Christian Indoctrination in Homeschooling

Grooming kids is actually fine as long as they turn into like straight Christian nationalists who run the government.

Hello, hello, and welcome to A Bit Fruity.

I'm Matt Bernstein, and I'm so happy that you're here.

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So homeschooling is one of those things that people outside of the United States hear about and they're like, what the fuck?

And then people in the US who aren't homeschooled like kind of vaguely know that it's a thing that some other types of families do.

And then people who are homeschooled are like, honey, take a seat and let me tell you what the hell went on.

Until researching this episode, I was kind of in that middle group.

I knew that homeschooling existed and I knew that I had some problems with the ethics of it, but the reality of how it actually works turned out to be a lot more complicated and darker than I realized.

So homeschooling in various forms has been around for a while, but the real modern homeschooling movement didn't really start surging until the 1970s when this guy called John Holt started advocating for teaching at home with curriculums designed at home.

And at first it was called unschooling.

And then in the 1980s, Christian fundamentalists and the religious right took up this cause.

Today, parents decide to homeschool their kids for all sorts of reasons, ranging from religious and moral reasons, but also racism in schools and bullying and specific disabilities that they feel their schools aren't meeting, or just dissatisfaction with the curriculum.

So the COVID-19 pandemic is really where the homeschooling movement exploded.

And yes, at first everyone was just forced to be at home.

And so we had...

no choice and a lot of parents started saying, hey, let's stop with the Zoom stuff and I'm just going to start homeschooling you instead.

But then then it wasn't just the fact that kids were already home.

It was also that public schools became the backdrop for a lot of culture wars that we're now seeing still play out in the U.S., like masking versus anti-masking and teaching about gender and sexuality and race in classes and the whole critical race theory panic.

So since the pandemic, we've seen numbers of homeschooled students skyrocket across all households from around 5% of all households to around 11% of all households.

In black families, which a lot of people don't realize have been the center of the current movement, they've increased homeschool numbers by a multiple of five from just over 3% to now over 16% of Black households homeschool.

And a big reason for that, which I didn't know about, was that a lot of Black families were seeing how topics like slavery were being taught in school.

And they were like, no, no, no, no, that's really whitewashed.

And we want to teach them how it actually happened.

That along with the fact that a lot of them were seeing that there were very few black teachers in schools and also racism that their kids were facing both from teachers and other students.

So, an estimated 3 million kids in the United States are homeschooled now.

There's sort of a patchwork of laws around homeschooling that vary state by state, but on the whole, there's really not a lot going on in the way of oversight by a third party.

You can basically teach whatever the hell you want and rarely need any sort of credential or licensing to do it.

16 states have no curriculum requirements, 32 states have no mandatory testing, and in 11 states, parents don't need to notify anyone when they pull their kid out of public school.

So like in a lot of places, you could theoretically teach your kids about Bible verses every day and nobody can intervene.

Does that sound fucking crazy?

Yes.

Is it fucking crazy?

Yes.

Wouldn't it be easy to pass laws that would put up some kind of guardrails around this stuff?

You would think so, but it's basically impossible, all because of one group.

The Homeschool Legal Defense Association, also known as the HSLDA, was founded in 1983 by a guy named Michael Ferris.

The whole point was to defend homeschooling families because at the time it wasn't officially legal in all 50 states to homeschool.

But now that it is, they've become a group devoted to fighting every piece of legislation that tries to implement any sort of legal guardrails around the homeschooling system.

So for example, and we're about to talk about child abuse, so trigger warning, maybe skip this part if that's triggering to you.

In 2018, there was an eight-year-old girl named Rayleigh Browning, who was a student in West Virginia public school.

And when teachers noticed that she had bruises and other signs of abuse, they called Child Protective Services because teachers are required to do that.

When Rayleigh's dad and his domestic partner found out about this, they immediately pulled her out of the public school and registered her as a homeschooler, which they were allowed to do despite the fact that there was an ongoing CPS investigation into them.

A few months later, Rayleigh Browning died from parental abuse and neglect.

Not long after Rayleigh's death, House Bill 4440, also known as Rayleigh's Law, was introduced, which keeps parents and other homeschooled teachers from homeschooling if there is a CPS investigation of abuse or neglect or a previous conviction of domestic violence.

You'd think that this would be extremely uncontroversial and that anyone who wants to support any kind of child welfare would support it, but the bill hasn't passed because the HSLDA is still fighting it.

A spokesperson from the HSLDA said, House Bill 4440 is based on insidious stereotyping of homeschooling parents and presumes without evidence that homeschooling is a risk factor for abuse or neglect.

What would happen if the West Virginia legislature banned children from enrolling in all schools where there have been allegations of teacher abuse?

I just want to say that he's wrong.

and that there are things about the homeschooling system, including the fact that he opposes this very law that do make it more likely for abuse to take place and more likely for that abuse to never go reported.

So that's kind of the group we're dealing with.

The HSLDA has over 130,000 members and receives over $13 million in annual funding.

It's extremely well connected and influential in state legislatures and parents who homeschool are essentially backed into becoming members of it, regardless of whether they agree with the politics of the organization, to protect their status as homeschooling parents.

The guy who started the HSLDA, Michael Ferris, went on to be the CEO of the Alliance Defending Freedom from 2017 to 2022.

The ADF is a conservative legal advocacy group, which is designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBT hate group.

It works to expand Christian practices within public schools and in government and outlaw abortion and oppose gay rights and trans rights and women's rights.

It's weird how those things always somehow end up going together.

In the year 2000, Michael Ferris opened up Patrick Henry College, which is a Christian university where notable alumni include the former one-term Republican congressman Madison Cawthorne, who, in his very one-term fashion, only attended the school for a single semester before dropping out and was later accused by other students of sexual harassment in a letter that had 150 alumni signatories.

But I digress.

Today, we're joined by two people who were profiled earlier this year in the Washington Post.

Christina and Aaron Beals were both raised in Christian fundamentalist households and homeschooled their entire lives.

And now that they have a family of their own, they're choosing a different path.

As it turns out, that's not so simple.

Christina and Aaron, welcome to A Bit Fruity.

Thanks for having me.

Great to be here.

Absolutely.

So take me to the beginning.

Like, where did each of you grow up?

What was your family like?

Did you have siblings?

Yeah, so I grew up in Northern Virginia and have basically been here my whole life, mostly in Fairfax County or actually in Fairfax.

Yeah, and

I was raised homeschooled to a very, very evangelical Christian household.

