Day 4,052 —Running to the Dealership and to the Library—

Yesterday, I ran back to the car dealership to pick up my wife’s car. I ran a slightly different route, and when I went home, I drove the exact same way. Today, I wanted to go to the library to return a book, check out a game, and go to a different library to pick up a movie that my wife and I finished half of a few months ago.

         I was listening to this podcast that has testimonies from people who grew up in the evangelical movement in the 1980s and 1990s. It is mind-blowing to hear how bad other people had it, but it also validates a lot of the methodology I remember as a kid. Something both my parents had no problem with when I was a kid was going through my room whenever they felt like it. My dad routinely took things out of my room and throws them away or gave them to my siblings. In all fairness, he did that with everyone in my house.

         This was a philosophy that was encouraged by James Dobson. Also, the pinching of the neck, among other things, was Dobson-suggested parenting advice. Today, I was listening to the episodes featuring a voice actor who played the ideal evangelical child, and what he went through was shocking. I never knew much about the production of the show before, but I remember so much of the messaging that they talked about. It is sad because it was my favorite type of entertainment growing up. At one point, I had every season currently available and would listen to each episode multiple times. What I didn’t know was that, as an evangelical homeschooler, I was the number one target audience for the show. Something the actor comments on is how when he met his fans, many of them were not doing well.

         It turns out that children who grow up sheltered and are homeschooled often do not have the most successful adulthoods. I knew we were extreme growing up, but I had no idea the goals behind what Dobson was promoting until now. In a lot of ways, what he did to a generation of white Christians explains what is happening in our country right now. It was not harmless. One of the major messages in all of Dobson’s work is that strong-willed children are demonic, which makes a lot of sense in retrospect, thinking how many evangelical leaders dealt with me. They were not interested in explaining things to me, but they did do all they could to shame me and make me feel stupid for asking questions.