From Faith & Fear to Freedom: Dee - Pt. 1

Support the Show • Part 1 of Santiago's interview with Dee, a fourth-generation Seventh-day Adventist, about his SDA background, early baptism, education, and what led him out of the church. In our wide-ranging conversation, we discussed racial issues in Adventist schools, the Civil Rights Movement, and more.

Resources / Topics Mentioned:
Video - We Are the World
Topic - Public Enemy
Film - Malcolm X (1992)
Topic - Assassination of MLK Jr.
Topic - Poor People's Campaign
Topic - The 15 Year Battle for MLK Jr Day
Video - MLK: "A riot is the language of the unheard"
Topic - White Americans Celebrated MLK's Death
Topic - Ronald Reagan's wartime lies

00:00 Intro
00:17 Meet Dee: 4th Gen Adventist
02:49 Early Memories & Fearing Ellen White
04:01 Questioning Church Teachings
09:02 A Life-Changing Tragedy
11:04 Living with Fear & Moving to Huntsville
19:01 Baptism and Religious Pressure
22:26 Purity Culture & Mixed Messages
28:51 Weird "Health Message" Fads
31:29 Racial Issues in Adventist Schools
38:11 Civil Rights, Division, MLK
43:30 Deconstructing Beliefs
47:02 How Othering Manipulates Us
53:07 The New Generation
55:29 Trickle Down Greedonomics
1:00:42 Dee's Adventist Education
1:07:16 Goodbye Oakwood, Hello Adulthood
1:11:26 Outro

Full Transcripts, resources and more: hell.bio/notes
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Credits: Music: Hall of the Mountain King Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) • Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License

Intro

[00:00:00] Santiago: Welcome to Haystacks and Hell, an ex-Adventist podcast where we tell stories about growing up Seventh-day Adventist, leaving faith behind, and building new, fulfilling lives.

Meet Dee: 4th Gen Adventist

[00:00:17] Santiago: Hey everyone, I'm your host Santiago and today, I'm very excited to share my conversation with Dee, originally recorded back in 2023. Dee grew up as a fourth generation Adventist in several cities in the United States, including Detroit, Michigan, Huntsville, Alabama, the Chicago suburbs, and Washington DC. He attended multiple Adventist schools, including Takoma Academy and Broadview Academy, and then spent a year at Oakwood before eventually attending a public university.

[00:00:54] Dee's great uncle was the longest serving president of the South Central Conference, a Black Adventist conference in the US. And his great-grandfather was actually at the meeting when they created the Black conference system in the United States. Interesting side note, Dee personally knows Dr Ben Carson, and Carson actually wrote about Dee's family in one of his books. For anyone who doesn't recognize that name, we'll cover Ben Carson later.

[00:01:25] At the young age of eight, Dee got baptized after reading the Spirit of Prophecy and then was pressured to get rebaptized at age 12. Today, he's living in Sweden with his wife and kids, and has been out of the church for about 25 years. This first half of our conversation was wide-ranging, including Dee's Adventist upbringing and education, as well as topics like the Civil Rights Movement and how fear and othering are used to divide people. So with that background, here's our conversation.

[00:02:01] Dee, thanks so much for coming on the show and being willing to share your story.

[00:02:05] Dee: Thank you for having me, I enjoy the podcast.

[00:02:07] Santiago: I'm so glad to have you as a listener. So, I wanted to start out by asking you if you know how each side of your family came into Adventism.

[00:02:17] Dee: I have a vague understanding. My great grandfather met two West Indian Seventh-day Adventists in Atlanta, I believe, and somehow got into it. I'm third generation on my dad's side. My grandparents met like a colporter or something like that. My grandmother started following him. My grandfather followed it soon thereafter, and they moved to Oakwood like a year or two later. I don't know, something like that.

Early Memories & Fearing Ellen White

[00:02:49] Santiago: So what are some of your earliest memories of growing up Adventist?

[00:02:53] Dee: My earliest memories were, eh, pretty chill. We went to a church in Ann Arbor, which is about 45 minutes outside of Detroit. Just remember, you know, basic stuff. I think the, the one memory that I do have is that it was also, I was very afraid of Ellen White, and Ellen White in Michigan is ever present [laughing]. Because we had Battle Creek, we would like, we saw the Bible she supposedly held up. Um, went to see her house and all this kind of stuff. And I think it's a mixture of, you know, the 1800s pictures are creepy. We had like a picture of her at the house and that creeped me out. [Laughing]

[00:03:41] Santiago: So in the home you grew up in, there was a picture of her on the wall somewhere?

[00:03:46] Dee: Ellen White in Michigan is a big deal. Because, you know, she lived in Battle Creek. So, yeah, there's a picture of her, uh, somewhere in the house. And yeah, it kind of creeped me out. This is a creepy picture.

[00:04:00] Santiago: I don't blame you!

Questioning Church Teachings

[00:04:01] Santiago: [Laughing] So with that in mind, did you ever openly question the church's teachings growing up? And if so, did you feel comfortable asking questions?

[00:04:13] Dee: As a super young child, no. I mean, you, you take things in as just fact. Your parents are telling you it. People around you that you trust and love are telling you. As I got grade school age, whatever, I'd ask some questions. I remember things like, we're not going to have sex in heaven. It was just like, "Why?"

[00:04:38] You know, I remember sitting in like Sabbath school class and like, "But why?" "God created sex." "It's how we got here." "Why would that...?" "Well, we won't need it anymore when we're in heaven." And I'm like, "Yeah, but that doesn't make sense." "We're going to do everything else." I remember asking, uh, and them telling me, "Well, when you get to heaven, you can ask Jesus or God" or whatever.

[00:04:58] And then I also remember being in class and I think they were, they thought I was being, uh, facetious. And I was simply asking, "What is the purpose of a mansion in a place where the sun never sets and no one steals?"

[00:05:14] Santiago: Hmm, that's a good question.

[00:05:17] Dee: And I got in trouble for that, because it really doesn't, well, you can keep your stuff?

[00:05:22] Both: [Laughing]

[00:05:26] Dee: "This is MY stuff!" "Yeah, I'm going to lock my door!" Yeah, you don't even sleep!

[00:05:35] Santiago: [Laughing] Yeah, there's still, there's still gonna be private property and good old capitalism in heaven.

[00:05:41] Dee: Guns, yeah! So it's, uh, yeah, I remember asking those type of questions. They would get kind of pushed off, or people thought I was trying to be funny. I was actually just curious. And to be fair, there were people who tried and answered my questions to the best of their ability sometimes, but there were other people who found it annoying.

[00:06:03] Yeah, my earliest memories, I remember thinking of things like, because jewelry was a big deal, like people wore jewelry. I assumed they were lost or didn't know Jesus. And, uh, I remember being with my parents in a Kmart parking lot for some reason, and there was a very nice lady who was talking to us. I think she helped my mom or something, bring the stuff to the car.

