Matthew Murray and his cult

Steve Benen at the blog Carpetbagger Report notes that the quintessentially idiotic Tony Perkins is making political hay from Sunday's shootings in Colorado. In an e-mail to his Family Research Council devotees, Perkins writes:

It is hard not to draw a line between the hostility that is being fomented in our culture from some in the secular media toward Christians and evangelicals in particular and the acts of violence that took place in Colorado yesterday.

Unfortunately for Perkins and his persecutionist blather, it's far easier and considerably more obvious to draw the connection between Matthew Murray's homicidal outburst and the Pentecostal cult he was reacting against.

Murray, using the nom de plume nghtmrchld26, was a contributor to an internet discussion board called Ex Pentecostal Forums. While the board's administrators have since removed a number of nghtmrchld26's most recent posts, dozens of them remain as of this morning, and they offer some insight into the type of creepy mind control exercised by the cult's members.

For example:

Since I was at least age 6 my mother and her church friends have always told me about how my birth was "foretold." They say that while I was still in my mother's womb a "prophet" told my mother that I was to be, quote, "a prophet to the nations" and something along the lines of the next Billy Graham/Peter Wagner.

They said that the following verses applied to me: Mat. 12:18 and Ezk. 36:26-28.

Basically, they believe that I am their "chosen one" for "the end times" and according to the Ezekiel passage they believe that I am going to go back to their church/system.

The problem right now is the fact that it appears that they are always going to pursue me throughout life (and they have said so), as I am supposedly the "chosen one." As far as I can tell they did not treat the other youth the same way.

Well, I don't want to be their "chosen one" at all. I just wish I could find some way to wake up from this nightmare.

Or this, contra those who are suggesting that Matthew Murray “hated Christians” en masse, or was an atheist follower of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens:

We can be christians, we can be spiritual and believe in God/the Cosmic Divine WITHOUT their abusive lying pentecostal charismatic Jesus People movements, groups, false prophets, churches, and programs.

Finally, Matthew Murray describes what sounds suspiciously like child abuse:

I remember getting thrown around the room and hit while getting interrogated about whether or not I had video games and DVDs.

That entire thread is instructive. And there are lots more like it.

Matthew Murray's hostility toward the particular cult in which his mother was and is apparently an active member wasn't fomented by any “secular media,” it was inspired by the cult itself. The “secular media” is right to expose and criticize it. Let's hope it does.

Obviously Matthew Murray was one deeply disturbed individual, but, according to his own experience and in his own words, it was the religious cult that exacerbated his disturbance, and not Tony Perkins's secular bogeymen. Perkins needs to look a little closer to home, if he truly is interested in conducting any family research.

And conservatives, in the meantime, are more worried about indoctrination by liberal university professors. What a joke.