My family attended Grace* Community Church in Panorama City when I was aged 3 through 10 or so. Those are my first church memories, and I can still recall sights, sounds, smells, and even textures from those days. I hope to talk about that in one of the installments.
My dad in particular was heavily into MacArthur during my childhood years (my mom was more into James Dobson); and, while it took me a long time to come to an understanding of this, MacArthur and his false teachings lie at the core of how my dad went wrong. I recommend reading my post on how my parents changed for the worse over the last few decades.
Not all poisons work immediately. Many accumulate over the years until they cause cancer. In this case, MacArthur’s teachings slowly poisoned my parents until they developed cancer of the soul.
Let me back up just a little bit further to explain a bit about my childhood. My dad went through two crises of faith when I was a kid. The first was when I was 3 years old, and I don’t really remember much about it - I heard a lot about it later. The second was when I was in my teens.
Unfortunately, both crises led my dad to embrace an increasingly toxic religion that negatively impacted me and our relationship.
In the first crisis, he had been (as he describes it) running from God. Then God burned down a lumber mill, causing my dad to lose his job. And then sent a snow storm to chase us from Montana back to California, ala the Angel at the gates of Eden. Yeah, pretty dramatic story.
But where did we end up? Well, in MacArthur’s church. With its emphasis on gender roles, culture wars, and barely disguised racism. And with a renewed commitment to corporal punishment and the breaking of the children’s wills. Particularly mine.
(I was the oldest, so I got most of the pressure anyway. But also, my parents projected their own childhood trauma from their fathers onto me as a fellow first born male. And, I was and continue to be strongly resistant to having my will broken. Their attempts just made me angry and hurt and frustrated. That will I hope be a future post: I wasn’t rebellious, I just had a strong sense of self and justice. Still do.)
For the second crisis, my parents explored some other branches of Christianity. We attended a Catholic charismatic group a few times, we tried some churches outside of the MacArthur/Master’s Seminary tree for the first time, and we explored the Charismatic expression of the faith in a few churches in my teens.
But, ultimately, were my parents landed, the theology that would linger like a dead woodchuck in their lives until the present, was that of Bill Gothard. Which, guess what? Had an even greater emphasis on gender roles, culture wars, and not-even-disguised racism. And new tools for breaking the will of a teenager. Particularly mine.
It’s as if the “spiritual crisis” wasn’t so much about God or faith at all, but an existential crisis of manhood. Which would, unsurprisingly but sadly, be “fixed” by finding a theology of white male supremacy, and express itself in ever more dramatic attempts to control the eldest child.
So, we ended up at Grace* Community Church, not too far from where I grew up. I still have a lot of memories there.
[Note: apparently, I have an unusual degree of memory of my childhood. I mean, I kind of remember being in a crib - more the taste, smell, and texture than anything. My first true full memories are from age 2, when we moved to Montana. I specifically remember riding in the U Haul, and vomiting after drinking an orange soda too fast. I still can’t drink orange soda. From that time on, I have various vivid and detailed memories, including some conversations.]
My first church memories are all from this church. And, I will admit, most of them are happy. As a child, you miss a lot of the underlying drama, of course. And, as I have found in most institutions, the people are often better than their theology. As cruel as MacArthur’s Calvinism is, most people didn’t actually act on those beliefs.
And also, as I have come to understand as a middle-aged adult, just because there are happy memories doesn’t mean that there wasn’t abuse. Most of a marriage, and most of a childhood, can be good, happy, and loving; and yet there can be moments of fear, trauma, and abuse mixed in. This was, I realize now, the truth about my own, mostly happy childhood. Just because it was better than many kids get and had a lot of good in it doesn’t mean that the abuse I also experienced wasn’t abuse.
So, back to my experiences.
I’ll also mention that my only “normal” school experience was there. I attended the Grace Community private school for my kindergarten and first grade years. Well, at least some of those years. I was sick so much and missing so much school that the principal actually recommended that I be homeschooled - something that my parents had never heard of back then. I was one of the first in the movement.
My kindergarten teacher - Mrs. Swedberg if I recall (I told you my memory was interesting…) pretty much didn’t know I existed. I could fake naps like a pro - I only confessed I didn’t sleep later to my parents. And anyway, I was and am fully capable of entertaining myself while lying still and quiet - I have a constant inner conversation with myself.
What she also didn’t know was that I could read. I insisted my mom teach me to read at age 4. And I learned, although I frustrated her with my tendency to memorize whole words rather than stick with phonics. So, while my teacher would report that I was learning my letters nicely, I was reading the teacher instructions in the textbook.
First grade was Miss Benedict, who was going to change her name when she got married the next summer. That was the year I was sick so much I left before the end of the semester.
I can still point out which classrooms I was in, and I bet I could give a damn good tour of the church campus. As I mentioned, I can still recall smells there.
I was in Sunday School at that church as early as I can remember. And, since this was one of the OG megachurches, classes were big. For the most part, I felt anonymous. I was a quiet, unobtrusive kid. I never misbehaved, so I didn’t draw attention.
Eventually, that changed. Not the behavior, but being overlooked. I was a smart kid, and while introverted, I was pretty confident. Eventually, teachers started noticing that I knew all the right answers.
Sunday School was one thing, but where I really found a place was in the evening programs. (Again, megachurch, so huge resources, slick programs for kids, seamless organization. It was quite the system.)
