Radicalism and the Death of Knowledge
Indoctrination rarely announces itself. It comes dressed as certainty, as tradition, as “truth” too sacred to question. For many of us, it was the air we breathed . Bible verses memorized before we could spell our names, slogans repeated until they calcified into morality. We called it education. We called it faith. But what it really was, was obedience training.
When knowledge dies, suspicion takes its place. Professors aren’t teachers anymore, they’re “influences.” Science isn’t discovery, it’s a scam seeded by a “psychopath.” Curiosity doesn’t survive here, only outrage does. I see it every day in the posts circulating: rants about gender studies as if asking questions is corruption, fearmongering about Darwin as if evolution is a personal insult, praise for pundits who promise to “rescue” our kids from thought itself. This is not knowledge. It’s indoctrination repackaged as discernment.
In charismatic Christianity, knowledge was often treated as a rival to faith. The louder the shout, the holier the spirit. Tears and tongues became the measure of belief, not study or integrity. It was a faith that thrived on arousal; mass weeping, collective ecstasy, altar calls where children were told they’d feel fire if they were chosen. This is what the psychology of cults teaches us: overwhelm the nervous system with emotion, and the critical mind cannot keep pace. In high-control systems, emotion becomes evidence, and thinking is the enemy.
Radicalism thrives in that vacuum. When your entire worldview is built on slogans instead of study, conspiracy instead of context, every challenge feels like an attack. Indoctrination doesn’t prepare you to wrestle with complexity, it prepares you to fear it. To despise it. To silence it. Charismatic fervor only accelerates the process. The same machinery that rewards speaking in tongues rewards political allegiance: absolute loyalty, all-or-nothing thinking, and the collapse of nuance. Cult dynamics work because they sever you from yourself until fear of leaving outweighs the cost of staying.
But when the script collapses, when indoctrination can’t contain reality anymore, the grief is seismic. Deconstruction isn’t rebellion. It’s survival.
Deconstruction is survival because indoctrination demands self-erasure. It’s the cornerstone of religious upbringing, authoritarianism, and colonization, In many ways, that obedience was holiness and curiosity was rebellion. Questions weren’t tools for learning, they were traps to expose disobedience. In some rooms, knowledge was treated like a liability, as though integrity could only exist in ignorance.
I was primarily raised by my grandparents, and my Papa believed deeply in learning. Later in life he became a pastor, but he saw education not as the enemy of faith, but as part of it. Which meant I grew up in the middle of a contradiction: a world that preached suspicion of science and psychology, and a grandfather who kept pointing me back toward the value of study and understanding.
Indoctrination tried to convince me that truth only flowed downward, from God to pastor to father to child. Vertical morality. But Papa’s example cracked the scaffolding. He modeled something closer to horizontal morality, where worth wasn’t measured by hierarchy but by how we live with and for each other. Where faith and knowledge didn’t have to be enemies.
Radicalism once convinced me that salvation depended on winning arguments, drawing harder lines, despising the “other” quicker and louder. But relationship dismantled that certainty. Queer friends, neurodivergent kids, immigrants, those labeled “broken,” none of them needed saving. They needed to be seen. And so did I.
I know because I lived it; in my whole existence. As a teen and young adult, I found myself asking very deep questions I didn’t yet have the language for. The way I received validation and connection was through scripture and biblical teachings with my grandparents. At times, when I went too deep or asked a question that couldn’t be reconciled with biblical knowledge, the response was to pray for discernment, to have faith, to ask for God’s will to be revealed
It is such an innocent manipulation. Because the premise is: you don’t know what you don’t know. You couldn’t possibly realize that what should be done in those moments is guidance toward critical thinking. Media literacy 101 — who, why, what. But instead of being taught to interrogate, I was taught to spiritualize.
When I finally reached the pinnacle of my deconstruction, the peace that Christianity always promised, the peace you were told you’d feel once you gave your life over to the “Lord” finally washed over me. Not because I had surrendered harder, but because my mind finally stopped contorting itself. The mental gymnastics, the endless loopholes, the desperate effort to make scripture stretch over every question and finally all of it ended. Everything clicked into place the moment I gave myself permission to let go of the real disillusion.
This is why deconstruction feels like death at first. Your nervous system has been wired for belonging through performance. Step outside the script, and the body shakes with terror. It isn’t rebellion — it’s trauma release. The psychology of cults tells us that leaving high-control systems comes with grief, guilt, and disorientation. But it also tells us survival is possible. And necessary.
In 2014, I stood in my great-grandmother’s house for the last time before it was tore into the ground. The walls were peeling, the floorboards cracked, but a single book lay open on the floor, catching the light from the doorway. I took a picture because something in my spirit told me the pictures would be important. Observation and documentation are the cornerstone of the scientific process. The photos I took that day stayed with me ever since. A visual piece of my history. A reminder that indoctrination can rot a structure, but it cannot silence the words left behind. Knowledge waits for us, even when the house that held it has fallen.
This isn’t theoretical for me. I’m raising a son in the shadow of these narratives. And what I want for him more than titles, more than approval is a future wide enough for curiosity, for compassion, for knowledge that breathes, and yes— empathy. He deserves more than indoctrination repackaged as truth. He deserves integrity, imagination, and the freedom to choose what scaffolding he will keep and which he will burn.
As do we all.
