Dear James,

I heard you died.

So did I.

Once.

Although I’m certain yours is more permanent than mine was.

I’ve been trying to write this piece for a couple weeks.

See, I’m not as good at capitalizing on current events for profit the way you were. Probably one of the many reasons why I still live in poverty.

When you died a lot of people reached out to me to see what my reaction was, and to be fair I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to really process the situation.

First, I’d had a chest scan the day before to see if I had lung cancer from all the cigarettes I smoked due to the destruction of my mental health that occurred in the years I was working as a child laborer for you.

Your organization put out a book that my smoking inspired, in fact.

I’m certain you made more money off my foibles
than
I
ever
did.

How nice that must’ve been for you.

The other reason I wasn’t paying too much attention to your demise was, I’ve been in the process of moving out of my marital home this past month after a 27 year long relationship.

I woke up sobbing at 3 am the day you died because the magnitude of the fact that I was going to have to move away from my 3 children I raised as a stay-at-home parent hit me so hard I was shaking uncontrollably.

The devastation and heartbreak so intense I actually woke up crying for the first time in my life.

Point being… I was a little distracted to pay your situation much attention as all the commentators and news orgs wrote stories of your exploits.

There are many who will praise the work you did and say you were a defender of the faith and made the world better with your homophobia and political shenanigans.

But, I personally know faaaaaaaar more people who greeted the news of your death with cheers. The damage your advocacy and publishing empire did in their lives. If you could read words soaked in tears and rage and righteous anger at how your voice became the reason so many lost their families, were kicked out, physically and emotionally abused in family cults all over the world…

Helluva resume.

And so, all this week as I moved out of my home and into an apartment I can barely afford and surviving on one meal a day and feeling kinda woozy… it’s made it a bit difficult to properly take stock of what exactly the world has lost/gained about your legacy.

Or more specifically what I have lost/gained.

And as the weeks have worn on, I reflected upon the tremendous influence your existence had on my existence.

And the effect my existence had on your existence.

And was it for the better?

Or the worse?

Who came out ahead here?

On the one hand, I had an amazing experience recording in your studios and with your employees for nearly a decade.

I think about the amazing actors I got to know and love. I think about the fans who your creative team kept me from knowing about for years and when I finally met them years later… well, it’s a mixed bag.

Many of those fans are wonderful people who have brought tremendous joy and love into my life. Others are terrifyingly illiterate and homophobic and racist and bring fear and terror into my life.

One of the writers you employed once told me:

“It would not be safe for your family if you were to share your story…”

I mean… what does that say about how stable and loving and filled with the love of Christ your audience is/was? That if I were to share what happened to me and the destruction of my life with the world as a warning that I would be in danger from Focus on the Family fans?

That is a chilling thought.

So, I got 2 good things from you.

1. I got a cool acting experience.
2. Some fans who aren’t batshit crazy

But then I thought all about what your association with my life co$t me.

Ya know… the “con” part of the list.

The most obvious thing I think about is how you pretended to be a champion for children and families… and yet your organization had no problem exploiting my child labor.

I was underpaid by your team.

Which kinda matters with this whole poverty thing
I’m
experiencing.

Man, if I was paid righteously for the value I created for your organization I probably would never have needed to go on disability for the last 20-some odd years and had to have the government step up for what your “faith-based” charity failed to do.

Christians sure do shirk their personal responsibilities don’t they? Moochers.

Maybe I could afford 3 square meals a day this week
and not feel so dizzy
while I type this.

I would also like to point out that while many of my fans are cool as fuck… many, many others are Fucking Evangelicals™. And these people scare the crap outta me.

You were very successful as a propagandist and you managed to lay the foundation for a christian nationalist takeover of the world’s preeminent democracy convincing those poor folk to live in perpetual fear of their own government and to hole up in their family compounds with their quiverfulls of illiterate children your systems created.

I’m gonna say the destruction of the democracy I rely on for social security payments– because again your organization refuses to do the right thing and pay artists properly– and how it’s white evangelicals who voted for a child-raping con artist to destroy the country I’m relying on for survival is rather negative for me.

Your organization certainly never offered to help me.

It’s interesting to me how all these noble “faith-based” charities… man, they never help those who helped them, do they?

They just take

and take

and take

and take some more

until you have nothing left to give

and they toss you aside

and go find others

they can consume.

Have I mentioned that I was the most punished kid of anyone I knew growing up and this probably destroyed my mental health more than anything?

And lastly, amongst the myriad things your presence in my life destroyed…

I’m going to add my marriage to that list.

Bet you didn’t see that one coming.

Like so many who grew up in the era of Purity Culture™ that was pushed hard by you and your collaborators, I have absolutely nothing good to say about this system.

A lot is written about how Purity Culture harms women– and it does.

But, it also
harms
men.

And while I have neither the time nor the energy– again I haven’t eaten much today– to list all the ways Purity Culture harms men I do want to bring up one overarching point that I experienced.

See, when people “save themselves” for “The One”… well, sometimes that works out great. There are many marriages where I’m certain the holy matrimony of people too young to know any better turns out fine and dandy.

It didn’t for me, though.

Waiting for The One just meant that I had no experience about myself or the world or dating or understanding what my needs were or what red flags looked like.

