Season 2, Episode 1: Intro to New Season

In this episode I'll be starting a new season and a new series:  All about being raised in a super religious home and how that impacted me as a GenXer.

Sound Attributions (Courtesy of Freesound.org)

 | Chase Through Time (30s) by Universfield -- https://freesound.org/s/754408/ -- License: Attribution 4.0 
 | 80's riff.wav by EchoCinematics -- https://freesound.org/s/392465/ -- License: Attribution 3.0
| Tada! by Yoshicakes77 -- https://freesound.org/s/850021/ -- License: Creative Commons 0
|  [cinematic background music][107 bpm] by Seth_Makes_Sounds -- https://freesound.org/s/814843/ -- License: Creative Commons 0
| 70s intro.mp3 by klausmogensen74 -- https://freesound.org/s/334011/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
|  Fun & Lively Game Soundtrack by LolaMoore -- https://freesound.org/s/766586/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
|  Mellow Punk Flow by LolaMoore -- https://freesound.org/s/767571/ -- License
|  Chase Through Time (30s) by Universfield -- https://freesound.org/s/754408/ -- License: Attribution 4.0 
 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This podcast is intended for mature audiences. So grow up. I'm Les, a Gen Xer, who loves to tell stories, true stories. I'm all about the awkward moments and the maybe you had to be there experiences. Those shaped who I am. From the suburban battlefields of being a childhood nobody to the existential angst of adulthood. In this podcast, I take you on a journey through the events, the people, and the pop culture that defined my experience. This is Gen X Crossing, Season 2, Episode 1. Hi and Sigh. It is so nice to be back to this podcast. I talked a little bit at the end of the last season about what I wanted to do in this season, sort of switch gears and maybe hear some stories from other people, but I decided to take a bit of a left turn instead. This season, I'm going to do a series all about my life as a staunch, conservative, super Christian. I want to do this series for two reasons. A few people have asked me to share more about my religious experiences and the frameworks that I refer to briefly in my series of stories in my first season. If you don't know what happened in the first season, I, for example, had an episode called Child Psychologist, where I referred to praising the Lord as a way of mitigating a family crisis. We went to a Christian psychologist during that time. This was a little confusing to people who were not churched as children, as we used to call them. I don't know if they still use that term or not, but it also created questions from a few people who were wondering if I was still a Christian. This is totally understandable because I know when I was a really devout believer, I wondered who I was talking to. I always wanted to sort of suss it out, and that would change the way that I related to people, depending on whether or not they identified as a Christian. So I'm going to tell you flat out, no, I am no longer a Christian. So if that bugs you and you don't want to hear anymore, that's fine. Whatever turns you crank. But if you're curious, I do think it would be interesting if you hang in there. This is the second reason why I want to do this. It's really popular right now for people to talk about deconstructing from religion, leaving their type of religion. I'm not seeing a lot though about my specific generation and our relationship with Christianity specifically. See, it's easy to lump a generation together, and I see a lot of people who are Gen Xers, but they are actually later Gen Xers or cusp millennials. I'm actually an early Gen Xer. We had a really different experience than the later Gen Xers had. They were babies and toddlers when I was a schoolager and a teenager. My formative years were in the 70s and 80s. Now by the 80s, I was still being cooked, don't get me wrong, but I was a teenager. I'm not a boomer, though. These were different experiences, as I said. My goal is for you to see where a lot of people are coming from that you may be around, who are very black and white or very staunch or very hardened in their thinking. And it's entirely possible, possible, that by understanding the depth of their own indoctrination, you may find some tools, other than just making fun of them, to communicate, to get through to them. Quick tip disrespect is useless on our generation because we will just shut down and because we don't give a shit what you think generally. I am not a Bible scholar. However, I grew up on, cut my teeth on the Bible and conservative Christianity specifically. For the first 12 years of my life, my family attended a traditional conservative Baptist church. I also want to mention to you that what conservative is has changed since then, at its core in a lot of ways, so I want to pepper that in for later. But anyway, we were at that church twice on Sundays and Wednesday nights and even Saturdays from time to time. I went to Christian camps, church retreats, all the way through college. In fact, I went to a private Christian college and majored in Christian music so that I could be what back then was called a contemporary Christian singer-songwriter. I had to minor in Bible in order to get a liberal arts degree. 