.

Even given that, though, I don't think Alpha is ever going to make legions of converts. As you point out, its aim isn't really to convert atheists but to get apathetic Christians to make religion a more significant part of their lives - I got the impression their target audience is Christians who only go to church for Christmas and Easter, don't know all that much about their faith, and have recently started to feel like they should perhaps be a bit more involved.

That, I think, is why it can claim to have such a high success rate - most Alpha participants aren't people who have just gone along to 'find out what it's all about', whatever the advertising for the course claims, but people who went along to become moderately devout Christians. I don't consider it brainwashing if people who wanted to convert to evangelical Christianity get converted to evangelical Christianity through Alpha.

Sure, if you're attracted to it... but a lot of people aren't, and Alpha isn't going to change their minds about that. Either you like the speaking-in-tongues, faith-healing, praying with arms in the air kind of worship, or you don't, and that's not the kind of thing you can convert people to. Churches of all varieties don't support it because they think it'll have their worshippers leaving in droves for the Pentecostals down the road - they think it might make some of their worshippers come to church more often. Whether they're right or not, I'm not sure, but I think if church attendance in Britain had significantly increased since Alpha, the stuff advertising the course might mention it.

The Jon Ronson article is about an Alpha course actually run by Nicky Gumbel, the founder, and it's exceptional in that regard - most courses just use videos of the man. He is a good speaker, and he can be pretty convincing if you accept his major assumptions - God exists, and God wrote the Bible. An Alpha course actually run by him in person is probably going to be a lot more intense than most other courses, which would explain why Jon Ronson's experience was very different to mine. Apparently, speaking in tongues doesn't really happen on Alpha courses outside Holy Trinity Brompton (Gumbel's church), and Alpha co-ordinators are trying to work out why. Still, though, I think there's some amount of exaggeration going on here.

Well... 'false pretences'? Alpha does advertise itself as a course to 'find out more about Christianity', and if Alice already knew who Nicky Gumbel was, she presumably knew it was evangelical Christianity. Precisely what false pretences did she get dragged in under? And, well, 'there's no escape' - I'll accept that Nicky Gumbel's own courses might be a little different to the one I went on, but I doubt they have armed guards at the doors. Hell, I burst out laughing during one of the videos - unintentionally - and while I got a few odd looks (and a few more understanding ones), I didn't get dragged off to a re-education camp.

Alpha would bother me if it was spearheading a huge movement towards evangelical Christianity, but for all its proclamations, I don't think it is and I don't think it's ever going to.

[ October 28, 2002: Message edited by: Catseye ]

[ October 28, 2002: Message edited by: Catseye ]</p>