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Who are the Moore family?


blessalessi

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I've just fallen down a rabbit hole thanks to a thread about John Moore and Iris Muscarella.

I think I understand that John Moore was a Vision Forum insider who won a prize at Doug's Film Festival a few years back, and who has now left fundiedom behind.

It also looks like he may have covertly posted here under another name, offering gossip, whilst he was on the brink of leaving fundiedom.

I'm not quite sure why he is important or relevant, though, apart from being a young person who defected as a young adult. Does his family have their own ministry? Are they fundie royalty? Was the guy well known in his own right before he became well-known for his accounts on Free Jinger? To which other families was he connected?

Any links or hints gratefully accepted!

Thanks. :)

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In short:

I wasn't ever on the inner, inner circle; but I have many friends who were high in the VF ranks. Some of us are still friends, some of us are not. I won some prizes at the festival, and my current career is still almost completely due to my successes in those circles.

I was involved in another account here very proactively in answering questions about multiple ministries. I request not to associate that account with my real name, but if people are snoopy enough to wonder, I suppose they deserve to know. Consequences of my involvement were significant. I later lied about it to numerous people who asked me in person, out of fear of repercussions partly, but also to protect the identity of others involved.

I'm not important. I was not important. There were some who treated me like I was important and it carried over into an interest here. In some circles 'filmmaking' was considered a ministry in it's own way, but I never thought of it that way and felt that calling low budget movies made with buddies a 'ministry' was a tad pompous. However, I gladly reaped the benefits of status in these circles.

I'm far more 'known' outside of any of the fundie circles than I am within them, but my parents are rather strictly fundamentalist. They were quite successful in an MLM which was later crushed by pyramid-style leadership of a training organization that they were part of, and it crushed their team. They still make a living from their business the old fashioned way, selling products.

I have not left fundamentalist or conservative circles, as I do have friendships I deeply value, but I've started making my views more well known. I still maintain a Christian faith, though I'm much more libertarian, and my view of the gospel and scripture would be considered extremely liberal by most.

That pretty much sums it up, methinks.

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Thank you for your post.

Since I started this thread, I've actually wondered if I was even allowed to ask who your family is, as we don't "out" members' real identities here. But you have kind of made a celebrity of yourself in both your iterations on the forum, and I think I read that you PM'd several members to announce to them your identity, and followed this up with a public post, so ...

Ultimately though, it wasn't my snoopiness that found you, it was your creation of two accounts here and the subsequent posts about you that brought you to my attention, so I won't apologise for asking questions. :D

I still haven't worked out who your family is, apart from seeing references to the "Moores" round and about the place in VF circles, but I no longer feel a burning desire to know. I'll admit that your own story is interesting to me, though, mainly because you are still here (in your own, unimportant way).

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In some circles 'filmmaking' was considered a ministry in it's own way, but I never thought of it that way and felt that calling low budget movies made with buddies a 'ministry' was a tad pompous. However, I gladly reaped the benefits of status in these circles.

....

I have not left fundamentalist or conservative circles, as I do have friendships I deeply value, but I've started making my views more well known. I still maintain a Christian faith, though I'm much more libertarian, and my view of the gospel and scripture would be considered extremely liberal by most.

That pretty much sums it up, methinks.

How do you feel about the fact that, as a man you have benefited significantly, and continue to benefit, from your patriarchal upbringing, while women like Lourdes Torres have been utterly abused and ruined, by the leader that you once defended so robustly?

Do you feel a responsibility to women like Lourdes, and how do you balance any feelings like that against your desire to maintain the relationships with those still deeply enmeshed in the old ways?

I am asking this pointedly because I saw that on another thread this weekend, you jumped into a conversation about "Bringing Home Rebecca" and seemed to want to minimise that situation as being about general "retirement parties", rather than being about the actual publicised agenda of "Restoring Manhood to America".

For someone who considers himself "not important" you still seem to me to be quite invested in a patriarchal system where all animals are equal, but animals with penises are significantly more equal than others. Am I wrong?

And if you hadn't been pushed out, do you genuinely believe you would have jumped?

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Alright.... So.... I'm going to try to deal with these one at a time. They're all based around a whole bunch of assumptions that aren't really unreasonable.

How do you feel about the fact that, as a man you have benefited significantly, and continue to benefit, from your patriarchal upbringing, while women like Lourdes Torres have been utterly abused and ruined, by the leader that you once defended so robustly?

I didn't say I was reaping the benefits of being a 'man' in my circles, as a lot of women were also making films and also becoming quite famous and influential as a result. I was reaping the benefits of being a celebrity. Female friends of mine did the same with their blogs. People were so eager to meet them and eager to meet me because we were well publicized through our online presence, which was for many of them, their only connection to the outside world.

