Recognizing the Signs of Indoctrination

The role of denial in reinforcing indoctrination

When I was a young child, I participated in a program called AWANA. The acronym stands for Approved Workmen Are Not Ashamed, and it was based on a bible verse. The whole purpose of the program was to indoctrinate children into being Christians. Its name and origin used the concept that good Christians couldn’t be made to feel ashamed of their beliefs. This principle served to reinforce the indoctrination because an extra layer of insurance was built in. If anyone thought less of me for my beliefs, they were just trying to make me feel ashamed.

But I knew better than to be ashamed of Jesus. God wouldn’t approve of me if I was ashamed of Jesus.

Indoctrination is highly effective. Even the smartest people are not immune to being subjected to it. In my experience, for everyone who questions their indoctrination, there are a dozen who don’t. It uses both marketing techniques and violence as enforcement. Furthermore, people on the outside are made into unknowing participants, like in the example about shame. Anyone who tries to reach an indoctrinated person has been warned against in the indoctrination clauses.

Questioning indoctrination is costly. It leads to being ostracized. The outside world participates in this aspect, too, simply by being a strange place. Those who leave behind a deeply indoctrinated community are both ridiculed for being weird and ignorant and unprepared for survival in the outside world. For me, this meant I didn’t have marketable skills. I couldn’t obtain gainful employment because I was too severely neglected educationally. Hard manual labor became impossible due to becoming disabled. So all I have to rely on is writing about my past.

Indoctrinating people requires repetition and enforcement. It also incorporates things like self-righteousness and denial. Misogynists will say they’re not misogynistic, racists will say they’re not racists, and extremists will say they’re not extremists. We all have assumptions to unpack, and it is helpful to learn about built-in denial.

I’m often asked what can be done for people who are trapped in controlling environments, and my answer is to make it easier for these people to leave. They must first question what they’re being told, and then they need the resources to get out. But I also want to encourage people to ask themselves what they believe isn’t indoctrination. Denial is a key ingredient to watch out for.