Spy on Fundamentalists

From the fliers you find around town, you can get some idea which churches in your area are most active and fundamental. The most active churches will have posted fliers more often and in more locations than the other churches. They would be promoting things such as a ‘revival meeting’ rather than a bingo game or spaghetti dinner. Try going to the church and looking for a bulletin board there. You should be able to find announcements or notices posted for scheduled meetings and activities. Go to one of the social events and make an acquaintance. At this point it is helpful to be able to speak the lingo.

Actually attending these activities can be very difficult because you may be required to pretend you’re praying without falling asleep or to sing christian songs without getting sick. However, you should be able to gain important info on what they are doing. Where do they put fliers and other ads that you may have missed? Are they crossing the line on political activity and can you document it? Are they monitoring your organization? Are any of their members on the school board or other local political groups? Talk them into wasting their money.

Ted Cox Undercover

Over the course of 2008-2009, writer Ted Cox posed as a gay man. He attended weekly meetings for several months at two churches in California and a two-day camp at a ranch in northern Arizona in February, both geared toward one end: turning homosexual men and women straight. Cox: "There is no such thing as atheist, agnostic or non-religious groups trying to make gay people straight. Evangelical Christians, especially, tend to be heavily involved in this movement. They promote this idea that they can make you straight. They tell people these programs will make you free from homosexuality through faith and prayer; the programs will help you find the strength to live a chaste, Christian life. They say you're not born that way, it's not genetic, but it is your choice as to whether or not you act on those feelings and attractions"

Ted Cox: This camp in Arizona bills itself as an intense 48-hours immersive, experiential retreat. The idea is that there's an emotional burden to fix. It's called Journey into Manhood, run by a group called People Can Change. The organizer of the camp is a Mormon, Rich Wyler.These men are being lied to; they're being charged $650 for a system that does not work. These men are victims of religious abuse and being told that there is something wrong about their fundamental identity, that they are committing a grievous sin if a man acts on what comes naturally to him. The paperwork tells you [camp staff members] are not acting as professionals so you have no idea how ethical this is, how safe—psychologically—any of these programs are. What was surprising at the weekly meetings was this emphasis on falling in love with Christ. In order to overcome your attraction to men, it was to fall in love—in almost a romantic way—to the most perfect man. Some of the songs they sang sounded like soft-rock 80s love hits, but they were about Jesus instead of your sweetheart.

Journey Into Manhood is one of those weekend manhood warrier-in-the-woods exercise that is supposed to put participants in touch with their masculine side and, thus, reduce their same-sex attractions. People Can Change claims an astounding 79% success rate, in which they define success as a decrease in same-sex attractions. People Can Change’s claims, like those of other snake-oil sale pitches, have not been subjected to peer review or outside scrutiny. when Cox was ready to submit his story for publication in the (Salt Lake) City Weekly, JiM founder and life coach Rich Wyler quickly intervened, urging City Weekly not to run Cox’s story because Cox signed a confidentiality agreement barring him from speaking about the weekend,” Ted Cox: I had to. If I don'ttalk about this, this is going to keep happening. A lot of these men are living lies and it affects themselves, their wives, their children. I can'tstay silentabout this. I feel like there's a greater good in talking about this and exposing what's going on.

The Great Derangement

An Atheist Goes Undercover to Join the Flock of Mad Pastor John Hagee

Matt Taibbi shares his experiences at a Hagee's boot camp for new converts in his new book The Great Derangement. "I had joined Cornerstone -- a megachurch in the Texas Hill Country -- to get a look inside the evangelical mind-set that gave the country eight years of George W. Bush. The church's pastor, John Hagee, is one of the most influential evangelical preachers in the country -- not because his ministry is so very large (although he claims up to 4.5 million viewers a week for his Sunday sermons) but because of his near-absolute conquest of a very trendy niche in the market: Christian Zionism."

Leaving Eden, becoming an atheist at a christian college

The author, Lily writes: "I am an atheist. I am also peaceful: in the sense of being calm, serene, and at peace, as well as in the nonviolent sense. I live in a very peaceful place in rural Alaska, where I work as an environmental science educator. I graduated from Wheaton College in 2007. I started my first blog, Leaving Eden, during my last year at Wheaton to share my experience of becoming an atheist at an evangelical Christian college. Lily is also author of the Peaceful Atheist blog.

The Unlikely Disciple

While most of his buddies studied abroad last year, Kevin Roose, a 21-year-old English major at Brown University, tried a different kind of cultural immersion: he spent a semester undercover at Liberty University, the college founded by Jerry Falwell. Roose joined the student newspaper, the school choir and even spent his spring break proselytizing drunk kids in Daytona Beach, Fla. Now a senior back at Brown, Roose wrote a book about his experience, called The Unlikely Disciple.

Here is another method that may or may not pay off but anyone can try it from home: Download the Basic version of the file sharing program, LimeWire. The Basic version is free and easy to use. Once it is installed, open the program and you will see a screen like this:
Click on drop-down menu and select DOCUMENTS to highlight it, then type CHURCH into the search box as shown and hit ENTER.	width="500"
When you get some search results, right-click on a file and choose BROWSE FILES.
You will get a listing of all the files that user has in their SHARED folder. This means they have agreed to share these files with others so it is perfectly legal to copy any file you find here. Look for files that will identify the user such as church letterhead. Then browse the files for anything incriminating. Just click the file name and it will be downloaded to your DOCUMENTS/LIMEWIRE/SAVED folder.