Christian School?

 Many years ago, when I was but a young child, my parents decided to send myself and my older brother to a private, christian school in North Carolina.  They were promised an academically inclined, superb learning environment for their children, one in which college preparation was well in hand and all students were equipped to succeed after graduation.   What they got, was sadly none of what they were promised.  Instead, their children were mistreated, bullied, abused, and even suffered academically because of that hellhole's agenda.  You see, the agenda of that particular so-called school was not so much to educate young minds for the future, as much as it was to condition our minds into their perfect, ideal, cookie-cutter little evangelical christian soldiers; who would never oppose them and always do whatever they say.  

From the time I was in the seventh grade, until halfway through my junior year; I was brutally bullied, abused, and mercilessly harassed: all by older students who often had the protection of the faculty.  I can remember vividly being slammed against walls, pushed down steps, my belongings stolen from me, and even worse than that.  Dealing with bullying and physical abuse is one thing, and there are sometimes ways that you can "get past" those things in time.  The worst part of my experience in this allegedly "Christian" environment was that I was apparently singled out for extra abuse because I was not a latter-day evangelical like the school preferred; so they allowed unspeakable crimes to be committed against myself, and others deemed undesirables.  I remember one incident in which one of my abusers was trying to force my head and kiss him, so out of instinct I slapped him across the mouth.  Our Choir teacher (whom we later found out was having an inappropriate relationship with another senior), forced me to apologize to this abuser.  The humiliation of being made to apologize to someone for what they are doing to you, is nothing I wish any child to have to suffer.   Yet, worse was still to come.

Every other year, the school took a school-wide (7th-12th grades) trip to a mountain retreat called "the Wilds".  Aptly named, in my opinion, for everyone went wild while they were there; and forgot any sense of Christian propriety or charity.  Students constantly sneaked off with their Boyfriends or Girlfriends to have some alone time in the woods, and older students took advantage of the near-constant absence of chaperones in the dormitories in order to inflict vile and disgusting abuses on younger students.  One of those incidents involved me being grabbed by a gang of senior class guys, and dragged, kicking and screaming (literally); back into a dorm room.   The evil and disgusting looks on their faces when that door shut still haunts me to this day, and sometimes I have flashbacks to that event that cause me to have... issues.   What exactly happened?  I can barely remember it, as a good number of memories I have from those years I forcibly repressed in my mind; just in order to survive and not go insane.  To this day, I have issues with memory loss, brought on by years of having to forget things as soon as they happened for survival.  What I do remember, is pain.  Excruciating, shooting pain all over my body; pain that I had never felt before.  I remember being tossed back into the hallway after what felt like an eternity of being lost inside my own head with this pain, feeling then a numbness over my entire body which was regularly interrupted by sharp pain, to remind me of what had happened to me.

Now you may be asking yourself, why didn't you tell someone or your parents?   Ah, the school had planned for this, probably because it wasn't the first time they'd had complaints.   Any time I reported an incident of abuse, I was told either that I "didn't really understand what they meant by it", or the it was somehow MY fault for "leading them into temptation"; but either way I was to blame, and I needed to beg God for forgiveness for MY sins.  Humiliation and conditioning, effective ways to convince the innocent and weak not to seek help to stop you.  

When I finally began to fight back against what had been happening in my senior year, it was too late for my psyche; but I was bound and determined that if I were going to suffer, by God they were all going down that hole with me.  When the administrator discovered I was no longer "playing ball", so to speak, he decided that the best way to treat the situation was to degrade and assault my reputation as much as he could; to make me look like a problem.  I finally graduated from my years in hell; but it has taken an everlasting toll on me as a person.

To this day, I suffer from: Anxiety, Depression, Memory Loss issues, PTSD, and a host of other psychological issues stemming from what I went through in that hellhole as a child.   It took me years before I could even begin to really comprehend the enormity of the evil that was inflicted on me and others, all in the name of an evangelical "christian" CULT.  And worse still for my poor parents, who unwittingly and sadly, were made to finance it.  That school is an outright cult, which destroys families and children's lives; leading to broken homes and broken lives.  

My only advice for any parent considering sending their child to a religious school: DON'T.  At least not to evangelical Christian Schools, which have a tendency to be in reality, brainwashing facilities for Cults.