[00:06:28] And as we drove away, I looked at her, and I'm maybe five years old. And I thought, "It's too bad she doesn't know the truth." And I think those type of memories I think of, and just wonder why a five year old would even think in such a judgmental way. But at that point in time, it was what I knew. I remember, uh, the, uh, Uncle Dan and Aunt Sue stories that we would listen to. They were like these, uh, children's stories. And I remember seeing them at camp meeting in Michigan because we would go to both...

[00:07:06] This is literally what we said, "The black camp meeting and the white camp meeting." And at the white camp meeting, [laughing] which is nicer by the way, they had Uncle Dan and Aunt Sue do one of their stories live in front of us. I was like, "That's awesome." So it's these like children's stories. Of course, they have a religious thing behind them. Those are the type of things I remember growing up.

[00:07:30] Santiago: Okay, and throughout all of that, do you ever remember people talking about having a relationship with Jesus and feeling any moments that were spiritual or supernatural in your mind?

[00:07:44] Dee: I remember people talking about it because they talked about it a lot. About having a relationship, how that relationship changed them. You get those extremist stories when you're sitting there and people get up and give their testimony and be like, "You know, when I was 12, I smoked a cigarette, then I got drunk the next day."

[00:08:05] You know what I mean? And then it spirals out of control and they're now addicted to crack or heroin. And then one day they walked past a church and they gave their heart to Jesus. And I just remember thinking like, "That story was real cool prior to the Jesus part."

[00:08:21] My life is set into, like, segments that are so exact. So what I'm talking about right now is before, like, the first phase of change in my life. And at that young age, I did not, um, didn't really question it. I didn't think of myself as connected to anything specific, but when I, when I would feel fear, I would just, like, pray to myself and hope I felt better. But it didn't really feel better, uh, in that.

[00:08:52] Santiago: You touched on kind of phases of your life and a big change that kind of upended your life, so can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:09:00] Dee: Yes, not a problem.

A Life-Changing Tragedy

[00:09:02] Dee: My mom, dad, little brother, and I were leaving my brother's Senior Weekend or something at the boarding academy in Michigan they went to. Both of my older brothers went there. And, uh, we got in a car accident and it killed my mom and dad instantly. And my brother and I went to the hospital. My brother died 10 days later and I was the only survivor.

[00:09:26] After that, I ended up moving down, like, maybe a month and a half later, with my grandparents in Huntsville. I think that, being that age at six years old, some of these things that were partially fears in my life that were based off of my understanding of religion or the things around Seventh-day Adventism, became a lot more serious.

[00:09:52] This happened in November, when my parents died. The summer before, my dad, I was helping him clean out his car. And he was listening to this tape, and I don't think he was doing this for me. He wasn't thinking about me, he was just listening to a tape, like we would listen to a podcast. And it was this woman who was giving a speech or something about her mom dying when she was six.

[00:10:16] And she talked about the night before her funeral, her dad was downstairs in her house, with family members, and she was supposed to go to sleep. And supposedly her mom came into the room and said, "Everything will be all right." So she ran downstairs and said, "Mom's alive!" "She just came into the room." And she said, "My dad looked at me and said, 'That wasn't your mom, that was the devil impersonating your mom.'" Then my parents died three months later.

[00:10:47] Santiago: Oh man.

[00:10:49] Dee: And that became my number one fear as a six year old, and it carried, you know, it was like underneath all those things. Again, I don't think my dad even thought I knew what was going on, but that was vivid in my mind the second they died.

Living with Fear & Moving to Huntsville

[00:11:04] Dee: And so, I moved down, and the first night that I get to Huntsville, I live in my grandparents' house. I have the whole upstairs to myself, and my grandmother's putting me to sleep.

[00:11:16] She, give her props, she gave me a little tape recorder thing, and it had like the children's choir on it, so that I could have some music or something to fall asleep to. But before she turned off the light, she was like, "By the way, you're sleeping in your dad's old bed!" And I was terrified because I believed that the devil would come in and my, my little brother and my dad and mom... And I remember just like, literally like repeating over and over like, "Jesus, don't let it happen," blah, blah, blah.

[00:11:51] And you know, that was, that was just like my existence from that. Because I was also taught that if you speak out loud, the devil can hear it. So it's not like I was able to use an adult brain to, like, help me process this information. And in 1981, don't know if you know this, but they didn't really send kids to, like, therapy.

[00:12:13] Both: [Laughing]

[00:12:14] Santiago: Yeah.

[00:12:15] Dee: So, uh, yeah, and this is not a reflection on my grandparents or the people around me. This is just what it was back then. But that fear dictated my life in a way that I don't think I was aware of in that time, or when I was a teenager, or even in my early twentysomethings. And that fear was deeply embedded into my life.

[00:12:38] Santiago: Yeah, obviously that's such a traumatic thing to go through, and then to have these ideas in your head where you feel like you can't speak to a trusted adult. For anyone listening who is kind of wondering what we're talking about, you know, if you're not Adventist, these ideas are possible because Adventists believe that when you die, you're just asleep. You don't know anything. You're not in heaven. You're not in hell. You're just asleep, you're not conscious.

[00:13:08] And so many Adventists grew up believing that if they thought a family member was communicating with them, exactly like Dee said, it's the devil, it's an evil spirit, or something like that. And so, yeah, I can only imagine, at such a young age, having to work through that in your head, wow.

[00:13:26] Dee: Yeah, I didn't really work through it. I just was in fear, a constant state of fear. And I remember we would take naps at our, at the Christian school, Seventh-day Adventist school. I would just fake like I was sleeping because my whole point was to hit the pillow and go to sleep when I got, you know, when it was time for bed.

[00:13:50] Santiago: So you're dealing with, you know, all this fear that you have as a kid. I'm wondering, mixed up with all of that, what were you taught about the "End Times?" And, you know, do you think you had additional fear around death and the afterlife because of this?

[00:14:06] Dee: I think I had fear of death because I understood death earlier than most kids would understand death. The "End Times," I don't recall being that obsessed with it. Like, the End Times thing never really made much sense to me. Maybe it's the cartoonish pictures that I would see in the end time seminars, I forgot what they're called. But I, I think death itself was more of a problem.

[00:14:36] I always thought of this more as, the individual person's life and, like, if you die, you're jacked out of going to heaven if you didn't become a better person or something in that point in time. The gift and the curse of growing up in a bubble like Seventh-day Adventism, especially for someone who moved as much as I moved, is that people always knew me no matter where I moved.

[00:15:03] People always knew my family. I was already included into something, even if I just showed up that day. You know, people knew my cousins, all that kind of stuff. The curse of that is the story of my, my parents dying and my little brother dying. You know, the people that went to Oakwood with my dad or went to school with my mom in Hinsdale and, uh, nursing school, or, grew up with her in Detroit or whatever.

