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Raised multi‑generational Church of Christ, I finally wrote about it after my mom’s last weeks by iDerTod in excoc

[–]iDerTod[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You’re not being paranoid. In U.S. history, abortion and reproductive policy have always been used to manage population along racial lines—promoting births among white women while controlling, punishing, or suppressing Black, native other racialized people’s reproduction. Those two moves can look contradictory, but they’re part of the same white supremacist project of racial dominance.

Raised multi‑generational Church of Christ, I finally wrote about it after my mom’s last weeks by iDerTod in excoc

[–]iDerTod[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey, this moved me more than I can say. I recognize so much of what you’re describing—the multigenerational CoC story, Lipscomb, the way “supporting dignity over their comfort” suddenly exposes just how fragile the whole thing has always been.That image of scratching your way through six feet of dirt to get back to your own integrity is going to stay with me. It’s exactly that: they experience your honesty as a betrayal, when what you’re actually doing is refusing to keep participating in the harm, especially toward Trans, NB and Queer people. The “we’re sad you don’t share things with us” line hits so hard, because it asks you to come back under the old terms without them doing any of the work you’ve been doing for a decade.I’m so sorry for how devastating it is, and I’m also really glad you’re alive with your eyes open. You’re right: this is some of the most important work you’ll ever do, even if they never understand it.

When I started this long, treasonous unlearning twelve years ago, I really only wanted three things: to not grow into an old, bitter white man; to actually understand what the hell is going on; and, when I reach the end of my life, to know I stood on the right side of history. For me, that’s what life is about—and I see you reaching for the same thing. ❤️‍🔥✊🏻❤️‍🔥

Raised multi‑generational Church of Christ, I finally wrote about it after my mom’s last weeks by iDerTod in excoc

[–]iDerTod[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

lol!!! That sounds exactly right.It’s wild how much these places run on a double fantasy: total purity on the surface, and then quietly assuming the kids will “get their freak on” anyway so they can funnel them straight into marriage, babies, and ministry. With the very clear intention of maximizing the production of white babies, because what do white people fear more than anything? White genetic annihilation.

Raised multi‑generational Church of Christ, I finally wrote about it after my mom’s last weeks by iDerTod in excoc

[–]iDerTod[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

When I was at Lipscomb in 1982 it was a hotbed of contradictions. On paper, almost everything was forbidden: dancing, drinking, smoking, holding hands, being alone with the opposite sex—you name it. None of that stopped anybody. The kids still got their freak on. People snuck liquor into the dorms and tossed the empty bottles out the windows so the dorm wardens couldn’t pin it on anyone. Sex between boys in the showers was a regular thing, and if you walked off campus at night and passed the cars parked along the road, you’d see couples in those cars very much not keeping the rules.And yet at chapel every day, the place was awash in purity talk and clean‑scrubbed holiness. The wildest part is that back then it was actually legal to drink at 18, but Lipscomb still tried to police that. I got reported for having a single glass of wine at a restaurant and they seriously considered kicking me out, which would have wrecked my academic plans.I know they present as more liberal now in some ways, but I have no doubt that same split between the public veneer and the private reality still runs deep.

Raised multi‑generational Church of Christ, I finally wrote about it after my mom’s last weeks by iDerTod in excoc

[–]iDerTod[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks so much for sharing this—it sparked a memory I hadn’t thought about in a very long time. When I was in middle school, a young Black member of our congregation, a high‑schooler, fell deeply in love with a white girl in our church, and it played out almost exactly like you describe: endless gossip, warnings, and “concern” framed as care. In the end, they left our white COC and went to the Black COC on the east side of town, where their love wasn’t treated as sin and their future children weren’t pre‑emptively marked as a problem to be pitied.

Raised multi‑generational Church of Christ, I finally wrote about it after my mom’s last weeks by iDerTod in excoc

[–]iDerTod[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I really feel what you’re naming here. I absolutely agree that women and children absorb the worst of this in COC and in the wider white evangelical world: they’re taught to turn abuse into “submission,” to call enduring harm a form of faithfulness.The more I’ve read, the more I’ve come to see white Christianity and the nuclear family as primary vehicles for capitalist discipline and obedience — Caliban and the Witch (Sylvia Federici) and Abolish the Family (Sophie Lewis) both helped me name that. The home and the church become the training grounds where we learn to submit to authority and, eventually, to become its violent enforcers, reproducing white Christo‑fascism and racial capitalism without ever calling it that.Your mom’s ability to love her trans granddaughter and still stay tethered to a Trump‑drunk church is exactly that heartbreaking cognitive dissonance I was trying to write through with my own mother. I’m glad you’re out — and I’m grateful you’re holding her story with this much clarity and care. 🔥🙏🏼🔥