My parents were actually on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ, which is now called Crew.

So they were very much deep in the kind of evangelical right political world.

That was my upbringing.

And we still live here in Northern Virginia.

So I guess I haven't fallen too far from where I started.

I grew up over on the eastern shore of Maryland.

I was the oldest of eight kids.

And we were all homeschooled from my beginning as a three-year-old.

My mom started, and she is still homeschooling my youngest brother, who's 15.

There's a 19-year spread between us, as is common in many of the families in the movements we came out of.

So in Maryland and in Virginia, there are like

few to no regulations or government oversight around homeschooling.

So for the most part, parents can teach regardless of whether they're qualified or credentialed, which most aren't.

And they can basically teach whatever they want because there's no assessments, there's no standardization.

I was doing a little bit of

research on the regulations in those states.

They're in Maryland, so there are none of the things that I just listed, but there are subject requirements that you have to teach theoretically.

But if you're under what's called a church-exempt school umbrella, so like a registered church-operated homeschool, you don't even have to follow those.

And the HSLDA will help you find a church-exempt school, homeschool for your child.

And Christina, that's what you are in, right?

It is, absolutely.

To be fair, I do feel like of all the horror stories I've heard, my parents followed a pretty standard, you know, math, science, English language arts, reading,

history, kind of social studies sort of thing.

But there certainly was sort of strict fencing around what ideas could be engaged with, whether that was only learning science from a young earth creationist standpoint or only learning certain facts about history or

certain books that we were allowed to read or not allowed to read.

So where I do feel like they,

my parents, succeeded in covering all the content areas, there was certainly a lot of limiting of what exactly that content looked like.

Yeah, I read in your article that one of you, I believe you learned that like dinosaurs were on Noah's Ark.

Oh, yeah, both of us.

Yeah,

that's a whole thing.

Not just that the earth is young, but that very specifically a focus on, yeah, dinosaurs were on the ark.

And

like.

Lived along with man.

Yeah.

So Ken Ham with Answers in Genesis was, I think, sort of the foundation for both of us of

our creation science upbringing.

I mean, we went to conferences and stuff.

Would you say that any of your curriculum was secular or was religion infused in every aspect of it?

Even though you were learning, like you said, math and science, was it like math and science as it was relevant to Christianity?

You know, it's funny you ask.

The very first curriculum I used, I believe, you know, kindergarten up until first or second grade, was a correspondence school program called the Calvert School.

I have a lot of fond memories of it.

I believe my mom had to like mail back in our work to show that we were doing it.

Remember, this was in the very early days of homeschooling in the early 90s.

And I've talked with my dad since then, and he has described it as, yeah, we had to leave the Calvert School behind because it was getting too woke.

And I said to him, I was like, what do you mean by that?

And he said, you know, they were teaching evolution and stuff.

And I do remember as a child being sat down and being like, we are moving away from this basically to teach you exactly what we think is true.

It's so fascinating because woke has become something that means literally everything everything and also nothing.

Exactly.

Yes.

Exactly.

And like woke means black people, woke means gay people.

I have to say, I've never heard of woke meaning evolution.

I think our parents are the OG woke.

Woke meaters.

Yeah.

I guess the standard for wokeness has become

really low.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I feel like you had something to say about your.

It was pretty similar to her upbringing with,

I don't really remember anything being secular.

It's possible some of the math was, but some of the math even was not.

Like when we did the ATI wisdom booklets, they would literally try to teach you arithmetic from like Bible verses.

Like, oh, Jesus.

you know, fed 5,000.

And if there were, you know, I don't even remember what it was, but it literally be any scripture verse where there was a number, you could turn into the math lesson.

What's so fascinating to me is like, I mean, you're not going to stay stay a kid forever.

And it's like, how do you apply a lot of this?

You know, the world is not governed by biblical math and biblical science.

Only the communities of Christians, you know, where it's predominantly evangelical Christians are.

And it's like, how are you expected to move into the world with an education that's only very specific to those communities?

I'm not sure that you are.

There was a lot of crafting of sort of our insular internal Christian community and Christian culture.

You know, even Aaron, who's in what you might, from our parents' perspective, call a secular career, computer programming, in his late teens, early 20s.

I know you've shared that there was a lot of trying to determine what Christian organizations you could work with.

There was skepticism of working with some larger secular companies such as Adobe.

Yeah.

So I think I'm not sure that really was the plan.

Yeah.

And then even tying that back more to this underbelly of Christian nationalism and how these people really did want this to be a Christian nation.

So ideally, if their whole vision came true, you'd be living in essentially a Christian society.

So the government, the world, like you're saying, would be operating from what they would call biblical foundations and a biblical worldview.

So they're not concerned with preparing you for the world.

They want the world to bend to what you're learning.

Yeah, basically.

I mean, there's this phrase you often hear: be in the world, not of the world.

And so, like, I really do think that as a child, I was raised with this mentality that, like, you're never really going to be part of the world.

And so, you, you will take advantage of the world in the way that furthers, you know, our Christian goals, but

you're never going to be an adult in the world, really,

was what they were teaching us, whether it was said in those exact words or not.

That's what it was.

Okay, so now

I'm going to get to your requirements for a husband,

Which I fail miserably now.

Okay, wait, I'm pulling it up so I can read it.

Sure thing.

So, Christina, when you were 15, you

made a list of requirements that you had for a husband.

15 being the age of a high school sophomore.

Correct.

We have that list.

I'm going to read it.

All right.

Requirements for my husband.

So, sorry, 15-year-old handwriting.

I'm working on it.

All right.

You know, that was one homeschool subject I did a really bad job at.

Oh, it's not that bad.

It's not that bad.

One, must be an on-fire, sold-out Christian who loves, fears, and serves the Lord wholeheartedly and myself and the kids next.

Two, must be committed to courtship so our pre-marriage relationship goes smoothly.

Three, must believe in full and unconditional surrender of our children to God Almighty.

Our number of children.

Number.

Our number of children.

What does that mean?

That means no birth control.

Yeah.

Oh, oh my gosh.

You're like already being like, I cannot be on birth control at 15 years old.

Oh yeah.

Oh yeah.

Whoa.

All right.

Sure.

Four, must desire to homeschool our children.

So that was like, that was like, no matter what, you're you're like, we have to, your parents told you, you're like, you're homeschooling your kids.

Your kids are homeschooling their kids.

We're all homeschooled forever.

Yes.

