Monty Mater (0:00)

Hello and welcome back to Flipping Tables. This is a little bit different episode today as things have changed. First of all, thank you so, so, so much for your support online. I opened my phone today and I saw that there's 450,000 people who follow me on Instagram, which is still incredibly shocking to me. And I'm deeply grateful. And with an influx of new followers, I've gotten a lot of questions both on Instagram and on my Patreon about my own deconstruction and my own journey. And I have given bits and pieces of it on the podcast and in videos, but I haven't really sat down and really kind of just told you about my life. I did a little bit in the intro of this podcast, but I'm gonna spend today telling you about my journey, telling you how I started deconstruction my life in the church and in far right Christian nationalism and the things along the way that bothered me, that made me wonder, I don't know if this is correct. That way I can, you can reference it and hopefully take away some hope that if I can change being the person that I was, anyone can change. And I firmly believe that right now America has to find common ground with each other in order to heal what's going on around us. So sit back and relax. Today is not information heavy as far as dates and historical context. It it's just the story of one person's life that's trying to do better and make a difference. So today is a reintroduction and kind of the full story of Monty Mater on today's episode of Flipping Tables. So before we get started, I just wanted to say thanks again to my Patreon supporters who have been so wonderful about helping me narrow down topics. The financial support is life changing. I may have to move out of my condo very soon because of some issues with the building. So just having that extra envelope of support is so wonderful. And if you do want to support my work, it's $1 a week for bonus content. I'm in the chats over there. We do live streams and you can find that in the show notes or patreon.com montemater and become an accomplice. And let's just. I'm just gonna get started and I do wanna give a soft trigger warning for child abuse, sexual abuse. We're just within my story. I don't want anyone to be caught by surprise in that. So. I was born in a small town called Gillette, Wyoming. And small town relative to most eastern Cities. It was 22,000 people when I was born, which makes it a very big city in Wyoming. And I was born in Campbell County Hospital, and I was number five of six children. My dad's name was Troy, my mother's name was Gloria, and we lived on a cattle ranch 12 miles north of town. And. And I grew up in a very, very Christian home to the point where I grew up in one of those families where we weren't allowed to really listen to secular music. And our TV was very strongly edited, but edited in the sense of you couldn't see any kind of sexual interaction, or I couldn't watch Harry Potter growing up because of witchcraft, but I could watch Lord of the Rings, which was an important kind of funny distinction. And we grew up on music like the Gaither Vocal Band and DC Talk in Carmen. And my earliest memories growing up are around two things. One was conversations about God and learning how to pray. And the other was I used to have really bad night terrors, and they're a little bit related. So my first fear I remember having is the fear of hell. So the way that I grew up was every day was in church on Sunday, oftentimes on Wednesdays. I went to a private Christian school called Heritage Bible Academy that was founded by my grandfather and was named after the Heritage Foundation. And at a very young age, I remember biblical teachings were a foundational part of my life for as long as I can remember. But one of my first memories of fear is hell. When I was told about hell, when I was told that if you don't accept Christ into your life, that that's where you go. And so I accepted Christ into my life. At the age of five, I went to my dad and asked him to teach me how to pray, teach me how to accept Christ, because I was so afraid of going to hell. And it was the fear of hell that triggered my night terrors that I had for several years. I was so worried as a small child that I was gonna do something wrong or maybe it wouldn't be good enough, or maybe. Maybe I was doing something wrong, or maybe God didn't actually come into my heart. I think I prayed the sinner's prayer probably 15, 20 times, like that year, because I was so afraid. And growing up in my family as well, my dad was the worship director at our church, which was Westside Baptist Church in Gillette, Wyoming. And it was. Everything that we did was integral to the faith. It was supposed to carry over into how you went to school, how you spoke. You know, I got my Mouth washed out with soap for saying what the hell? One time it was at a birthday party. It was a whole thing. And I also was taught very, very young that being a Christian should influence everything you do, including how you vote. Another one of my earliest memories. So I was born in the 90s, and I remember having hearing so much criticism about Bill Clinton. And one of the earliest conversations I remember having with my dad about politics was, was around the issue of abortion. And growing up, I grew up in the environment where, and this is something I wish that people that don't grow up in fundamentalism would understand is what we're actually taught. I was taught that the Democrats were the devil and that they worshiped Satan and that they believed in abortions up until the moment of birth. And after birth, I was trained as a young child to give out Bible tracks in public. I would run around leaving them in restaurants, handing them to people. And these were pretty aggressive salvation tracks that were pretty, in retrospect, disturbing and quite violent oftentimes. And my dad had a conversation with me about Bill Clinton and how immoral he was and that he shouldn't be president because he's immoral and because we're a Christian nation, someone like that shouldn't be leading. And then he talked to me about how since Bill Clinton was a Democrat, that he was allowing the murder of all of these babies. And my dad sat me down at our old big box dial up computer and I wrote a letter to President Bill Clinton demanding that he end abortions in the US And I got an official response letter from the White House acknowledging that they had gotten my letter and that they cared about what issues concerned Americans. And it was pretty cool to get a letter addressed to yourself as a little kid from the White House. And one of the contrasts of my life growing up in is all of this emphasis on Christian values. And my younger brother and I would be memorizing Scripture all the time. But I had the contrast of this perfect exterior in my family versus the reality of what was really going on. So you have the backdrop of my life. We were very, very Christian. We were very Republican. My uncle was a Republican state senator. My dad, later in my life would be a state representative as a Republican. I met Dick Cheney when I was 10. I worked on John Thune's campaign in middle