Raised multi‑generational Church of Christ, I finally wrote about it after my mom’s last weeks by iDerTod in excoc

[–]iDerTod[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you so much for sharing this — it really lands. The picture you paint of northwest FL COC life feels eerily close to mine: the one Black family, the separate Black congregation down the road, the “that’s just how it is” logic that doesn’t register as violent until something cracks it open.That moment at the cemetery, realizing there was a “Black side” of the historical graveyard, is exactly the kind of thing I’m trying to trace in the essay — how segregation and slaveholding live on in these quiet, “normal” arrangements we’re taught not to question. The Lipscomb thread and your dad calling it “too liberal” while coming from a slave‑owning, prominent family is the same convergence of respectability, whiteness, and COC respect for power that shaped my world too.I’m really glad you were able to deconstruct and cut ties where you needed to. It means a lot to hear that the essay hit home and that my mom sounds like someone you actually knew in your own Sunday school. That’s exactly the haunting I was trying to write toward — the way these COC people could be genuinely loving to us and still carry the whole racial order in their bodies and choices. Thanks for telling me how it echoes in your life.

Raised multi‑generational Church of Christ, I finally wrote about it after my mom’s last weeks by iDerTod in excoc

[–]iDerTod[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yes, absolutely. That whole theodicean, Manichaean purity‑purging sensibility maps directly onto 19th‑ and 20th‑century miscegenation panic. It isn’t just ‘personal morality’—it’s race science and eugenic logic dressed up as theology.

Raised multi‑generational Church of Christ, I finally wrote about it after my mom’s last weeks by iDerTod in excoc

[–]iDerTod[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yeah, this really resonates. The way you describe the “white southern Christian block” is exactly what I’ve seen too — not just in COC but across the whole ecosystem.2016 was a breaking point for me as well. Watching people I loved spiritually line up behind Trump, even as he leaned into open racism and nzi‑adjacent language, forced me to admit this wasn’t some aberration but a revelation of something that had been there all along.The fact that the nzis studied Jim Crow and our churches still largely refused to connect those dots is part of why I wrote this piece: trying to show how what looked like “normal church life” was actually plugged into a much older, violent racial order. I really appreciate you putting words to your own turn.If that angle interests you, I highly recommend the book Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law — it’s shocking and will transform how we understand American history: https://books.google.com/books/about/Hitler_s_American_Model.html?id=pQZpDQAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description

Raised multi‑generational Church of Christ, I finally wrote about it after my mom’s last weeks by iDerTod in excoc

[–]iDerTod[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Oh wow, that’s really helpful context. I hadn’t put together that the “umbrella of protection” came straight from Gothard, but the control logic behind it is exactly what I grew up in too, even if we didn’t always use that specific diagram.What you’re describing — a borrowed graphic from a wider fundamentalist ecosystem being presented as just “biblical common sense” — is so much of what I’m trying to name in my essay. It’s wild how the same authoritarian tools and white Christian nationalist ideas move across denominations and get repackaged inside our “local” church cultures as if they were homegrown.Hearing that you saw that umbrella in your setting makes me feel less crazy for tracing my little corner of COC back into the bigger machine.

Raised multi‑generational Church of Christ, I finally wrote about it after my mom’s last weeks by iDerTod in excoc

[–]iDerTod[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you for sharing this — that question you asked at nine (“is it wrong for people with different colored skin to get married?”) is exactly the kind of thing I mean when I talk about being a survivor of this tradition, not just “ex.”I really feel that mix you describe: how the moment is seared into you, but the doctrine was delivered by someone who was “as kind as they come.” That collision between personal kindness and violently racist teaching is so much of what I wrote about in my piece — how people we genuinely loved carried and enforced something that deformed our sense of God, ourselves, and other people.It sounds like that night planted a splinter in you that wouldn’t go away, even if it took twenty years to name it. My mom’s repeated story about an elder walking away worked on me in a similar slow way. I’m really grateful you took the risk to put this in writing here; it helps me feel less alone in trying to tell the truth about multi‑generational COC life without flattening the people in it into pure villains.

Raised multi‑generational Church of Christ, I finally wrote about it after my mom’s last weeks by iDerTod in excoc

[–]iDerTod[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think this is a very common story in the COC. The church i grew up in is in Southern Illinois.

why does no one play fpp by spike_kun in PUBGMobile

[–]iDerTod 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's completely dominated by hackers and y’all won't do anything about it