REPOST: The Monster in the Closet

So... 

Normally I write original pieces for my blog.

Normally I avoid certain topics that are highly offensive to those who know me.

Normally I don't read things that resonate so strongly with me.

The author wishes to remain anonymous  But that doesn't make these words less true, because I too was this child:

When I first realized that most everything I'd been raised to believe was a lie, I felt a lot of anger toward my parents. How could they have been so deceived? How could they have been sure enough in their beliefs to teach their children that it was absolute truth? Most kids lie in bed at night afraid of the monster that might be under their bed. My monster was real and he lived in the tape that I had to listen to as I fell asleep, filling my head with fear about things that I didn't understand.

The closet in our hall was filled with hundreds of tapes, all organized in chronological order. His physical body might be rotting in the ground in Jeffersonville but William Branham's spirit lived on in that closet, imprinted in those rows of brown tapes. A monster in the closet... now that's funny.

As an adult I ask myself, could I ever expose a child to the hatred, bigotry, horror and doom contained on those tapes? Tell them it was the voice of God? To do so would seem insane, reckless, cruel. Abusive, even. To a child growing up under Branhamism the world is a meaningless horror show. Branham's own cynicism becomes absolute truth. His psychosis, his hatred of humanity, his whole nihilistic world view becomes imprinted on their still forming brain. There is no future, no personal dreams. We are forced to burn them on a pyre of faith and obedience.

But who is to blame? My parents are not “bad people”. They were just trying to raise us in the best way that they knew. They are victims just as I am. “The Message” is Branham's demonic spawn. It is its own living entity that continues to grow and mutate and infect people's brains long after his body has decomposed and gone back into the soil. His long arms reach out from under his self-aggrandizing pyramid monument and control the lives and destinies of thousands, maybe millions of people.

Being angry at my parents now almost seems like being angry at someone for having cancer or some other horrible illness. It is a cancer of the mind that slowly eats away at the capacity for independent thought. These days William Branham is not quite so terrifying and threatening to me. He is more like an annoying dog nipping at the heels of my subconscious. I can laugh at his many contradictions and his backwards ideas about the world. He is a ridiculous farce. But to those children laying in bed at night listening to his voice in the darkness, filling their head with his disease, he is very real and very destructive.

-- Former Victim, Enjoying Freedom