I Grew Up in a Southern Baptist Elementary School

Howdy, folks! So I’m about seven or eight years old, marching around a church with the rest of my classmates. Why, you may ask? Well, you see, we had to march around the church seven times and shout in order to simulate the battle of Jericho. You know, where Joshua’s forces marched around the city walls seven times, and on the seventh time blew on their trumpets, causing the city walls to fall. We then learned about how the Israelites slaughtered every man, woman, and child (except for Rahab) in the city. What a wonderful, uplifting story to teach children, especially in such a hands-on, interactive manner!

So as you may have guessed, this will be about what it was like to go to a Southern Baptist elementary school. There’s going to be some overlap with my child abuse article, but I’ll try not to cover the same things twice. Anyways, things like the aforementioned Jericho story were pretty common back at my elementary school. They didn’t bother hiding the fact that the Bible openly talks about genocide and war crimes, either; these were always told to us and they were always portrayed as the acts of a just God. There was no hemming or hawing about the Old Testament being a product of its times and how we shouldn’t give it much credence; no, God was a vengeful sort who wouldn’t hesitate to strike you and everything you loved down if you disobeyed his commands. The only thing standing in the way of this was the love and warmth of his son, Jesus Christ, who was the only hope you had of escaping God’s wrath, be it on the material plane or in the afterlife.

They started this at an early age, too. As a preschooler at this school, they routinely told me that I would burn in hell if I didn’t accept Jesus into my heart. They’d also try to convince us to get our parents to stop listening to things like rock & roll (because the devil controls rock music, don’tcha know). We also had Church two times a week, on Wednesdays and Fridays. We’d all gather together in the giant church and listen to a sermon. These sermons covered various aspects of the religious beliefs we were expected to adopt, and were pretty universally awful.

One particular sermon that stands out took place in Kindergarten, where a (guest, I believe) preacher went on a long rant about homosexuality and said that (excuse the slur) “f**gots will burn in hell.” I have no idea if anyone there was gay or not, but given the size of the audience, odds are that at least someone was. What a wonderful, loving, accepting environment my school was, eh? If you ever wonder why evangelical Christians can be hateful towards the LGBT community, now you know: they start the indoctrination at an early age. They raised kids to be hateful, spiteful, and vindictive towards anyone different than they are. Our other sermons — hosted by the staff at the school and church — were just as bad. Fire and brimstone, “homosexuals and the unbelievers” would burn in eternal hellfire, and so forth. We were also told as children that lying — any lying, for any reason — was universally a sin and we would face God’s wrath. And yes, this included things like ‘lying to the Nazis to hide a Jewish family’.

The material we studied in class was… interesting as well. As I’ve mentioned before, we used primarily A Beka Books and Bob Jones University Press books in school — both of which, I might add, are favorites of the homeschooling community. So these books taught us many interesting things. While most of you have probably heard of Bob Jones University Press, A Beka Books are published by Pensacola Christian College. If you aren’t familiar with Pensacola Christian College, I encourage you to Google it and to read this article. It’s a pretty horrible institution — founded by two Bob Jones University alumni — and by Googling either the school or the book company you can find out some interesting things.

For example, I read in one of my history books that most slave owners were in fact wonderful, nice people who were very kind to their slaves and that while, sure, there may have been a few “bad apples”, the vast majority were really great people. I also learned that early man used to pal around with dinosaurs and that there were cave paintings of dinosaurs so that proves the Bible is the 100% literal true word of God. Evolution was also described as a lie, probably created by Communists (who, by the way, were apparently still a huge threat to the American way of life in the 1990s). We learned that World War II was a war of Christianity against Atheism (represented by the Axis powers), and any number of other demonstrably false ‘facts.’