school. You can see where the backdrop is. But in my home was a disaster. And it was violent and it was painful. And so growing up in the Christian faith, especially around prosperity gospel, which I'll touch on a little Bit later, I had this belief that, well, God's supposed to bless Christians. God's supposed to make life better and easier for us and take away our pain. But that's not how life was playing out for me growing up. My first few years, so zero to six were pretty standard church. I remember my dad having a bad temper. You know, usual family conflicts. There's six kids, chores, learning all that, fine. I come home from school one day at the age of six, and I come into the house and my dad is on the couch crying. And I had never seen my dad cry. And my dad was very conservative, old school guy, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and men don't need therapy. And he was sobbing on the couch. And I went over to him and I said, daddy, what's wrong? And he says, your mom's left. And I had no idea what he meant by that. I just knew that he was sad. And I remember putting both my hands on my dad's leg and I said, daddy, I'm gonna pray for you. And I prayed over my father crying on the couch. And what had actually happened was my birth mother had left my dad for another man who actually used to work for my dad. And it was three months before we even found out where she had gone. My dad hired a private investigator to find her. The man she left with was also married. And it started this upheaval in our family that would have repercussions on myself and my siblings for years. And the divorce took about two years to finalize. And I'm going to address this as telling you what I understood at the time versus what I found out later, because I. My whole life was a daddy's girl. And I was so loyal to my father, and I believed everything he said. And the way that he painted the divorce was, she's an adulteress. The Bible says she's evil. My dad literally made us kids memorize an 8 and a half by 11 page of verses about adultery and the adulteress. And it was very much weaponizing the scripture against our birth mother. And being a little kid, we don't understand how adult relationships work or that it takes two kind of a thing. So I grew up thinking, oh, my God, she's so sinful, she's so evil. She's caused this pain in our family. But also the normal little kid of, why didn't mom stay? Why did she leave us here? And it took two years for the divorce to finalize. And in that time, as I got a little bit Older, I started to experience abuse from my dad. My dad was not the kind of raging drunk abuse that would, you know, come home and beat you for no reason. But he always took discipline too far. He would if you left something sitting out. One time I got woken up out of my sleep with a beating because I had left the dish soap out after cleaning the dishes for my whole family. And he was brutal with my siblings in ways I didn't even know until I became an adult. So as I'm growing up in the church, I am in church, and I'm in Christian schools, and my dad at home is enforcing independent Bible study. Independent, what's called devotions, if you didn't grow up in religion. And also independent study of U.S. and World War II history, because those were areas that were passion, passion areas of my dad. And he thought it was really important that we understood U.S. history and the version of U.S. history that's very whitewashed and very. America is perfect and exceptional in every way, and God has blessed us, and we are a Christian nation, which I learned later is not true. So I grew up in a lot of conflict. I grew up in a very, very violent home. And two years after my parents divorced, my dad met and remarried my stepmother. And when she first entered our lives, I was like, cool. Dad seems happy. She seems nice. Great. My dad, you know, went so far as to kind of coerce my younger brother and I to say that we wanted him to marry her, that we wanted her to be our stepmom. And once they got married, things got really bad. And in addition to my dad's violence and my dad's anger, it was. There was added conflict in the house. The second that my dad got married to my stepmother, she refused to speak to any of us children, all six of us. And she would stay in her room all day. And the only time she would speak to us or the only time we would see her was if she had a chore list for us or we were in trouble. And it began to immediately start a lot of conflict with my siblings. So I'm number five of six. I have three older sisters and. And an older brother and a younger brother. And my stepmom had a particular issue with my oldest sisters. It was very much a competition kind of thing. And also, my oldest sister was 15 when my mom left. Of course she's attached to my mom. Of course she's wrestling with that, being a teenager and going through a divorce. And now you have a father who says, you're on my side, or you're on her side, I don't care. Like, if you wanna associate with her or talk to her, then you can't live with me. And so, as the abuse escalates with my stepmother, my siblings start leaving one by one, and my oldest sister leaves first and then my second oldest sister. And during that time, my older brother became increasingly more violent. And he was angry, he was confused. And again, we are in an abusive home, and violence begets violence. And my younger brother and I were being beaten on a regular basis, either by my dad, by my stepmother, or by my brother to the point where there were times my younger brother was much smaller than me physically. He's not anymore, but he was at the time. And I would hide him under the stairs. And I was overweight as a kid. I was a pretty roly poly at the time, and I couldn't fit in the space under the stairs. And so I would hide him and take the beating myself when I could. And I remember I was 9 at the time when things were really starting to unravel. And I remember laying in bed at night and I was praying, and I just. I asked God why he wasn't protecting us. It's like, why don't you care? And I think that was my first time ever having any kind of doubt about Christianity as it was sold to me. Because the Christianity I was raised with was that, well, if you love God enough, then you're gonna make tons of money and your ventures are gonna be successful and your dreams are gonna come true and your family's gonna be happy. And if those things aren't happening for you, well, then that's because you have unrepentant sin in your life that you need to fix, because God's not gonna bless you unless you do. And I'll get into that ideology again a little bit more in my deconstruction. But I believed at 9 the. That something had to be wrong, because why wasn't God helping us? And I knew that my brother and I hadn't done anything wrong. And eventually the violence with my older brother escalated so much to the point that my dad threw him out, honestly, to protect my younger brother and I's life. And at that point, all four of my older siblings left. And my younger brother and I, who were the only two siblings raised together our whole lives, were now in this