The Wisdom Deficit
What happens when your elders have toxic and destructive beliefs?
Hello and welcome to today’s post. This essay is the perfect mash-up of D.L.’s passions — writing literary essays while also critiquing the white evangelical patriarchy. Although this is different from the usual STRONGWILLED chapter, we thought it would be relevant to our readers which is why we are cross-posting this essay both here and at Healing is My Special Interest.
We also wanted to let our readers know that Flightless Bird just released a short audio documentary on Focus on the Family that delves into a lot of the topics covered here at STRONGWILLED (and you might even hear a familiar voice in the doc). Here is a short substack post about that episode or you can watch/listen on Youtube (or wherever you normally get your podcasts).
As always, this is a survivor-led and survivor-supported project, and we thank you all so much for reading, liking, sharing, and supporting our work here. In these incredibly triggering times for survivors of religious authoritarianism, we are so glad to be in community with you.
The Wisdom Deficit
“Moral education — the training of the heart and mind towards the good -- involves many things. It involves the rules and precepts — the dos and don’ts of life with others — as well as explicit instruction, exhortation, and training.” Bill Bennett in the introduction to The Book of Virtues1
“In recent decades the so-called ‘family-issues’ have seemed almost wholly owned by the Republican Party. While the democrats prosecuted for votes among allegedly ‘victimized minorities' from blacks and homosexuals to pot-smokers and American Indians, the GOP has been happy to portray itself as the natural home of the American family and the defender of its interests: the sanctity of marriage, and opposition to all the newer ‘lifestyles’ seeking to compete with it. The result, more often than not, has been Republican victories on Election Day.” Samuel Francis in The Conservative Chronicle
From the ages of 8-11, I lived in Cody Wyoming with my family. My dad was an evangelical pastor who hopped around from church to church my entire childhood — Northern California, Alaska, and Mexico — and now, Wyoming.
As a homeschooled kid, it didn’t matter much to me where we lived. I never stayed somewhere long enough to develop deep friendships, never went to school, and my life revolved around Christianity — constant church services, Christian homeschool materials, and daily Bible times with my mom. Wyoming struck me as a very strange place, however. We giggled hysterically at how there were actual real tumbleweeds blowing around constantly. The church folk all dressed in worn-out flannels and boots, faces grim and weather-lined as we sang hymns out of ancient books. It was as conservative of a church as you could imagine, and it was here that my dad took his family of five in the mid 1990s.
We lived in a modular home on the church property, surrounded on all sides by fields where people kept their horses. My dad spent most of his time at the church and in his pastor’s library, while me and my two sisters were home with my mom. She was incredibly depressed, and it was in Cody where she became convinced that the end of the world was quickly approaching. She immersed herself in crackpot charismatic Christian “prophets” who stoked her fears and took her money. Me and my two sisters clung to the belief that our dad was the safe parent. The stable one. He took us out of the house for weekly trips — $5 skiing in the winter and the Thermopolis hot springs in the summer. He had a tape of “secular” music that he busted out when my mom wasn’t in the car. Most of the time he seemed calm and affable and funny and wise.
But when he talked about politics, his entire demeanor changed — mirroring the horrible voice of Rush Limbaugh, who I dreaded being forced to listen to on long car trips. At home, my dad would often sit in a blue recliner chair and read his special weekly newspaper called The Conservative Chronicle. As a kid, I would sneak the paper to look at myself to try and figure out what my dad was so upset about. I couldn’t understand the syndicated columns, so I pored over the political cartoons instead. I absorbed the belief that donkeys were bad and elephants were good. That the government was greedy and Bill Clinton was the worst. Hillary and Chelsea Clinton were ugly and to be mocked. Welfare programs were ridiculous. And, most importantly, liberals were trying to take away everything good: guns, tobacco, parental rights, family values, and Christian principles.
Week after week I perused the paper, always stored in a wicker basket next to my dad’s chair. I wanted to be close to my dad, to care about what he cared about. While my mom was the one who talked about Christianity constantly, besides my dad’s weekly sermon I never heard him talk too much about God. Instead, he talked about politics to his parishioners and to his own dad, while I tried desperately to understand the conversation.
To be close to him meant I had to love what he loved, and hate what he hated.
So of course I tried. Week after week, puzzling over his angry paper, absorbing the emotions and none of the arguments. Desperately wishing I had something to add to the conversation, something to make my dad proud.
When I was 19 years old, I found myself living at home again after two years of being in Christian mission programs. I started attending a local community college and for the first time I was in a non-Christian environment and had access to educational materials that were not propaganda. I, as a trusting autistic person, started to process some of what I was learning in my history and sociology classes with my mother. She in turn told my father that I was turning into a liberal, and the arguments began.