[00:15:32] They were talking about it around me, but not including me in the conversation. And, uh, I kind of hated being singled out. I had teachers that would stand up in class and talk about that my parents were dead, and I wanted to be a normal kid. So a lot of my life was just like, smoke screens and not talk about it and hope people forgot about it. Because I had a lot of those, like people talking to my family members while I'm present about it. "Oh, it's so sad," and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, but I, "End Times" wasn't, wasn't that big of a deal to me.

[00:16:10] Santiago: Gotcha, okay. It sounds like you were kind of used as almost, almost as a character maybe, in the stories they were telling.

[00:16:17] Dee: Oh, I absolutely was. People talked about it, like, I remember being a small kid and people talking and then looking at me. And I just didn't want that attention.

[00:16:30] Santiago: I've heard some people who grew up as pastor's kids talking about that, being included in their father's sermon without any desire or any sort of, "Hey, do you mind if I..." Obviously there's the, the idea of consent, the word consent wouldn't have even been considered in such a context.

[00:16:47] Dee: "My son stole a cookie this weekend and I had to give him a spanking." "And here's a private conversation I had with my son." [Laughing] That sounds horrible. But yeah, I had that. And I think the other part too is, I'm really not anyone's. You know, like, I didn't have parental protection. With my grandparents, I did, but once I was not around them, I never had any parental protection.

[00:17:15] So I could be, that story became something that some parents used to blame me for stuff. "Like, obviously he has problems because of what he went through." "That's why when he got in trouble with my son..." "It was that person." You know, "He is the one who created the problem." And then with family members, they would freely talk about what they thought was my business to people.

[00:17:41] What it does, I mean all of us within this bubble, is we learn how to basically hide aspects of our, our lives and things from other people. And when you come out of this, it takes a long time. To this day, I always explain to people around, because I live in Sweden now, where majority of the people are not religious. Or even if they claim to have been religious growing up, it's laughable to us.

[00:18:07] Both: [Laughing]

[00:18:09] Dee: "Oh, must have been hard!"

[00:18:11] Santiago: Yeah, yeah.

[00:18:13] Dee: "Did you have to go to church?" "What, three times a month?" "Wow, that must have been hard on you." "How long was it?" "An hour?" "Whoo!" [Laughing] The thing with dealing with people who don't understand what it's like to live under a microscope is they think that I don't get caught out in situations because I think I'm perfect, but it's because I've lived under a microscope my entire life that I think 50 steps ahead.

[00:18:44] Because I remember people getting back to family members of mine that they saw me smoking cigarettes. And I hear about it like a week later with someone who lives halfway across the country. Because it's policing within it. You know, it's self policing.

[00:18:59] Santiago: Yeah no, I, I bet.

Baptism and Religious Pressure

[00:19:01] Santiago: So in the midst of all of this, you've talked about how you got baptized at the age of eight, so this is two years after the accident. And you've talked about having already gone through and read the Spirit of Prophecy. So can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:19:17] Dee: From what I remember, my cousin was three years older than me. So he was already at the get baptized stage. And for me, I wanted to do what he did. So I, that gave me the inspiration to read the Spirit of Prophecy or Great Controversy. I read both of them, I understood them. I had a high reading level and all this kind of stuff since I was young. So, the pastor of Oakwood, who's an awesome dude, he like sat down. I'm asking some questions, he was like blown away that I understood the concepts that this person with a third grade education who wrote the books, plagiarized the books, uh, did.

[00:19:59] So he baptized me, and he made a point, my cousin and I got baptized together. He made a point to say, "You know, I usually don't do this, but this young man seemed to understand the basic tenets, and we had really in depth conversations." I don't remember those conversations. I liked him, he was awesome. Yeah, I think it was more so my cousin was at the age that people get baptized, and he's like 11. You know, so, uh, I wanted to be in that, too.

[00:20:29] Santiago: Yeah, yeah, that's definitely a common theme I've heard with some people. My brother ultimately did not end up getting baptized because our parents weren't sure that he was quite ready. They kind of took the opposite approach where they were like, "Hey, take your time." "Don't do it just because your friends are doing it." But in all honesty, when he did talk to my mom about saying, "Hey, maybe I want to get baptized," looking back he's, he was like, "Yeah, that's that's exactly why I wanted to do it, because my friends were doing it." And so I know it's different for everyone...

[00:21:01] Dee: And that grape juice looks great. You know, you're sitting there, people are eating stuff next to you, you know? I could go without the foot baths, but, you know, yeah, yeah, it was awesome.

[00:21:15] Santiago: Between then and twelve, was it another cousin that was getting baptized? What's the story there?

[00:21:22] Dee: So when I was 11, I moved up to Maryland and got pressured by my dad's sister. Because her son was getting, my cousin was getting baptized. And yeah, I got gung ho into it. I really don't know what, what I did between 8 and 12... [Laughing] Didn't kill anyone, didn't have a heroin addiction or anything. But I got rebaptized.

[00:21:49] But there was, it was a weird thing, like, the 80s were weird, man. They were extreme. You had AIDS, you had starving kids and We Are the World, and, uh, you had violence explode around that time. When I'm 12, it's '87. So it felt weird during that time period, and I was like, "Yeah, no big deal." So I got baptized twice, which makes no sense. But it was more so, um, pressure from her.

[00:22:21] Santiago: Gotcha, okay. Things were definitely different back then.

Purity Culture & Mixed Messages

[00:22:26] Santiago: The, the term purity culture, I'm sure didn't really exist or get used back then.

[00:22:30] Dee: No, but we were raised by people who grew up in the 50s, so they didn't need to create purity culture, they just didn't say anything.

[00:22:40] Santiago: So what did that look like for you then? Did you ever get "the talk" from your grandparents or sex ed at school?

[00:22:46] Dee: I got, uh, sex ed at school. They separate the boys from the girls. They had a separate sex ed talk, of which we learned nothing. We weren't taught about them in any kind of meaningful way. And the thing that I remember from the sex ed talk is at the end, whoever did the sex ed talk decided that he was gonna take his time to speak to me real quick. And he said, uh, he gave me some condoms, because they had brought condoms in to show us.

[00:23:20] It's maybe seventh or eighth grade, somewhere around that. It had to be seventh or eighth grade. And he gave me his extra condoms and said, "Young man, there are girls that you have fun with and girls you marry." "You go out there and have fun." And I have no clue why you would say that to a 12 or 13, because I have a 13 year old son. That's the last thing I'm gonna tell him!

[00:23:46] Yeah, so I do remember even really rigid religious dudes giving us this weird mixed message where we're allowed to do stuff, and they're not allowed to do stuff. It, my, um, perspective of sexuality was really, and then it was reinforced too by, you know, like older dudes. Which again, older dudes are 15 year olds when you're 12, which we all know 15 year olds have "so much" knowledge.

[00:24:21] Both: [Laughing]

[00:24:23] Dee: So um, I remember thinking if I really, really liked a girl, then I should be very careful with what I experienced with her. So I had like a hierarchy as to what they were. Yeah, which is stupid. Like, they're no different than me. If they want to experience things, they want to experience things. And I happen to be one of those guys that I just didn't run my mouth. So it worked out great for me. So I got to experience things, but then I would judge girls that experienced things with me. Not, not like, to their face, but in my head, I'd move them over into the other category, at least for a little while.