environment alone. And we were living in this huge house that had been built for eight people, and now there's just four of us. And the abuse intensified, but it was much more covert for Instance, one of the memories that is really burned into my brain, my brother and I would have to clean the whole house by ourself. And I was nine, he was seven. And my brother was tasked with mopping all the floors. And there was tons of. Of linoleum floors, like, everywhere. And he's seven, and he missed a spot under this stand that we had the landline telephone on. And when my stepmother saw it, and she. She pulls out the stand, she screams at him, and they beat him mercilessly for missing that spot on the floor. And I've never been able to erase that image from my mind. And again, it was in such conflict with what I was learning in church. God is love. Love your neighbor. You know, blessings to you if you serve God. And I remember sitting with my dad one time and asking him why evil was so successful in the world. And, you know, he explained it as the traditional, well, God gives us free will, and people are inherently sinful. We're born sinful. And some people find God and do the right thing, and some people don't. But for me, I was supposedly living in this family with two people who served God. And externally, a lot of people that knew my family really did think we were perfect. And so I started recognizing that conflict at nine, wondering where the gap was. And for context, this is not like a bragging rights thing. It just makes a little bit more sense why I am the way I am. I was always really, really smart as a kid and far too rational for someone who is that age. I started reading when I was four. I could read full books at the time I was 4, and I was always gathering information. I was always so logical, to the point where, as an adult, I've had to go to therapy to be a little more in touch with my emotions, but I was always very rational. So when things didn't add up, I would ask questions. And nine was when I really started having a lot of those questions. And one of the most common questions I've gotten on Instagram and on the podcast and on Patreon is, what was the first moment that you started to notice a problem? And I remember this Sunday exactly. It was one of the first Sundays that I was not in children's church. Children's church couldn't keep up with me. So they sent me upstairs because I was bored and I was, you know, not paying attention. So they sent me upstairs. And the first sermon I ever heard in the adult service was about, wives, submit to your husbands. And this pastor never read any of the other Part of the passage, nothing addressed the husbands. It was an entire sermon on why women are secondary to their husbands, why they're secondary in the church, why they can't lead, et cetera, et cetera. If you grew up in a fundamentalist church, you know exactly what I'm talking about. This is an ideology in fundamentalist churches called complementarianism. And so what they say is, well, women and men are separate but equal, and they have two different functions. And the woman's function is to help the man, and she's supposed to serve him. And if she does work outside the home, it needs to be in support of her man's dreams. And it's really just the subjugation of women. And I remember sitting in the pew next to my dad, enraged. And I was like a good Christian kid. I knew all the Bible verses. I did all the extra homework. I did all the bonus questions. I did all the extra memorizing. And I was sitting there holding my Bible, fuming, because in my mind, I was like, why should I respect someone just because they're a man? Why should I have to serve someone because I was born a woman? That's not fair. And it was my very childlike acknowledgement of that is not fair. And also, I didn't believe that the separate but equal, because I knew that if one person has all the control and all the authority and all the power, then by definition, those two people aren't equal. I knew at nine it wasn't fair, even though I couldn't articulate it at the time. And I remember going home and going to my room to change clothes, and I took my Bible and I threw it across the room. And I was like, if that's what I have to do to be a Christian woman in marriage, I'm not gonna get married. Because I didn't wanna be treated like that. Like, especially feeling like a prisoner in my own home already. It was my first time where I looked at the church, and I'm like, that doesn't seem right. If God created men and women and we're both in his image and he loves the world, then why would he make some of us not equal? And it wasn't until much later that I realized how many harmful ideologies showed up. One of the things. And these kind of all happened when I was nine. It was kind of the age where I was getting enough knowledge that I could start to ask the right questions and I could start to question things, but I could also pick up on things. And I remember, same year being nine, sitting with my dad in a kfc. And I didn't realize that this was racist rhetoric at the time, but my dad sat there and had a whole conversation with me, a nine year old, about how my purpose in life was to make sure I married a good Christian man and had as many kids as possible so that Christians can control America. That's not a summary, that's a direct quote. But then he continued with, you shouldn't. This is, and it's so painful to say out loud, he's like, you shouldn't marry a black man because they will see you as a trophy. And races really shouldn't mix with each other because it's hard on the kids and the kids don't fit in again. I'm nine years old, my dad's my hero. In my mind, he's this perfect spiritual leader and he's teaching me all these things. And I want to be a good Christian and I want to go to heaven. I had no idea that that was a racist mindset that was used to manipulate people. But as I grow up again, home life really abusive. I'm starting to ask these questions. And I also grew up in the form of fundamentalism, again, complementarianism. So women are beneath men. But also a lot of pressure was put on women to look perfect. You had to look a certain way, you had to dress a certain way. You couldn't be overweight because that just showed that you were lazy in the eyes of God. And because I was an overweight kid, that was when the bullying from my family started. So my dad would ridicule my weight, he would mock my looks. He would say, you're not as pretty as your sisters. You're gonna have to try harder. If he saw someone who was really overweight in public, he would point them out and mock them to me. But say, you, you're gonna look like that when you get older if you don't change. And I obviously was traumatized. I remember again, this all happened when I was nine. It was a very formative year. I remember coming home again from church and my dad criticized what I was wearing and criticized my weight. And I remember going down into my room and taking all my clothes off and standing in front of a mirror and pointing out all the places I was fat. And that's the first time I remember hating my body and feeling like I