Hello Friends,
On this holiday weekend as we celebrate workers, we are also mourning children, victims of another senseless school (church/Catholic school) shooting. I’m thinking a lot about children and how we value them (or don’t). So—today’s post revolves around that. Before we get to it:
If you’re having a terrible time getting creative work done, this thought from Junot Diaz is good to keep in mind:
Monte Mader
I just love Monte Mader. She doesn’t suffer fools; she takes NO shit. And Christian nationalists can’t win a religious argument against her—I think she’s memorized the entire Bible—but they keep trying, bless their hearts.
She has broad and deep knowledge of the Bible, so she knocks away Christian nationalists like the buzzing flies they are. Like this:
Mostly I’ve seen her on reels, but I thought the best way to support her was to get a paid Substack subscription Monte Mader. Here she is discussing the same thing that worries me enough that I got the idea to write Keep Sweet—patriarchy, the loss of women’s right, and eventually child marriage.
And this week, cutting through the ‘thoughts and prayers’ bullshit to lay responsibility at the feet of the responsible.
Uncultured: Children of God Cult (the ‘Family’)
Daniella Mestyanek Young grew up in the Children of God cult (often referred to as ‘the Family’). Her experience there is horrifying. Her childhood traumas (physical abuse, rape, forced ‘sex play’ with adolescent boys, too little to eat, begging on the street and more) are so numerous, it’s hard to understand how the cult even exists. Why don’t its members run the other way?
Mestyanek Young seeks the answer through this memoir. She looks back at her mother’s participation as one of the most strict adherents to the Family culture. Mestyanek Young’s mom, Kristy, was only fourteen when she gave birth to Daniella, forced to have sex with older men. Because the group doesn't believe in birth control (common in Christian cults—let God decide on the number of babies), she goes on to have seven more children in rapid succession. She only escapes after Daniella leaves at fifteen, determined to get a college education and then join the Army. At that point, Kristy’s youngest daughter is very ill, in need of medical treatment. The cult doesn’t put much faith in doctors, but they do allow members to go for serious conditions. While they have lived all over the world, particularly in Brazil, Kristy and her daughter are given permission to go to the U.S. for treatment. Kristy decides not to return to the cult.
When Mestyanek Young joins the Army, she finds that she is in another cult of sorts with similar mind games, strict rules requiring absolute obedience, and even, for women, the constant threat of rape.
For readers who wonder how much description of traumatic events there is in the memoir: for the first third of the book, Mestyanek Young only says things like ‘they did what they came to do.’ But once she is punished for asking a perfectly normal question about the Family’s beliefs. She is locked in a dark room, spanked more than once, raped by the ‘Uncle’ who is in charge of her discipline, and left alone for hours. She's only nine years old, and this is a pretty difficult scene. From this point on there is more ‘in scene’ telling of traumas. I believe this is necessary for the reader to understand just how terrible ‘the Family,’ and later, the Army, is. So this is not a criticism. Just a trigger warning.
Mestyanek Young reminds us:
None of it is easy to spot, these tactics that cult leaders—and many other kinds of leaders—rely upon to gain loyalty and inspire their followers. None of it happens all at once, and all of it is genuine. People don’t join cults. They join churches, organizations, communities, and groups they think will solve a problem for the world or within themselves. They follow leaders, the more charismatic the better. Maybe they’re driven by hope, or maybe it’s fear. Maybe it is a combination of the two, strengthened by the fuel of righteousness and, often, resentment. And then the logic breaks down, but we’re too tightly enthralled to these cults among us to notice.
The first rule of cults is we are never in a cult. It’s always them, not us. There is always someone else to blame: the others, the outsiders, the unchosen. And as belief builds in its followers, the less likely we are to question, the easier it is to hate, harm, even kill because we are the good guys. We are right, no matter how many signs point in a different direction or how that direction shifts with the course of the wind. (334)
The reader takes away an important lesson from Uncultured: we must always ask where the trauma, where the evil, comes from. Is it from a few ‘bad apples’ or is the institution poisoned at its very roots? This is something we often aren’t honest about. When I think of my own experience in the Catholic Church, of course there were bad apples molesting kids. But it was the structure and practice of the organization to move them around, allow it to happen again and again, and to look the other way.
High school housekeeping
I realize that this opinion is one that might send some people over the edge, but I’ll just say it: I’d include this memoir in my high school library (but NOT in a library for anyone younger than that). My reason is that lots of young people experience abuse and blame themselves (as Mestyanek Young did as a child). In Uncultured, they can see a roadmap out of that territory of guilt and shame. And: if a high school girl is planning on a military career or even a few years’ stint in order to get an education, she needs to be aware of the culture and how to deal with it.
Similarly themed
She survived abuse and left her faith. Now, she gives religious trauma survivors a voice on YouTube. From Religious News Service
Today, Sola is the host of Cults to Consciousness, a YouTube channel with 326,000 subscribers she runs with her husband and co-producer, Jonathan Rosales. Since the channel’s launch in 2022, Sola has interviewed hundreds of survivors who escaped what she often described as “high-control” religious and/or spiritual groups, or more plainly, cults. Guests recount harrowing journeys through systems of manipulation, abuse and control by fear and exclusion in long-form interviews. …
“We are not anti-religion,” said Sola, who now lives in Austin, Texas, with Rosales and their 16-month-old daughter. “We’re just anti-abuse, manipulation and control.”
A 2023 study from the Global Center for Religious Research on religious trauma found about a third of Americans have experienced religious trauma in their lifetimes, defining the experience as trauma “resulting from an event, series of events, relationships or circumstances within or connected to religious beliefs, practices or structures that is experienced by an individual as overwhelming or disruptive and has lasting adverse effects on a person’s physical, mental, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.”
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