Five, must want me to be a full-time homemaker and only have an outside job if required or instructed by my potter.

Can you explain what potter means?

That is a reference from within Christian circles to humans being like clay and God being like a potter who molds them.

God and or your parents who are God's manifestation on earth.

Yes.

I see.

So it's like you're only going to have a job if God comes to you and is like, you're getting a job.

Yeah, I'm not quite sure how that was supposed to work, but

15-year-old dreams.

That's why it never does,

surprisingly.

And then we have, so those are our five pillars, and then we have a couple preferred.

Preferred.

To play an instrument that could be used to play songs to lead our family in worship.

Like, I got the first part of that.

Like, yeah, I mean, I think a husband who plays an instrument, that's cool.

Only for worship music.

I don't know.

Like, no, you have to understand.

It probably was only for hymns because music with a beat was like the devil's way of

coming in.

That's another Bill Gother teaching.

Yeah, like what happened when like Britney Spears started dominating the airwaves?

Oh, that was.

We weren't allowed to listen to the radio.

Yeah.

No, no.

Yeah.

No, we literally were not allowed to listen to secular music.

So that that was not even like we vaguely, I vaguely knew about Britney Spears.

I don't think I heard a Britney Spears song until like well into my 20s.

Yeah.

Which is like honestly one of the most shocking statements said so far because

at a time when media consolidation was such that they if there was a pop star that they wanted to be famous, that you had to hear them, the fact that you went so long shielded from Britney Spears is pretty remarkable.

Yeah.

Almost done here.

They preferred would be to like farming and horses and to possibly own either one or both.

I actually think that that's like a totally reasonable, like, yeah, if you want a husband who's like into farming, sure.

It is, but sadly, the motivation for it, I think, I mean, I did like farming, but there also was this undercurrent in our circles of you have to be self-sufficient because the end of the world is coming and you've got to be able to like take care of yourselves.

So as much as I am an animal lover

and I think part of that was in there.

There was also very much.

As a matter of fact, I remember when I met Aaron, he was a tech guy and I was like, hold up, we're supposed to be able to like farm our way to survival in the end times.

How's that going to work?

So

it was deep, Matt.

It's like you can't farm if you're like coding

a view source without the internet.

And the internet's kind of global so yeah

basically already taking the mark of the beast oh

wanting a husband who farms in the proliferation of of email is probably really hard yeah

all right uh to consider missionary work in parentheses to a spanish country

maybe we wanted someone bilingual that's i mean that's cool

And to have known me in a brother-sister relationship for some time before courting me.

Can you explain what that is?

That sounds so incestuous.

It does.

It sounds very incest.

It does sound very incestuous.

Man, this is hard.

It's hard for me to hear, even though I recognize that this was me writing it 19 years ago.

The whole courtship movement where there was a lot of emphasis on sexual purity, and we were not allowed to kiss before our wedding day.

There was just,

you were supposed to treat each other like a brother and sister.

And by so our pre-marriage relationship goes smoothly, that's essentially code for it, so we don't have sex.

Right.

It's a lot to juggle in the mind of a 15-year-old.

It absolutely is.

Yeah.

How were you taught in your homeschooling days to view your parents, both like as teachers and also, I mean, spiritual teachers and authority figures?

Yeah, well, it was very authoritarian.

Our parents were sort of given a divine right by God to be,

you know, our authorities.

And so it was, it was more than just, oh, they're the parents who have been around, but it's like, no, God, like somehow up there in heaven, was like picking souls.

And he's like, okay, this parent is going to go with you.

And so like, you dare not question your authority under that ideology.

And yeah, my parents were very controlling and it was sort of justified through biblical and spiritual language constantly.

And it was reinforced in the community that we were in as well that had that view.

I guess one specific example is my parents, and you'd hear people in our circle say this, would say that you don't become

an adult until you're married.

And then your authority is transferred.

They literally had this phrase, the transfer of authority.

The authority is transferred from out from under your parents at marriage on your wedding day.

directly to God.

So that's when you kind of become directly to God for the man.

Oh, right.

And from your parents to your husband for the woman.

Yeah.

So it's this very hierarchical, authoritarian gender roles.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Tons of gender roles.

And at the risk of sounding insensitive, what strikes me immediately is just how, like, for anyone who's outside of communities that believe this, like, it sounds so transparently made up.

Yes.

Absolutely.

Like, like, unbelievably made up.

Like, like, playing house in school levels of made up.

It does.

And

I have gone through some dark places trying to imagine what kind of mind,

what kind of pathology is attracted to this sort of thing.

Because like growing up as a child, you just don't know any better.

And you think like, oh, there's all these strict hierarchies and rules and things.

And you don't know that it's made up.

You don't know that it's basically being justified by scripture.

You think it fell out of scripture.

You think it fell out of set.

You basically think that God like spoke this and people learned it.

And so it's just kind of like beyond question.

You just don't get to think critically about it as a child.

But the adults who are in it, like, how can they not notice we're just making this up as we go?

And then we're taking outside things to try to justify it.

But we're clearly, you know, bias is going to be involved in that process.

So maybe we should think critically about what we're doing.

Like, I don't know why that doesn't happen to some adults.

Well, and to that end, I was going to ask, like, how central is the lack of critical thinking for kids to this whole religious homeschooling experience like are you ever taught to think independently are you ever taught to question what happens if you do question it it's fundamental to strip away critical thinking abilities and sometimes I don't know that maybe they realize that's what they're doing you're never given any opportunity to doubt something to ask questions that that actually have multiple possible outcomes like is this

true could be a yes or no question.

You're allowed to ask, is this true?

And the answer is yes.

But actual critical thinking skills, I was certainly never taught them.

I was very, very much just taught a how to think.

And that was the foundation of basically everything.

And I think it was also that goal of keeping you, you know, on track, that's language they would use on the rails, that goal of keeping you pursuing the knowledge and ideology that was important to them was also accomplished through pretty strict restriction of the information you had access to.

You know, we see the people like Moms for Liberty nowadays who are championing book banning.

And,

you know, our parents were the OG book banners.

Aaron's mom would like make sure he couldn't look at different parts of the encyclopedia or say, oh, that's just made up.

Yeah.

For evolution, was it?

Right.

You know, we were also very isolated

from peers who might have different ideas from us.

I was not allowed to play with neighbor kids.

Aaron was for a time, and then that was sort of cut off.