was sinful because my body wasn't perfect. I was nine. And in the years following my parents, my dad and my stepmom would force me on diets. They would starve me. I have memories of sneaking up to the kitchen to try to get food because I hadn't had dinner or I hadn't been given enough dinner. And. And that also became a very defining trait for my faith because I thought, if I can just have self control and I can put my hunger in check, I'm gonna be closer to salvation. And I know that if you didn't grow up in the church, that sounds crazy, but because of the influence of purity culture, which I'll get into in a second. Because of the influence of complementarianism and purity culture, a lot of emphasis is put on young women in the church around their weight and their appearance. So I get a little older. We end up moving out of Wyoming into South Dakota, which was horrible for me. I missed all my friends. It was my first time in public school and getting ready for public school. My dad sat me down and we had been raised our whole life that evolution is a lie. It's Satan's attack on God and the Christianity of America. And we would hold special services specifically to learn how to refute evolution and how to beat someone in a creation versus evolution debate. And a lot of those videos that we would watch were called Answers in Genesis. The leader was Ken Ham. I've mentioned him on a couple episodes. And so before I go to public school, my dad sits me down and makes sure he's like, you need to confront your teacher. If they mention evolution, and if they don't like it, that just means they're persecuting you because you love God. So that entered the rhetoric of my life of, well, if people disagree with you or they hold you accountable, it's because they hate Christ, and so therefore they hate you. So I enter my first year at public school, and I was in sixth grade, and I come in and the schoolwork is just way too easy. I will say this about the Christian school I went to in elementary school. Their academics were really great. So I come home and I say, dad, like, I'm correcting the teacher. Like, I've already learned all of this. So he goes to the school, fights them on it. He's like, she needs to be in seventh grade. So they give me a stack of seventh grade homework, and they start making me do assignments to see if I can handle it. I pass really well. And so they bumped me up to seventh grade. I was 10. And because this was fairly new for the school, they brought in a bunch of people, and I was IQ tested. And again, that's not a bragging right but it affects my relationship with my dad. So they come in, they do this testing. I'm 10 years old. They get my IQ, and they also realize, okay, she has a master's degree reading level at 10 years old. And up until that point, my dad had very much ideologically taught me that your goal is to be in service to your husband. You need to have a big family. You need to be hot all the time. You need to wait until you're married because your body is your husband's, and then you need to give sex on command once you're married. That was. That's a summary. But those are pretty much the ideals. But when my dad got that piece of paper in his hand, his opinion towards me changed. So he treated all other women with that same consistent, well, you need to get married, and you need to serve your husband, and you need to do this with me. It was suddenly, oh, I'm going to train you to, like, be a legal warrior for God. He really wanted me to go into constitutional law or to become a Supreme Court justice. So he started to treat me and raise me differently than he had my sisters. I remember walking in on my sisters and my dad, like, he was forcing them. And they were teenagers. I think my youngest sister was 13. And he was teaching them how to tie a tie so that they could do it for their husbands. This is just the environment I grew up in. This is what you did. So I started going to school in public school, and I did argue with the teacher about evolution. And I got kind of reprimanded after a while when I wouldn't back down because I was being mouthy, not because of the questions. And. And so I was like, oh, I'm being persecuted for Christ. Yes. Not realizing, no, I was just being disrupted, kind of being a little bit of a dick. But at that time, when we lived in South Dakota, we lived in a rectangular house that had a cinder block basement. And there was two, like, in ground windows, but there was really no light. And for two years, my younger brother and I were forced to live in that basement. We weren't allowed to come upstairs. We weren't allowed to be upstairs unless we were cleaning. And. And if we needed to come through the upstairs, it needed to be to leave to go to school or to go outside to work with dad or to play or whatever. Um, it was a really dark time. And the abuse with my stepmom also escalated. And she would tell me things like, you know, I'm gonna make your dad choose between me and you. I Know what you are. You're deceitful, just like your mother. And all of this was going on in the backdrop. My dad didn't know that this was happening, and I was too scared to tell him because I grew up with children, obey your parents, and that the parents rule was law. And the bullying at school also escalated. The combination of being really young for my grade. I was really overweight. I was really awkward, and I was a Christian loudmouth. I grew. My family was very, very far right. I was very vocal because I wanted to be a good Christian. I wanted to save people's souls. And I also didn't want to go to hell. And I thought that if I didn't be that vocal all the time, that I was gonna go to hell. And eventually, I go to my dad, and I ask him at 11 to send me to boarding school. Now, there's a little tiny boarding school in South Dakota by a little town called Miller, and the school is called Sunshine Bible Academy. And it's where my dad graduated, and it's where my three older sisters. Sorry, two of my older sisters graduated. And I asked him to send me to sba. And I said, I don't want to go to school here anymore. I don't like it here. I really want to go. And my dad reached out to the school because I was much younger than they would typically accept because this was a boarding school. But they agreed to let me come in on a trial basis. I passed the trial, and it was a really tough year. I mean, I was in eighth grade. I was 11. But they let me come start school. And I ended up going through high school at this Bible Academy and started high school when I was 12. And it was more enforcement of the same. But this was another area where at the time, I still had a major issue with how the church treated women. I would watch women be abused or their husbands would cheat, and pastors would tell them, you need to stay with him. You need to work through it. Everybody makes mistakes, but if a woman did that, she would be asked to leave the church. And I was starting to notice these patterns. And I still, in my mind was like, this isn't fair. I also don't. I don't want to submit to someone just cause. But I was convinced in my mind that, oh, well, that's just my