To speak frankly, the Baptist church broke me. I spoke in my last post about how excited I was to begin a new adventure in the North Country of Minnesota. And there was much that was positive about my time there, but it’s also where I began to develop my own set of thoughts and beliefs. It’s where I experienced adolescence, which is difficult enough on its own, but to have spiritual abuse added to the mix made it something entirely worse.
I can’t cover every detail about my life in my first few years in Minnesota, because it would end up being novel-length. So let me address some of the high(and low)lights.
I pointed out in my last post that going to school was completely new to me. I’d never been to public school, and so I didn’t know what to expect. I spoke of my social awkwardness, my tendency toward trying to be funny and a class clown. It was my way of coping with new experiences.
I told you, I spent at least 6 days every week at the church building that also served as a school. My first year there, we had a principal from a southern state. You could tell by the way he talked. Sometimes when he was trying to give a lecture or be hard on us kids, it would sound so funny that we would laugh or giggle. This would upset him even more. I never crossed him too much, since I was always deferential and tried to follow the rules when I was being watched. The same can’t be said of my friend.
I knew him from the first weeks of life in Minnesota. When I first met him, I noticed he was tall, had a thick Minnesotan accent, and had died his hair an unnatural shade of red. He was a bit older than me, around my brother’s age. His name was Thomas*.
At first I don’t think he liked me too much. He was my brother’s age, about two years older than I was. I was young and annoying. I dressed funny and played foolish jokes on people. Thomas was cool. He had a job, and he shopped at designer clothing shops so often that the people at the local Banana Republic knew him by name. He was a bit embarrassed by that.
That all changed in the winter of 2004 when we went on a mission trip to Uruguay with our youth group. For some reason, our youth pastor teamed us up, and so we sat next to each other on the plane and spent much of our free time together. It turned out we got along much better than either of us had realized.
I think our youth pastor regretted his decision to pair us up rather quickly. I remember being called into his office to talk at one point. I was told that I was a good kid, but that I needed to stop spending so much time with Thomas. I said, “yes, sir,” but I didn’t listen.
I’ll delve into some of the more ridiculous situations we got ourselves into in a later post, but Thomas has become a lifelong friend, someone I still talk to rather often and spend time with whenever I’m in town.
School itself was fine. I’ve always been the type of person who didn’t have to try too hard in school to get good grades. So I usually did my homework, but I wouldn’t study for tests or go above and beyond in any way. I wonder how much more I could have achieved if I’d taken my schooling more seriously…
We used mostly Bob Jones curriculum, the same as what I’d used when I was homeschooling. As a result, I largely knew what to expect. It was “history” and “science” with a fundamentalist Christian bent. That means we learned science from an exclusively young earth creationist perspective, with many proof-textings from the Bible. Our history, especially the American history, had a conservative bias, for example heavily focusing on states’ rights as the primary driver behind the Civil War.
I didn’t think critically about it, and I hardly even knew there were any other perspectives. I wasn’t taught to think critically, and I was expected to accept all the teachings as gospel truth, especially when it came to things like the Bible. I was taught one way to interpret the Bible: literally. Any apparent contradictions or errors were either explained in such a way that the answers put the onus on the individual for not understanding correctly or were explained away in such a way that they weren’t really contradictions or errors at all.
I thought this was the only approach to the Bible and to science and history. This would lead to a sort of crisis of faith for me during college, when I realized that there were other ways of reading and interpreting the Bible, and when I started to read about scientific topics, realizing that many of the things I’d been taught were just plain wrong. But that, too, is a topic for another post.
The rules were very much black and white. Dress code was heavily tilted to place more of the burden on the girls, as is quite common in this type of church. Girls had to wear skirts, couldn’t have shirts cut too low, had to have their hair in a certain way. I remember that they would have dress checks before we had our formal banquets in the spring. They had to make sure that us boys were protected.
But the dress code didn’t only burden the girls. For boys, we were required to wear collared shirts and to have them tucked into our pants. We had to wear belts if our pants had belt loops. We also had to be clean-shaven. This wasn’t a problem for me at all during my teenage years. I only had to shave once a week, if I was lucky.
Thomas wasn’t so lucky though. Sometimes the principal or secretary would come into a class room, and the boys would have to stand. They would walk up and down the rows of the boys and check to make sure we were wearing belts, and then they would lean in close to our faces to make sure we had shaved. If you had failed to shave that day, you would not only be written up, but you would be sent to the bathroom to shave with a pink women’s razor.
Yeah, shame was a big part of the experience.
One day one of these checks took place and Thomas was told he hadn’t shaved, and was sent to the bathroom to shave. The problem was that he had, in fact, shaved that morning, but his hair grew in quickly and so he had some stubble on his face. There was no use in arguing however, though he often tried; rules were rules, and authority was to be respected and unquestioningly obeyed.
Thomas was often getting in trouble for this kind of thing. He was never a strict rule follower. He was the type who wanted to know why the rules existed in the first place. He was also different in the fact that his family were Democrats. We looked askance at Democrats or anything having to do with them. All good Christians are Republicans, so they were not good Christians.
The only reason he even went to that school was that his mom was a teacher there. She was a wonderful, kind, generous person who was very much beloved by her students and others in the school. Perhaps his parents were a bit too permissive, but they obviously loved him, and I really enjoyed getting to know his whole family.
And I, the good kid, would allow myself to be drawn into his antics, which is why I was told not to hang out with him. Most of the things we did were innocent enough, at least at first. He would hold my hand and we would sing songs together from the stage in the sanctuary. “It looks like you’re gay,” we were reprimanded. We would play wrestle and rough house in class. We would run together at soccer practice and gossip and complain about the rules.
He was a classic bad influence.
But he began to open my mind in some ways that I had never thought of before. I’d never spent much time with a real Democrat. It turned out they weren’t as bad as I’d been led to believe. He’d question some of the policies at the school, and some of the political messages we received. Once our principal showed up for a patriotic day dressed in full Civil War chaplain attire, revolver and all. Thomas wasn’t crazy about that.
They had a “government” class, which mostly consisted of long, meandering lectures from the principal. The message boiled down to “America good” and “other countries bad.” Or more specifically, “capitalism good” and “anything that isn’t explicitly capitalistic is socialism or communism.” Thomas really liked to shake things up in that class, poking holes in the teacher’s arguments and sometimes purposely playing devil’s advocate in order to feel heard and annoy him.
Being younger than he was, I looked up to him. I wanted to impress him. I didn’t want him to think I was a sheltered baby. This got us into a lot of trouble later on, but it started innocently enough. If it hadn’t been for him, I don’t know how I would have turned out. He is partially responsible for starting me on a path that I never saw coming, and, in hindsight, ended up having a positive outcome.
And so, I continued in this school until my sophomore year of high school, 10th grade. Why did I leave after 10th grade, you ask? Well that’s a story for the next blog post. It was an event that sparked my desire for something different and forced me into uncomfortable relationships with people of other faith backgrounds. It fundamentally altered the course of my life. It was traumatic at the time, but looking back I am thankful. If I hadn’t been suspended in my 10th grade year, my life would have been completely different.
But that’s a story for next time.
Life is crazy, my friends. Everyone’s journey is a little bit different. What about you? What experiences did you have in school growing up that have stuck with you and shaped you to become the person you are today? Feel free to leave me a comment below or send me an email. I’d love to hear more about your life.
Until next time, I wish you peace and a spirit of grace. Make time for kindness.
*Not his real name
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