Not only was there a lack of critical thinking, but there was also an elimination of outside ideas that would have possibly,

it's hard to say with how deeply entrenched we were in a certain ideology, but it seems like there was other information that could have possibly started to percolate in our minds and make us think, something seems a little off.

off or

how come they think this but other people think this um it was it's like it was almost cut off at the root yeah it was well we were taught not to trust trust our mind was core to that as well so like everything was filtered everything was censored and explicitly so like this is this is bad and evil so we're not even gonna let you look at that not just we didn't know it was out there we knew it was out there we knew it was bad and we knew that if we were to look at it we can't trust our mind because our mind will be led astray by satan and so we're afraid to even look at those things.

It's very cult-like.

In fact,

it was actually a, sorry, I just have to say this, a shocking moment for me when I was

googling stuff.

This was like early part of my deconstruction, and I came across something called the bike model, which probably a lot of your listeners have heard of.

It's pretty well known now, but it describes how cults control people.

And I was like, dude, this was literally my upbringing.

Like all these points are exactly within a Christian framework, how my parents explicitly raised me.

I can't say that I was raised in a cult just because of that, but like it really was shocking to realize that critical thinking skills had been very deliberately robbed from me.

I mean, telling people to not trust their gut instinct is like textbook cult leader behavior, like beat into submission kind of behavior.

I also just feel like not trusting your intuition is like the last thing you learn before like truly horrible things are done to you.

Yes.

Was abuse, I mean, first of all, this all sounds like abuse.

Was abuse like physical, emotional, psychological?

Was it part of your experience in homeschooling?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's taken me a long time to even be able to say yes to that without hesitating, mainly through therapists and people saying, yeah, that's what happened to you.

But yeah, there was a lot of abuse.

And it was very institutionalized.

So people were teaching how to abuse.

So like everywhere we went, it was the pastor saying it.

It was your, you know, your dad's friend saying it too.

Saying what?

That in order to teach a child, you have to hit them.

And that.

That's the way you'll save them from eternal conscious torment.

Yeah.

I mean, a lot of it was motivated by fear of hell.

And,

you know, part of me is, yeah,

it's just a whole messed up ideology that reinforces all sorts of bad parenting.

It's interesting, too, that as children,

we were frequently told that we couldn't let anyone else outside know what was happening.

CPS was regularly talked about.

So we were aware that CPS existed and it was regularly demonized as out there to split families apart, out there, basically.

Again, this was the evil world.

And it's just so ironic to us now that child protective services, obviously, there's flaws and corruption, I believe, in every system, but was just unilaterally dismissed as out to get us.

And we were the good guys.

So from a very young age, we knew you don't tell anyone you're being hit.

Actually, Erin has an interesting story about that.

I don't know if you want to.

Yeah, like I remember one time.

with some friends and we were just all talking about like our, you know, our parents and the things they did to punish us.

And I started to tell my stories, and like, they were just all like

in shock.

And

so then my friend's parent came in.

She must have overheard something.

She's like, I just want to make sure you guys all know it's not okay for your parents to hit you.

And she like went around the room and asked everyone, Your parents don't hit you.

And she came to me and said, Your parents don't hit you.

Do you?

And I was like, no.

And then after she left, my friends were like,

you were just telling us like all these things they do.

And

I said said and believed, oh, that's not what hitting means.

Hitting is like you're just randomly punching someone.

Like what they're doing is

hitting you with a punching with a rod because I did something wrong.

Like that's a whole different thing in my head.

Yeah.

And I also knew not to, I actually kind of learned in that moment, oh, I can't really talk about this with my friends because they don't understand is what I'm thinking.

They don't understand how this is actually good.

Yeah.

It's like you were like trained to justify it on your parents' behalf.

Yeah, yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It sounds like some of the abuse that you were facing was like structurally upheld by the homeschool, by the religious homeschooling system itself, by like the pastors and the community of parents who were all like, okay, we're going to like beat our kids into submission in the exact same way.

Something that really frustrates me is when lawmakers introduce legislation that would put up some guardrails to make sure that like, you know, this one called Rayleigh's Law, which is basically, it says that if a parent is actively being investigated by CPS for child abuse or has in the past, then they cannot take their kids out of school, out of public schools and start homeschooling them.

And the HSLDA is fighting against that still, because they're like, no, any amount of restrictions on who can homeschool is, first of all, it's a violation of parents' rights.

But then the other thing that they say, and this is what really, really frustrates me, is they say, well, just because some kids who are homeschooled have gotten abused, abuse can happen anywhere.

Are we going to shut down every public school where a teacher has abused a student?

Are we going to shut down anywhere where a child has been abused?

And it's like, that is so fundamentally dishonest because

part of the abuse that happens in the homeschool system, correct me if I'm wrong, is upheld by the system itself.

It's protected by the system itself.

Yes, kids are abused everywhere.

Kids are abused in public parks, but there are structurally places where kids, and systematically places where kids are abused more, like in a homeschooling program, like in churches,

like in places where there are these like hierarchical structural incentives for people to cover up and hide abuse.

Absolutely.

Yes, it's 100%

promulgated from the top down.

And then, you know, I certainly am not going to say this is all homeschool groups.

I do think the group we came out of is

towards the extreme end of the spectrum.

But our previous homeschool group, superintendent/slash pastor,

is literally currently advocating for children, you know, within his group.

He's teaching his congregation,

the homeschool families in his group, you cannot let your child have access to mandated reporters.

And he goes so far as to say this includes police officers, this includes teachers, this includes doctors.

His reasoning, you're just going to die over this, is like, oh no, the gay agenda.

And he's like, we can't trust any of them because they're not in line with our thinking on sexuality.

Like it's, it's ridiculous.

But there's that very,

like, yes, abuse occurs in many settings, but also, yes, most children have access to adults that they could go to for help.

And I recognize there's often emotional psychological barriers to a child reaching out for help, but at least most children have that.

A homeschooled child can literally become invisible and have no way to reach out for help.

Absolutely none.

And that is explicitly being advocated for by homeschool groups like the one we came out of.

So I wanted to take a moment to thank the sponsor of today's episode, Blue Land.

I am so extremely grateful that you chose to sponsor this podcast.

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You were part of what's called Generation Joshua.

And so I'm going to give you my understanding of Generation Joshua and then you chime in with like what it actually is.

But basically, Generation Joshua is, it's an organization, it's a division of the HSLDA, and it's like the kids' division, which encourages and then like runs like conferences and activities for kids who are homeschooled by Christian conservative parents to take part in government and politics when they get older.