evil, sinful nature talking, not the fact that it is actually wrong and unfair to subjugate people. And as I got into high school, my dad started talking to me a lot more politically. Again, he was very much intentioned on me entering law school and wanted me to be this crusader for Christ in the secular world. And we must make America a Christian nation again. And I'll go back to why. If you've seen my content, you know why I say that it's not a Christian nation, but that was the goal. And in high school I started to really wrestle with what if we're wrong? Like why? Like why? Why are we so convinced that our one faith is the one true faith? And so I started reading about other religions. I read about Islam and Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormonism and Satanism and secularism and atheism, because I wanted to know. And at the time, the Christian bubble was so enforced that I still stayed with the conclusion that Christianity was right. But I started to question things. But I couldn't bring those questions to pastors or to my dad because it would have been seen as like denying the faith or doubting your faith. And I, at that time in high school, boarding school, as strict as it was, and again, the rules, very, very strict, you had to sit six inches apart from like a boy. You couldn't sit next to a boy, you couldn't hold hands. We had a strict dress code. But compared to what my home life was like, this was great. This was wonderful. It's like, this is freedom. And it was in my freshman and sophomore years that I decided I was. This was my actual thought. I'm going to think my way out. I'm going to get out of here. And during that time in my freshman and sophomore years, my dad's bullying of my looks and my overweight escalated a lot. He would call me to ridicule me. I would end up in tears. He wouldn't buy me certain food. And finally, the Christmas of my sophomore year, we were in Colorado and he started mocking my weight, telling me, you don't need to eat that. And I told him, I was like, dad, this year I'm not going out for track and field. He had made me go out for track my eighth and ninth year. And it was embarrassing. I was overweight, I wasn't fast. I mean, I was a really good shot put in discus thrower. But I told him that year, I said, I'm not going to go out for track. And he's like, well, you're gonna get as fat as a whale. And you're went off just screaming at me. And something inside me just snapped. And I was like, I'm gonna show you. I'm gonna show you. And I lost £90. That year. And it changed my life. And it started to change my faith because that question of unfairness that I had been wrestling with in regards to Christianity got played out in a broader scale because I was treated so much better at school and in the church when I lost weight, because my weight was now apparently in alignment with God. And I ate it up. It made me feel validated, and I was like, oh, I'm so close to God, and I'm gonna do this. And I knew all the right answers, and I could debate people, and I was purely anti choice and anti gay rights. And I was all these things. And I didn't realize that I was racist and homophobic and that I was, you know, really opposing the rights of women, which I am. But I'm kind of setting the scene for how this progresses. I ended up falling into anorexia nervosa, and I struggled with anorexia for two years. I'm 5 foot 10. I weigh about 160 pounds now. I dropped down to 110 pounds, and I became obsessed with controlling my food and trying to be perfect, because in my life, it was the one thing I could control. And it made me believe that I was closer to being saved, because that's what I had been taught. I had been taught that how a woman looks is a reflection of her salvation. So if you've heard of the Tennessee cult, where it was, like, really heavily dependent on weight and they would do fitness classes and weight loss, it was very much that. I was very much taught that a woman's worth is reflected in her body. That was never addressed to men. I was also very much steeped in purity culture at this time. So when I turned 13, so I was a sophomore, end of my freshman year, and a sophomore, my dad gave me a purity contract. And if you're not familiar with these, and we talk about it in a later episode coming up. But in purity culture, in fundamentalist circles, it's very common for a father to give his daughter a purity ring or some kind of purity jewelry. Because the belief in fundamentalist churches is that your body is your dad's until he gives you away in marriage to your husband. So for my 13th birthday, which was when my dad would let us girls get our ears pierced, he bought me this Black Hills gold earring and necklace set and took me to get my ears pierced and gave me this two or three page contract promising my purity to him and to God until I was married. So that happened as I was losing weight. So there was all. All of this Coming together at once. I wasn't taught anything about sex. I wasn't taught about consent. I was taught that once you're married, you can't say no. I was taught that marital rape was something that secular circles made up because a man can't rape his wife. I didn't know any of that. I didn't know what a condom was, much less how to use one. And it was just understood that, well, your body is for your husband. And if you do have sex before you're married, not only are you sinning, but you're a piece of used gum is is how they would describe it. And no good man's gonna want you. You can imagine the impact that that has on a young woman's self esteem. To be told her whole life that her entire value to her husband is her body, her appearance and her virginity. And also to be taught that sex is shameful and dirty. But there was this conflict, and this was another conflict I had with the church growing up, that if you wore shorts, for instance, and a man looks at you lustfully well, that you caused him to sin, not the other way around, but that men were supposed to be leaders as well. And I remember asking in Sunday school once, well, if men are supposed to be leaders, why should we follow them if they can't lead themselves? And I was thrown out of Sunday school for that. So it's a lot of conflict. I graduate from high school at 16. I go to Liberty University, which is the third most conservative college college in the nation. My dad forced me to go. He was like, you need to get out of Wyoming or South Dakota at the time. And he was right. I was angry at him for that choice, but he was right. Because even going to that school, expanding my worldview by meeting other people, especially people of color, began to totally transform my viewpoint, even in that conservative bubble. And for me, it started with inherent racism. I didn't know that. I was caring because despite being raised this way and being very racist and homophobic in my ideologies, I also always had curiosity. And I was still asking that question of how do we know that this is right? Like you're telling me it's right. You're telling me the Bible says this at this point? By the time I got to college, I had read the Bible through nine times. So I knew what the Bible