What to do with a Girl like Maria Magdalene*

Mother Jones magazine has delved into the lucrative American Christian-run 'corrective' organizations turning life into Hell on Earth for American youths, with emphasis on rendering girls into Stepford zombies, but not ignoring the rending psychological and physical damage done to boys as well.

Incompletely obedient youth touted as criminality to their parents becomes an excuse parlayed into unregulated imprisonment, punishment and torturous indoctrination into a certain interpretation of authority made sancrosanct by a veneer of religion.

I've often wondered how many broken inner children, grown and with children of their own to break, are the invisible mainstays of organizations wanting to move regional theocratic control into imperial state authority over everyone. For every survivor who continues to dissent, how many are silent and obedient, needing to identify with the abuser or fall apart more completely than they are if consciously having to face the idea this wasn't done to save their spirits, but to callously exploit them as resources?

Fewer than historically indoctrinated by state-run theocracies. That's the sad thing. Compared to pre-separation of state and church, this is improvement. The despots running these hellholes have to hide it now, however thinly in some locales. They have to demand anti-regulation. They have to close down and move. They have to make excuses and dismiss survivors and the damage done. They long for the return of theocratic glory days where all of that *work* lying about it won't be needed. Because they know what's really at stake here. Their comfort and bank accounts, the rest be damned. Literally.

I expect this is where someone makes the "No True Christian" jazz hands argument to make it all go away.

*Where the Hills aren't Alive, so much as they Have Eyes.