So, from the Wikipedia page, Generation Joshua participants, composed mostly of homeschooled teenagers, campaigns for conservative Republican candidates who support homeschooling and who oppose abortion and LGBT rights.

During election years, Generation Joshua students are often sent to areas where voter outreach and registration could play a significant role.

Their volunteer work has helped some of their preferred candidates win elections.

Prominent former members of Generation Joshua include Madison Cawthorne.

So, but this is crazy.

So it's a division of a homeschooling association that's just employing kids to campaign for Republicans.

Yes.

At some point you wonder, wait,

how's this legal?

Is it legal?

How is it legal?

Somehow it is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I would say Generation Joshua.

So I'm pretty sure, I mean, it's certainly a concept that's wider than just that one organization.

Like our family was involved with an organization called Team Pact, which is very similar.

And yeah, the concept...

somewhat horrifyingly comes from Joshua's conquest in the Old Testament, slaughtering the inhabitants of Jericho and

basically expelling them from the land so they could set up their theocracy.

That's literally what it's invoking.

And the idea was also that the children of these people doing the conquering were going to be the ones who possessed the land.

And we, as the homeschooled children, we were those children.

We were being raised up.

from childhood with a very political end in mind.

And that was basically taking over America.

So as part of your homeschooling kind of experience, you were were raised to be like if you work in government like like you're basically going to be like the gop leaders of tomorrow yeah i mean if if you're cut out for it if you're a guy which fortunately yeah if you're a guy i was gonna say christina what about what about for you uh so my job hypothetically would have been to

marry a guy who was doing that kind of thing and

uh

support him.

I never really quite figured out what that was supposed to mean.

Your full-time job was like supporting your husband.

There was a lot of language over he sits in the gates with the elders of the land, and

but also primarily continuing the ideology by having a lot of kids.

There was this idea that we would outpopulate our opponents by scorning birth control and just having a crap ton of babies.

Your opponents being who?

Like other religions?

Yes, Muslim-specific.

Not religious.

You know, in the post,

when I wrote this 15-year-old letter, this was two or three years after 9-11 when the evangelical fervor against Muslims in particular was very strong.

But yeah, certainly, I know you had mentioned that you had heard that atheists, you were taught, are not having many children.

So it should be pretty easy to outline.

The Muslims were also specifically a threat on our radar as they have a lot of babies.

Another group that is having a lot of children.

So watch out.

Right.

We have to have more children than next.

It's a race.

It's a race.

Yeah.

And there were literally graphs spelling out how this would happen.

If each person had a certain number of children over a certain number of years.

Yeah.

It was like exponential growth.

And like, look, in five generations, we're going to be 10 billion people.

Yeah.

Jesus Christ.

So

you were taught as a child that like, Christina, that like basically your body is a vessel for you to like

broaden the Christian population to make it bigger than the Muslim population.

That's crazy.

Oh, 100%.

That's wild.

I'm sorry.

I don't mean to react insensitively.

No, no, no.

I mean, no.

What strikes me too is that, like, I mean, it sounds like everything that they were teaching you and everything that they were doing with with you, that like, that's what gay adults are accused of and have been accused of for decades as far as the gay agenda is concerned.

Absolutely.

I mean, every day I go online and I see hundreds of people being like, you're indoctrinating the kids.

I mean, they talk about this on Fox News.

It's a mainstream right-wing talking point now.

I'm indoctrinating the kids.

You can't reproduce.

So you have to go through schools and be social workers and all these things.

So you have to work with kids so you can indoctrinate them into your agenda.

And it's like, that's what the Christian right is actually doing.

And it's not even really under wraps.

It's like, there are organizations that explicitly say like, we're raising the Christian conservative GOP of tomorrow.

Yeah.

It truly feels like when I look at my upbringing, every accusation was an admission to what their strategy was.

Their strategy was to indoctrinate.

Their strategy was to groom.

You know, like

I don't know how else you can describe the way we were brought up in purity culture was sexual grooming.

Now, was it sexual grooming on what they think is the right sexuality?

Sure.

Maybe that would even be something that they'd admit to, but it's okay because it's the right sexuality, according to them.

And that strategy ends up being projected onto everything they don't like as, well, that's what you guys are doing.

And the concept of plurality or critical thinking or open future with options is just not there in their mind.

When I say they, I'm talking about people from my past and upbringing.

I'm not trying to say every, you know, every conservative necessarily.

Right.

It took a lot of

reading,

particularly memoirs for me of people from

other religious points of view and memoirs specifically of people who had come out of abusive environments to see like oh hold on you guys don't actually have something special here you just have like the tactics that always lead to abuse

and always lead to human rights violations yeah grooming grooming kids is actually fine as long as they turn into like straight Christian nationalists who run the government.

Yeah.

Right, exactly.

They're not babies.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I want to talk about your relationship.

You did not grow up knowing each other

and you obviously love each other now and I love that.

But at the beginning, like how involved were your parents in like the arrangement of your relationship.

I mean, would you say it was an arrangement?

I I think I would describe it as a pseudo-arrangement.

At the end of the day, both of us could have said no.

It wasn't like, you know, when you think of an arranged marriage, I think there are some movable differences, but

was there absolutely pressure?

Pressured, set up.

Well, so how did you meet?

So our parents met first.

Well, actually, you met my parents first.

So his, okay, important part of the story is that the homeschool church umbrella group that I grew up in had the church, which, best we can understand, it may have actually been established so they could have this homeschool group.

And his parents started going to this church when you were

16-ish.

So, our parents kind of, there were overlapping functions where our families knew each other or of each other.

So, we were in the same very extreme religious community.

So, our options for what our parents would consider suitable potential spouses were narrowed down.

You have to understand, I went to Patrick Henry College, which closely associated with Generation Joshua, Mike Ferris, HSLDA, all of that stuff,

and went through relationships that had to end with Christian conservative guys, but they weren't quite

conservative enough.

They weren't 100% sold on having all the babies and homeschooling.

So I moved back home after college and college was sort of supposed to be where I was going to find this guy, but I didn't.

Were you freaking out?

Yes, I was absolutely freaking out.

My parents

lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere and we didn't have social circles.

Yeah, Tinder wasn't happening.

No, and I had to move back home after college because girls are not allowed to live on their own.

So my dad literally said, Well, God will bring someone to our doorstep.

And that's how he's supposed to find a guy.

Now,

remember, too, in this world, getting married, and especially getting married young so you can have a lot of babies is super important.