Facebook didn't become truly popular in many fundamentalist homes until I had been running my blog for 5 years. I definitely reaped benefits of being a man in some circles, but even at the highest of my involvement with the VF community, I had much greater involvement in the MLM and local film production circles that were far from patriarchal. But running a blog was meaningless to them, so my blog tended to focus, as it does now, on things relevant to readers of my blog. But back then, I would post about whatever. Names of pets. Projects of my siblings. Conversations between my parents. But in all that time, I was on the 'progressive end' of my circles. While I would definitely push 'manhood', I would have hours-long fights with my Dad about how oppressive a lot of these ideas were to women. I would defend women who ran away from home to go to college, for instance, to get away from abusive parents. I didn't do a lot of this publicly, because I didn't want to be 'out of step' with my Dad, but my siblings heard the wars perpetually and would actually get sick of them.

To say I was benefiting from being a man, is probably true to some degree, but not in a material way. I was in a home where I didn't get to make my most of my own choices on almost anything. I was just like a daughter in that sense. What I believed was pretty thoroughly regulated, I couldn't travel without months of consideration and weighing the merit of it, and it took years of almost secret pursuit of filmmaking before I was able to do it at a higher level with approval from my Dad. In fact, it took 4 years of making short films only when Dad was out of town or on trips before it gained his approval. In spite of being male, I had little to no authority, but there were tons of mandatory 'manhood studies' and mens meetings I was required to be at. He often threatened to make me get rid of my blog because he just couldn't figure out what was so damn important that a child (18 and under) would need a website of their own, if it wasn't for business. Most families of course, practiced it differently, I'm just describing my particular family scenario. I also don't 'continue' to benefit from patriarchy I'm not sure where that idea came from. I mean, if you are referring to the overarching cultural privilege that exists for being male, yeah that exists. I'm also tall and slender and have a decent speaking voice and a face that most people like. The combined net effect of that privilege in mainstream culture has been far more beneficial than being male was in patriarchal circles, because unless you were a married man with kids and a business to support your wife and kids, you were nothing.

Today, my Dad has radically altered his parenting style, and he and I have had a growing relationship over the last two years.

Do you feel a responsibility to women like Lourdes, and how do you balance any feelings like that against your desire to maintain the relationships with those still deeply enmeshed in the old ways?

I wasn't really part of that community, didn't watch it happen, and would not have supported what happened, so why would I feel a personal responsibility? I understand privilege and how it affects women everywhere but I don't feel a personal responsibility when somebody else is an asshole. The hyperactive levels of it in these sorts of communities is not surprising. I counted her as a casual friend through mutual friends back in the day, and I count her as a friend now. My responsibility to her as a friend has nothing to do with my responsibility to my other friends. My friendships with those 'deeply enmeshed in the old ways' is virtually non-existent. The only person in my life who is significantly invested in patriarchy is my Dad. Though there are many attached to fundamentalism who are close friends, most of them either abandoned patriarchy or never bought into it in the first place. They aren't really one in the same anymore.

I am asking this pointedly because I saw that on another thread this weekend, you jumped into a conversation about "Bringing Home Rebecca" and seemed to want to minimise that situation as being about general "retirement parties", rather than being about the actual publicised agenda of "Restoring Manhood to America".

Sorry, that was a miscommunication. Remember that even at the height of my investment in patriarchy, most of my friendships were not with people who were deeply invested in VF or patriarchy. Most of my friendships were through a mixture of agnostics and mainstream Christians in the MLM community. These people had retirement parties all the time, and they were gender neutral, based on achieving a business goal. The reason for the party was to help motivate other salespeople on the team. The reason this particular retirement was unusual, was that it was based specifically on the whole, 'be a man, bring your wife home' paradigm. This was not the norm in those parties, but this event invited basically just people from our church. It was a highly patriarchal environment where everybody was in a competition to be more dedicated to the fundamentals. More people were bragging about the movies they threw away or the types of standards they had in their home. Things you wouldn't let your kids do were like merit badges of patrio-centric authority, even if it was predominately the wife coming up with ways to show how manly her husband was. The whole thing was quite intriguing. I think this is because of how the MLM world and patriarchy intersected.

For someone who considers himself "not important" you still seem to me to be quite invested in a patriarchal system where all animals are equal, but animals with penises are significantly more equal than others. Am I wrong?