The two programs I remember the most were Search (Sunday night) and AWANA (Wednesday night. And I really enjoyed them. They were calculated to be fun, of course. But more than that, there were a lot of really good, well-meaning people working with the kids. I think this is the case at most churches, large and small. With the exception of the pedophiles (who are attracted to churches as the perfect place to find victims), people who volunteer their time for religious causes are generally generous, well-meaning people. Yes, there are exceptions, but most have good intentions.
I still remember a number of people who were positives in my life at the time. I have lost track of all of them, although some remained in contact with my family for some years afterward. And I want them to know (they will know who they are, but I also talked about them on this blog years ago) that I still value their contributions to my life.
Some of them have passed on, most I haven’t seen since I was a child. A few are still part of my life, and are the same decent people I remember. Alas, a few of those names went full Trump and/or white supremacist in later years, victims of the same toxic theology that poisoned my parents.
I came into my own in these programs because they rewarded kids like me. (I feel bad for the kids whose personalities and skill sets didn’t fit as well.)
My ability to memorize and my self-confidence meant that I was a Bible Quiz superstar. Along with a pair of other boys my age (everything was gender segregated for AWANA at Grace), we dominated the Bible Quiz competitions with area churches for the years we were there.
I mention this not to brag, but to make it clear that I was one of the “good” kids. I was all in on religion, fully committed to doing right, following Jesus, all that. And I was recognized as such.
One thing I have noticed is that many of us who have deconstructed from Evangelicalism were the most committed, the most knowledgeable, the most devout. We are disproportionately represented in the exvangelical community.
Why is it that the most committed, knowledgeable, and devout kids of my generation have turned into disillusioned adults at such high rates?
I believe it is because we actually believed. We really thought church was all about following Jesus. That it was all about loving your neighbor. That it was all about healing and caring and love and peace and goodness. We thought the Fruit of the Spirit mattered.
And we found out that it didn’t. That church to people like MacArthur was all about exerting power over other people, being mean-spirited and cruel to those outside the tribe, and ultimately bringing back White Supremacy, Misogyny, and hate in the form of their new Messiah, Donald Trump.
Gag.
Before I end this installment, I want to talk a bit about my parents again.
My dad for years had boxes and boxes of MacArthur’s sermons on cassette tape. And he listened to them regularly. I can still hear in my head the rise and fall of MacArthur's voice - the way he built to a crescendo before hammering home his point. Up and down, up and down. For an hour a sermon.
And man, even then, he sure was an arrogant son-of-a-bastard. You could tell in his voice.
It was during these years that I was first introduced to the toxic doctrines.
I remember crying when I first understood what Penal Substitutionary Atonement was. My parents probably thought I was crying over how awful my sin was.
I wasn’t.
I was crying because if that brutal violence was the nature of the universe, I wasn’t sure I could bear living in it. If God was really that cruel, how could humans be any better?
I was steeped in the doctrine of female subordination, and it took me years to deprogram. That process started in high school, but it really was experiencing competent women outside my family that made me realize the whole idea was horseshit on a stick.
When I married my wife, I was determined to have an egalitarian relationship, not some hierarchical nonsense of “male leader because he has a penis” and “submissive female child-wife who can’t be a full adult.”
I also heard about the “curse of Ham” (stay tuned) at that time, although my parents rejected the idea of race-based slavery at least back then. (I’m not entirely sure these days, given some of the things my dad has said about black people in the last decade.)
But probably the most personal experience I had of MacArthur’s teaching was the use of physical violence to break the will of a child. I’m not going to get into all of what went down during my childhood other than to say that it went well beyond spanking. And also that it was directed primarily at me. (And never at my younger sister, who was the favorite child.)
I have changed my mind about corporal punishment, and deeply regret I used it on my own kids. Sorry, guys, I wish I had done better. I really do.
But, in my opinion and experience, it wasn’t the means of discipline that was the primary abuse. It was the whole goal: to break my will. I wrote extensively about that here.
This toxic teaching continues to reverberate in our family today, even as I rapidly approach age 50. There is still the expectation of obedience without backtalk, and not just from me, but from my wife and kids.
Again, I will borrow and paraphrase from Mark Wingfield of Baptist News Global:
MacArthur influenced [parents] across evangelical Christianity and taught them to be mean-spirited, divisive, judgmental and absolutely certain [they] alone held God’s truth.
That is ultimately my experience of what MacArthur (and Dobson, and Gothard) did to my parents. He made them unshakably convinced that they alone hold God’s truth, and when they tell me and my family how to live, they are speaking the very words of Almighty God.
That, combined with the mandate to use whatever means necessary - violence, psychological abuse, and eventually estrangement - to force me to believe and live the way they do - is why we have no relationship today and why I still have a lot of trauma to work through.
I hope this post illuminates a bit of why I have had so many emotions regarding the death of John MacArthur.
So much of my childhood memories of church, religion, and community are located there. On the one hand, I had good experiences and got my start in being a spiritual and empathetic human. On the other, the betrayal was all the greater when I realized that those things didn’t matter, and that the real belief system was based on white supremacy, male supremacy, and power to be wielded at the expense of the vulnerable.
I’ll get more into the specifics of that in future installments.
This post also explains, I hope, just how much of a malign influence MacArthur was on my parents, and how he taught them to do abusive things that eventually led to the breakdown of our relationship.
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* Grace: “Grace” in Christianese is an example of George Orwell’s Newspeak. As the philosopher Inigo Montoya said, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” If you see “Grace” in a church name or on their website, run like hell. It is a social signal that the church is Fundamentalist in outlook, particularly when it comes to the Culture Wars™. If the word “sovereign” is in there too, that is a signal that the church is hard-core Calvinist, with all the cruelty and hate that implies.
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