The Nightmare of Christianity: How Religious Indoctrination Led to Murder

[Joanne98]

By Max Blumenthal, The Nation
Posted on September 14, 2009, Printed on September 14, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/142605/

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Max Blumenthal's new book Republican Gommorah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party published by Nation Books.

A few miles down the road from Colorado Springs , in the quiet bedroom community of Eldredge, a deeply disturbed young man named Matthew Murray followed the unfolding debacle at New Life Church with an interest that bordered on obsession. Murray, a sallow-faced, bespectacled 24-year-old, had been indelibly scarred by a lifetime of psychological abuse at the hands of his charismatic Pentecostal parents. Murray's mind became crowded with thoughts of death, destruction, and the killings he would soon carry out in the name of avenging what he called his "nightmare of Christianity."

On an online chat room for former Pentecostals, Murray heaped contempt on his mother, Loretta, a physical therapist who homeschooled him to ensure that his contact with the outside world was severely limited. "My 'mother,'" Murray wrote, "is just a brainswashed church agent cun,t . The only reason she had me was because she wanted a body/soul she could train into being the next Billy Graham..."

He went on:



...my mother was into all the charismatic "fanatical evangelical" insanity. Her and her church believed that Satan and demons were everywhere in everything. The rules were VERY strict all the time. We couldn't have ANY christian or non-christian music at all except for a few charismatic worship CDs. There was physical abuse in my home. My mother although used psychotropic drugs because she somehow thought it would make it easier to control me (I've never been diagnosed with any mental illness either). Pastors would always come and interrogate me over video games or TV watching or other things. There were NO FRIENDS outside the church and family and even then only family members who were in the church. You could not trust anyone at all because anyone might be a spy.
An authoritarian Christian-right self-help guru named Bill Gothard created the home-schooling regimen implemented by Murray's parents. Like his ally James Dobson, 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."

At the Charter School for Excellence, a school in South Florida inspired by Gothard's draconian principles that receives $800,000 in state funds each year, children are indoctrinated into a culture of absolute submission to authority almost as soon as they learn to speak. A song that the school's first-graders are required to recite goes as follows:



Obedience is listening attentively,
Obedience will take instructions joyfully,
Obedience heeds wishes of authorities,
Obedience will follow orders instantly.
For when I am busy at my work or play,
And someone calls my name, I'll answer right away!
I'll be ready with a smile to go the extra mile
As soon as I can say "Yes, sir!" "Yes ma am!"
Hup, two, three!
Former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is among the 2.5 million Americans who have attended Gothard's Basic Seminar. According to Huckabee, who once earmarked state funds to distribute Gothard's literature in Arkansas prisons, Gothard was responsible for "some of the best programs for instilling character into people." But to the deeply alienated Murray, Gothard was the original source of his pathology. "I believe that the truth needs to be exposed," Murray wrote in a September 2006 discussion forum of recovering Gothard followers. "People need to see through errornious and destructive doctrines and teachings including Bill Gothard's."

After graduating from Gothard's home-schooling seminars, which constituted the bulk of his education (Colorado has no educational records for Murray after third grade), he was presented by his parents with two options for higher education. The first choice was Haggard's alma mater, Oral Roberts University. ORU at the time was beginning to unravel under the weight of scandalous revelations that its new president, Richard Roberts--the scion of its beloved founder--had allegedly looted university coffers to pay for his daughter's junkets to the Bahamas and bankroll his wife's shopping sprees. (Oral Roberts's other son, Ronnie, was a cocaine-addicted closet homosexual who committed suicide in 1982). Murray's second option was the "Discipleship Training School" of Youth with a Mission (YWAM), a Christian Reconstructionist-inspired missionary group that trained bright-eyed youngsters to spread the gospel of Colorado Springs to under-evangelized Third World nations. Desperate to escape his parents' rigid order, Murray joined YWAM.

But as soon as Murray enrolled at YWAM's training center in nearby Arvada in 2002, he found himself trapped in an authoritarian culture even more restrictive than home. He realized that, as another student of YWAM bluntly put it, the school's training methods resembled "cult mind-controlling techniques." Murray became paranoid, speaking aloud to voices only he could hear, according to a former roommate. He complained that six of his male peers had made a gay sex video and that others routinely abused drugs. Hypocrisy seemed to be all around him, or at least dark mirages of it. A week before Murray was scheduled to embark on his first mission, YWAM dismissed him from the program for unspecified "health reasons." "They admitted that I hadn't done anything wrong, just that they had prayed and felt I wasn't popular/'connected' and talkative enough," he recalled.