How could I?

Was naive AF.

See, in the Marital Bliss™ world you hype, any problems in a marriage are chalked up to testing of the faith, or personal sin, or [insert christian lingo to avoid systemic responsibility].

And when people in shitty marriages are suffering, those folk turn to Trusted Iagos™ like you who tell them this is just a test of their faith and to double down and die to yourself and keep serving your spouse and blah blah blah.

How many people over the millennia have been trapped in shitty marriages and the only place they can go to for advice is their religious leaders who tell them they can’t ever leave the marriage and to keep praying and persevere in the faith?

For the low, low price of 10% of everything you make.

Well, I’m standing upon a pile of ashes of one of those we-were-way-too-young-and-inexperienced marriages that eventually died a

slow,

painful

death.

The details of this I won’t bother getting into for privacy’s sake.

But just know that my marriage

is one of the corpses

left in your wake.

So the con list:

1. Exploited my labor as a child
2. Didn’t credit me for my work
3. Criminally underpaid me, IMO
4. Fans that scare the shit outta me
5. The destruction of my country from voters educated by you
6. The destruction of a marriage and family
7. Pimping illiteracy
8. Fans held in family cult prisons
9. A strain of virulent homophobia perpetuated by you
10. Endlessly punished by my Religious Parent who I’m now estranged from

I could go on… but again… feelin woozy.

Suffice it to say, I think the “pro” list is severely outnumbered by the “con“.

It’s a LOT of conning going on.

So, I’m going to say that the net result
of how your existence
affected my existence
was profoundly
negative.

But my existence was a benefit to your existence, wasn’t it?

How much money my work created for your “faith-based” charity that was exploiting my child labor.

How my work $TILL $ell$ and make$ money all over the world for you.

Did you know that there’s a $treaming $ervice where fan$ pay your organization a monthly fee to li$ten to the epi$ode$ I recorded and I don’t get a ¢ent of that?

Did you know that?

I was on¢e lied to told that the reason your “¢harity” didn’t give out re$idual$ to actor$ wa$ because your org always gave away the epi$ode$ for free.

But as we’ll see in the rest of my story, that wasn’t true. Was it?

So much for Thou Shalt Not Lie.

Btw, Is it too much to ask for a “christian” organization to actually uphold christian values?

I could go on but I think I’ve made my point.

Since you died, I keep thinking of the one time I met you.

You probably forgot all about it, but we bumped into each other outside the AIO studio at the Pomona facility when you went in to record your warning about how Dungeons & Dragons was pure evil and a tool of the devil in one of your crusades against pop culture.

That was another thing you ruined for me.

It might irk you to know my kids LOVE playing D&D now.

I think of that interaction we had… how brief and banal it was.

I’ve written about a lot of this in this blogject of mine where I was trying to warn my fans about how following your political shenanigans as the pied piper of democracy destruction was going to cause me harm and if they were actually Christians instead of Fucking Evangelicals™ they should vote different.

I failed.

The fascist was voted in.

And all the things I tried to warn people
about
are
now
happening.

Pretty powerless feeling.

But, I’ve always been powerless in the FOTF world.

Dominated.

Used.

Discarded.

Forgotten.

I guess we weren’t much of a family after all.

Or… this was exactly, precisely the outcome of your family system. That the “Strong-Willed” ones would eventually be no-contact with their family after a lifetime of abuse.

Happened to me, didn’t it?

I wish I could tell you in person 2 things:

1. I will make myself The Example™ to the world of the failure of your systems and perverse ideology. I will expose my scar tissue for all to see. To mock. To jeer. To laugh at. To call me a Prodigal. I will do this to show the fraudulence of everything your entire life stood for and the utter waste of a life it was even if it fucking kills me.

2. When ya die… there ain’t nothing. Those loving arms of The Lord’s embrace… nope. You’re gonna understand what I understood when I died. There is no god to greet you or devil to persecute you. No angels to sing with and no demons to torment. Your brain fizzled out and maybe it had one last flash like mine did… and then… nothing. And the entirety of your life’s work was rooted in a lie.

The untold damage you did.

The self harm and suicides your work was responsible for.

The destroyed families.

The ignorance and illiteracy and fear mongering you caused and profited from.

The destruction of a democracy in the name of Jesus.

Like I said… helluva resume.

We get one life to live in this world.

And after I died, I spent many years thinking about what I wanted the rest of my life to be about. What I wanted to achieve. And while that list is far from complete the main thrust of it is that I want my life to make the world better.

I want my life to NOT cause harm in this world.

I want to own my bullshit and my mistakes and try to better myself and to examine my ego and wonder if I’m right or wrong instead of carrying myself with arrogance and smug self-righteous confidence while peddling snake oil in the halls of power like you did.

It takes humility to self-reflect.

Not posing false humility while you bask in the presence of Presidents and live a life of material comfort on the backs of other’s labor.

Our lives were affected by each other… yours and mine.

Your life benefitted from my life.

My life was irreparably harmed by yours.

I guess you won and I lost.

I’d write more…

but damn

I’m feeling

really woozy

from a lack of food

and

unable to focus

anymore.

C’est la vie.

You’re Welcome.

– A former child whose labor you exploited