Indoctrinating Children

IN MANY AMERICAN FAMILIES, especially those of the conservative evangelical Christian kind, it is taken as a matter of faith that when young couples marry, they will soon start having children, raise a fine family, and proceed to abundantly replenish the Earth with human beings, to be fruitfual and mulitply, or however the Christian bible puts it. Married but childless couples can even become the object of suspicion, scorn, or contempt. As if the world didn't already have a sufficient quantity of human beings, as if more than eight billion, and counting, were not enough. One begins to sense that the global population isn't the actual issue, that the actual issue is the number of white Christian folks multiplying abundantly. American exceptionalism, Christian dominionimm, Christian nationalism; all these terms have common underlying overtones, the key ingredients of which seem...seem, to be the color "white", the religion "Christian", and the country America the United States of. Among the thus anointed, it is considered of the paramount importance that the children be raised in a Christian home, and that they are raised to be Christians. Whether the kiddos have any choice in the matter, is left unsaid, as if there is no other choice, other than eternal damnation dangling over the flaming pits of hell, and all that. Indoctrination is fine and dandy, so long as it is indoctrination of the proper kind, the only kind, the Christian conservative kind. Heterosexuality is the default sexual orientation; nothing else is acceptable. The rainbow gay pride LGBTQ flag shall never fly above a white Christian conservative home, the Christian domionionist flag shall. That, and the American flag, turned upside down only on those rare but heretical occassions when an election is stolen from Donald Trump. Trump is the default politician, the annointed one, appointed by christ, by God. Political conservatism is the default political setting. Progressive politics is indistinguishable from socialism, that dreaded specter, and from communism, that more dreaded specter. One needn't even bother to know the difference. Social Security, public schools, public streets and highways are all fine, as long as we don't call them what they are, "socialism." Them kids gotta be raised right, and Bernie Sanders and the secular multciultural socialist Democrats don't cut it. Verboten. The strong, macho, capitalistic Jesus Christ, an American, through and through, and, white as a ghost, to boot, is the one true savior of the one true faith. Within these clean cut families and communites the "Sermon On the Mount" and the "beatitudes" never appear on the walls or magnetically attached to the refrigerator. Nor are they making many appearances in lily white right wing Trump loving churches; they are the weak Jesus, the inclusive Jesus, the Jesus who never said a word about gay people, but who condemns them by defaul, The Jesus who did say "welcome the stranger: and "blessed are the meek", as they inherit the Earth. is forgotten. White Republican households much prefer a stronger version of their savior, much more compatible with true American values. "The Ten Commandments" must be nailed, in large print, on the wall of every classroom in these United States of Avarice, by law, by God. But nothing about welcoming the stranger of the meek inheriting the Earth. The weak, liberal socialist render unto Caesar give unto the poor Christ is banished, the strong, white, muscular American one proudly dominant. Jesus, above all else, was and remains an American. The children of such families are being brainwashed. The parents are guilty of child abuse. Any normal, reasonably intelligent human being is perfectly capable of deciding which, if any, religion to embrace. People, all people, have an inalienable, sacred, God given right to select for themselves from among the world's more than four thousand religions, or to select "none of the above." The dirty little secret is that we are all free to invent our own religion, or should be. The even dirtier little secret is that we indeed all do invent our own religion, for we have no other alternative, even if we have to wait until we leave home, and the terrible abusive tyrannical constraint of your average middle class white conservative evangelical Christian parents.