Subject: Re: Genesis of Christian Nationalism
I'll warn you in advance that this is a somewhat lengthy and perhaps overly detailed description of my personal evolution from naive religiosity to informed ignorance — skepticism, if you will. I apologize for using this venue to prompt the writing of this long-procrastinated biographical summary. Given that motivation however, I'm now loathe to suppress it.

FWIW ...

For me life is a progression through boundless experience.

I was born in Appleton, Wisconsin 83 years ago fifth of seven siblings parented by devout Catholics. So my earliest perspective was imbued with their orientation.

My mother was a strict disciplinarian of the “spare the rod and spoil the child” persuasion. To be fair, she’d had her entire thyroid removed when she was in her mid-twenties as treatment for a goiter; something medicine seeks to avoid today owing to the critical role thyroxin plays in maintaining emotional stability. So we younger siblings were subjected to frequent formal belt-beatings for virtually anything. Mother and dad were highly intelligent, and both staunchly encouraged our effective realization as human beings.

Among other things, mother liked to remind us that we “didn’t lick anyone’s bootstraps.” Perhaps this attitude contributed to my being targeted by a predominant gang of Catholic elementary school classmates led by a bully named Joe. So I was an outsider. For whatever reason, my academic performance in those years was dismal.

In eighth grade I was excelling in basketball and looking forward to ninth grade at St. Mary’s Menasha, which was well coached and had recently won the Wisconsin state Catholic basketball championship.

Then a priest in our Capuchin parish, Fr. Fidelis, solicited my mother’s assistance in recruiting me to a Capuchin boarding seminary for high-school boys located about 40 miles from Appleton. Mother subsequently asked me whether I was planning to attend St. Mary’s, or the Capuchin St. Lawrence Seminary located on Mount Calvary (no joke).

When I told her I’d be going to St. Mary’s, she directed me to go to my room and pray over the matter.

I went to my bedroom and twiddled my thumbs or whatever for a few minutes before returning to report that I’d decided to go to St. Mary’s.

She told me to return to my room for more prayerful reflection.

At that point my deliberation immediately concluded that I’d be better off getting out of there, free of her dictates and physical abuse.

So I emerged to inform her I’d be going to Mt. Calvary. Of course she was delighted, as was Fr. Fidelis.

Going there did indeed transform my experience. At the outset none of the freshman students knew one another as they came from widely disparate areas, so it was a freshly entangling social group. Among other things, there was no oppressive gang headed up by my arch-enemy Joe. There was a sophomore class that sought to lord it over us, but we were united in our opposition to it, and found we were able to defeat it every which way, partly because of our larger numbers.

That first year my academic performance remained poor, and I was at or near the bottom of my class. But to my surprise and delight, I was quickly accorded acceptance. Rather than being disregarded as an outsider I was recognized as a fellow human.

Of course, there was a great deal of obligatory chapel time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I spent much of it envisioning myself playing basketball, making fade-away turn-around jump shots or hook shots, usually in super slow-motion accommodating perfection of form.

Much to my chagrin, the powers that be in the school discouraged indoor free-time activity during warmer weather, and didn’t open up the gym for basketball until after the Thanksgiving break.

When we were finally allowed into the gym I discovered that my game had been transformed. (As an aside, only many years later was this explained by the rise of psychocybernetics.) Our class turned out to have a number of very fine basketball players. Among other things we handily beat the sophomore team despite all expectations to the contrary. Some of us would likely have made the varsity had we been allowed to compete during that first year. Warranted or not, my popularity in the class and the school as a whole grew with my basketball performance.

As a sophomore I was given a starting position as varsity center, despite being just six feet tall. As a decent jumper I could usually hold my own against inevitably taller competitors. While our school wasn’t part of any basketball conference, we did play against a number of Catholic high schools in the region, including St. Mary’s Menasha. During my first year on the varsity, they beat us with a well-practiced offense. Our young and charismatic first-year coach, Fr. Vernon, made notes during the game, and we subsequently practiced many of their effective plays and strategies. We played them again during my junior year and this time we won. At one point during that game, their highly respected coach McClone threw his papers to the floor shouting “now they’re beating us with our own plays,” much to my delight. I believe St. Mary’s again won the state Catholic championship that year. My grade school nemesis, Joe, was a substitute on their bench who was never called upon to play in the highly competitive game.

In my junior year I was shocked to be overwhelmingly elected class president, as I had no such ambition or anticipation. I was relaxing as a casual observer in a back corner of the classroom with my feet up on the desk when the vote came to pass, after which I stumbled my way up to the front while probing my awareness for some sort of acceptance talk.

During the prior two years our class had grown somewhat polarized. A small group that referred to itself as “the neat suckers” was comprised of would-be machismos who indulged in antagonizing another small group they liked to put down as “the girls.” Given my own experience earlier in life, I was not a fan of such bullying.

Absent any prior preparation, I expressed my appreciation to the entire class, and then addressed this divisiveness, inviting anyone who may be subjected to such degradation in the future to come to me, as I would then do whatever I could to resolve the issue. That was the end of the neat suckers. The entire class came together as one, and to this day only occasional fragments of family experience have been similarly harmonized.

A couple of years later, upon applying for admission to Jesuit Marquette University in Milwaukee, it was revealed to me that I was academically at the top of my high school class during my senior year. Bottom to top in four years. I’d never have guessed. Might it have been just some sort of genetic flow? My guess is it more likely reflects my highly contrasting social experiences at home and across the two schools during that period.

But there was a dark side to this richly rewarding high school experience. At the boarding seminary, my “spiritual director” an official every student was required to engage, was obsessed with my sex life. Fr. Hilary Zach was his name. Sitting as my confessor behind his desk, with me as a young repentant sinner on his couch, on frequent visits he spent hours ruminating over every detail of my personal experience. Masturbation is a “mortal sin” in Catholic mythology. That means if you die before confessing it to a priest and receiving his absolution, you’re doomed to eternal hellfire. Sheesh! Who’d ever want that? Also, we students took communion every morning, and that was prohibited when one harbored an unabsolved mortal sin. So I had to seek him out whenever I’d jerked off, which, for me, was quite often at the time. What a mess!

Obviously he could have just kicked me out of the seminary at any point. Instead, he gave me a key to his office, and left cigarettes on his desk for my use. Yes, he shared smokes with me during all visits, from the time I was fourteen. I was obviously one of his favorites. I have no idea why. He never put a move on me, other than to obsess over my reports of sexual activity. Fifty years later he was included on a list of Catholic clerics in the Milwaukee diocese who had been implicated in sexual abuse up to that time. Also included on that list were other priests serving as teachers and administrators at the seminary during my stint there. Much more could be said about this, but I’ll leave it there for now.

At Marquette I majored in philosophy and minored in theology, in keeping with what were then my most fundamental interests.

Several years later, while serving as a USAF junior officer, I ceased any and all affiliation with religion of any ilk.

Since then I have, however, extensively explored ancient and modern Greek, Taoist, Hindu, Buddhist, and Sufi wisdom, as well as the sciences, including psychology, evolutionary biology, quantum and relativistic physics. Of late my focus has been on reconciling the exponentially elaborating complexity described by General Relativity with the boundlessly decohering infinity that's ubiquitously manifesting as quantum phenomena.

Comments, questions invited.

Tom