I was so confused — at my community college I was being told that I was a brainwashed conservative, and at home I was being told I was a brainwashed liberal2. My dad would try and talk about politics with me and I started arguing back for the first time ever. I don’t remember what any of the conversations were about, but my parents seemed shocked that I could (and did) disagree with them. Eventually we had to come to a truce to not talk about politics with each other, because my dad would get so angry during our discussions. After a few weeks/months of an uneasy truce, my dad started slipping a newspaper under my door once a week. It turns out he had ordered me my own subscription to The Conservative Chronicle. I hadn’t thought about this publication since I was 11 years old, and here it was being pushed on me by my dad.
As a young adult I never read a single article, and the sight of those political cartoons made my stomach hurt in a way I couldn’t quite figure out. I put them in the recycling and went on my way, desperate to hurry up and get back to a place where my dad could be proud of me.
Eventually I moved out of the house, and I worked extremely hard to maintain a good relationship with my dad over the next two decades. He was a stable grandfather and was always down to help with car issues and to take care of us when there was a power outage. I loved my dad, mostly felt comfortable around him, and believed he was a nice guy deep down. Everyone around me agreed — by this time he was the marriage and family pastor at a large megachurch on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. He was known as a spiritual leader who helped people become closer to God.
But the older I got, and the older he got, the harder it became to ignore what was underneath the surface. The angry parts of him came out more easily, and the nice guy mask started slipping more and more. Around this same time I was watching my conservative grandpa age into his 90s, treating my dad (and everyone around him) in ever more abusive and angry ways. I watched my dad patiently take care of my grandpa who never stopped spewing racist, homophobic, patriarchal resentment. And I saw that same generational anger leak out of my dad, coming out sideways.
Cloaked in the language of benevolent Christianity, my father was angry at the state of the world. I saw it grow, each year, though he often tried to hide it. I saw it in the way he responded to the Black Lives Matter movement, gay rights, feminism, the Americans with Disabilities Act, gun control, bodily autonomy for women, Trumpism, Immigration, systemic racism, COVID-19 — a seething, quiet anger that I could never fully come to terms with.
I still had that childish desire to do anything I could to make my dad love me, but I was starting to wonder if he was someone that I was proud to call my elder.
A few weeks ago, I searched on eBay for an issue of The Conservative Chronicle. I could imagine myself being 8, 9, 10 years old and sitting cross-legged on the floor of our living room, trying to decipher this text that captured my father’s attention week after week. There was precious little information about this publication online, but I saw a copy from 1997 being sold for a few bucks. So I bought it, and when it came I carefully pulled the yellowed newspaper out of the plastic cover. I wanted to know — not just have hazy memories of — the kinds of writers and thinkers my dad was listening to in the 1990s.
This edition starts with the headline around the gun control lobby. For conservatives (especially in places like Alaska, Wyoming, and northern California where we had been living) gun control was a hot topic. The main article was about how the “gun gestapo” was encouraging the Justice Department and local law enforcement to use X-ray machines to screen for weapons.
“The Big Brother Implications of this kind of high-tech search are staggering, but the Times seems relatively calm about them. The X-ray machines, which could be used from squad cars or held in the sweaty little hands of undercover agents, could paw through your clothes to find not only guns but anything else the cops may take a passing interest in . . . it’s just as likely they’ll be used to crack down on otherwise law-abiding folks who carry concealed weapons illegally for self-protection.3”
The next page is a column on how out-of-touch mainstream media is with how many God-fearing people there are in America. Right next to this (without any irony) is a piece on how liberals are (wrongly) using the Bible to argue against capital punishment. Here’s a key quote: “liberals — who could care less what the Bible has to say about homosexuality are fascinated by what they consider Scriptural support for the anti-death penalty position.”
There were so many articles on government overreach: “Should we ban motor vehicles from large cities, or should we ban breathing outdoors? Look for a special blue-ribbon committee led by Hilary Clinton, to be adjudicating the issue soon.”
Or opinion pieces by old white men on how racism is not real. Cal Thomas, in an article titled “Victory, not Victimhood” (about Tiger Woods) says a lot of terrible things, including this: “It is nice to see a man with dark skin who claims victory and not victimhood; a man who doesn’t have a grievance, but one who can smile engagingly in a way that makes people of all races wish him only the brightest of futures.”
There are entire columns where the author highlights women in the air force, pettily tracking each mistake made as evidence that women should not be allowed in the military.