[00:25:07] Santiago: And do you think that's because of kind of the attitudes and the things you were taught by adults or other people around you?

[00:25:14] Dee: It was constant. By the time I was in high school, yeah, I remember we had teachers, we had a teacher who was very proud of being a virgin. And I don't know how old she was, but she was past retirement age. And this was, this was a thing, a librarian or something like that. It was a thing.

[00:25:35] But I remember asking, because I was cool with girls, like really, really cool ace friends with them. And I remember asking some of them, like, "What did you, what did they teach you?" And their stuff was like, "Don't ever do it." "Guys are out to use you." "You can't wear stuff." One of your guests talked about it, that stuff was exactly what they said.

[00:25:59] But practical stuff? I mean, if you, if you were coming up when AIDS was an incurable, obviously, "God plague" for people doing "bad stuff," they didn't really have to do that much to us to terrify us. And that's actually something, like to this day, if I go get blood tests, I ask to get the HIV tests and all this kind of stuff, and then I go through 10 days of just feeling horrible [laughing]. Because it's, that time period was weird. It was very, very weird.

[00:26:35] It was super violent and um, you know, on the news it was super violent and then you had, uh, HIV/AIDS. And I, I think it's sad that there was never any kind of like put that same energy terrifying us, into just like updating the information as we got older. "By the way, there are pills." "By the way, we're here." "This information was slightly wrong."

[00:27:02] Santiago: Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't hold my breath on that. I think Melissa, in the interview we had, Melissa mentioned that as recently, I think she said maybe 2016, 2018, they're still using these analogies for women of, you know, "Do you want to be the chewed up gum?" "Do to be the piece of paper that gets crumpled and thrown away?" And I'm like, what the hell are you doing to people, giving them these incredibly just unscientific and just harmful, horrible ideas?

[00:27:31] Dee: Yeah, and that messed up a lot of people. And then when you put that concept with, with either you're a sinner or you're a saint, you make one little slip, you know? And then you might as well go do all the crazy stuff now. To be fair, I think that is a reflection of mid century, 20th century ideology. If there was a thing as demonic, there's something demonic about the type of control that people who grew up in the late 40s, 50s were submitted to. And you can hear a lot of that stuff in them. And we just happen to be the people who were raised by, raised by, or taught by these people.

[00:28:17] Santiago: Whenever I think about how there's so many things that are still backwards, it helps to remember exactly what you just said. I think in one of the other earlier episodes I did, I talked about how John Harvey Kellogg died, I think, roughly 80 years ago. And, you know, my grandma is approaching 90. That's roughly a lifetime ago that somebody that had some of these horrible, horrible ideas that John Harvey Kellogg had, you know, like it's not that much time.

[00:28:50] Dee: Eugenist.

Weird "Health Message" Fads

[00:28:51] Santiago: Yeah, yeah. So speaking of, speaking of him and, you know, having talked about Ellen White, I've had a couple people talk about how their family avoided mustard and spices. Did you hear anything about that growing up and is that something you ever saw?

[00:29:08] Dee: No, there would be swings. I, I preface this with saying that I lived in four different households by the time that I was 15, 16 years old. So I don't have the type of consistency with the Seventh-day Adventist experience in my household that other people did. I vaguely remember my dad being a little fanatic on food stuff. I don't vaguely, I remember him being, like coming up with stuff, or read something with Ellen White, and then all of a sudden we can't do stuff with this, or whatever.

[00:29:42] My grandparents weren't like that. But I, I do remember, like, food would change, and all of a sudden we can't do this. When I was in sixth or seventh grade, my dad's sister decided that we were going to eat breakfast at night and dinner in the morning, which sucked. So it'd be like eating actual full dinner in the morning, and then breakfast at night.

[00:30:13] Santiago: You know what, that doesn't surprise me because I've heard my mom talk about how, you know, breakfast should be the heaviest meal of the day and before you go to bed and you're gonna go to sleep, like, dinner should be the lightest meal. We never did that, but I heard her talk about that.

[00:30:29] Dee: Yeah, it sucks. It sucks. I do remember food being there, but as far as spices and all that kind of stuff, I don't recall. I don't recall in any serious manner anyone doing that type of stuff. I do remember, I mean, Ellen White stuff would, it just kind of permeated through and just would, like, get hip at times, and then some random stuff would pop up.

[00:30:55] Santiago: You've written a comment on the exAdventist subreddit that I really appreciated and thought was a great point, which is how Ellen White had some really strong feels about things like diet, like masturbation, but she didn't say nearly enough about slavery and the Native American genocide and robber barons and other systemic issues that were facing the country during that time.

[00:31:21] Dee: Real issues.

[00:31:22] Santiago: Yeah, so, is that realization something you noticed before you decided to leave Adventism, or did that happen after you left?

Racial Issues in Adventist Schools

[00:31:29] Dee: Yes, so I went to predominantly Black schools, I went to predominantly White schools, I went to mixed schools. And you get taught some strangely different stuff. In fact, one of my issues with Seventh-day Adventist education altogether is that there's no through line to it. You can go to one school that's trash [laughing] and then you go to another school that they're really trying to keep up with the academic standards and exceed them for the day, or you know, whatever the time period is.

[00:32:04] One of the things that I would learn at the Black schools is like context within the area, at some of the Black schools. And then you go to the White schools and I was literally at a high school, the boarding academy Broadview. They were trying to teach us that "unequally yoked" meant Black kids and White kids couldn't date.

[00:32:27] Santiago: Damn. What year was that when you attended?

[00:32:30] Dee: This is 90, the early nineties. I'm about go to my 30th high school reunion, I graduated in '93.

[00:32:37] Santiago: Damn.

[00:32:38] Dee: Like they literally did that. In fact, there was a girl who had a crush on me. And she asked me to take her to the prom, whatever it was, the banquet. You know, we don't have proms. And someone came to me from the school and was like, "Well, you all can't go to the prom together." "Because that would be unequally yoked."

[00:32:59] Santiago: Wow.

[00:33:00] Dee: Yeah.

[00:33:00] Santiago: Just a prom.

[00:33:02] Dee: A prom.

[00:33:02] Santiago: For everyone listening, if you missed it,

[00:33:04] this was the early 90s that people are still saying this bullshit. Wow. At the time that we're recording this, I haven't published the episode yet, but Abby and Ami did an episode where they talk about how there's separate conference systems, how there was blatant racism, the whole amalgamation quote from Ellen White. And they were both told the same thing growing up as Adventists in the South, that that's what unequally yoked meant. And they did talk about how some of their family members later, years later, recognized how just wrong and horrible that was, but they were taught that growing up.