30 hours of Bible. And although it's really tempting for me to skip past all of that and give you my opinion about our current culture and give you a snarky opinion about Christians today or Christian influencers or roll my eyes or whatever, I kind of want to take a different angle to see if maybe you understand a little more about where people are coming from. You don't have to necessarily agree with where they're coming from, but if you get a bigger picture, it might help you. So what I'm telling you is, I've been through it. From birth, I was in it. And what might be really obvious to you today in our current cultural framework oftentimes is oversimplified or completely goes over the head of somebody of my generation who was raised as or is still Christian. Now that was a mouthful. So while you digest it, I'm gonna repeat it real quick. What might be really obvious to you today in our current cultural framework is oftentimes oversimplified or goes completely over the head of somebody of my generation who is raised or is still Christian. So, what can you expect in this series? We're gonna talk about some of the tools of the trade of my religious indoctrination, what that indoctrination looked like, how effective it was. Indoctrination is the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs, doctrines, or ideologies uncritically without questioning or examining alternative viewpoints. We're gonna dissect how the indoctrination stuck with me for so long. And we're gonna talk about what precipitated my exit and what ultimately led me to freedom from this mindset and this way of approaching life and approaching the world. We're also gonna talk about what happens after, what happened to me socially, emotionally, mentally, physically, and yes, spiritually. And I'm gonna tell you all of this through a series of little stories. So when I use the word indoctrination, I am not using it in a hyperbolic way. I am actually going with the definition of indoctrination. I wish that I could promise you that this is going to be full of salacious, scandalous retellings of the worst of the worst where they're outed and shamed. But the fact of the matter is, it was in some ways more insidious than you can imagine because it was born of good intentions and it was wrapped in love. And the damage wrought was to my developing psyche, and is never going to be completely undone. So it might be worth your time to hang in and check it out. I'm gonna start you in 1970. Are you ready for the 17 in Wheatridge, Wheatridge, Colorado? Wheat Ridge, Colorado is a little suburb just outside of Denver. It's literally borders Denver. Like you can be in Denver in a mile. It's not that far. So it sounds super rural, but it was actually just a suburb. Sunday mornings were really special at the Wilson household. It was the one day a week where we were all together for the whole day, the Lord's day. There were seven people in my family, five kids, and my mom and dad. So my mom would get up early and make us a hot breakfast. It was really the only day of the week where we would have a hot breakfast, quite honestly, because there probably wasn't any time. She'd crack a dozen eggs in her avocado green frying pan with a heaping spoonful of cheese whiz to get us to eat it. Ugh, it was so good. It worked. We'd have that with toast and margarine or jiffy brand blueberry muffins with imitation blueberries in it, and wash it down with grape juice made from concentrate. All of these were very special. They were Sunday and holiday only. Each of us kids got one small glass of that grape juice. Every drop was gone in seconds. What a treat. Whomever got the privilege of making the grape juice always had the great responsibility not to eat so much of the concentrate that the juice turned out watery, which was a big job and required more self-discipline than I ever had. I'm not sure I ever made the juice for that very reason. They probably couldn't trust me. By the way, I didn't know any other form of blueberry until I was about ten. Ten when my dad made us the Betty Crocker brand, which included canned blueberries. They weren't as sweet, and they were just in this purple liquid, so I actually liked the fake ones a lot better. We'd eat before getting dressed, of course. Mom would get us ready before getting herself ready. Dress pants and a clean shirt for my brother tucked in and belted, of course. Dresses for me and my three sisters, the oldest two in bouncy curls from sleeping in sponge rollers after our once a week bath we all had the night before. My dad was a local trucker during the week, so he wore his work shirt and jeans, but on Sundays he dressed up a little more. In fact, he was a deacon, so the weeks that it was his turn to do the offering, he would wear a suit. Anyway, it was the one day of the week we were all cleaned and quaffed at the same time. We looked good and we smelled good. We were at our best to be with God and God's people at Beth Eden Baptist Church. But at that young age, it never seemed to dawn on me until we pulled into the parking lot where we were headed. And, family lore has it, I was having none of it. Three-year-old me was giggly and bright-eyed while we sat together at the breakfast table, smiley and pleasant while my mother got me dressed, and sweet while I was nestled between my twin sisters, whose job it was to entertain me on the way there. But once we got there, I would melt down. I cried, clawed at the seat, the door frame, the window, while my mom and sisters dragged me out of the car, screaming. Don't worry, I wasn't being beaten or anything. I just hated it. I hated church. Hated having to sit still, listen, be away from my parents and my siblings. I'd rather be at home watching cartoons, coloring in my coloring book, anything else. I mean, who wouldn't? I hadn't learned just yet to associate all that good stuff, the breakfast, the togetherness, looking nice, with church, Jesus, and God. The truth was, I just didn't care. It was enough for me to be clean and have a nice breakfast and be with my family. Toddler me just frankly didn't see the point. Part of the family lore was the joke that I was like a little demon child or, you know, not demon-possessed. That was a pretty heavy thing to say back then, but kind of a joke that, you know, that we