said. You know, I'm saying, well, this is your interpretation. You're telling me this, but how do we know? And also, more than anything, I cared about people because I knew what it was like, to be bullied and harassed and beaten and scared, and I didn't want other people to hurt. I was the kind of person, even with these far right ideologies, if I saw someone crying, I wanted to help if I could. So I get to college and the first confrontation happens because I was walking around with my backpack and I used to carry a Confederate flag keychain. And one of my friends from Maine pulls me aside and he's like, why do you do that? I was like, what do you mean? He's like, why do you walk around with that flag? I said, well, you know, the Civil War was about states rights and Abraham Lincoln overstepped, and it wasn't about slavery, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And people need to stop playing the race card. You hear the rhetoric. I had it all. I gave my whole argument. And he just looks at me. And he didn't mock me. He didn't make fun of me. He said, monte, how do you feel? How do you think black people feel when they see that flag? I had never thought about that. I had been so entrenched of this is about states rights and conservative values and Christian family values and America's a Christian nation. I had never been taught about civil rights. I had never been taught about what America did during Jim Crow. I had never been taught about the assassination of Martin Luther King. It had been mentioned, but it hadn't been talked about. I had no functional knowledge of America's true racist history. And I also didn't have a clue what systemic racism was. But I did know what empathy was. And I did know, and I really, truly believed that Jesus wanted me to love everyone no matter what. So I remember going home that night into my college dorm, and I'm sitting there staring at the ceiling, and I'm like, I Again, I had been taught this rhetoric. You got to stand for. This was about states rights, and you got to stand against people that say otherwise. And I was like, no. I was like, it's not. That doesn't seem right, that if that hurts, like, if black people see that, I know what they're thinking about. I don't want to do that. I don't wanna promote that. I don't want people to think I'm okay with that. So I took the keychain off and I threw it in the trash and I started reading up on it. I started reading about the civil rights history. I started reading about the Civil War from other sources than the ones that were given to me by my dad. And my opinion started to Change. And also amazing how this works. I met so in Wyoming, there's not a lot of black people, it's white people for the most part. It's really cold there. People know better than to live there. And so I made my first black friends and I asked them about their experiences and they told me about their experiences with police brutality to them or their families. They started explaining to me over policing things I had never heard of. I had been taught this Hollywood version of thugs. And I believed it. I did 100% believe it until I met people. And I was like, wait a minute, you're just like me. Like, we struggle with the same things. Like we don't come from like these rich trust fund families, like a lot of the Liberty students do. And I just started to listen and I. My views started to soften. So I had already had an issue with the church about inequality towards women because I saw it. I saw it in the women around me. I saw women get abused and the church justified it or they would make the woman leave. And I didn't know enough about the racist rhetoric to pick up on it yet, but I did in college. My deconstruction started in earnest after college. So I graduated at 20. I started working two jobs. I was originally going to go to physician's assistant school in Charleston. And at the last minute I was like, I don't know if this is what I want to do with my life. And so I decided to work. I was going to take a gap year. It's now been quite a few years, but I was going to figure it out. And during that time I just kept asking questions. And that's what I challenge people all the time. Like, wherever you are with your beliefs, ask questions, understand that it's impossible for any one of us to have the answers. And I just kept asking questions. But I was again, still very, very Christian, very fundamentalist. And I was still for the most part, in those beliefs, but I was softening towards them. When I was 20, I met my. Who would then become my fiance. And while we were engaged, his younger sister, half sister, turns up pregnant. And I've mentioned this on a couple podcast episodes. She was 12. And I was someone who was a no exceptions, pro life person, as in it doesn't matter if it was rape or incest. I did the. I would say the whole two wrongs don't make a right thing, which I'm pretty horrified by now in retrospect. But I'm sitting there and I'm in the room as the family's talking about it. And I'm looking at her, and this is a child, a little girl. And I was just sitting there and I'm like, oh, my God, like, how could she even have a baby? Her body is so small. And at one point, her stepmother asked me to take her to a pregnancy class as they were kind of deciding what to do because she had gotten impregnated due to being raped by her mother's boyfriend for three years. So this had started when she was nine. And I took her to this pregnancy class. And it's all teenage girls. Most of them are there by themselves. Most of them have been impregnated by adult men. And I'm like, where are the men? Who's taking responsibility for this? And I'm sitting in the back of the class turning green, feeling nauseous about what the instructor's talking about. And the little girl I'm with is 12. And I was sitting in the back of the room and I was like, this is wrong. Like, I just knew in my gut, and I was far enough away from the indoctrination of my family that I'm like, this is wrong. This, this ha. This cannot be right. This is not justice. And I started researching abortion for the very first time and I started looking up statistics and I found out things like, I was told that the evil devil worshiping Democrats were, you know, doing after birth abortions. And I found out that that wasn't real. I genuinely 100% believe that was real. And I believed that all these abortions are happening in the seventh, eighth and ninth month. And then I find out that none of that is true. I read about the history of Planned Parenthood, and I read about Roe v. Wade, and I read about how women's suicide rates dropped when no fault divorce was passed. And I realized I'm like, everything I have been taught about this issue is bullshit. And because I already had that bothering lifelong question of why does the church treat women so unfairly, I was like, wait a minute. This seems an awful lot like you're trying to control women and force them to have babies and stay at home. Because I have watched churches try to force women to stay in abusive relationships. I already know that's what they did. And one by one, I started to address these issues and I