[00:33:42] Dee: But can you imagine being the Black kid? Dealing with that? Like, they got to figure it out later, but I remember girls that would sit there and make out with me and would be like, "Well, we have to keep this secret, 'cause, you know."

[00:33:53] Santiago: Wow.

[00:33:54] Dee: And I know people at my school, that the school worked with the parents of a White dude who had, they literally like fell in love with each other the second they met each other, Black girl. And the school helped watch them to keep them apart. I found this out years later because I would, I'm one of those people that if it's wrong, I'll stand up and I'll say it's wrong.

[00:34:23] And I, I, I can't even imagine what, what a 14, like, I have a daughter who's about to be 16 this year. I can't imagine her going through that type of stuff. She likes somebody, and not only are his parents pushing this crap, but the school is watching them to keep them apart. Because they promised the parents they would do that.

[00:34:46] And they did all kinds of stuff. I, I remember in, uh, high school, my guidance counselor asked me to come into the office. Now, this is the 1990s. In the 1990s, walking around with loud colored clothes and doing all kinds of individualistic stuff. And I remember, I loved Public Enemy, and Flavor Flav had like a baby bottle. And they asked him, "Why do you have a baby bottle?" And he just kept drinking that, I think he had vodka or something, [laughing] whatever.

[00:35:14] And uh, he said, "Because in the span of time, we're just babies." And I was like, "That's dope!" So I bought a baby bottle, cut the tip end off, and I put red Kool-Aid in it. And I would just sit that in class. And this was just like expression and, and all that kinda stuff. There's nothing more to it than I liked the concept that we are babies in the span of time.

[00:35:37] And I got called into my counselor's office and I was like, "What's the problem?" She was like, "I noticed you've been walking around with a baby bottle." I was like, "Yeah, and?" She was like, "Does that make you represent your race correctly?"

[00:35:55] Santiago: What?

[00:35:56] Dee: I'm looking at her like, "Represent what?!" She was like, "Yeah, does that represent your race correctly?" I've read the autobiography of Malcolm X. [Laughing] In fact, the Malcolm X movie had just come out, I'm on my thing! And I was like, "Why would you think that I would need to prove that we need to be represented?" "When you are of the people who have wiped out the Native Americans, who have proved over and over to be the most violent people on planet Earth?"

[00:36:28] And she was like, "That sounds like racist against White stuff." I was like, "No, you brought me in to ask me if I was represent — to who?" "Why would I need to prove civility to you?" "Intelligence to you?" "That means nothing to me." "Don't ever call me into this office again for this." Walked out. [Laughing]

[00:36:49] Santiago: Wow. [Laughing]

[00:36:51] Dee: I'm proud of that moment, but they did that stuff all the time.

[00:36:54] Santiago: Wow, yeah. For anyone who's outside of the US or who hasn't really thought about this, there's this whole idea that if you're a minority, that you are somehow "representing your race" with the things that you do, or do not do. That concept never gets applied to the majority, right?

[00:37:14] Dee: Ever.

[00:37:14] Santiago: Ever. I mean some people, now, will say "Hey take a look at mass shootings." "It's predominantly White men who are doing this," but I never really hear people go out and say, "Oh, well, that means that all White men are mass shooters," right?

[00:37:30] Dee: Because we already know it, we already know it's not true. It's an insane concept.

[00:37:35] Santiago: Yeah, it's interesting, again, this idea that minorities somehow are supposed to...

[00:37:41] Dee: Represent.

[00:37:42] Santiago: Yeah.

[00:37:42] Dee: To who? To who? But to be fair, there's nothing for you to feel bad about. There is no "Struggle Olympics." You don't get a gold medal for anything. The concept is a, it's a wasted idea. I like to look at it in a very simple thing. What are we robbing ourselves, the world that we share, by creating arbitrary concepts as to who and who cannot do this? And I'll even go a step further.

Civil Rights, Division, MLK

[00:38:11] Dee: This vitriol that we hear with trans people... They're by far the most oppressed people walking around in the United States and in Western culture. They have the highest unemployment rate, highest unhoused rate, they have the highest rape rate. The highest you name it, they have the highest of everything. What are we robbing them of, but ourselves of, by them not being able to be themselves, and live their lives with no fear?

[00:38:41] You know, their parents kick them out of the house and never speak to them again. You know, all of these things that they're going through, we're jacking ourselves just in humanity, the world, Earth, altogether, because it's not just us. We share this Earth with a whole bunch of other beings. You know, we're just animals amongst the animals.

[00:39:02] And so I, I think the question is, how do we get out of this crap? It's because it's all manipulation anyway, just to benefit whomever from us fighting amongst each other or distrusting each other, instead of understanding the power of the actual people.

[00:39:18] Santiago: Yeah, absolutely. Before we started recording, you know, you and I were talking about the 60s and the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King. And it's interesting because we have a day, a holiday, a federal holiday dedicated to his memory. And politicians across the spectrum will say nice things, nice platitudes about him. But we forget that he was deeply hated up until and after the day he died. And he was killed because of what he was saying.

[00:39:55] Dee: Yup, yeah. Not only that, the New York Times wrote that he had outlived his usefulness to his people, like a month or two before he died. The version of "I have a dream" and all this kind of crap, that wasn't him. He was ever evolving, he was only 38 when he died. He was an ever evolving human being who understood that any oppressed people, any oppressed people, "I have to stand up for that."

[00:40:26] And when you start to, when you start to expand and be like, "This is what we were able to do with a certain group of oppressed people who are Americans," then you start to expand on a global scale, you become dangerous. And what he started doing was the Poor People March. Now you're talking poor and middle class and working class people. That's a big group. He was doing the Poor People's Campaign when he got killed.

[00:40:58] What he represented, the version that you hear people talk about, is a whitewashed version. I don't know if you know this, but Ronald Reagan wouldn't say that he was a hero. He was against the holiday. Then what they realized is they whitewash him, they'll be able to, you know, use him as some kind of weapon, when he would have been against all of that. People literally used this during the 2020 protests. They were like, "What would Dr King say about these protests that are disrupting traffic and messing up capitalism?" I could tell you exactly what he would have said! "Keep doing it!" [Laughing]

[00:41:41] Santiago: Yeah.

[00:41:41] Dee: People would be like, "What about these riots?" He would say, "Riots are the voice of the voiceless." What are you talking about? It's already there. It's already there. But they want to whitewash it and then act like they cared. If you ever get a chance and you're talking to someone who's giving you these platitudes and they were alive when he died, just listen to him for a second, look at him and be like, "Tell me the honest to God truth." "What did your parents say when he got killed?"

[00:42:10] Because the majority of White Americans, there were ones that didn't say it out loud, but the majority of White Americans laughed and joked about it and said all kinds of crazy stuff. About a person being killed. A father of four being killed. The thing about what we exist in, the world we exist in, and moving over to Sweden has, I don't look at it as just America. I look at it as like the West in general. Every aspect of what makes what we exist in, is the West exploiting everybody it can possibly exploit. It creates bad guys, it does this.