always wondered if you would be a pagan or whatever. Little knowing. But anyway. As I began to realize that church was an inevitability, I focused on the good feelings before church and after. My mom performed an absolute miracle every Sunday, managing to prep Sunday dinner while she was making our breakfast, getting us ready, and getting herself ready. We knew what we'd be coming home to: a huge pan of lasagna, or a pot roast, or a delectable casserole. Slowly cooking in our gas oven while we sat in the pews waiting for it to torture us when we walked in the door. See, we'd have to wait an hour when we got home for dad to finish his deacon duties, or his turn driving the bluebird. The school bus painted white and blue that he used to ferry all the heathen brats whose parents didn't attend church back home after the service. While we waited, we toasted French bread with margarine. We'd make a big iceberg lettuce salad with tomato and cut-up carrots, and occasionally even some cucumbers. No snacking allowed. The smells, the anticipation, the post-church reward, everyone being together enabled me to soldier through the awful in-between as a little kid. I couldn't wait to get home out of those stifling clothes and into something I could actually get dirty in the yard. Sunday afternoons with my family were relaxing. My dad had his rare commandeering of the TV to watch the Broncos with my brother. My mom napped, and my sisters and I played in our room and later with friends. Sunday afternoon progressed, and eventually, a slow dread would creep in as it got closer to 5 p.m. dinner, which was usually grilled cheese and potato chips. 6 p.m. was Sunday night church, which was absolutely mandatory until I was about eight years old. Occasionally we'd get out of it and instead watch Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and then Wonderful World of Disney, but for those early years, we'd load up in the car again for evening church, camping out in the balcony, taking turns laying in my mom's lap and staring at the ceiling lights while the pastor droned on and on. Sunday was a feeling before I had the words to describe it. It was an unstated sacredness. My mom wouldn't listen to the easy listening secular radio station she enjoyed other days of the week. We were not allowed to turn on the TV before church, even if we were ready early. There was zero bickering or fighting allowed. And the church I went to, Beth Eden Baptist, did not allow women in the early 1970s to wear pants. Men with beards could not sing in the choir or serve as deacons. There was a tone, kind of a reticent happiness, reserved, which is kind of weird, because the first songs I learned after the themes from Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers neighborhood were Are You Downhearted, No No No, and Let the Sunshine In, Face It with a Grin. Open up your heart and let the sun shine in. Happiness. The first message of early childhood indoctrination was happy. God church happy. Church happy God. Pretty simple message, and most kids are generally happy, so that one was an easy in. So let me recap the routine behind the early indoctrination. Association of family, safety, dressing up, eating well, being together, and happiness with church, with God. I learned early on. It was the highlight of the week. Once those associations were made, I started to look forward to church. Put a pen in that statement because it's gonna factor in huge in an episode or two. So how does one indoctrinate tiny children? Children love stories, and so Sunday school was all about Bible stories, felt boards with beautifully illustrated sceneries and characters, not cartoons, actual artist illustrations, Adam and Eve, Daniel in the Lion's Den, David and Goliath, Jonah and the whale, Noah's Ark, richly colored, two-dimensional demonstrations as teachers told of acts of bravery, disobedience, pleasing God, and also risking his wrath. Wide-eyed, I listened, my brain making connections. God was who we prayed to. Prayer was closing your eyes and clasping your hands together and asking him for things. Like with your parents, you could be in trouble with God if you don't do what he tells you to do, and he only tells you to do it because he loves you. There is no chance at that age to think for even a second that that isn't real. Hell, I was in an age where I thought Grover was a real person. We put up a cardboard chimney and fireplace every Christmas for Santa to come down and deliver our presents. But mom said God was more important than Santa, and he was bigger than Grover. What does he look like? I remember asking around age four. Nobody knows, but we know he's there, and he helps us tell right from wrong and good from bad. God is love, God brings us joy, and Jesus loves us too. Jesus, I had heard that name when we learned the song Jesus Loves Me. More songs came along that we sang during children's church. I've got joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart, and it's a happy day, and I thank God for the weather. And if you weren't having a happy day, it was because you left your Bible on the shelf. By the time I was five, I had the basics down. God and Jesus were father and son. God wants us to obey him. God loves us. God created heaven and earth and the animals and the people and all the plants and flowers. And Jesus died for you. What what what was that last thing? Jesus died for you. There are pivotal moments in indoctrination, and I'm gonna talk about those next time, including the concept of Jesus dying for me. We're gonna talk about the day I got my very first Bible and what happened after that. Thank you for listening. If you're enjoying the podcast, I'd really love it if you'd take the time to rate and subscribe to it. Until next time, peace out.