Also, as part of our ‘academics’ we were forced to read and memorize Bible passages word-for-word. This was in addition to virtually every class lesson we had relating back to the Bible in some way. Everything was also presented to us in a very Dominionist fashion. While Dominionism is mostly outside the scope of this article, I will link to the Wikipedia article on it as well as give a brief description here. The entire point of our social education was to prime us to be ready to accept a conservative Christian, right-wing form of politics and to argue for a right-wing Christian dominated state and federal government. History lessons were presented to us as the United States being created as a Christian nation, with a special destiny and authority conveyed upon it by God. If you’ve ever seen Glenn Beck speak about America and Christianity, you’re on the right track. The Democrats — and the left in general — were portrayed to us as essentially a fifth column for Satan and for the Communists, trying to destroy God’s new Kingdom on Earth.

Another thing we were forced to do was pledge allegiance to the Christian Flag (“I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Savior for whose Kingdom it stands; one Savior, crucified, risen, and coming again with life and liberty to all who believe. Amen” ) and the Bible every morning. It was … interesting, to say the least. All three pledges — the American Flag, the Christian Flag, and the Bible — were mandatory on pain of punishment, which I’ll address later. We also were forced to sing such wonderful songs as “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “I’m in the Lord’s Army”. We were very much expected to be warriors for Christ (“Forward into battle see His banners go!”) and to carry his message forth to an unbelieving, fallen world. There were other hymns we had to sing as well — Father Abraham, Jesus Loves the Little Children — but these two hymns definitely stood out to me as a kid because of their martial lyrics and message.

I’ve already covered the disciplinary aspect of the school I went to in another article, but I’ll give a brief recap here. Asking questions was discouraged, to put it nicely, and as someone who asked questions a lot, I was frequently in trouble. I would often get detention — in fact, I don’t think there was a single week during my eight year stint at the school where I didn’t have detention — and be forced to sit through recess with my head down on my desk. They didn’t even allow you to work on homework during detention; you had to place your arms around your head and lay your head down on your desk, to cut you off from visual and audio stimuli as much as was possible. They were very much in favor of corporal punishment, which I experienced quite frequently. After each session with the paddle, they would also make you pray to God to forgive them for having hit you. If you want to know more about that, though, you can read my article on child abuse here.

The school infiltrated every aspect of my life. What we were allowed to wear was totally controlled by the school’s dress code: tight jeans and a collared shirt for the boys, dresses for the girls. They would — strongly — encourage me to not play video games or to watch shows like Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, because such things were tools of the devil meant to corrupt our minds and turn us away from Jesus Christ’s light and love. They would also blame individual students for tragedies that occurred throughout the world as a tool of intimidation. The 1994 Northridge earthquake, for example? Apparently that was my fault. According to my teacher, because I refused to let God into my heart, he killed fifty-seven people to teach me a valuable object lesson about humility and worship. I have no idea how it was my fault, but my teacher at school seemed pretty convinced of it at the time. “Maybe if you would let Jesus into your heart and worship him, these things wouldn’t happen,” she said. I know that doesn’t make any sense to us adults, but let me tell you, as an eight-year-old, that was a pretty terrifying and chilling thing to hear.

My school relied heavily upon manipulation and fear in order to sell their message. They took innocent little children like me, and did their best to craft us into horrible, hate-filled monsters. We were subjected to vitriolic rants about the LGBT community, about the poor, about “communists,” about liberals; we were subjected to various dog whistle attacks against people of color and women (who were definitely responsible for the fall of the human race, according to my school). Luckily, most of their tactics never really worked against me, but it worked for the vast majority of my classmates. It was a hate-filled environment filled with misinformation, where the very people responsible for our growth and development as human beings terrorized us and abused us. I still carry the baggage of this upbringing, and I don’t know if I’ll ever truly get past everything I was subjected to.

Surprisingly, a lot of this indoctrination did not take. While the more political aspects did — like I’ve written before, I was a conservative for many years — the religious aspects never clicked with me. I’m not entirely sure why this was — it may have been the amount of physical and mental child abuse I received at the school, combined with my obstinate personality, made me unwilling to believe what I was being taught on principle. Whatever the cause, I’m very lucky I never had to unlearn the religious messages along with the purely political ones. And, unfortunately, these sorts of messages and treatment are commonplace in Dominionist schools. I didn’t just ‘luck out’ and end up in a bad environment; this sort of treatment is the norm for this branch of Christian schools.