Learning Day: A Life of Faith Dolls

Quality pitch. But the meta’s changed a bit since ‘05, so here’s an update.

Have kids? Hate them? Live near black people? Ibid? We’ve got you.

Skip the dictionary, it’s doll time. Christian doll time.

Specifically southern gospel madness, the largest staple in America’s brain. Adapted from a series of semi-readable kids books, A Life of Faith dolls were hot gifts in towns I don’t stay in overnight. Long after the author’s death, which must’ve made accountants ecstatic. Getting creative off the payroll lets franchises soar. No more mopey killjoys at launch parties, mumbling about royalties.

Life trains you quickly: blur out “faith,” “extraordinary faith” and that extra sad child to the right, and this still screams gospel madness. It’s a scent. Dogs can smell predators from a distance, and so can you.

Meet the A Life of Faith crew. From the Mission City Press homepage:

Hey, someone felt shame! That’s nice. We’re still digging past hell, but the process feels much more human. Shoutout to whoever at Mission City Press gave up. If there’s anything to Exodus, your coworkers will burn.

Now, here’s the gang.

Which skinwalker’s your favorite? Elsie’s the popular choice, but Millie has a joie de vivre about her. You can tell the last person she ate was delicious.

Base photo courtesy of Living a Doll’s Life, a witness to A Life of Faith’s sins. Thanks to Mission City’s wholly inept copywriting, their review’s also why I know the dolls’ tertiary gimmick: raising their hands in prayer. Think kung-fu grip for erasing the ego. Teaching your kids cosmic anxiety can be hard, and piety playsets keep them on track.

I could shit on them for ignoring some other quirks. But they also shared this photo of Doll Mass:

They might be your last sight before the collector catches you. But you’ll die laughing.

The trio have a nostalgic look, which I can’t really relate to. My topics may sound like a retro kink, but it’s really a Fallout kink. To me, love is a blue jumpsuit. No really, I need the jumpsuit. It makes me feel obsessively min-maxed. Reactions vary.

Anyway, that group shot’s missing someone. Not sure why, other than keeping dollhouse values up. Here’s our truant heroine, casing the 2005 catalog:

Mission City must be wokie/CRT/DEI/darkling lovers. Who else adds a diversity doll to an otherwise hireable line? Maybe they redeem themselves in the caption.

There. Plantation dwellers.

They wouldn’t. They couldn’t. Rickey Pittman himself wouldn’t have the balls. Well he would, if he could think of it. But no one’s dumb and smart enough to sell slave dolls.

Especially for thirty dollars, two bursts of inflation ago. There’s a word for that level of economic exploitation, and it’s not relevant here. Because these aren’t plantation dolls. Satan wouldn’t let that exist, and God fucked off halfway through the Crusades.

There are eighty versions of each doll, per Pokemon tradition. We’ll try a more office-friendly Laylie. One that’s traded her sugar sack for hustle.

Maybe dolls are the right medium for this. It’s one thing to read a dweller has an apron made from the effects of loved ones beaten to death in the eternal summer sun. And it’s another to see it on a doll. Or the fashion notes on a doll expansion pack. The latter’s insane enough to distract Musk Youth from their usual rejection of new data.

Along with sticker shock.

Or maybe it’s nothing. We’ve still only proved that Laylie’s an indigent plantation dweller. One surrounded by toil and death. She could just be a sharecropper, which wasn’t slavery for reasons. I’ll let the high-grade Laylie model with a posable beam cannon vindicate me. You can’t beat the original.

A dress! If Laylie was a slave, and her friends were chattel slavery nepo-belles, this would be the emptiest fucking gesture in the world. It’d be hot piss on a burning man’s foot. I’d be fucking furious in the library catacombs at 2 AM. I’d call the sect celebrating a break from its own cruelty a crack in America’s spine. But Laylie’s a dweller with a haunted apron. I’ve seen weirder battle manga gimmicks.

