Super Bowl Sunday 1999
Seven years ago today, I found myself sitting at a liquor-free Christian Cult Super Bowl Party where I was quizzed, not on super trivia, but the people at the party’s names. I bet you are wondering how a nice Jewish girl like myself, ended up at a Christian Cult party. Well, the story goes like this-I studied abroad in 1998 and came back to Purchase College in January 1999. Being a Women’s Studies major and late for registering, I had been camping out in the Social Science office trying to get into already filled classes. There was this super nice girl working in the office for the Dean of Social Sciences. Since I was there so much, we naturally just started chatting. She asked if I wanted to meet up for lunch and I had no reason not too. For a few weeks of the semester we chatted and had lunch together. I would like to add that never did we talk about religion and never did she seem weird in any way. The most I can say was that she was a bit of a goodie goodie. Nothing to clue me in that she might belong to a bizarre Christian Cult ruled by the controversial New York City Church of Christ that started taking over the rather liberal campus of Purchase College and not letting the kids involved call or talk to their parents.
So fast forward to Super Bowl Sunday, she invited me to a party off-campus in Rye. I didn’t have a car that semester, so the opportunity to get off campus sounded great to me. She said she would drive and I said yes. We picked up a friend of hers from Manhattanville and where on our way. The girl from Manhattanville asked me about the classes I was taking and I told her one of my classes was Hebrew. Her response was, “Wow! I have always wanted to read the Bible in Hebrew!” yeah, this is where things started to get weird. The rest of the car ride consisted of a conversation about different translations of the Bible.
When we got there, there were 2 boys wrestling on the rug. They didn’t stop when we entered. Everyone went around in circling telling me his or her names with the promise of a quiz before I left. I had no need to share who I was because apparently the lot of these kids already knew my name and all sorts of little things about me like my major, what classes I was taking and where I lived on campus. They made sure to drop little tid bits about how much they knew in each conversation. At this point I needed a beer, and I needed a beer badly. Unfortunately for me, this was a dry party. No beer, no chips just cut veggies and OJ. Yikes.
Before the game started everyone got in a big circle and all held hands. They prayed before the game. Then they stood there and did the full star spangled banner with the crowd on the TV. Afterwards, more wrestling for the 2 boys and more quizzes for me about people’s names. This went on for quite some time. Luckily for me at Half Time I came down with a really bad stomachache. The really nice but now cultish and creepy girl drove me back to campus and offered to walk me to my dorm room. No thanks.
I got back to campus, walked to the apartments and drank lots of Bud for the rest of the evening always and forever more avoided the super nice girl in the Social Science office.
Read the article about the drama and the Church of Christ here.