[00:42:49] These things that they used in the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s, they're useless to you and I. The people who created these things will be long gone when we start to deal with climate change and we start to deal with real global phenomenons that they never will ever experience. I don't care about demonizing White people or demonizing churches or anything else. I care about solutions. Don't worry about guilt, let's move past guilt. Let's get to solutions. Didn't mean to go off the beaten path on that one.

[00:43:27] Santiago: No, no, I appreciate it.

Deconstructing Beliefs

[00:43:30] Santiago: I feel like these are the conversations that I wish we would hear in churches. And these are the types of conversations I tried to start introducing into my youth Sabbath school as I was deconstructing. Because as I was deconstructing some of the things that were in the lesson for the week, I was like, "I don't know how I feel about this." "I don't know." "I don't know if that lines up with what my moral framework is shaping up to be and what my belief system is shaping up to be."

[00:44:00] So I tried bringing in themes of civil disobedience and justice, you know, without pushing the envelope too far, because I didn't want to have parents come back and talk to me. And I know, I know some churches are talking about this, right? But I feel like it's very few and far between. I've talked before about how within Adventism, within Evangelical Protestant Christianity as a whole, there's this attitude that "Jesus is gonna come back." "Everything's gonna be made new again." "It's not our job to fix it." "It's not our job to do this."

[00:44:35] It breaks my heart because there's a lot of good people within the Adventist church and within churches in general, but I think the eschatology and the theology has got them with this tunnel vision that they're so focused on a future that is not guaranteed to them and they're missing out on the reality that all of us are living in together.

[00:44:56] Dee: I mean, Christianity as a whole, using Dr King as an example, is the equivalent of doing a I Have a Dream version of Dr King to a Jewish nationalist, Jesus. That's what he actually was. He was against the Romans putting them in a subservient role. His whole point, and the reason why he spoke in parables, was he was like, "Let's get this freedom." "Let's get out of this."

[00:45:30] To actually use someone who is a freedom fighter to control people into being controlled, is a disservice to the human being that existed. You know, that's why I respect um, religious leaders throughout history that have stood up to wrong at the expense of themselves. There are people who were in places then, they would have never got hurt preaching these sermons, they wouldn't have lost congregation.

[00:46:01] They got on buses, and they got on planes, and they went to the South during the Civil Rights Movement, and lost their lives. Because that in itself is what we need out of religion. Like, a good moral stance. Like, when you talk about your, um, thinking about that with Sabbath school, you're already making judgments as to if the parents will get back in touch with you. Because what's around you tells you to look for these bumps, but you're not supposed to do that. Because if you're following, following a freedom fighter, then you should fight for freedom. We just don't live in that world in which that many people actually do it.

[00:46:43] Santiago: Yeah, it's so interesting to me to see people online will put "Free Thinker" in their bio when yet they're toeing the party line and they're actively fighting against freedom and personal liberty for marginalized people. And it blows my mind how, how they don't see it.

How Othering Manipulates Us

[00:47:02] Dee: It's the othering, it's the othering. Othering is the best way to manipulate people. "Are you not happy with your life?" "You don't have enough money." "You don't have that, that summer home." "You don't have the vacations you deserve." "Well, these people over here are the reason why that is." But who are you? "Well, I'm super rich," you know? "I control the government, I control this." "I do this, I do that, I go to those vacation spots and have a yacht." "But really, don't focus on me." "Focus on these people over here." "They're the reason why you can't live to your best life."

[00:47:42] That's a stupid concept, because those people over there... I mean, I am cool with people who are super conservative, right wing leaning people and all this kind of stuff, because they're a part of my life growing up, or in my life, and they brought some value to my life. I love them to this day. So I have no problems having conversations with them about their...

[00:48:05] Strange thing, I, I talked to a friend of mine, um, who I love this dude to death. But he, he did the conservative line about trans people being in bathrooms and what if his daughter's in there? And I was like, "Bruh, you live in a southern state that's small." "When do you see trans people?" "Why would you need to pass a law that bans trans people from going into public bathrooms?" I was like, "Ask yourself, why is it that this is what you're willing to stand on a hill and die for?" "And who told you that?"

[00:48:41] Santiago: Yeah, the priorities are all backwards.

[00:48:42] Dee: But it's not really about priorities. It's about creating fear. That's the whole thing. It's about creating fear. We started this talking about fear. When fear drives you, fear kind of puts blinders on you. You don't take everything in. When you don't take everything in, you're going to miss all the little weird tricks they're doing to, to be able to do stuff.

[00:49:06] And this is, this isn't some like, "I know how the government works and they're, they're pulling the wool before our eyes." These are the oldest tricks in the books. They've been doing variants of these tricks for forever. Whoever has a lot, wants more. We're in a zero sum game now because the next 20, 30 years, when the people who are in power or vying for power right now have been dead... Because, mind you, the President is an 80-year-old man, and he wants to run again. [Laughing]

[00:49:44] Santiago: Oh man, I know.

[00:49:45] Dee: I mean, and this isn't, I'm, it's not even talking about what his ideology is. It's, you're an 80-year-old man. If I become President and I hit my 75th birthday or 70th birthday, you're welcome to call me out and be like, "Dude, you already called out a dude that was only 10 years older than you." [Laughing] Because the truth of the matter is I want people who will be around when the decisions they made hit us. Previously, the oldest president we had before the one that just left, was Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan's decisions are what we deal with today.

[00:50:28] Santiago: Yep.

[00:50:30] Dee: Is Ronald Reagan dealing with his decisions right now?

[00:50:34] Santiago: Nope.

[00:50:35] Dee: There you go!

[00:50:37] Santiago: Yeah, yeah that's so true. It could just be perception, but it seems like Gen Z is informed or more informed than Millennials and previous generations were. And we recognize, I say we because I'm counting myself, you know, with the Millennials, we recognize that the future, the opportunities that we have are very different than the opportunities that our parents and their parents had.

[00:51:08] And you're absolutely right. We are dealing with the fallout, we're dealing with the repercussions of people who came decades before us and couldn't even anticipate the things that are happening today. I think about technological advances and how we've got, you know, Mark Zuckerberg being brought up in front of Congress being asked about data breaches and privacy. And here you have some, here you have some, you know, person asking him, "Oh, how does Facebook make money?" Uh, [laughing] it's like you, you had one job!

[00:51:46] Dee: They're doing it purposely. The, what they, the thing that these people are doing is they're projecting ignorance because they think that the, the people are ignorant. And it works with a handful of them. But they're projecting ignorance. I mean, some of them are actual idiots, but there are way less actual idiots than there are people who are taking advantage of this idiot movement.

[00:52:13] So, to get the soundbite becomes the point. It's just kind of like when IG came around, and you saw people taking pictures when you're on vacation, and you're like, "That's for their IG." And you can see, like, the unhomed person that they're keeping out of the picture, or, you know, whatever they're doing. It is for the cameras, it's for IG.

