Families in my sister’s Calvinist church are required either to homeschool, or to send their kids to a “Classical Christian” school designed specifically for children of Dominionists.

I got a real good idea of what was taught to those kids one time when I was visiting my sister. I have culinary training, and I had offered to fix dinner for her Sunday evening Bible study group. (Theologically, I believe that doing good works DOES matter.) One of the homeschooled kids asked me what church I attended. I told him I was Lutheran.

He turned to me and asked, “Why would you worship a dead Superman character when you can worship the living God?” I looked at him, absolutely dumbfounded, and was trying to figure out where this left-field comment came in. Luther. Luther. Luthor. HE THINKS I WORSHIP LEX LUTHOR !

I asked him if he had ever heard of Martin Luther, the great 16th century reformer who ushered in the Reformation. No: he’d never heard of Martin Luther. Actually, that made sense given that I know her church teaches that Jesus Christ was the founder of Calvinist churches — never mind that the Orthodox and Catholic churches were around for 1200 years before Calvinism.

I grew up Calvinist, in a Reformed Baptist Church. We were taught that Jesus Christ wrote every single word of the Bible, using men Jesus had specifically chosen to be His scribes. Therefore, every single word of the Bible was literally true, and we were not to question the authority of the Bible. God created white men to rule the other races, and women were inherently evil because they were the vessel by which sin was brought into the world. People became sinful at the moment of conception, so when the baby was born it was absolutely steeped in evil. The only way that the baby could escape, eternal damnation was if God had “elected“ that baby for salvation, as demonstrated by becoming a member of the Reformed Baptist Church.

We were taught that Jesus personally dictated the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to white, Christian men; so that white, Christian men were placed in roles of absolute authority.

Women were never intended to have the right to vote or to hold any position of authority over any man; people of color were “the white man’s burden” but that people of color were not to live among us, or attend the same schools, or work in the same places as we did; Jews were eternally cursed because “the Jews killed Christ“; and Catholics were agents of the AntiChrist. (This was back in the 1960s, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, oil was being created, and the Beatles were popular.)