In an article titled “Clinton seeks to ‘ungender’ the military”, the author wrote: “Back in the dark Ages, before feminism and egalitarianism enlightened us, conservatives used to claim that women just weren’t suited for life in the military . . . the purpose of the army is not to cultivate idealism or other political ideologies. The purpose of an army is to win wars, and to do that you have to take large numbers of men who really prefer to be doing something else and to turn them into soldiers who will fight, kill, and sometimes die on command.”
In “The Arts will thrive without the NEA” the author writes that “Americans are positively ravenous for good books, music, and film and we've enriched or exalted most of the truly good artists. The NEA has no choice but to hurl money at second-rate dreamers whose ambitions outrace their talents. These folks should be doing something like bagging groceries if it weren’t for the fact that the NEA gets its money through coercion.4”
And on and on and on it went. There are screeds against paying taxes. There are Black men who write about how Black people who complain about racism are just committing grievance politics5. There are columns about how social services don’t help people — strong, heterosexual patriarchal families help people.
And cartoon after cartoon distilling these arguments to their chilling, selfish bones. A paper full of hatred — towards women, minorities, liberals, and anyone who wasn’t a white, male republican.
Here was an artifact of my dad’s entire worldview, a time-machine delivered from eBay. It was proof of the simmering patriarchal white resentment that I’d felt all those years from so many Christian men— in a clear, tangible form that I could hold in my hands.
It was my dad, my grandpa, my church, my homeschool history curriculum, our news sources, and my Bible college worldview classes all rolled up into one publication. It was a papery-thin artifact of the kind of information my dad was drawn to, that he invested in, and that he somehow thought I would agree with as a young adult and beyond.
Here was the “wisdom” of my elders, the beliefs that had caused me and so many other marginalized people pain, laid out before me. It was a picture into my dad’s worldview, and nothing about it made me feel good. Here in my hands, I finally had proof.
My father was the kind of elder who had no real vision for a future where he — and those just like him — weren’t in power. The patriarchy & white supremacy embedded within his faith had hampered his ability to envision a better future for everyone.
And it was becoming increasingly clear to me that he was the kind of elder you must learn to ignore, if you care at all about the fate of humanity and the planet we live on.
I’m obsessed with collecting evangelical artifacts from the 1970s-2000s6. I think it’s because I want to prove that it all really happened, and I know all the gaslighting that comes when you try to tell an evangelical Christian that their beliefs are harmful to others.
Reading this 1997 issue of The Conservative Chronicle was existentially terrifying to me in several ways. It reminded me that long before Fox News, there was a physical media presence of the white supremacist patriarchy — their newspapers, radio programs, syndicated columnists — and their absolutely relentless mocking of anything resembling social equality. These men (and the few women who wrote for them) believed that denigrating those who identified as “marginalized” was the most devastating point one could score. As I read this yellowed newspaper, I saw all the hallmarks of the hateful, illogical rhetoric I had been raised with since birth. This was what my community thought of as excellent discourse. This is what conservative Christians read to feel morally superior to others while stewing in a toxic soup of anger at women, Black people, gay folks, and liberals. This is what my dad read and what influenced his preaching and his “biblical” marriage and family counseling — much more than the actual Bible.
And this is what impacted him more than any other force in his life. A truth I have been running from for decades, but that now seems inescapable. I was raised by people who have no real wisdom, and no sense of a future that is based in anything other than white male grievance politics. The older I have gotten, and the more my parents have claimed that I have become brainwashed by the left, the more I have come to understand that they have been telling on themselves this whole time. They have willingly consumed decades and decades of white supremacist patriarchal Christian propaganda, and are angry and heartbroken that it did not work on me like it did on them.
I have broken one of the ten commandments, as I am reminded of over and over again. I have not honored my parents because I have not continued on their legacy of elevating the white Christian patriarchy above all else.
But why should I honor people who have no real wisdom, no vision of a future where everyone can flourish in a democratic and pluralistic society? How do you honor people who don’t even value the planet we all share together?
I am an ideological orphan, someone whose natural bent towards justice, balance, and equity has been met with scorn, derision, and anger from my parents for as long as I can remember. And I am far from alone in living through this experience of being someone who has had to look outside the fold to find people who grounded their beliefs in history, scholarship, a diversity of opinions, and genuine dialogue.
Currently, there is so much discourse happening around estrangement in families around political divides. Conservatives for as long as I can remember have claimed that young people are ignoring their elders and we are experiencing a wisdom deficit as a result. But what do we make of people like white evangelicals — 81 percent of whom voted for Donald Trump and his racist, transphobic, xenophobic policies in 2024 — and their “wisdom” we are supposed to be learning from?