So, I'm 22, I'm moving home, and you know, it was like a common joke in my family.

Christina's biological clock is ticking.

Like, she's 22 and she doesn't have a husband on the horizon.

She's going to have less babies because of that.

So, then, how would you say we?

I mean, how did we start?

Start things.

I mean, basically, I would say our parents kind of matchmade us.

And so, in my case, being

a man, I was allowed to have a career.

So, I was fairly focused on developing my own career.

Now, of course, it was like from my parents' home, but right now.

Yeah, he's 26 and still living at home because he's not allowed to move out either.

Yeah.

Because you're not married.

I'm not married.

Yeah.

I'm not really an adult yet.

Right.

And to Christina's dismay, the career that you were starting wasn't farming and like playing hand.

Yeah.

But, you know, things are going well for me on that front.

So I was kind of just focused on that.

But I had the same kind of like feeling of like, I'm not married.

I'm not really fulfilling my purpose in this world.

And,

you know, like time's running out.

And like, how am I ever going to find someone?

So,

yeah, our parents, I would say, kind of matchmade it.

Certainly, my mom was heavily involved.

I don't know about your parents.

They were definitely...

There was certainly a lot of scoping out prospective young men.

Now, always like from a distance, because we didn't know any.

Right.

And you're not really allowed to know any.

Like,

this idea of actually having a friendship with someone.

Oh, yeah.

you know, a different gender than you is like kind of discouraged because it's because it's going to lead to sexual temptation.

So, like

it was very much a catch-22.

Like, you're not supposed to, you're supposed to get married, which is like the ultimate, you know, goal of

love, but you're not supposed to actually do any love before then.

So, like,

how you're supposed to get there is really,

no one really knew how to answer that question.

It was kind of magic.

It was like, God will make it happen.

You just like click your heels three times and then start having children.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Eventually, Aaron comes and asks my dad, hey, can I get to know your daughter?

Yeah.

That's a big step in this world.

You got to ask the dad first,

which shows also how there was this setup of like

your parents owing you.

Yeah.

And just like

perpetuation of the system because you do have to get married and you do have to have the babies, but your dad is the gatekeeper to make sure you have a guy who's going to be committed to those same exact ideas yeah you're not gonna get out without that um yeah

so

first date he asked my dad my dad says okay

and we go hang out for our first date and conversation topics were hey are we gonna homeschool are we gonna have a lot of kids um i mean this is like step one

absolutely

and you were like wait what's your last name yes yeah pretty much like Yeah.

We were lucky enough to be able to spend some time on private 101 dates.

Yes, because we happened to live about two hours apart.

Typically, in this movement, you were supposed to be chaperoned by a younger sibling.

Yeah.

Sounds like a

joke, but this is like literally.

It's on the sibling.

Like the siblings were supposed to be on the date with you.

Yeah.

To make sure there wasn't too much touching.

Right.

Oh, my God.

I mean, it's so sad.

God forbid you put your hand on her knee.

It's so sad.

It's hard to talk about.

Getting really hot on this podcast.

So, you know, we did end up taking about six months until we got engaged, which was a really long time.

There was a lot of pressure.

I was getting the, dude, what are you doing?

What are you waiting?

Like, get her married.

Wait, six months?

What's the normal time?

Like, what would they have been happy with?

Like, two months?

I mean, my brother was like, what, three months?

Yeah.

I don't know.

It's yeah, a few months.

Because you essentially don't start this relationship until you're pretty certain you want to marry the person, even though you've kind of never spent any time with them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was right.

Oh, and by the way, marriage is for life.

Yeah.

So this is like anxiety-inducing

to the mat.

Yeah.

And I think we both have a tendency towards anxiety.

So like this was really you even more me.

So yeah, this was this was

one of the most stressful times of our life.

For both of us, our wedding should have been one of the happiest times.

It was incredibly anxiety-inducing, not for the normal reasons.

Because it was just like, what am I doing?

Well, and you, Christina, you were like, I can't fuck this up because if I,

if I need to have like eight children with this guy and be with him forever and homeschool and serve him in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Like, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Whoa.

It was beyond stressful.

Yeah.

So as you were preparing to become parents, you took a class on, quote, gospel-driven parenting, which was led by a minister who was like part of the same network that you were homeschooled in.

And in that class, you were told how to, quote, break a child's will.

And you weren't sure about that.

And so we have a worksheet from that class.

that you all received.

And I'm going to read the instructions from it.

So this is from the worksheet.

Question, how much?

The use of the rod is for the purpose of breaking the child's will.

One way to tell if this has happened is to see if they can look you in the eyes after being disciplined and ask for forgiveness.

There should be a rebellion detector inside of every parent.

And then they give examples of what active rebellion on behalf of the child looks like.

And it says, defiantly saying no, hitting parents or other authority, knowingly disobeying, throwing temper tantrums, and ignoring instruction.

And to me, those are just like things that kids do.

Like those are just things that every kid does.

Not just things that every kid does, but that modern science understands as developmentally appropriate.

Yeah.

As essential to childhood development.

And then it says passive rebellion.

So those were active examples of rebellion.

These are examples of passive rebellion.

Consistent forgetfulness.

external disobedience with a bad attitude, doing what is required, but only on his own terms, fussing, muttering, complaining, pouting, eye rolling, whining, grumbling, slamming doors, or stamping feet.

So, in this class, those were all grounds to hit your child with a rod.

Yep.

Yeah.

So, Christina and Aaron, you were exchanging handwritten notes on this worksheet to each other in the class.

And Christina, you wrote, I really don't think I can be a parent, sad face.

Aaron, you wrote in distinctly different handwriting.

Yes, you can.

Christina, you wrote, it makes me sad because I know it's not true, but it just feels like you have to be like hardened to be a parent.

I just really don't like thinking of having to be strict.

In parentheses, sigh, and then another sad face.

And so, Erin, even though you were initially encouraging her, you both were having some doubts about the whole like chastisement thing.

Oh, yeah.

And Erin, in the Washington Post article, you described this as being your first independent thought.

Yeah.

And so for both of you, like, how important was that initial knee-jerk of like, no, wait, I don't want to hit my kids.

And wait a second, now I'm questioning the authority model that I grew up with.

And wait, now I'm questioning, like, were you all of a sudden, like, how quickly was the spiral into like questioning everything?

It wasn't that quick.

