Matching Tracksuits

I’ve been listening to some of Herbert Armstrong’s sermons the last couple of days, and it’s been a fascinatingly awful experience. I knew what was coming: I grew up listening to this shit, but I still had forgotten about just how awful he was. Just how misogynistic he was. Just how much he liked to yell during sermons to impress upon congregants just how serious his words (and thus God’s words) were.

I made a mental note about a couple of the passages because they just stood out so drastically. In this one, for example, he goes from talking about the fall of Lucifer and his resulting transformation into Satan to the evils of women wearing makeup — without any kind of transition at all. None.

By the end of the sermon, he turns his attention to men and the inappropriate clothing some of them are wearing to church — shirts with no jacket!

What’s most interesting is he suggests that not everyone has to be dressed up just wearing the best clothes they’ve got without even thinking that perhaps the men who aren’t wearing suits are doing just that — wearing the best they’ve got. And then, of course, there’s the misogynistic double standard: women aren’t to worry about their appearance but men had better be dressed smart!

As I’ve listened to these three or four sermons (how many more will I put myself through?!), I’ve come to re-learn the man’s cadences: I can predict with dreadful accuracy when he’s about to ramp up, go off the rails, and start yelling.

Today was my first full day off. What did I get scratched off that list? Something I’d forgotten even to add to the list in the first place. It’s something I started last summer. Or was it the summer before that? I could check, but what’s the point — the point is that it wasn’t completely finished, that French drain project. I’d intended to hook the whole system up to three of the five downspouts on the back of the house.

Since we’ve hired someone to enclose the area under our deck with lattice, and he was scheduled to start today, I knew I had to finish hooking everything up this morning.

While I worked, I conducted informal research on a project I’ve had lingering in the back of my mind for years now, something I’ve wanted to write but just never had the distance required to write about it. Now that both my parents have passed, I’ve started drafting ideas for an extended piece on my religious upbringing. A memoir? Who knows what it will be. But I’ve started exploring that world again, downloading old sermons from the 70s and 80s from an internet archive of impressive scope, a site that has made available all the literature (books, “booklets,” magazines, sermons, television broadcasts) of the Worldwide Church of God, the organization in which I grew up.

I grew up having expectations for my teen years and early adulthood that were so different that my peers’ expectations that they’re almost laughable now.

I’ve written about similar matters here, but mainly I’ve explored the groups that exist that profess, to varying degrees, the same theology of the WCG. Now, I’ll write about my own experiences growing up in such an environment.