The Righteous Who?

Recently I came across a show on HBO called The Righteous Gemstones. I don’t know how I missed it, but damn did this show hit a cord with me. I’ve never been too into Danny McBride content. I’ve seen a bit, but he’s not an actor or screenwriter that I’ve really seen a lot of. I think one time I saw an episode of Eastbound & Down and it just didn’t really appeal to me. 

But, The Righteous Gemstones, well that is a show that hit a chord with me. When I watched the first episode all I could think to myself was how familiar everything was. The show exaggerates a lot due to its dark comedic nature but I can tell you as one who lived through a very similar situation, it has gotten so much right in terms of an environment filled with hypocrisy, greed, lies, and abuse. 

Another thing that the show gets so well is the absolute failure of the protagonists to understand their own immense failings and that they are behaving in the exact opposite way that their god would want them to behave. It’s amazing how well it captures this situation, because I lived it. 

My father was the ultimate hypocrite and liar. It’s really hard to put into words, but the Gemstones family embody his behavior, and that of his lieutenants, so well. When I was growing up, it was always an environment in which everyone in the church had to do as my father said because he spoke to god, and at the same time nobody could question his behavior because he spoke to god. Granted, many people didn’t see the real him and his endless lies because they only say him at church, but me and my siblings did. It was terrifying when I could really see it.

Growing up in a cult, you don’t question things so much. It’s all you know and at four or five years old, when you see your preacher father pour a big glass of red wine for dinner, you don’t understand at all that this is the same thing that he tells his congregation not to do. If you ask, you’ll hear some excuse about how it’s okay for him because he needs it because he speaks to god, while others in the church don’t. You believe him because you’re four years old.

I’m not a child psychologist, but I think it is human nature for most children to want to be loved by their parents and to feel that their parents have pride in them. In a health parent-child relationship, the child shouldn’t have to be the one to constantly try and pull these emotions from their parents. They should feel them every day without effort, because their parents are truly proud of them no matter what. 

I never felt that way. I didn’t realize it then, but I was always looking for my father’s approval. The problem was, he was never very approving of me for no apparent reason. The older I got, it seemed that no matter what I did, my father was never proud of me. He was never approving of me. It didn’t matter if I did everything right. There was always something wrong with me. I could feel it, but didn’t know how to process these feelings because I was too young. I would just try over and over not realizing it was all futile. 

One of the things I did as I got a little older (I’m talking about 7 years old) was really throw myself into his religion. I realize now that this was very subconscious because when you are born into a cult you don’t have any other frame of reference as to what might be normal. I didn’t go to school. I didn’t have friends outside of our church. Everyone around me praised my father like he was the prophet of the end times. This all felt so normal to me and I couldn’t imagine anything else. As I grew, especially between the ages of 5 and my teenage years, I was completely immersed in this religion. 

People who came to our church and then left had something to go back to after they left. My siblings and I didn’t because we didn’t know anything else. 

Because it was all I knew and I wanted my father’s approval, I was as involved as a seven-year-old could be. It was a lot easier back then to be insulated because there was no Internet, no 24-hour news, and no TV in hour house. To keep people in line, it’s important to insulate them from the outside, and it was easy for my father to do back then. My life revolved around the church and I really, truly felt that my father was right, that he was speaking to god, and that only our church and those who believed what we believed would be saved. I also truly believed that the world would end in 2000, as my father claimed.

Although the hypocrisy was all around me, when I was young I didn’t understand it and as I got older, I didn’t question it because I believed there was a reason for it and that I shouldn’t question his behavior or decisions. 

I think it was about when I was 8 years old that I really believed with every fiber of my being that I was born again, as they would call it. I remember getting baptized in the baptismal of our church. I remember telling my parents what a good Christian I would be and that I would devote my life to my father’s work. There was a time then that I really felt that way. I did everything my father would ask and everything that was the right thing to do in our cult. 

But I never got his approval. It wasn’t until decades later, when he was homeless and needed help, that he would apologize and give me that approval that I longed for when I was a little kid. Given the situation, I never really believed him because he would always do something to fuck it up. I kept helping him, though, because I guess part of me was that little kid deep down, still subconsciously wanting his father to be proud of him.

But yeah, anyway, this has turned into a bit of stream of consciousness post. But the takeaways for me are that it is so different to be born into a cult than to enter one. You can’t compare the two experiences. And, trying so hard to feel wanted and loved from my father was a useless endeavor. I wish I would have known that when I was little.

But what do you really know about anything then anyway?