Isn’t my dog cute? I thought you needed a cute picture to go with a serious post, especially one with a title like that.
For many of you who have known me or followed my work through the past decade or so, you have heard me talk about coming back to the community in which I was raised as a chaplain.
What I have not talked about so much is my own journey and experiences growing up, first in the Bay Area, where I was born, and then in Grays Harbor, where I was raised. One of the prices that millennials often feel like they have to pay to stay in their hometowns is to downplay the abuse many of us grew up with. I was eager to get on with my life and for a long time, felt embarrassed to talk about how I grew up.
Perhaps one of the strangest things about my growing up years was my isolation on a little farm outside Aberdeen. The first time I stepped into a classroom, I was in community college at 24 years old. As a child, I never went to school and I was raised in the extreme fringes of the Religious Right. In my teens, my parents were involved in a cult group closely associated with the Christian Patriarchy Movement, also called the Quiverfull movement, where I witnessed and experienced extreme abuse (in all its forms, including religious abuse) in fringe religious circles in Grays Harbor.
I have buried so many of those memories quite deep, but I am also at an age where so many of us who grew up in cults and fundamentalist cell groups like this are coming forward to share our stories. Especially as we see the open rise of white Christian nationalism in this country. Especially as the young men raised in these movements and groomed to go into politics start taking center stage in the GOP. And because, as the world becomes more scary and dangerous by the day, too many working class families are drawn to movements that claim to give them power and control over their lives and their children.
My parents both come from pretty traumatic backgrounds and I think that Christian fundamentalism offered them some order, a blueprint for a good family life that they never had. It was a promise to white working class people that they could find a path in a world ripped apart by war and greed.
I do not think they set out to abuse their children. But they read books, like James Dobson’s, telling them to break their children’s wills, which they did with great effectiveness. And they went to homeschool conferences where all the little kids stood in neat rows, girls in dresses, boys in button down shirts, where they learned that they were part of a movement to take back America for Jesus.
I was steeped in a white supremacist narrative of American exceptionalism: America was God’s new chosen nation and Western Civilization, from the Roman Empire to European conquest to American world dominance, was part of God’s plan. We were raised for a mission: to take back America for Jesus, to restore God’s honor in the nation. It was a religion of both extreme American patriotism and a literal, fundamentalist reading of the Christian Bible.
It was a narrative I seriously questioned, even as a child. I read voraciously and what I read made me question the intense violence and cruelty of empire building. But I was not allowed to have a different opinion. In a closed family system, with literally every aspect of my life controlled by my parents, there was no room for selfhood, no room for free thought, no room to be different. In the United States, we don’t really believe that children have rights, and fundamentalist homeschooling movements take this to an extreme level. I witnessed intense examples of abuse– and the state never intervened, until there were cases when children were dead or hospitalized. But the mind control was worse. Christian homeschooling gurus literally train parents on how to turn their children into little robots from a very young age, using a combination of serious punishment, withholding love, and behavioral modification techniques that most people are taught not to use on their pets, much less their children.
Years later, I would read Judith Herman’s book on trauma, where she says that children growing up in an abusive and closed family system show similar psychological damage to people who spend years in prison; the inability to have any control over your own life for so long leaves you unable to function in the outside world.
I did leave and I did get out and I did learn to function in the world, and it was hard work. I went to college and grad school, I got ordained in the Episcopal Church, and I started my own ministry. Even when I moved back to Grays Harbor, I kept as much distance as I could from the groups that had done so much damage in my early life. For awhile, I tried to forget and move on.
However, as our nation enters a time of reckoning with white Christian nationalism, it feels like it is time for me to speak more about these memories and the damage that has been wrought by a highly funded, highly organized effort to maintain white supremacy and white nationalism. And to speak out about the tremendous toll movements like these have on children. My two decades of being a prisoner in the Lord’s army left me with deep scars, ones that gave me deep empathy with the suffering of people around me, and deep anger at injustice and cruelty.