What I learned during my time as a White "Subscriber of Christ":
- ignorance over knowledge
- self above others
- feelings over facts
- god over country
I grew up in the tiny mountain town of Basalt, Colorado (technically, our house was in the 81623 zip code of Carbondale, Colorado, but I attended K-12 schools in Basalt), and so, I am familiar with the particular brand of Whites that live there. For instance, while I was living there (I merely spent my childhood there, but upon turning eighteen, graduating from high school, and attending college in Texas, I never returned except to make money over the summers during college, and since graduating from college, have yet to return for any meaningful amount of time, although I have plans to, but for reasons this is not currently about) there was a group of families that essentially came in and took over the entire “christian leadership” of the Basalt community. When I was tiny, my adopted family attended a church called Basalt Bible, and it basically shared a parking lot with a church called Christ Community. There were other churches of other denominations, but in short, everyone I knew attended church on Sundays. Not to say that all of my friends (and their parents) were “christ-like,” ha! As if.
Of my high school group of twelve friends (the twelve female students who rounded out the top-twelve of our graduating class, and honestly, I’m not entirely sure who makes up the twelve beyond the first five or so since I was competing for the top spot) had exactly one member who did not attend church, and that was really fucking weird. Her family must be full of something … bad, I ignorantly thought to myself on more than one occasion, while also ignorantly not knowing what that “bad something” actually even meant.
Needless to say, this was/is a very White, religious (read "tight-knit") community, and I attended a religious school from sixth through tenth grade. A story for another time.
My point is that a handful of wealthy White families arrived sometime in the early 90s, and the vehicle they used to pull off a few financial scams was the church, religion, the religiously-aligned nature of the community in Basalt. The face of the operation was the Collins family, and the matriarch, Barbara Collins (née Trotter?) who married (fat loser) William Collins, had six (now-fat) daughters (who were touted, somehow, as “beautiful,” *sigh* ah … White people): Leslie Paige, Hattie Something, Chandler, Adelaide, Rebekah (or Rebecca, I’ll never know) and Sydney (or Sidney? Ugh, Australia, much?). Barbara had a sister named Paige Holloway (née Trotter) who was married to Don Holloway, and the Holloway family, for some reason, posed as Jewish, with Paige Holloway routinely teaching Jewish Orthodoxy, covering her head during a Seder dinner lesson, etc., etc. There were five children in that family, and I don’t remember them, really. And then there was the Williamsons or Williams, I can’t remember—I left, never to return, eighteen years ago—who were clearly the head of the operation as they arrived last and got the hell outta there first. They were seemingly the wealthiest of them all, with a large estate ranch up over Missouri Heights, etc., and I’m not sure how many children they had, because they were older, and their children never attended the schools in the valley, while I was in school. And then there were some bit players in the Moore and Still families, along with maybe another two or three families I do not know about.
Over the course of about ten years, they built a church (the name of which continues to legitimately escape me, probably due to the traumatic nature of all of this) poached all of the surrounding congregations, named themselves the "Elders" (although, I'm remembering now that the Williams[sons?] did not attend church, first red flag), built a “school,” built an oil-lube service shop, and scooped up an unknown amount of cash for their Texas oil “investment opportunities” from their congregation and the parents of their “students” ($10K of which my adopted father was scammed out of but who had the temerity to get back, and whose experience taught us [both my older adopted brother and me] about both the nature of the church and the nature of rich people). In short, they preyed upon the religious community that IS the community of Basalt. It’s easy. The entirety of the community is White. They are not hostile, per se, but they are racist (read "self-serving").
My so-called bestie in high school, (“Han” for Meghan with an “H,” cause there was another Megan in the group, without one) who was obviously white, was obviously raised in a white family, but it wasn’t until I left that I learned that her family is also White. An obsessive (obsessive!) lover of all things Black, it was strange to me when she ditched her Black boyfriend when things seemed to be getting serious, for a burly (fat, but I shouldn’t mock a veteran, thank you for your service) white ex-military-turned COP. It was strange and frankly, quite unsettling. I could, obviously, go over her upbringing—her parents’ pride in her ability to make a $400/month car payment while living under her parents’ roof, not paying rent (because your mom stashing away your “rent” for your first mortgage down payment hardly counts as “supporting one’s self”), as a college graduate, with a job, etc., but it would take too long to fully explain, and I don’t really want to spend that kind of time on her—cause she is the embodiment of White Privilege, but I’ll refrain (for now). All of my old high school “friends” are products of White Privilege, and they all (with the exception of one who married a globaux citizen and made exceptionally beautiful globaux babies) love it. So there’s that.