Two years later, Murray raged at two YWAM administrators during a Pentecostal conference his mother had dragged him to attend. The shocked staffers promptly warned Loretta Murray that her son "wasn't walking with the Lord and could be planning violence." Within days, an ornery local pastor was allowed to burst into the young Murray's room, rifle through his belongings, and leave with a satchel full of secular DVDs and CDs--apparent evidence of his depravity. Murray's mother searched his room for satanic material every day afterward for three months, stripping him of his privacy and whatever was left of his love for her. After the trauma-inducing raids, in which Murray estimated his mother and her friends destroyed $900 worth of his property, he concluded, "Christianity is one big lie."

continued>>>
http://www.alternet.org/story/142605/the_nightmare_of_christianity%3A_how_religious_indoctrination_led_to_murder

[sui generis]

1. isnt' it odd that when you displace our natural moral compass

with a contrived one, when things break down there isn't anything natural to fall back on, besides anger, betrayal and a cathartic need for vengeance.

Cause, meet effect.

[Lerkfish]

3. correlation, certainly

however, I would venture not everyone in that congregation has imprisoned a minor for decades and forced to bear his young, even as much as I think their teachings are a bit whack, I think sick people are sick anyways and use religion or whatever to justify their sickness.

[Taverner]

5. Unfortunately, you are off

You would be surprised at how many children are imprisoned by these kinds of psychopaths.

Matthew was just the tip of the iceberg - there are MILLIONS - one of the reasons I am so against home schooling

[Lerkfish]

6. everyone in that congregation was imprisoning children?

that was my point, not the one you brought up. Of course there many more out there.

[bertman]

7. Is it "imprisoning" to keep a child in an environment where his/her only social contacts

are related to the religious activities of his/her family? This would include allowing only "approved" playmates, schooling at "church" schools (madrassas?), exposure only to biblical texts or church-approved reading/viewing materials.

Then, let's not forget the ongoing Sunday schools, prayer services, revivals, retreats, etc.

No, it's not technically "imprisoning", but in reality the child has been imprisoned in a world that is so circumscribed as to be the equivalent of protective imprisonment.

In my opinion.

[Taverner]

8. And you are correct sir

[patrice]

14. Thanks for that picture! Ted makes me think of people I know and Love.

[PDJane]

2. This is organized religion at its worst.......

And this kind of indoctrination leads to either personalities who absolutely have to act out and lash out, or good little automatons who continue the cycle by indoctrinating their own children.

This kind of religion is a brainwashing process. Combine it with the theories of Bernays and you get a really compliant populace.

[Taverner]

4. I blame New Life Church. They Are more guilty than Matthew.

[AsahinaKimi]

9. Taliban techniques...

or worse.. is the burka next?

[patrice]

10. James Dobson made $1,000,000. off of the women that Ted Bundy killed.

[patrice]

11. James Dobson picked that Secessionist VP "candidate" - Sarah Palin

The quitter governor, hoping for a Media job.

[patrice]

12. To: J Dobson + The Family, war is Economic Class Cannabilism &

for the non- and under hc insured, Anything less than Universal USA Health Care IS Death Panels.

STRONG! PUBLIC OPTION

[patrice]

13. P.S. Nurses are Demanding a Strong Public Option! - to stop waste and improve hc processes!

There are 3 nurses in my Family.

The Nurses are Ready to DO This Thing!!

[Kievan Rus]

15. Christian fundamentalism, not Christianity as a whole

Not all Christians are crazies like those people. Every religion has its crazies and loons. They're just more vocal in this country.

[Taverner]

16. Are you sure of that?

[Gman2]

17. yup

[Taverner]

18. OK - I disagree

Although I do not think religion is evil in itself, it is definitely the blanket of choice for the truly evil.

[Gman2]

19. And that makes it what it is. Dangerous, in the wrong hands.

[Taverner]

21. But one must admit, the seeds are there in Christianity

Not just the celebrated genocide of the Old Testament, but plenty of fear and hate in the New Testament too...

[Gman2]

22. The seeds are there in Dr. Suess, if one is already inclined.

[Taverner]

23. Not the same: No parent tells their kids Dr Suess is real

There are many who tell their kids that the Bible all actually happened, and what God says in the Bible is nothing short of a slave owner speaking to his slave.

Apples and oranges.

[Gman2]

24. That would be bad parenting, and a disservice.

[Taverner]

25. Oh I agree - My kids are learning Critical Thinking from day 1

Sometimes it drives them nuts, but its important.

But you would be surprised how many parents teach the Bible as a History book, a Law book and a Science book all rolled in one.

[vinylsolution]

20. Thank you for an excellent post.

Home-schooling (i.e., dark-ages indoctrination) is rife here in Colorado Springs, and still they wonder why their kids end up planning mass-murder.