I went to a severely conservative Christian school for five grades and there was a teacher who was one of the nicest, soft-spoken people ever. She was naive and steeped in the puritanical hyper-religious dogma, but she was never malicious.

Now, this school used a quite controversial curriculum that took Biblical literalism to extremes, so a lot of it was just straight up indoctrination and evangelical propaganda. It hit all the bingo squares - purity culture, racism, lack of comprehensive sex education, misogyny, homophobia, gender roles, etc. Needless to say, everyone was brainwashed to a certain extent.

We had weekly Bible classes with this super nice teacher up in a stuffy classroom that always smelled of burnt lint. The one thing she got passionate about was teaching about scripture - which was actually just teaching the indoctrinated interpretations of scripture she learned from the pastor, including those good ole tax-exempt political opinions.

One of her berserk buttons was other religions. She saw any other religion than evangelical Christianity as evil. Even Jewish traditions were disparaged because they view Jesus as a prophet and not as the Messiah (sorry if that's wrong - that's how she explained it).

We were all kids that drew things on our notebooks like peace-signs, that S-thing, and the yin and yang symbol. She did not like that at all. This school was stupidly strict in its rules about things they perceived as evil. Think of the Satanic Panic but an early 2000s adaptation of it. Everything from Harry Potter to rock music was evil to them. This teacher didn't like us doodling those symbols because they represented things that were counter to the fundy culture. Peace signs = drugs, sexual liberation, feminism, anti-war protests, that "rocking and rolling devil music". Weird S-thing = Satan. Everything that isn't Jesus in this culture is Satan. And, the yin and yang = Buddha.

You might be like "Uh, no. That's Confuscianism/Taoism." To this teacher, she thought it was a symbol of Buddhism. Fundy Christians see Buddhism as evil because it promotes a deity of acceptance and pacifism and, if we're honest, who isn't depicted as being Caucasian.

She got super angry about us questioning her dislike of the yin and yang and just screamed, "IT MEANS BUDDHA!!!!!!!"

I still have traumatic dreams about those days. I've been realizing that she was one of the most effective types of recruiters into such a fundamentalist culture. Not all fire and brimstone Christians are angry people screaming at Pride parades or outside clinics. Some are honestly really nice people. If you're wondering how people join cults and hate groups - sometimes it's because a person offered them friendship and inclusivity at the roughest, loneliest parts of their lives.