You are definitely wrong if you're thinking that I'm invested in patriarchy at this time. Even my family, as staunch as my Dad had been for decades on patriarchy, has weakened his views significantly. The peak of my investment in patriarchy and reformed doctrine was 2006-2012. And it's important to note, that basically since late 2009, I've had more and more realization that the patriarchy emperor had no clothes. Doctrinally I would support it, but in practice I hated the way there was this misogynist overtone. I believed patriarchy and equality could co-exist, and continued to believe that for some time. By the end of 2012 I fully rejected patriarchy without any questions asked, though I didn't make anything public about it. Much of that was due to researching in attempts to defend it it theologically.

And if you hadn't been pushed out, do you genuinely believe you would have jumped?

I was pushed out because people were realizing I had started leaving. I was pushed out because my actions were so thoroughly inconsistent with perceptions of my worldview. I was walking away when I got caught being a hypocrite. Everybody fully expected me to actually 'change my ways' and stay in the community with all these ultimatums. The whole thing split the community and many of the people in our church never spoke with me again. Jumping out was done intentionally, gradually, and with as much caution as possible, to best preserve my relationships with those who were unmoved. By 2014, I was being more solid in my voice against patriarchy to those within what little community remained. Had I radically jumped ship in one smooth motion, that would not have been possible. I'm referring to my own community though, not those of VF or ATI origins, most of whom I never had any significant connection to. My link to that world was filmmaking, and of the filmmaking crowd, I was decidedly on the more patriarchal/reformed spectrum to begin with. So as my beliefs grew, I grew more into the mainstream, not away from it, even at the VF festival.

One important thing I would like to note about the experiences of the community... the women weren't the only ones ruined. There's a myth that these cults ruined women and benefited men, but that's not true. Authoritarian structures benefit authority, and crush the followers. It benefited male leaders most of all, to be certain, but wives of the leaders were far better off, had more autonomy, celebrity, and authority, than men who were merely attendees or customers. The power scale was definitely present in men vs. women, but far better off to be a female author of a VF published book, and a beautiful keeper at home, than a homely looking dude who was just there to learn or attempt to court somebody above him in the caste system.

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One important thing I would like to note about the experiences of the community... the women weren't the only ones ruined. There's a myth that these cults ruined women and benefited men, but that's not true. Authoritarian structures benefit authority, and crush the followers. It benefited male leaders most of all, to be certain, but wives of the leaders were far better off, had more autonomy, celebrity, and authority, than men who were merely attendees or customers. The power scale was definitely present in men vs. women, but far better off to be a female author of a VF published book, and a beautiful keeper at home, than a homely looking dude who was just there to learn or attempt to court somebody above him in the caste system.

THIS is so true. A LOT of sons weren't treated very much better than SAHDs... although it varied a lot by family and levels of belief. I wouldn't say that there was ONE across the board experience.

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I think it was hard on both boys and girls, and on women and men. But men had more power. (And by extension boys have a greater hope for the future than girls)

However, even that probably diverged wildly depending on whether leave and cleave was actually practices or the idea of the generational influence was practiced.

I also think it's bad for males because it deprived them of things they may have enjoyed or males who would have never been a good fit in a patriarchal role, or men who for various reason would not be able to support monetarily a large family.

But it harmed women and men unequally, even if it harmed the majority of men.

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I think it was hard on both boys and girls, and on women and men. But men had more power. (And by extension boys have a greater hope for the future than girls)

However, even that probably diverged wildly depending on whether leave and cleave was actually practices or the idea of the generational influence was practiced.

I also think it's bad for males because it deprived them of things they may have enjoyed or males who would have never been a good fit in a patriarchal role, or men who for various reason would not be able to support monetarily a large family.

But it harmed women and men unequally, even if it harmed the majority of men.

Yeah, this is very fair. And the big problem is that not only were women treated unequally, they were treated unequally.... unequally. In some homes, women were genuinely not allowed any personhood outside of marriage. And you could be severely disciplined for trying to intervene in a father's treatment of his daughters. Insanity. And yeah, in public discourse, women were definitely not treated as well. There was this sorta, 'My son, my son, heir of my empire,' where for women it was like, 'Yup, what your life holds will be a total mystery, but lets not waste a lot of time dwelling on it...'

Horrendous.

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I know of sons not allowed to move out, expected to work in a family business, very very sheltered. Very discouraged from going to college or anything of the sort. They make next to nothing. They are expected to work to make the family wealthy. The mom is more of a dictator than they would let the world know, and the girls maintain the purity of doctrine even though it doesn't really benefit them. Those guys are worse off than their sisters. They probably would have high standards for anyone that would marry the girls, but any girl that marries those guys is in for a surprise because he is going to be starting from lower scratch than most public school kids I know.

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I know of sons not allowed to move out, expected to work in a family business, very very sheltered. Very discouraged from going to college or anything of the sort. They make next to nothing. They are expected to work to make the family wealthy. The mom is more of a dictator than they would let the world know, and the girls maintain the purity of doctrine even though it doesn't really benefit them. Those guys are worse off than their sisters. They probably would have high standards for anyone that would marry the girls, but any girl that marries those guys is in for a surprise because he is going to be starting from lower scratch than most public school kids I know.