Admittedly, things look a little slave-y here. Some keywords play oddly together. Like South. Servant. Working. 1830’s. Together, they add up to a series of bible-flavored slave plantation dolls. But that’s nonsense. Humans wouldn’t sell those, or buy them en masse. At the very least, they wouldn’t be marketed as a cozy nostalgia romp. That’d mark a fragmented national psyche, doomed to madness. A place where MGK could cover “Aerials” without being executed.

We’re above that.

At the very least, we’d find cheaper ways to embarrass ourselves. I can imagine a child taking a bible doll over an N64, but only to avoid going back in the Sinner’s Cupboard. At that price point, you’d have to pass Laylie down to your equally traumatized kids.

And I’m wrong again! Laylie’s a slave, saved by God. Or God’s referral program. All those other converts just didn’t believe hard enough. Sucks to suck, I guess. Couldn’t be me. I wouldn’t even need a white savior to nail it. I’d be my own John Brown, without the last part. But at least a YA Harriet Tubman has good intent buried somewhere under six tons of missionary zeal. A toy of YA Tubman? A century of Uncle Tom’s Cabin reactions later? Less so.

But enough dress-leeching sidekicks. You need to meet our true heroine.

 e.

There’s confidence in the writing around Elsie. Note the raw gall of underlining the setting, instead of dancing around “dwellers.” It’s like Exxon’s CEO changing his name to Fireplanet Sealfucker. Or HealthFirst’s CEO going outside.

Elsie Dinsmore has a unique perspective. At first, it seems like she’s always right. Then, you learn that she’s rich and always right. But not rich yet, so you can feel her tears until the tobacco checks clear. What can I say, she just wants it more. You’d be like Elsie if you stopped whoring and dug into Bible footnotes. No really, Deuteronomy’s got all the expansion rules for Slave Manager 2k24.

Sorry, I forgot the important part.

Christ. I’d have to off my Dad to collect these. And that never goes well in the Old Testament.

That’s nice of her. Elsie’s always nice. It makes her books fucking unreadable. Now that we’re a thousand words into the article, let’s give them a minute.

Martha Finley published twenty-eight Elsie Dinsmore books before entering Sentimentalist Nirvana with Harriet Beecher Stowe. And they all suck. All of them. The main series sucks. The spinoff about her cousin–who’s the same fucking character–sucks. Layla’s cover of Uncle Tom’s Cabin sucks. Life’s real awkward in Sentimentalist Nirvana. And warm.

The series is one long, rambling, melodramatic love letter to publishing sloth, slave-powered vacations, and sometimes God. An achievement the toy industry topped in 1998 with these fun-sized corpses.

Lord, toy companies dig for every cent. Decades after convincing kids each Transformer needed a smaller, shittier Transformer to live, they sell enslavers and enslavees separately. And neither comes with a whip. That might not be the weirdest thing about this to you, but I am, by default, Earth’s leading Confederate children’s literature expert. I know Florida museums say everyone went on vacation in 1860, and 600,000 people liked it so much they stayed. Nickel-and-dime sales surprise me much more.

And shipping takes forever.

I’m new here, so I’ll be quick. Confederate dolls don’t play well anywhere, but especially Brooklyn daycare. This building feels like an NYU dorm. That’s the kind of first impression you explain to an officer.

I used to wonder if I was normal. Now that I know that’s out, life’s much easier.

Honestly? It looks nice from here. Maybe we can leave it like this. Sealed. Where it can’t reach the children.

Scratch that.

It lives! No really, it talks. It’s asking if Lee won the war, and if I’m allowed out this late by myself. Fair question, but for different reasons.

Ah, shit.

I guess I’ll try Queens next. I could walk to Ridgewood before the cops even get here.

My new friend’s gone, and the doll’s still here. I think she made me…nah, that’s dumb. We probably got drinks and hashed it out. I’m really good with people.

The eyes are extra lifeless in person. I think my roommates are building a bonfire.

Elsie’s got a dog tag! Less anachronistic than you’d think–soldiers messed with paper and metal tags, since cannonballs didn’t leave much to identify. Maybe I’ll write about the Civil War sometime. For now, Mission City Press takes Elsie pretty seriously.

Along with the worldview she embodies.

Me too.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Elizabeth Shope, a hallowed figure in the world of niche Christian doll enthusiasm.

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