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Originally Posted by aron
I think you hit the nail on the head here. It's like someone growing up in a dysfunctional home, and they go out and mirror that dysfunction in the world, always hating what happened and never realizing that they were unconsciously spreading the very thing they run away from. They don't call Satan the subtle one for nothing.
To me, the poison pill of the LC was always this: they believed that everyone else was wrong, and they were right. It was built into all their "truths", that they recovered the light. So they were immune to correction, to reproof, to adjustments, to pointing out their own errors. How can someone in darkness correct someone who is in the light? Impossible.
Once you bite firmly on that hook, it is very hard to wriggle free. Many of us were outside the program physically for years, yet we were still firmly convinced the program was right.
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WL was a product of early 20th century China. This is such a simple fact, but hardly any LCers would recognize it as being true. Why? Because WL presumed to have ‘overcome’ his culture. Furthermore, in the LC, elements of various cultures were deemed to be irrelevant. This supposed cultural transcendence was part of the whole ‘recovery’ narrative.
WL made Gal 3:28 a central theme of his ministry. Because the LC has a fair amount of diversity, I think there was the tendency not to question the apparent absence of 'culture', and it was even taken to be something meaningful. It’s no wonder so many bought into it. For Americans especially, I think that it was thought that they in particular needed to drop their culture. I remember hearing that Nee had stated that the U.S was too materialistic, thus his reason for never wanting to minister here.
I’m not here to promote my culture over Lee’s culture. Don’t get me wrong. It is particularly important for LCers to realize that we cannot just ‘drop’ our culture. Our culture is central to who we are. We cannot function socially without understanding how to function as part of our culture. The Bible does not tell us that we need to ‘drop’ our culture. It only tells us that in Christ, individual cultures don’t matter and are not recognized. It speaks nothing of Americans assimilating to the Chinese culture or vice versa. This is what WL got completely wrong. I hesitate to put this so frankly lest it be taken the wrong way, but it’s something important that LCers need to come to terms with. What happened in the LC was the replacement of all cultures with WL's own culture.