our "Nightmare of Christianity," or as we fondly call it, "Home"

I saw two nights ago a link from Google News to an article called "The Nightmare of Christianity: How Religious Indoctrination Led to Murder," by Max Blumenthal, writing in The Nation.

The article is about the background of Matthew Murray, the young man who went on a murder spree in Colorado in 2007, taking out his inner demons on the unfortunate people who happened to be that day at New Life Church, in Colorado Springs, and the Youth With A Mission training center in Arvada.

The byline of the article reads: "The authoritarian culture of the Christian right pushed a deeply disturbed young man named Matthew Murray over the edge."

Those religious nuts. Let's find out how they did it:

An authoritarian Christian-right self-help guru named Bill Gothard created the home-schooling regimen implemented by Murray's parents.

Uh, oh--there's your first danger sign. They were home schoolers. Only kooks who want to isolate their children from the scary world of free-thinking home school. And they were supposedly Christian, which is synonymous with creepy medieval totalitarianism.

. . . Gothard first grew popular during the 1960s by marketing his program to worried evangelical parents as anti-hippie insurance for adolescent children. Based on the theocratic teachings of R. J. Rushdoony, who devised Christian schools and home-schooling as the foundation of his Dominionist empire, Gothard's Basic Life Principles outlined an all-consuming environment that followers could embrace for the whole of their lives. According to Ron Henzel, a one-time Gothard follower who co-authored a devastating exposé about his former guru called A Matter of Basic Principles, under the rules, "large homeschooling families abstain from television, midwives are more important than doctors, traditional dating is forbidden, unmarried adults are 'under the authority of their parents' and live with them, divorced people can't remarry under any circumstance, and music has hardly changed at all since the late nineteenth century."

Woah. First I have to shake off all that loaded wording--the red teacher's pen in me is rising.

Mr. Blumenthal, throughout the article, is clearly antagonistic towards Christianity, and leaves blatant holes in his argument that Murray's parents and their Christian religion are responsible for the massacres. (My 6 years teaching college writing,* in which I held my students to very high standards of balanced, well-supported argumentation, does not serve me well here--I would have quite a few words for Mr. Blumenthal if he were my student.) Most startling is with what broad strokes he paints the life by which Murray "had been indelibly scarred by a lifetime of psychological abuse at the hands of his charismatic Pentecostal parents."

They have large families? Oh, that is also a rationality red-flag--perverting "pro-choice" to mean the freedom to choose having as many kids as they want, and thereby selfishly threatening to overwhelm our planet's ability to sustain humankind. Yes, we have a large family, at least by modern Californian standards.

No TV? There are still people around who think the lack of TV is abusive? So, exactly how many mind-numbing, consumerism-indoctrinating, lemming-making, life-dissatisfaction increasing, weight-gaining hours of TV = love? No, we don't have TV.

Using a midwife instead of a Dr.? When decades of research proves that countries that still use midwives and home births as the norm have a shockingly lower infant and maternal death rate in childbirth than we do here in the good old "modern" US? Yes, we use midwives.

No "traditional" dating? Does anyone ever stop and think about how recent "traditional dating" is, anthropologically speaking? How many parents who have violent reactions when they hear someone else's kids are not going to date have stopped to think about why their children are? It is strange to me that people get so bent out of shape if you want to forgo a "tradition" that is only about 3 generations old, to return to older, much more time honored--and in my opinion much healthier and more successful--ways of being in relationship with the opposite sex outside of marriage.

No, our children are not going to date in the "traditional" sense, not if I have anything to say about it. Almost all the parents I have mentioned this to have freaked out and have given me all kinds of dire warnings for our future as over-protective parents when our kids become teenagers. So, just to clarify, our kids are not going to be teenagers either. They are going to be young adults, and they already know the difference between the two.

You certainly don't have to agree with my perspective, just like I am not at all trying to defend the particular way of parenting described in the article, esp, the next two things on the list. Those two rules have to do with adults, not children, and when you are an adult claiming to follow Christ, then you are no longer under the headship of your human parents--you are under the headship of God the Father, the Lord of the Universe, and are completely capable of making adult choices and answering to Him alone. Parents, at this point, hopefully have done their job well and can freely let their children go to be fully-functioning adults in the great, wide world. And hopefully they have been preparing themselves and their children for this for a long, long time.

Here is one way I am looking at how the whole parenting/child thing could work out: Our expectations/values as parents for our children (and ourselves!) are like a road map that we set out before our whole family before we head out on our journey, to show them where we hope to end up. If everyone does their part, then there is a good chance we will all make it to our planned destination in safety and fun. Every family has a different destination and different route along the way, and no one's are better than anyone else's. The important things are that everyone in the family is on the journey together and everyone is treated as a necessary, valuable part of the "Corps of Discovery."** There are many, many ways you can go with this journey analogy, so I won't bore you any more with my own interpretation. (Although I would love to hear your own family's analogy in the comments!) But basically, I think if you have wise, effective leadership, there may be grumblings of mutiny from the underlings when things get really rough, but no real desire to act on it. If trust has been established early on, and reinforced along the way, then the underlings should be able to follow the leader willingly. And over the course of the journey, they will grow into capable leaders themselves.

There is a whole lot of idealism in this analogy, and you--my readers, my friends--of all people understand how much I am desperately trying to get myself "ship shape" as a good, trustworthy leader of my children. I am not the leader I want to be, and I have a feeling my husband would say the same thing. We are not perfect--but maybe perfection is not required for good leadership. Maybe honesty and humbleness and perseverance matter more. Here's hoping.

In the meantime, we are probably going to be judged as wacko and oppressive by many people--but I'll bet it will at least be condemnation of an equal opportunity sort, as we offend people from all religious and political and socio-ecomonic backgrounds. ; ) Rest assured, however, that we are not parenting without lots of questioning, introspection, reasoning, and prayer.

Which is probably what Matthew Murray's parents said.***

Lord, help us!

*That being said, please don't read my postings looking for errors--I make no special effort to proofread my postings, but I--unlike Mr. Rosenthal--am not being published.

**We are currently studying Lewis and Clark. ; )

***I am sure Murray's parents did have a lot to do with negatively affecting his psyche--I am not at all defending them as parents. I am defending the potential to raise healthy children with similar "rules" as his parents supposedly used. I wish the readers of this article could see some of the successful, healthy examples that I have seen.