You know, it's probably a little overdramatic to say it was my first independent thought, but definitely it was a

important part of realizing that I could maybe do something different than I'd been very much indoctrinated to do.

Because, yeah, so first of all, for context, that parenting class that we took, this was when we were, wait, were we engaged?

I don't think so.

I don't think we were even engaged.

So, this was like before we're even married or having parents, this is how important it is to understand you're going to be parents and you're going to do this thing that is going to be to save your child.

So you're going to hit them with the rod.

Because, by the way, we were planning to have babies right away.

Yeah.

Successfully got pregnant within two weeks of our wedding, right on track for the movement's goals.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So leading up to having a child, like, I just was always like, how is this going to, how am I going to be okay with doing this?

Like, obviously, this is a thing I'm supposed to do and everyone does this.

And in my head, like, it's hard to explain that.

I really thought, because I had been indoctrinated to think so, that.

hitting your child with a rod was like the good and godly and loving thing to do.

And obviously there's a, there'd be talk about like, don't do it in anger, which everyone would do it in anger.

But, you know, supposedly there was like the right loving way to do it and it's loving.

And I just remember having this disconnect of being like, but I just don't like hitting people.

Like, how am I going to hit a child?

And so by the time I finally had a child and it was like, okay,

I have to do this.

I just simply could not do it.

And that was terrifying to me.

because I thought I was literally doing something wrong by not doing it.

But I just got to a point of being like, I don't have the will to do this.

So I'm just going to not do this.

And nothing happened.

My world didn't collapse.

You know, my, you know, obviously parenting is hard, but like

it's hard whether you, you know, no matter what you're, how you're trying to parent, children are going to be difficult.

So it wasn't like I was like, oh, all this bad behavior is clearly because I'm not spanking.

Like, it was just more like, wow, maybe there's other ways I can discipline without having to hit like timeouts or whatever.

And, and, um, and that did plant a seed of, okay, I was very much told I have to do this, but maybe I can start to think independently and start to form my own

strategies here.

And it took, it was years of slowly unraveling that thread and more and more things.

There's a bunch of things I could point out as moments where it was like, oh, here's another thing where I had been raised this way.

And I realized I actually think I disagree with that.

And I could recognize that I disagreed with that.

Yeah, it was basically latent critical thinking skills that had been very deliberately robbed for me as a child and even adult, slowly creeping out and having those experiences of realizing I can actually come up with my own decisions.

Yeah.

After we're married and have several children.

A little late to realize that, but

better late than never.

Yeah.

True.

So now all four of your kids go to public schools.

Whose decision, who sparked that conversation?

So we both,

as the parenting class notes show, show, we both always just naturally did not like spanking,

the idea of it, even before we were faced with the reality of deciding.

But we were still very much entrenched in the super fundamentalist mindset, which includes things like young earth creationism and just all that stuff.

Still, obviously, because we had four children, having all the babies for a while, yeah, yeah.

Anyway, so as my kids are getting a little bit older, they start to ask great questions.

Our kids are just brilliant.

I mean, they really are.

So, they're asking questions that are like good questions about like dinosaurs and space.

And so I started like doing just independent research on those things with the internet.

And somehow at this point, I was a little bit more open to like, well, what is what is the, you know, secular ideas about, you know, why are they so confident that the universe is so old when clearly all the evidence is it's almost 6,000 years old.

I think you were honestly motivated to give your kids an honest and well-informed answer and

just be as it went through their question.

I was really trying to give them meaningful answers, not just regurgitate the indoctrination I'd received.

And part of it was actually realizing, dude, I could tell them anything and they would believe me.

I could say, the world is on the back of a turtle and they would believe me because they're children.

They deserve some autonomy to, like, I'll give them answers couched in like, well, here's what some people think and here's what some people think.

And that was sort of my motivation.

But learning about like real science very quickly made me realize, oh, yeah, real science is real.

You know, that I had been told absolute nonsense.

And, but this is all happening without her knowing,

kind of on the side.

And so I basically was like deconstructing a lot of our shared fundamentalist ideas.

It included things about the Bible, literalism, you know, like the historical accuracy of the Bible,

obviously science-related topics.

And it's just, it's just more and more unraveling.

And for me, it got to a point of basically being like, yeah,

I'm not even a Christian.

Like, I don't believe any of this anymore.

And, you know, this was not a recommended strategy.

She had no idea any of this was going on because it was kind of a,

I was scared to tell her.

I was scared to tell her, hey, I'm not so sure that, you know, Young Earth creationism is actually the case here because it was so much of what our relationship was founded on.

Absolutely.

It really was.

It's kind of the rug being pulled out from underneath you.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

It eventually came out.

I think it kind of came out because like I was reading a book and

it had some evolutionary factor.

Reading a book to our kids.

Yeah, reading a book to our kids, a children's book.

And

I just read through it and didn't jump in and say, and that's a lie from the pit of hell.

I just read over it.

I didn't make any commentary, but I read it.

I didn't filter it out.

And that was a huge flag to her.

I was just walking by and I was like, wait, hold on, what, what's happening here?

Yeah.

Christina was like, Aaron, did you get woke?

Yes.

I was, yes.

Yes.

Because he mentioned that, like, like, evolution.

Yeah.

The evolution.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, yeah.

So it eventually led to kind of us sorting through

like

where we were and what's it mean for our relationship.

And

oh my gosh, like for me, like, what the heck just happened?

I thought I was like in this program.

This is like only a couple of years ago at this point, I think 2020.

So, you know, we're locked down.

The world's falling apart around us.

We've just had our fourth baby.

And then, like, all of a sudden, the contractual agreement we built our relationship on is like crumbling.

It was a hard time for us.

And I will say, it's especially like this world we were raised in was incredibly damaging to her because she was not prepared for me changing my mind.

Right.

She is supposed to submit to me.

She is supposed follow me wherever I go, but now I'm going to the dark side.

How is that supposed to work?

There were no helpful solutions for this.

And I remember questioning both sides of our family and being like, hold up, I've got some questions here.

And tying back to the school thing, you know, eventually in this process, he's like, hey, you know, maybe school wouldn't be so bad.

As we're talking about all these changing beliefs.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And I remember going to our parents.

I went to your mom and my dad.

And I was like, okay, guys, I'm like really stuck here because homeschooling is absolutely required, but submitting to your husband, aka doing whatever he says is also.

So I can't do both.

And as you might imagine, I was not able to get any meaningful

tips from either side of our family.

I think I kind of presented them with a conundrum that.

Yeah.

