Donald's Random Blog Thoughts

Growing up in a religious cult

I mentioned a bit of my family background in my last blog post. I was the youngest child of a baptist deacon with two older siblings. We attended a church where the bible was supposed to be the ultimate authority, though in reality it was the pastor's interpretation of the bible that reigned supreme. That meant that when the pastor of our church convinced my dad that "biblical discipline" meant that he should beat me with a rod or whip me with his belt (when I was as young as age 4 at least if not younger) he did and even occasionally used a wooden canoe paddle. That meant that when the church opened a school on church premises using the Accelerated Christian Education system as curriculum, my parents sent me to this school. (Despite the makers of this curriculum not actually understanding basic historical or religious facts such as the difference between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Church). I was repeatedly and continuously bullied from fifth grade onward in a school where, despite the claims by the pastors that such things were not tolerated, the teachers blatantly ignored the bullying that I was subjected to and even contributed to it at times. It was during my early grade school days (2nd or 3rd grade) that I was beaten with a rod to the point that I started bleeding (on two separate occasions). It was in 5th grade that I was denied lunch on one occasion by the classroom supervisor (who later denied doing this) causing me to black out and hit the back of my head on a thinly carpeted floor. The injury for this never properly healed and as a result I suffered seizures throughout junior high and high school. This was the same classroom supervisor who repeatedly abused her authority to either place me in a detention office or to have me run "detention laps" simply because she could do so and would often deliberately add time or laps because it amused her to do so. Give this woman a wand and the ability to do magic and she would have been Dolores Umbridge. She truly was that evil. How did she get this position of power? Simple: Nepotism. Her daughter was married to the Senior Pastor's son. She certainly would have never gotten away with what she did at a public school and certainly wasn't qualified or certified to hold the position she did. This was the same woman who dealt with my difficulty understanding math by simply piling on detention after detention after detention. Every "monitor" (The ACE system does not use teachers but rather uses "monitors" whose job it is to give students signatures to score their own work but not to actually help a student having difficulty understanding the concepts of a particular subject) is selected by the senior pastor and can be removed at his whim. One monitor seems to have been selected on the basis that he was a West Point Graduate (no indication he actually was qualified as an educator) and fit in perfectly with the church's authoritarian mindset. These are the same pastors who sent one of my best friends to a psychiatrist who specialized in "christian counseling" and who ran a "home for troubled youth" (apparently sending this young man to a youth home was easier for them than addressing the bullies at the school that made this young man's life a living hell and caused him to become anorexic). It was at this home for troubled youth that my friend was raped by the psychiatrist who was supposed to be helping him and later committed suicide as a result of being raped and molested while his parents did nothing. His parents and the church apparently chose to simply cover up his death. The scary part is that my friend was not the only kid from our church that was sent to this psychiatrist. For almost two decades since graduating that school, I berated and blamed myself. I thought the academic difficulties I had were because I was either "lazy and undisciplined" (the school's explanation) or that maybe I was ADHD or developmentally slow or disabled. I have been attending therapy with a psychiatrist for almost five years now due to depression and anxiety and it is only relatively recently that I was able to accept the reality: I had a bad educational system, a bad school, bad teachers and I was not the only one. I thought I was. That is what cults do. The cult I grew up in was never concerned with making sure that I got a proper education. They were focused on brainwashing me into their mindset. And when I tried asking questions, when I expressed doubts, I was labelled a troublemaker. Isolated and abused. Why have I brought these memories up? Because this church still runs this school today. Because I was not the only one who was abused by this cult and my church was not the only one to use the cult like system of ACE. Because the church that I grew up in is on world wide television. Because I was not the only one. Because I HAVE to speak out. Even if I cannot convince any that still attend to listen, perhaps those who have left will find the courage to speak out about their own experiences. Some already have shared their stories with me. Stories of emotional abuse, sexual assault and harassment, physical bullying and many more horrors. Because as I have seen with the recent Catholic Church scandals, cults like this grow and thrive in secrecy and darkness. Because this cult will take advantage of "freedom of religion" to insist that they be allowed to effectively brainwash and ruin the education of generation after generation. My name is Donald Vincent and I am a survivor. An escapee. And I was not the only one.