Anyhow, my point is that religious communities are sitting vats of tinder that can easily be persuaded into thinking (i.e. believing in) just about anything, because they are religious. The giving over of the self to some other entity in the name of whatever comes after life is religion. To care more about what happens to you after you die than you do about how you live here on Earth is religion.
And so, seeing small pockets around Colorado embracing the nut-jobs who wish to have the Church control the State are revealing their ignorance time and time again. To claim that this “separation of church and state” is somehow unconstitutional is to proclaim the capital-T Truth. This country is already suffering from the unconstitutional state of the Church ruling the State. To say otherwise is to be dumb as fuck.
We literally just watched the dismantling of the State by the Church, literally, just a few days ago.
The state of the United States IS the state of the Church controlling the State.
And this is how I know that Boe-tard Fuck-bert is a fucking dumb-as-fuck idiot (and ugly as shit, cause this is all very petty). And so is anyone who listens to her or supports her apolitical ambitions. But fear not. She’s overwhelmingly useless due to her White Incompetence. She, like all others like her, suffers greatly from Blanquism. Sometimes, I actually get a little chuckle from the thought. But this is serious stuff, so no! I will not joke around! Ugh.
Seriously, though, these are the communities that make up the majority of These United States. Large urban centers are just that, large, urban, and central. But that does not mean that all together, the urban centers outnumber the amount of people who live apart from each other in small, local communities. These are the people who are sitting ducks, waiting to be scooped up by the next White-Forward ideology, and they will support whoever preaches the loudest. Duh. This also means that any Democrat, willing to lie to their faces, could succeed just as easily.
In the end, the Still family left in disgrace as the husband was “caught” (more like scapegoated) as the perpetrator of tax fraud in the oil-lube business. They were followed shortly by the Moores (whose excuse was the warmer climate of Florida), and then the Holloways (whose excuse was that one of the daughters was a volleyball talent who needed the competitive edge of Denver), and finally, the Collinses (who left without excuse). Like I said, nobody knows for sure when the Williams[sons?] came or left, but they were long gone before the shit went down. And also, like I said, I was a child when all of this was happening, so I only know a few details, and I was unable to make sense of any of it until I was much older. All-in-all, they were all gone, vanished (although, it is somewhat known that Barbara and William Collins landed in Kerrville, Texas, the Holloways in Tennessee, and the Moores in Florida) by 2003.
And so, this is a real story about a really small town in Nowhere, America (except that if you know exactly where Basalt, Colorado is, then you know that it is not actually nowhere, it’s in the very middle of Somewhere). I do not know all of the facts, nor do I know more details than I’ve presented here. The point is that I would like to know more about what happened there in the 90s. I’m older and wiser now, and what I know for a fact is that the families (Williams[sons?], Collins, Holloway, Moore, Still) got away with something criminal, because the punishment they faced was tax-fraud, which means that they got away with much much more, since they escaped that valley as soon as they could when one (seemingly small) piece fell out of place.
Thus, if anyone has any information, I’m willing to pay for it. I’m also willing to receive information pro bono, free, voluntarily. I do not wish to put anyone away or look into this like a criminal investigation. I simply want to know what they were up to, whether or not they were largely successful, and where did all the money go, exactly?
Upon their Big Shameful Exit, the majority of the congregation flocked (amazingly enough, but drugs are hard to wean one’s self off of) to Christ Community, and by the time I left high school, the pastor of that church was ousted because he fucked the Spanish tutor, while married to the mother of his three (four?) children.
And I’m the “crazy one” who considers herself a “recovering christian”?
p.s. William and Barbara Collins took over a little one-room schoolhouse called Alpine Christian Academy (the private christian “school” I attended from grades six through ten), and William served as the school’s principal. The family, obviously, had plans to cheat their daughters academic performance/grades, etc., but I have a theory that when I and a childhood friend of mine (who I will not name, since I have a deep respect for her and would like to be friends again someday) proved ourselves as serious competitors to the Valedictorian Throne, the family had to switch it up, and so, the second oldest (Hattie Something cause everyone knew that Paige was no Hattie) was transferred to a Texas high school her senior year. I have absolutely no doubt that her parents fudged her high school transcript. Not a doubt in the world. *sigh.