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Former racist emerges from the dark Racism wasn't about hate, as one living on the inside of this story as a brainwashed kid.
MONTANA, USA — I was around four years old when my family joined the Worldwide Church of God. It coincided with the Nixon Presidency.
One of my earliest memories is watching a Nixon rally from my dad’s shoulders. The energy of the crowd was supercharged and left a series of posterized moments in my brain. My dad, Bill, was a traveling sales rep for Ralston Purina. He spent long hours on Oklahoma’s flats with a bombastic apocalyptic AM radio preacher as his company. Herbert W. Armstrong was a voice of White Male outrage and certainty, contrasting with uncertainty.
Dark as a child, when he went by another name.
Our identity was racial. This cult is one of several that might be called “British Israelism.” Only the (White) descendants of the British Empire are God’s chosen people and can earn salvation. All other races are not in that club. Everybody else is going to Hell to suffer unimaginable torment.
Read this fascinating story here: Former racist emerges from the dark....Racism wasn't about hate, as one living on the inside of this story as a brainwashed kid.
Author's comments:
When Dark was still in junior high, the family stopped going to church in Tulsa—an hour car trip each way—but it wasn’t until years later he discovered they had been ex-communicated. He later learned the rift coincided with David Robinson’s tell-all book, “Herbert Armstrong’s Tangled Web,” which caused a schism within the church. Robinson had been the pastor of Dark’s family’s church, and because his family was part of Robinson’s flock, they got lumped in among the unwashed.
Robinson’s book painted Armstrong as a charlatan and narcissist, lining his own pockets with donations and caring almost nothing for his acolytes. It didn’t help that Armstrong’s son and heir-apparent, Garner Ted Armstrong, was accused of not only bucking from his father’s orthodoxies but of sexual adventures outside his marriage. One of Robinson’s most shocking accusations in his book is that Armstrong had a longstanding sexual relationship with his daughter.