started to ask questions for every single thing that I had ever been taught to believe. And when I was in college for part of my degree, I was able to study theology in Israel, which was a really incredible experience. And it was right after one of the other, the previous Gaza incidents, and going there and learning real history in real locations, but also learning a lot about the Bible I hadn't been told. Like when we learned when certain books of the Bible were written, I had no idea that Genesis was written almost 5,000 years after those events supposedly took place. That Genesis is fiction, it's a work of fiction. And I remember going through all of this and this book that I had been told was the 100% literal, infallible word of God has several books of fiction. And I can laugh at it now, but at the time that was mind blowing to me. And so I was deconstructing the theology behind the political beliefs. And also I had in college a confrontation with the real impact of purity culture. So when I was in college still and I was 18, I was home for a break and I was raped by a friend of one of my sisters. And I was terrified. I didn't tell my dad for two years and I didn't tell anyone. I was afraid that I would get blamed for it. I was afraid of like the repercussions falling on me. And I also was truly convinced. I remember sobbing on the way home, not because of what had happened, not just because of that, but because I truly believed that no man was ever gonna wanna marry me now. And because I had allowed myself to be in a room alone with him, I thought it was my fault. And when I told my dad two years later, he, because it wasn't full penetrative rape, my dad wrote it off because in his mind I was technically still a virgin. And he said to me, oh, so he just roughed you up a little bit. And my dad ended up reaching out to that man to minister to him. Never confronted him, never stood for me, never comforted me, simply told me, oh, nothing happened. And because it wasn't penis vagina rape. And I kind of stopped functioning well in relationships after that. And I started to believe that none of it mattered. And what's the point? I'm used goods anyway. And after my ex fiance and I broke up, I moved to New York and we broke up because he had stolen my identity and put $65,000 of debt in my name. He was seeing other women. I was homeless for 10 months and I was in this position of life where I didn't believe in myself at all at that point. And I had been taught that a woman's grace is in her submission, her self sacrifice, her kind of self deprecation. And I had also been taught that because this assault had happened to me that it didn't matter because no good man was gonna want me. And so when my ex fiance actually found out about the five women two days after I had had my first consensual sexual experience with him, and he knew that I wanted to wait until marriage, and he pushed it. And I thought, well, you know, this other thing has already happened, but I'm still technically a virgin. And then I, two days later found out about these other women. And so I just. I remember sitting in a warehouse, really questioning everything, questioning, hey, all these beliefs I've been raised with about who I am as a person aren't working. And I have done everything right. And I now recognize that I've been lied to about all these political issues because in fundamentalism, Republicanism is married to Christianity. And if you're a Christian, you vote Republican because the Democrats are demon worshippers. And I'm sitting in this warehouse, and I'm sitting in this room, and I remember seeing a daddy long leg crawl across the floor. And I was like, I've got nothing to lose right now. I've literally lost everything. And what I had always wanted to do in my life is I wanted to sing and I wanted to be an author and a speaker. And I decided in that moment I was gonna move to New York. And I did. And I moved to New York with my clothes in February of 2014, and I restarted my life. Within two days, I had a job. Within three months, I was one of the top trainers in that company. I was working as a personal trainer. My degree is in physical, basically pre physical therapy, hard sciences. I'm a clinical exercise science major and a clinical exercise physiologist. And I started to finally rebuild my life and all the work I had done studying history. Like, when I read the True History of the United States by Howard Zinn, I was shocked, gobsmacked. And that's why I'm such a big supporter of, like, expand your library and read everything you can get your hands on. And then I went to New York with these baby ideals of, okay, maybe this racism that people talk about is real. And that was when I discovered Jane Elliott. And I saw her video about the brown eye blue eye exercise. And I'm like, oh, my God, I've seen that play out in real life. I don't want to treat people that way. I started meeting more and more people of color, people who were immigrants. I started meeting people in the gay community. It was the first time I had met openly gay people. And I was in my mid-20s, the first time I met openly gay people, and I started to realize, I'm like, wait a minute. If I make laws based on my religion and force that on other people's lives, then I'm violating their freedom of religion. And Donald Trump enters the scene. And in my mind, growing up in the Christian family, I did, where adultery was so taboo and morality was everything, and, you know, the criticism of Bill Clinton and all this stuff, I was gobsmacked to see my relatives and friends support this man. Now, I, at this point, had already deconstructed fundamentalist Christianity. I had already. I was already pro choice. I was already pro Black Lives Matter before Black Lives Matter happened. I was also pro LGBT rights. I was still wrestling with transphobia. That took me a long time to get over and to work through. And again, it came down to meeting people and asking questions. But Donald Trump enters the scene, and it brought into full light the absolute hypocrisy of it all. And I was like, you mean to tell me that my entire life, you have taught me to love my neighbor, to care for the poor and the sick and the needy and welcome the stranger. You have taught me about sexual ethics, purity, culture. That has wrecked my life. When I had my first consensual sexual experience, I called my dad the next day because I felt so guilty. I called him sobbing, and he screamed at me and hung up and all of that. But you're supporting this man? I couldn't believe it. I could not understand how those two things could coexist. And as someone who had voted Republican up until Trump, it was the first time I voted blue. And I was like, this is wrong. And that was really. So 2016 was the point where I really started deep diving. Not just deconstructing the harmful effects of my faith and political ideologies, but Christian nationalism itself. And I wanted to become an expert in the history of Christian nationalism and how this movement became what it is. And so 2016, again, my dad and I have a really close relationship. He's the only parent that I've known my whole life. I still don't