Gethsemane Academy

Faith is belief without evidence or reason. So too, is delusion.

Faith led many to believe Gethsemane Academy miraculously came into the world fully formed as the highly esteemed community outreach arm of a strict evangelical Christian sect. A non-denominational religious academy catering to elite, ultra-high net worth, fundamentalist Christian families. A therapeutic boarding school with a rigorous selection process and an insanely expensive tuition.

Despite the Academy’s immaculate conception, it managed to garner endorsements from the likes of the Baptist Congress of Christian Education and the National Association of Christian Therapeutic Schools, among other high-ranking ecclesiastical organizations and church officials across the nation.

Those early endorsements begat others. Soon, every reputable Christian organization clambered to be affiliated with such an august and pious institution, even though no one could remember having met any of its administrators in person, nor anyone else who’d ever participated in one of its programs.

They’d all taken it on faith.

But truth never paid heed to faith. The fact that Gethsemane Academy was a fiction, spun entirely from whole cloth, was a truth known only to me.

Forming and registering the academy’s byzantine non-profit structure required a convolution of tax loopholes and legal chicanery. Ostensibly a religious educational institution, Gethsemane Academy operated via a charitable trust, administered by a donor-advised fund, which itself received financing from a series of shell corporations and religious non-profit institutions, all of which led back to a single individual. A fictional person who did not exist.

Creating the Academy’s eighty-year backstory had been more straightforward, assisted by copious amounts of plagiarism from a variety of now-defunct and obscure religious organizations and institutions.

With the academy’s pedigree and credentials established within the Christian educational community, marketing could begin. Cross-referencing church membership rosters with IRS tax filings resulted in a list of annual tithings for just over thirty-five million congregants. The list narrowed to forty thousand prospects by filtering for tithings in excess of one million dollars. A website was built, whitepapers written, online channels identified, ad slots purchased, and market segments micro-targeted in a social media marketing blitz.

On the surface, Gethsemane Academy billed itself as a religious boarding school, preparing young women for marriage. Between the lines, however, lurked its real value proposition. A super-strict, fundamentalist Christian indoctrination program named Forbidden Fruit. Its target: the unrepentantly wicked. A re-education camp for promiscuous, high libido, hypersexual girls.

Forbidden Fruit promised to bend even the most degenerate, ungodly girls to the Divine Will of the Lord.

With verbiage lifted directly from gay conversion therapy, the program promised to use any and all means necessary – a firm but loving hand – to bring these lost lambs back to God. To restore her faith and virginity, and deliver her pure and clean. She would be returned obedient, godly, demure, and eager to assume a subservient place at the feet of her future husband.

Applications for Forbidden Fruit poured in immediately.

Nearly five thousand requests for information arrived in the first week alone. Each family received full-gloss, printed binders, stuffed to bursting with collateral materials plastered with carefully chosen stock imagery depicting smiling, happy nuclear families and resplendent campuses exuding sufficient elitism, tradition, and magisterial authority to make even the ivy-est of leagues appear shabby by comparison. No detail had been overlooked, no expense spared. Even the academy’s official seal and motto had been embossed and tastefully gilded.

The academy’s eye-watering, two-hundred-thousand-dollar per semester tuition fee covered room and board, uniforms, transportation, and therapeutic instruction at a secluded, undisclosed facility. The program semester ran for four months, during which time the girls would be shielded from the relentless temptations of an ungodly world. That meant no access to phones. No internet. No friends or family. Like the time Jesus spent alone in the wilderness, isolation would be an integral and necessary part of the spiritual purification process.

Age restrictions limited the applicant pool to girls between sixteen and eighteen years old, to keep them within a compatible social peer group, and allow them to bond more easily with one another. Of the original five thousand applicants, rejection letters were sent to ninety-five percent, whittling down the applicant pool to just two hundred fifty top prospects.

Each candidate was subjected to a battery of psychological and behavioral evaluations that pried deeply into her personal life. A condition of acceptance into the program required parents to turn pertinent records over to the academy. Financial records, school records, medical and psychological records. Parents were provided software tools to hack their daughters’ phones and computers, turning full control over to the academy. This opened a backdoor to every connected device on the family’s home network. Keylogging software revealed passwords, which granted access to each girl’s social media accounts, and those data were scraped and mined for analysis.