[00:52:36] And so, what these people are doing is they're singing dog whistles, because they can live in their own silo. And I try to stay out of being in a silo. Because I don't see any point of it. There is no winning. My side doesn't win, their side doesn't win. We all lose in this concept. That's why I said earlier, you don't have to feel bad that you didn't experience the type of stuff that I, a six foot four Black man with dreadlocks, experiences. Let's just get past this.

The New Generation

[00:53:07] Dee: You know, like, when my children started experiencing these things, that became different. I'm built for certain things and they grew up in Sweden, they grew up here in Sweden. But it hits different when your kids start to do that. Like, your thing is not to change then, it is to change now, so that irregardless of your kid or any other kid, they can live in a world that's a little bit better.

[00:53:33] I agree with you that the generation coming out now is obsessed with things being fair, and I think it's a good thing. I think we all improve generation to generation. And then we, we move back as we start to own things and have stuff, and that's how they manipulate us. But we're going to see an ebb and flow of some of these things. I would say that generation has the chance to do this, and I always tell people, like, please tell me a time that was better than now. Please tell me, because I don't know of anything.

[00:54:12] I remember the 80s. I remember the 90s. It was not better than it is now. I think of the people that I grew up in the Seventh-day Adventist church who may or may not have been, you know, LGBTQ+ people, and they had to hide it. Or they were sent to predators who molested them, and all this kind of stuff. And it was all with blinders on to assist people around them. Because we had no concept of that.

[00:54:38] My children know that there are people that they are not supposed to judge or make them feel smaller for, and that is an improvement. You know, right now it's watching people cosplay the 90s and 80s, 90s clothes and all this kind of stuff. I'm like, cool. Because y'all don't live in that hell hole that we lived in. [Laughing] So it's, uh, yeah, I just want improvement. That's all.

[00:55:06] Santiago: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I agree. I think sometimes it is, it is difficult to see the progress and the improvement that's been made. I think especially right now because we are experiencing a pushback against the progress that's been made, right? There's this kind of reaction to it.

[00:55:26] Dee: But it's always been like that.

[00:55:28] Santiago: Right, right.

Trickle Down Greedonomics

[00:55:29] Dee: The 80s was that. They elected a dude, this blew my mind when I found this out. Ronald Reagan sat down in an interview and said "The war was terrible." "I barely remember what I went through during those four years of the war." He was talking about World War II. Do you know where Ronald Reagan was? He was in, like, North Carolina doing propaganda films because he was an actor.

[00:55:55] He never went to the war. But he looked at someone in a time when pretty much, I don't know, a fourth of the adult men had actually killed people or been in the war? And was like, "Yeah, it was rough." "It's real rough for me." "I don't even try to think about it." You can look it up. Like he's in an interview saying this and he spent the rest of his thing, not to mention 1950s, selling out his, his, uh, Hollywood people and doing vindictive stuff by working with the McCarthyism and Un-American Committees.

[00:56:30] He's feeding that. 1960s, he becomes, um, Governor of California. He works with J Edgar Hoover to, to destroy the Black Panther Party. He also works with the NRA stuff people talk about right now. Cali got rid of that open carry once they saw Black people with berets walking around, and he is the person that did that. In fact, he was so stuck with his ideology that it followed all the way through.

[00:57:01] He also sold the small government concept. Less taxes, more greedy capitalism will create more jobs somehow. Because greedy people would be like, "Hey, do you want some money?" "Do you wanna work for me so we can make money together and we all benefit?" 'Cause that's what greedy people do. Well, he put this forth after he ran on it. And in 1981, up until the age of 23, you would get Social Security if you were an orphan, if you're an orphan who went to college. So you graduate from high school, you go to college, now you have, like, a little ability to pay rent and eat and not starve.

[00:57:43] He cut that within months before my parents died. So the day I turned 18, my Social Security, which is the reason why some of those moves happened, because people thought they could benefit from the money that I brought to the table with the Social Security... That money dried up and was gone. So I was on my own from that day forward.

[00:58:06] This is what these type of ideologies do, because it uses like a religious fervor with nothing behind it. He used magical thinking, magical math, which he predicted in the beginning of the year, they were like, "Yo, we'll run out of money." And his cuts were to the most vulnerable of people. And that's where we are right now. They use magical thinking and, and use fear. And then what do we get out of that? They do cuts. They create all kinds of stuff.

[00:58:44] I say all that to say that I don't care about where people stand. I care about solutions. I've been listening to this crap over and over and over and over again. People think they're winning when their supposed side wins. This is not sports. Now, if you want to talk to me about my Detroit Pistons, who have the worst record in the NBA, and we would get Wemby this year, then we can talk about that. But that is a zero sum game. This is not a zero sum game! And we're playing with other people.

[00:59:16] Santiago: So many of the issues that we have come from a mindset of scarcity.

[00:59:22] Dee: Yeah.

[00:59:23] Santiago: And that's one of the things I've actually noticed as I was deconstructing, as my politics even shifted. I was able to see it just made more sense. And I could see a difference between me and even my own father. For various reasons, I think part of it was his upbringing, part of it was, you know, things that happened to him in his life. But he has had forever, as long as I can remember, a mindset of scarcity. Whether it's related to time or money or favors, doing favors or receiving favors from other people.

[00:59:58] And that's one of the things that I've appreciated having left now is just, I don't see the world as a place of extreme scarcity. I see it as a place of extreme abundance and if we could get out of our own way and really focus on solutions, we have what it takes. I think we need the will and the unified direction to go there.

[01:00:21] Dee: Definitely.

[01:00:22] Santiago: So just to take a step back and bring it back to, you know, your, your story and kind of what you're dealing with within Adventism... The experience I had growing up with parents who both converted is obviously different from somebody who has parents and grandparents and maybe great grandparents who've been in it.

Dee's Adventist Education

[01:00:42] Santiago: So can you talk a little bit about after you've had your second baptism and you're getting older, how do things look like for you and how do you go from there to eventually going to Oakwood?

[01:00:56] Dee: The Oakwood question is very easy to answer. I kind of always knew I was going to go to Oakwood. My dad went there, family members went there. My options were Andrews or Oakwood. And from an educational aspect, I really don't like that, but I'm sure this is, this is an experience people outside of Seventh-day Adventism who have, like, legacy stuff have experienced.

[01:01:22] So I didn't really look into any other options. I just kind of knew I was going to Oakwood. My experience as opposed to yours with being, you know, third and fourth generation Seventh-day Adventist, is that I existed in a world where every single person was Seventh-day Adventist. But they also knew of my family, there was a backstory, and regardless of what I thought about it, I probably had a little bit more leeway to make mistakes and do stuff.

[01:01:54] Because people assumed I'd, you know, get on the straight and narrow and become whatever. And I wasn't doing anything bad or anything, I just didn't, I didn't feel that connected to the concept of a higher power in that way. But I'm also a person who grew up literally after the Civil Rights Movement, so I also have this sinner or saint concept. So if I'm doing something wrong, then I'm obviously bad, and eventually, you know, I'm gonna give my heart back to Jesus or some type of stuff, and I'll be okay.

