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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • I read most of that (think I missed the last few chapters, but he was out of Elan and had done some traveling)–it was horrifying. There’s also a 3 episode documentary on Netflix called “The Program” where the documentary maker revisits the now closed school where she went (The Academy at Ivy Ridge) and by episode 3, she’s followed the money to one family behind a lot of these institutions. But as she and former AaIR students actually see other facilities far from where they were locked up, they’re all carbon copies of each other, they’re all just the same punish-for-everything camps with no escape. Fucked up that there’s like a formal recipe for how to do this to families and not get caught. And that there are so few legal protections for children.


  • A lot of them are raised to be that way though. One of the big pushes in a lot of Christian circles, for example, is the push to raise kids believing in complementarianism instead of egalitarianism–simply put, that god created men and women to have different roles, and that men just so happen to be in the role of leadership. Combine that with extreme purity culture (at times involving courtship instead of dating, for example) and a fervor to push for big families, and you get a bunch of grown ups looking up after 5, 10 years in a marriage going, “wait, I was promised happiness, why am I so miserable?” Divorce is a huge tool to help. We need to give people, especially women and children, a safe exit from high control spaces.


  • My small city is getting a new Christan Nationalism school next year. The neighbors aren’t thrilled that the adults will all be in armed to the teeth at this school in the middle of a decent neighborhood. One of my kid’s friends is going there next year, and told the class that her dad is draining her bank account for the tuition. For an elementary school year education.

    Another fun fact: private schools don’t have to take all applicants, so they regularly turn away students with disabilities or special learning needs.

    I pointed that out to friends of a friend visiting from Ohio, after they told me how their state did a great thing, making vouchers available to all families in the state. I pointed out how the public schools need the ‘regular’ kids to help subsidize the special services needed by other kids. When the non-special needs kids aren’t there, funding for the specialists gets too expensive for public schools to be able to maintain. The lady clearly didn’t know what to say to that, and after a minute she just said how their children’s private school was too small to be able to have specialists like that. Not sure how that invalidates my point about accessibility of education for all students… It was too sensitive an event to voice that I don’t think public money should be going to institutions that are tax exempt churches. If churches don’t want to pay taxes, their organizations shouldn’t have their hands out for the public coffers. Simple.





  • What people identifying as Christian do and act doesn’t represent Christianity as a whole.

    I mean, religions are what people define them as, use them as. If two million people use the Christian Bible to prop up child abuse, slavery, and sexual, then that is part of the tradition of that faith. Perhaps you didn’t ascribe to faith that seeks to sever people from God via thoughtcrimes. Perhaps the church you attend works to alleviate those injustices, and that seeks conservation of the planet we were gifted. But I know when I asked about racism at church, when I asked about what we as a congregation were doing about it, I was told that was a heart issue that we just had to pray people would resolve on their own. Women, again, could not hold positions of authority because that was against God’s will, gay people were sent away, but racists, what can you do? Again, my experience isn’t unique. There was never any talk of care taking the planet. Fair bit of talk about the dude who buried his Talent vs the one who invested it, though.

    I think you identify a lot of real evils in this world, and people really do create a lot of problems. I fundamentally don’t believe we are overwhelmingly evil, and I think teaching people they are evil is more likely to create people who grow up to be evil. People live up to what those around them believe them to be. When people believe to their core that they are truly evil and cannot trust themselves, that they instead must trust the human layers between themselves and God., that’s gonna come up as trauma and/or abuse somewhere down the line.

    And while any environment can become abusive, churches preach truth and morality; tied in with that is a strong sense of community and family. Trying to call out abuse from an elder or a pastor often results in the pastor getting moved and ‘prayed for’ and the victim pressured to forgive before is appropriate. They’re bullied to say they forgive when they are not actually ok. And the abuser gets to move on and find new victims. We’ve all seen the scandals about the Catholic Church over the last couple decades. The Southern Baptist Convention had a list of 700 abusers they covered for. But still don’t be a loud lady, that’s against God. The SBC is one of the biggest evangelical denominations in the United States. I don’t think they’re what Christianity is supposed to be. But they are Christians and this is how they express their faith, so this is how I understand Christianity.

    Bad theology hurts people. And to pretend there isn’t bad is to be unable to fix.


  • I do think that there are a lot of good branches of Christianity out there, where the main focus is on loving thy neighbor and opening the way to God to all people, not being exclusionary.

    My experience of religion, like so many others though, hinged (more and more strongly over the years) on a literal interpretation of Genesis. One in which eating a bad piece of fruit causes inseparable rifts between parent and child; one in which the creator of all, the knower of all, created rules that unless I grovel and beg and pledge constant devotion, I deserved eternal conscious torment for existing. That’s an abusive belief. Especially to teach children.

    That’s before the curse of Eve, for eating the bad fruit first, causing the pain of childbirth, hereditarily (the biggest cause of death in women throughout history), as well as god-sanctioned subjugation of women. (For example, a woman doing everything right knows not to try to teach a high school group–those are men that she’s not qualified to minister to. She knows it’s better not to vote in church matters, even if she’s allowed, because the head of household, her husband does that). This creates social structures that disempower women as a point of culture, another abusive trait.

    Children also deserve subjection. They are to be obedient at all times, it’s literally one of the commandments. Our denomination taught that “Obey thy father and thy mother” also applied to all earthly authority over us. Authority and structure mattered more as a culture than understanding and insight.

    And the social culture of church can feel toxic or stifling. Often outright sinning, even as a repetitive behavior is tolerated in church spaces (especially in cases of child or domestic abuse), but someone who has reason to think a little differently (like believing in Jesus without believing in Genesis, being queer, being progressive) is shunned or made to be quiet. They know from a young age that their voices can never be respected in those spaces, the number of sermons I heard about how evil/misguided/ other awful stereotype that non believers were supposed to be… It teaches othering, it teaches people to reduce other people to stereotypes of what the pastor says instead of what the person’s lived experience is.

    This isn’t unusual for Christianity, especially in the States. My experience with abuse patterns in Christianity may truly not apply to you. But I think they apply to many.

    And I’m not even going to touch on the abuse that happens to homeschooled children, often strongly correlated with religion.









  • There’s a Venn diagram somewhere of the states denying food aid for children and states rolling back child labor protections. From the linked article “State child labor law changes are part of a broader, troubling agenda to boost corporate profits and increase economic desperation of low-income families and children” and “While FGA lobbies for the erosion of child labor protections in states like Arkansas, Iowa, and Missouri, they are simultaneously working to limit access to anti-poverty programs like SNAP and Medicaid, block expansion of Medicaid eligibility, and promote the defunding of public education through expansion of school vouchers in the same states. Taken together, FGA’s priorities represent a radical, multilayered assault on the same low-income families whose economically desperate children are most vulnerable to recruitment by unscrupulous employers for jobs involving long hours, low wages, and hazardous conditions that harm their education, health, and well-being.”

    So literally the plan is: Make em super hungry, exploit them for cheap labor while they’re young, tell em anyone who’s still hungry is a lazy leach who deserves to starve.