I think they are worse off in a very practical sense, and in other senses, no so much.

And not sure why you needed to do a dig at public school kids. I would put my daycare'd, public schooled 15 year old head to head on about any subject other than bible recitation with most fundie families' homeschooled kids.

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Two fundie men sticking up for other fundie men. Go figure.

I'm grateful for the mansplanations. :whistle:

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...

I wasn't really part of that community, didn't watch it happen, and would not have supported what happened, so why would I feel a personal responsibility? I understand privilege and how it affects women everywhere but I don't feel a personal responsibility when somebody else is an asshole.

I was wondering if you could reflect on your own participation in your patriarchal community. However, your response seems to rely heavily on lecturing me in the passive voice and in general terms about your community. You seem so utterly disengaged from your previous life that you are looking back on it as though you were always just a passive member of the audience and not an actor on the stage of your own life.

From what I have read of your earlier postings on this board, you used to consider yourself so involved in the lifestyle that you could act as a (cloaked) spokesman for your community, and you seem to have defended Doug Phillips very robustly at a time that Lourdes would still have been deep in a shitty situation with him.

I couldn't stomach reading the whole of the thread from 2011 but I see you were called out here then and offered very specific advice as to how you could change the world you lived in. You obviously were aware of the failings of your religious institutions long before you finally acted but you didn't seem to be moved to act until your peers started to screw with your own head. Exaample: viewtopic.php?f=93&t=3942&p=89568#p89610

As of now, although you have yourself been through a rough time, you are surviving, thanks to the relatively stable financial and employment situation that arises from being a man who was always encouraged to be self-supporting. Lourdes, on the other hand, seems to be flat broke and starting over with her education after a lifetime of abuse by a man, and in a lifestyle, that you once strongly defended.

I don't think you do yet understand privilege and I think a very good place to learn would be to reflect on your own responsibility for the times that you yourself were (and still are) a total arsehole.

TL:DR If I have learned my user title history correctly, I think I can safely assert that you, John Robert Moore, win the prize for being the ultimate patriarchal dick in the hive vagina.

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Except, I didn't. I had no income until I moved out. I had some small savings I had accrued over years. Many women in many homes had far more income and savings than I had at the time I had to move out. I have gone hungry many times. I worked very very hard and made things work but it was very scary, and as I said, women in my field have also had incomes from their filmmaking endevours and some have hired me. I guess I'm missing your point but in terms of enforcing patriarchy, I didn't do it. Am I better off than some women? I would say I'm better off than most of the men and women in patriarchy, because I left it three years ago. Was I better off while I was trapped in it? Yeah, there are privileges of being a man. I pretty much agreed with all those points.

My Mom has a substantially better life than I do, for instance, in patriarchy, because she's married to my Dad. Her life has not always been awesome, but her life and my life were always pretty similar. In some circles, the sons are worth far more than the mothers. I was not in one of those circles. So the point is moot.

And yeah, I'm gonna explain my community because every one is radically different and there's no way to know how 'supporting patriarchy' might have affected a given community.

I didn't come from a point of neutrality and start supporting patriarchy. Since I was 14 I've been progressing out of it. But it was all I knew, my entire world, the air I breathed. I didn't invent it, and I'm responsible for shattering a lot of patriarchal worldview for a large number of people. So my active voice did more to damage it than support it in my circles. I feel pride in that. I don't feel pride for the years that I bought into it. But again, If you were taught the earth was flat for 20 years, you wouldn't feel like you were an 'active voice' in supporting the myth. I never punished people who weren't patriarchal, often broke norms where I could, supported women who were 'outside their role' and overall called douchenozzles douchenozzles when I knew it.

EDIT: Also, you say I didn't seem moved to act until my peers screwed with my head; I was long out of that world in my head before that, but legitimately had no income with which to leave. My bank accounts were all controlled by other people and I had to layer my way out gracefully or face starvation. The very act of creating that thread was in a way armed rebellion against the throne; it was an act totally against the wishes of the leadership, created a buzz in the community, caused more traffic and discussion in private amongst young people about the criticisms of the organizations, and I'm proud of it, even if I disagree with a lot of my discourse in it. Also, not all of the opinions are mine so I don't take 100 percent responsibility for the things written in that thread.

But decades of indoctrination will take decades of decompression. It is what it is, I'm still on a journey. But as early as 2010 I was being rejected by families in my circles for my 'anti-patriarchal' views. Granted, to anybody on the outside, they still were pretty damn patriarchal.

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