The real wisdom deficit is not that we don’t have elders to learn from — it’s that our elders have taught us nothing but how to comply with a violent, patriarchal, white supremacist world.
//
I have seen first-hand how unprocessed generational trauma builds up in a family until someone finally decides to break these cycles. I have experienced how emotionally immature people who are drawn to supremacist ideology (be it Christian, white, or male) are dangerous to a pluralistic society. I have learned that my role in both my family and in the wider world was set for me at birth based on my assigned gender and the authoritarian apocalyptic religion of my parents. It’s no wonder I and so many others have rejected the “wisdom” of our elders and moved on towards learning from more diverse communities.
Our moral education comes from the earth itself, the balance and care and love it desires. Our moral education comes from the marginalized groups I was supposed to hate — queer people and Black archivists and Indigenous healers and the generosity of those who have precious little capital. Our moral education comes from learning at the feet of those who have a radical vision of the flourishing of all, instead of just a few. Our moral education comes from searching deep within about the world we want to live in and the world we want to leave the younger generations.
Sometimes I fear we will never be as successful as the writers of the Conservative Chronicle. The morality of the earth, of connection, of creativity in the face of terror and violence is something that cannot be contained in a single screed, column, or essay. We who want us all to survive are not as good at propaganda as are those who have bought into the lie of white supremacist patriarchy.
But perhaps the antidote to propaganda, and to bad elders, is not to spend all of our lives refuting them. Perhaps the best revenge is to live our lives being exactly who we are — as safe as we can be in our bodies, in our minds, in our friend groups and in our homes. To become the good elders we never had.
Recently I found out about the online archival project called queering the map. You can find any location and see proof that queer folks lived their lives there — especially in places where we have been erased from the narrative. I found Cody, Wyoming on the map and a small cluster of notes from queer folks who had lived there. I put down my own note, to mark the truth of my life. It was here that I tried so hard to be the good little daughter my father always wanted. And it was here that I began to come into my true self — non-binary, in love with nature and with the promise of a better world for everyone.
And maybe that is all we have right now. We are archiving our emotions, our bodies, our childhoods, our futures. We are determined to move forward into a future for everyone. We grieve our bad elders while we embrace all those who will continue to teach us the ways of connectedness — today, and forevermore.
We learn to choose love, connectedness, and creativity over fear.
And we grieve how this puts us at odds with the very people who our attachment systems long to be close to.
We know that these are heavy times for so many in our community. We hope you are finding ways to ground yourself in your body and finding places where you can be safe. If you have experienced a similar indoctrination into hate in childhood, how have you processed this reality? What are some ways you are moving forward and moving on? Let us know in the comments.
In 2005 Bennett, who was the Secretary of Education under Reagan, said in a radio interview “You could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Politics/story?id=1171385&page=1
One of those groups was correct 🙂
I think we should be having more discussions about technology and assuming governments will use it well, but this article is NOT IT. And really doesn’t hold up well after Columbine and everything afterwards. For every kid (like mine) who had to grow up learning how to hid from shooters in school, I say a big Fuck You to angry conservative men hiding out in their homes and lobbying against gun control.
Guess what Trump did? Cut off funding for “underserved’ communities in the arts. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/02/07/nea-shuts-down-arts-grant-for-underserved-communities-amid-flurry-of-trump-executive-orders
Which is wild, coming from a paper that is just one long instance of white male grievance politics
That picture at the end of you with the question gutted me. The answer is no for me/my family too and also, geez…it’s easy to love!!! As I’ve said before, parenting myself has given me far less grace for how I was parented. Also this: “We who want us all to survive are not as good at propaganda as are those who have bought into the lie of white supremacist patriarchy.” I want to be part of actual good news.
"To be close to him meant I had to love what he loved, and hate what he hated."
I never put this together in my own experience until just now. And it's devastating. As aloof and moody and occasionally violent as my own father was (and, yes, he was also heavily into Limbaugh), there was still a part of me that was longing for acceptance. There were a couple of Limbaugh books at home I would performatively read sometimes although it was all over my head. We did have some common interests to bond over that helped keep a superficial relationship going after I deconstructed, but eventually that ran dry as his faith/politics became supercharged. And to be honest the only times I felt he was truly proud of me was when I was demonstrating the most fealty to the worldview I was expected to adhere to--first as a Christian college student who "surrendered" to the ministry, then as an on-fire Christian summer camp staffer, then later as a football coach at a Christian school (bonus points for the masculine compensation). We were never very financially stable and "economic anxiety" would be an easy excuse for my family's cultural grievance, but we all know it was never really about that.