know my birth mom that well. I know a lot more about her now and understand that the divorce wasn't totally her fault, that my dad was abusive and mean, and obviously he enforced the same sexist rhetoric on her that he did on me. And as 2016 is heating up and I'm kind of watching to see what my dad does because I don't want to see this hypocrisy in him. And to my relief, he's not jumping on board with Donald Trump, but he's not opposing it the way I think he should either. And that summer, at the end of June, my uncle, his brother passed away, and I was really angry at him for not going to the funeral. They had had a long term feud kind of instigated by my grandfather, and I was upset that he wouldn't be compassionate enough to show up. And we'd been having fights about that. But I also knew I'm like, I have to confront him about Trump and I have to call him out to be very clear about what he stands on, because he taught me one way my whole life, and I'm not gonna let him slide with the hypocrisy. And two weeks later, my dad died. And my world immediately fell apart. My dad was the center of my universe. And even though I can look back now and I can recognize the dangerous teachings and the harmful rhetoric and his own mental health issues, I also loved him more than I have ever loved another human in my entire life, damage and all. And then a month later, I was sitting in the hospital room of a close friend who was about to be pulled off life support, and I got a call from my sister saying, grandma died today. And I was just lost for the next 10 months. I fell into alcoholism. I was in a relationship that was extremely violently abusive to the point where between the alcoholism and the conflict at home, there had been an incident where I ended up unconscious in a closet. And I just decided I didn't want to live anymore. I didn't want to live anymore, and I didn't want to witness the hypocrisy. I was so disenchanted with what I thought Christianity was and with what I. What I had been raised to believe about America being this Christian exceptionalist nation, which now I knew at the time. I'm like, now I know that the founding Fathers wanted a religiously free nation and that they weren't Christians. And my whole world just kind of collapsed because all these ideologies were debunked. And then now my dad, who was the foundation of all of this and who kind of held my life together, was gone. And In February of 2017, I had gotten to the point where I emptied my work locker, I had notes written. I knew how I was gonna do it, how I was gonna make sure nobody found me. And that night, I was ready. And I just had this brief moment of clarity, of, no, it's not time yet. If I can just make it through tonight. I'll be okay. And I did. And of course, we go through Trump's first term and I continue to watch all these Christians I grew up with celebrate and model and promote things that just absolutely shocked me. And it further inspired my deconstruction. And I was determined to become well versed and to become a voice. And I admit that I got a little bit complacent after Biden won. It kind of made me feel like I could breathe a little bit. And then the election, obviously the 2024 election, and I am not a fan of how the Democratic Party handled any of that. When he won, though, I remember just feeling just real sick to my stomach, just like, oh, no, here we go. And obviously we've seen over the last few months, we've seen these ideologies in full force. And a couple things I want to mention about that is that fundamentalists are taught that we are supposed to have enough kids to overtake America and control it. We're also taught what's called the Seven Mountains Mandate. And I'm going to give a full podcast episode on this. I'm just going to mention it here. And this was an idea that was promoted starting in 1975, that Christians are biblically ordered to rule seven different pieces of culture. And that's religion, family, education, government, media organization, arts and entertainment and business. And we're taught that it's Christians job and their calling to rule and to enforce Christianity, which is really just enforcing theocracy on society as a whole. And we are now seeing what I was raised with, this Christian nationalism and this ideology play out on the grand scale. And it is scary and it's a lot. What I'm thankful for is that it's showing people what this movement really, really is. And what I'm hoping that this story and I am writing a book that's much more comprehensive. I wanted to give people a little bit of background when they ask. But what I'm hoping that this episode reminds you of is that I was the perfect Christian nationalist. I did everything right. I knew all the scripture, all the talking points. I was a great debater. You've seen my social media. You know that I was all of these things. I parroted all the talking points you hear that are anti choice and that are racist and homophobic and transphobic. I said things and posted things on Facebook that people could dig up that I'm eternally ashamed of. And I share this episode for partially for new followers to know my story, but also to tell you that I am a testament to. To change. And that if I can change, as deeply entrenched in it as I was, as wholehearted as I threw myself into it, because I believed it was my ticket to heaven, anyone can change. And people over the next weeks and the next months and even now are starting to wake up. And I know it's tempting to look at them and say, fuck you. Serves you right, I get it. But also, there's gonna be a lot of people who are finding out the truth for the very first time. When you are indoctrinated with something from the time you're three all through your life, and they insulate you from any media that disagrees with it, from any music that disagrees with it, from any schooling that disagree with it, from any science, they teach you that scientists are your enemy. It is very hard to learn the truth for the first time. So I hope that this episode is one a little bit more of an introduction to me for those of you that wanted to know more. But I also hope that it reminds you that people can change. And change is powerful. Because I used to do and say some really messed up things and those beliefs deeply harmed me. And it took, you know, it's almost 10 years now of therapy and work and research to get where I am now. But there's always hope, even when things feel as bad as they are now. We all on both sides of the aisle and different religions have a lot more in common than we have indifference. And I wanted to remind you of that today. And if you have questions, please feel free to leave a comment. You're also more than welcome to email. Flippingtableswithmmail.com Send me an Instagram message. I'm here to support you. I'm here to answer questions. My goal with my channel is to not convert you to anything, is to encourage you to be curious to know what the Bible actually says and for people like me who were so deeply harmed by these teachings, to find healing and hope. And I can't thank you enough for being here and supporting me. And I'll see you next week on Flipping Tables.