Honestly, it's actually

my own process of walking through this with Erin and learning to

respect one another in our different beliefs

has been,

it's really opened my eyes to how much of this system was just kind of built on like an unrealistic idealism that like doesn't even really

exist.

Like

rich white pastors speaking from a place of privilege about

things and how society should be structured and honestly having no clue what it's like to be any number of marginalized groups.

Anything outside their very strict blueprint for how everything should be, it just implodes it.

Like it's so fragile anytime it comes up against a different reality.

Like it's one thing to sit outside that and speak against it and say, and here's how we do things.

But as soon as you're entrenched in that, the whole whole ideology just can't sustain itself.

Yeah.

Which is why I guess you're taught to ignore that.

And to shield yourself from the outside world.

Because the second someone asks any question, none of it holds any water.

So you just have to bank on the fact that you'll never be confronted with any questions.

Yeah.

Yep.

Absolutely.

And so eventually I agreed to give it a trial run.

With public school?

With public school, yeah.

We decided to send just one of our daughters at the very beginning.

Poor thing.

i in retrospect feel like what were we doing sending one kid but she is the bravest and she

not the bravest of our kids she is a very brave child and she was very proud to be the trailblazer yeah um

and you know meanwhile i'm still wrestling with a lot of internal guilt and shame and I've seen people my whole life who homeschool 10 kids and I'm wondering why is it hard for me to do four?

Like what's wrong with me?

And this is my identity.

You know, my friend groups are based around being with other homeschool moms.

I have never pursued a career because I'm supposed to be a homeschool mom.

So it feels like this ripping away of who I thought I was.

Now, in retrospect, I think that was really unhealthy to make that my identity.

But that was sort of our agreement: like, okay, we'll send one kid and I can stay home and homeschool the others this year, just as sort of a trial run.

But I think it went better than either of us expected.

And by the next year, I was still considering homeschooling the two boys who were school age.

I had seen so much good in a school system I had once been taught was the definition of evil.

And I couldn't imagine keeping my kids from that.

I would drive in the car line and just the sense of community and the sense of just what good people there were in our school was overpowering.

And I couldn't imagine not allowing my children to be a part of that anymore.

Yeah.

In the Washington Post, Christina, it mentioned that on the first day that you dropped your first daughter off at public school, you followed her inside.

I did try.

I love that detail.

Well, because you didn't know that you, that you don't do that.

Exactly.

Exactly.

We were clueless.

We absolutely were.

Yep.

So you two are part of what some would describe as a growing resistance of parents who were homeschooled in unhealthy and abusive ways and who are now fighting for more oversight and regulation in homeschooling, which, again, there is basically none.

And in some places, there is literally none.

So, what is your goal?

What would you like to see change?

Are you against homeschooling categorically?

No, definitely not.

I would definitely plug CRHE Coalition for Responsible Home Education.

I think they pretty much have said everything that I would say.

They have this amazing list of Bill of Rights, and it basically comes down to, at its core, children's rights.

Homeschooling, well, in America in general, there's definitely a problem and a lack of children's rights.

And homeschooling is an area where, combined with lack of prioritizing children's rights, homeschooling just becomes this black box where all sorts of horrible things happen.

And there's ways, there's solutions to this.

And anything towards that, whether it's ensuring that children have access to mandated reporters or providing more opportunity for children education and so forth, options that parents don't get to just unilaterally say they're not allowed to have.

All those things I think are important.

Yeah, I agree.

Absolutely.

I don't think we are opposed to homeschooling.

I 100%

see how it can be done in ways that

are not isolationist, are not indoctrinating children.

But I am concerned.

I'm concerned about the spike in homeschooling that has come about as a post-pandemic trend.

Wild spike.

Yes.

Yes.

And,

you know, you've mentioned the Post article several times.

The reporter who wrote that, Peter Jamieson, and his colleagues at the Post are doing an entire series called Homeschool Nation.

And they've done some incredible research on the data of different, you know, ways homeschooling has grown over the past several years and what is happening in various districts and demographics.

And I'd highly recommend that for people who are interested in learning more.

But I feel like the regulations are not at all keeping up.

And we realize that, as hard as our experience was, and as difficult as it is to talk about it still, in a lot of ways, we were privileged.

There are stories far worse than ours.

And that's what motivates us to want to see change.

It's one of those things that it's hard to talk about.

It's cost us a lot to talk about about it.

It's cost us a lot of relationships, but we aren't able to say, oh, it's a small minority of homeschoolers and oh well.

Like

I feel like that was the strategy to say, yes, some people mess it up, but oh well.

We simply can't cannot in good conscience do that.

And that's why we're advocating for reform, but certainly not abolishing homeschooling.

I think it's a valid option for a lot of people for a lot of different reasons.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Christina, in your Instagram bio, you write that, quote, you still have faith in Jesus.

And so I was just curious to wrap up: like, what does your faith look like today?

And after everything and after

spiritual abuse that was wielded against you, how did you hold on to your faith?

And what does your faith look like today?

I'd say it's certainly a growing and evolving understanding.

I 100% don't claim to have all the answers or even necessarily settled convictions on most things.

But what I think I hope for is that from the story of Jesus, I can see not the same perspective I was raised with, but a perspective that does condemn abuse and that is welcoming and that, you know, is looking out for

the poor and the marginalized.

And I feel like where my faith journey is going right now is very, very different from the indoctrinating Christian nationalist perspective that I was raised with.

You know, oh, my darkest days when I'm like, is any of this true?

I'm holding out hope that there's a better story that actually wants to see good in the world and wants to see people cared for and taken care of.

Christina and Erin, thank you so much for being here today.

Yeah.

Thanks for having us.

So that's our show for today.

And as a parting word, I just want to say, whenever you hear people justifying their actions, whatever those actions may be, with, I am protecting the children, I always implore anyone to take a coin and scratch just a millimeter below the surface and see what they are actually defending, because I will tell you, it is almost never the children.

If you like this show, please give us a rating.

And once again, if you don't like the show, please just, you know, don't give us a rating.

I am so grateful that you spent an hour or so with us today.

If you really liked this episode, feel free to send it to a friend, maybe your mom who homeschooled you and you're trying to now bridge this awkward conversation of, like, hey, mom, what was that about?

Or I don't know, maybe your cousin who lives outside the US and is like, what the hell is going on in the United States?

Maybe this is, maybe this is one for them to listen to.

As always, I appreciate you being here.

And until next time, stay fruity.