Okay.

So who's ready for story time?

Let me tell you about my childhood, and the Communist Run... https://twitter.com/AMulderWrites/status/1325250478071046150

I will preface this by saying I'm still a Christian, & I've found a very progressive, inclusive church that I love...

I believe that Christianity doesn't HAVE to mean things like this.

But at the same time...there's still a lot of THIS out there.

Take a few steps back and OOF.

I want to emphasize too--
The church I grew up in was conservative, definitely, but not like...
We would not have called ourselves "EVANGELICAL." We raised our eyebrows at a lot of Evangelical stuff.

This was considered just a "normal", wholesome level of being religious.

I'm no expert.

All I know is how I grew up. What passed for normal--genuinely felt NORMAL at the time.

Thought people might find it interesting...

An example of how you start to convince some extremely privileged, mostly white Midwestern kids to believe their FAITH is at RISK.

OUR SETTING:
- small rural Minnesotan town, ~ 2008
- population is under 300
- There's two churches in town, plus a community center that used to also be a church. The main difference between the two churches is whether or not you send your kids to Christian School.

When I called The Communist Run "LARPING for my youth group," that was a drastic understatement.

Picture every youth group in the nearest THREE towns, hauling their kids out to this tiny Christian School auditorium, hyping them up for a "cool, fun" game!

This is, of course, after you let them stock up on sugary candy, an aspect I'd forgotten about before scraping my sister's FB to double check dates.

If this reminds you of certain culty brainwashing tactics HAHA SAME :')

At this point, I am maybe...14? Ish?

I doubt I really understood what a Communist WAS.

What I understood was--

This game was going to take over town for a night!
We had permission to run through people's backyards, struggle and fight back if we got "captured". What a NOVELTY.

We filed into the school gym, grouped in our "teams." The mood is ~festive~.

Some kind of communist manifesto is getting projected onto a wall.

They lock all the doors behind us.

On the stage, they've got a car battery hooked up to some ominous wires.

Someone gets up on stage to explain the situation.
Communists have taken over our small town! They want you to deny your Christianity...

[Translation: Every youth group leader, Church camp counselor, local pastor, including my own dad, is going to be chasing us, capturing us...]

They kick off the event by "shocking" whoever explained the rules with the car battery, "torturing" him, while they held the doors shut, and packs of middle schoolers screamed and clutched at each other...

Again. This is all a fun, fun game. We were privileged & secure af.

Ostensibly, this game involved getting your whole team to a series of safe houses, check points, eventually getting to "freedom."

This goal dissolved Immediately as people scattered, every prominent adult role model in our lives gave chase.
We overran the town, after dark.

I was not an Athletic child.

Pretty quickly, I got caught. Started struggling, kicking, screaming, trying anything to get away, as we'd been encouraged to do.

I hear, "Oh, Pastor, it's your daughter!"

Dad helps them put the zip ties on my wrists, and duct tape my feet.

I think the adults in this scenario weren't Rough with us exactly.

But yeah.

Zip ties. Duct tape.

Super normal--like ANY elaborate game of capture the flag or something.

The game's not over when you get caught.

Instead, you get loaded into vans--or horse trailers--and they drive you and the other people captured to the local park, where they've pulled out the jail cell--

[No, I have no idea why there was a jail cell cage thing at the park.]