[01:02:32] But I never thought about it, the legacy aspect of being a third or fourth generation, uh, Seventh-day Adventist until I spoke to a friend of mine years later and she explained to me that her mom converted when she was a kid. And she was like, "The rules are different." "People are telling me what to do or telling my family what to do and instructing us as to how to become Seventh-day Adventist, but also judging us when they perceive us as making mistakes." I never felt that in that way, unless it was, you know, at certain schools or certain situations where people didn't know my history.

[01:03:14] First and foremost, I went to Oakwood Elementary at the beginning of my school, like, kindergarten, after my parents died. Kindergarten through fourth grade, and then a teacher of mine skipped me to sixth grade. And then I moved up to Maryland for sixth grade. So Oakwood's, like, kinda in your bones. My family worked there. My grandparents retired from there. It was just kind of the place I was supposed to go. So I went there my freshman year after getting kicked out of Broadview like a month before graduation. Still got a diploma, [laughing] but, uh, got kicked out of there.

[01:03:52] I moved to California for the summer and then I called my grandparents and said, "I want to go to Oakwood." All my friends from everywhere come down to Oakwood. Awesome experience. But that was the summer that I learned that I was on my own. So, went like 10 days without food. [Laughing] I'm working the whole time, and I was like, "This sucks." So I call my grandparents and fly to Huntsville, and um, go to Oakwood. But I, I think that was the summer I realized like, that was the first time I felt like an orphan.

[01:04:27] You know, I had moved by myself, multiple households or whatever, and I probably was dealing with a level of depression, but I also I was introduced to marijuana about a year before that. [Laughing] So my Oakwood experience was smoking weed and being that dude on campus that all the people who did parties came to and gave flyers, so I got in free to all the parties. And people liked the way that I was when I was high, so they just gave me weed all the time. [Laughing] And I walk across campus like obviously high, all the time.

[01:05:04] I wasted my grandparents' money. And I look back now as an adult, and I'm like, "What are you doing?" I did nothing at Oakwood, but I was a part of the Oakwood community. So, into my freshman year, I hadn't done anything, it was a waste of time. Drop out, and spend about two years working. Oakwood has a very long break, as do all of the Seventh-day Adventist colleges. But because you get all these kids from all across the world, they would have a break from maybe the week of Thanksgiving until like two weeks after January. And that year, I had nowhere to go. Literally nowhere to go for that time period.

[01:05:48] I had no home all of a sudden. And friends of mine from Broadview, their family kind of figured it out. They took me in. Like, I literally was, like, packed up and had nowhere to go when everybody left the dorm. And I went up to Chicago, realized I didn't have a place to stay there, and in Chicago, my friend's parents took me in. And it was one of the most beautiful things that anyone ever did to me in that time period, which they took me in.

[01:06:18] Christmas comes. I'm not thinking about Christmas in that context, but their family got together and got me like awesome Christmas presents, better than everybody else's. And then they put money in my pocket every day, because I'm a broke college student. They put money in, they would make me pull my wallet out and show them. I was like, "No, no, I'm fine." And then they would just like stuff $40 in my wallet.

[01:06:43] And they did one of the most beautiful things, and I, I have lived a life in which people have shown a level of just humanity to me when it's been the worst times in my life, and that kind of pushed me through. But by the time I got back, I distrusted my family, I distrusted everyone, and I really didn't see a point in continuing my education at Oakwood. So I finally got out, worked for two years, and then I went to my first non Seventh-day Adventist education, and it blew my mind.

Goodbye Oakwood, Hello Adulthood

[01:07:16] Dee: Yeah, blew my mind, like, sitting in class next to kids, and I, I've always read a crap ton of stuff. I'd go through four books in a week, I'd sit in the library and do stuff. But I didn't realize how limited Seventh-day Adventist education was. Because there's all these things we can't read and all these ideologies we're not exposed to growing up in Seventh-day Adventist schools.

[01:07:41] So you get into a real college, you know, not to say Oakwood isn't a college, I'm not saying it from that perspective. But with no ideology behind it, just follow the curiosity. And it blew my mind. As a curious person, just like, I wish I had this the whole time.

[01:08:00] Both: [Laughing]

[01:08:03] Dee: I mean, just think of like, did you go to Seventh-day Adventist schools?

[01:08:06] Santiago: I did very briefly for elementary and junior high. But by the time I was in high school, I went to a public school.

[01:08:16] Dee: Oh, wow. So you were able to experience reading various... like, our stuff was controlled. It was controlled what kind of books we could read. It was always, you know, even if we went outside of that stuff, it was a weird way of pushing us back into it. Like, "Ah, that's, that ideology is this," and you know, blah, blah, blah. Going to a public university was, it was the best thing I ever experienced.

[01:08:49] Unfortunately, I was a full adult at this point in time, had to pay rent, had my fiancée at the time, a girlfriend at the time. We're living together "in sin." [Laughing] I was working full time while in school, like more than full time. So I didn't get to experience it in the way that I could have, but it blew my mind. There were so many things I had to, like, rush and catch up on. Because I didn't know a lot of these pathways.

[01:09:18] And again, my experiences are Huntsville, DC, and suburbs of Chicago. Educational system that really doesn't connect in any way, shape, or form. Some of them were amazing. Some were trash, like straight trash. But the one thing that they kept in common was controlling what we could be exposed to. And I just found it fascinating. Like, I didn't know about Nietzsche. [Laughing] You know, I didn't even understand these concepts. Like, we had philosophy class at Oakwood. But philosophy class where you could argue about different types of philosophy with no religious thing pulling it in, that was amazing.

[01:10:05] The thing I figured out about the educational system with Seventh-day Adventism is it funnels us back into the system. So if you think about your friends that went to nothing but Seventh-day Adventist schools, they're doctors or some type of medical related thing. Or they're educators, administrators, or there's some type of like, "I manage this or that," that has to do with the church or GC or something like that.

[01:10:38] Like, it's just not normal, because they're funneling us into being teachers and being a part of the bubble. Because there's a value to those of us who've been conditioned inside of that bubble. And it's a business. At the end of the day, it's a business. I'm sure Apple employees are funneled into, you know, staying Apple employees. But it was really refreshing when I got out of that. And around that time is when I start to truly question religion itself.

[01:11:14] Santiago: And we're going to pause there. Come back for part two, where we cover more of Dee's Adventist background, his connection to Ben Carson, and life after leaving Adventism behind.

Outro

[01:11:26] Santiago: Thanks for listening. If you have a story to share about your Adventist or fundamentalist experience, we'd love to hear it. You can submit stories on our website at hell.bio — that's H E L L . B I O or leave us a voicemail at 301-750-8648 and we might feature it in a future episode. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you on the next one!