Author: HA Editorial Team

Ken Ham’s Colossal Failure: Samantha Field’s Story

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CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

Samantha Field blogs at Defeating the Dragons.

Many of my high-school days were spent reading books like Darwin’s Black Box and The Case for a Creator. My church and family were six-day Young-Earth Creationists, and defending this interpretation of Genesis 1-2 from Neo-Darwinian or Gap theory was central to my faith system at the time.

Without a literal understanding of those chapters, I believed, the Gospel fell apart.

For many years I made it my mission to stay current with all the creationist arguments—I’m fairly certain I’ve read any layman-accessible book on the subject that was published before 2005, and I read the Answers in Genesis blog and Ex Nihilo (now called Journal of Creation) fairly consistently up until 2009. Creationism was important enough to me that I defended it even when I struggled with the rest of Christian theology and the concept of a loving God in particular.

In college, I decided that it was pointless for me to keep reading only books written by creation scientists, so I started picking up other works like The God Delusion and A Brief History of Time. Dawkins’ book rattled me because he agrees with fundamentalists about the nature of God but is far starker and blatant in his descriptions, but nothing any of these books said about creation really shook me. I already had arguments that “disproved” their position.

During this time, I got involved in a fairly heavy internet debate on creationism that went on for weeks. Interestingly enough, even though the debate started out extremely antagonistic, it grew milder and eventually I became friends with a few people from the “opposition.”

Toward the end of that conversation, one of my fellow debaters brought up a point I’d never encountered before: endogeneous retroviruses. He sent me a few journal articles about it, and after reading them I was deeply disturbed. ERV insertion points in human and chimp genomes matched too closely for comfort, and I was sick and tired of the “common creator” defense. A common creator could explain a lot of things from an early 20th century phylogeny perspective but not with modern understandings of genome mapping—and most especially not ERV insertion points.

So, I did what any good creationism-defender would do: I wrote a letter to Answers in Genesis. I outlined the debate I was in, included links to the journal articles, explained all the research I’d already done (which included everything AiG had on genetics at the time), and asked if there was a creation scientist who’d studied ERVs and had a compelling argument against them as evidence for common ancestry.

The letter I got back was … infuriating would be putting it mildly.

They sent me a link to an AiG article on genetics that didn’t even mention ERVs (they’ve since updated a page to include it after I called them on it last year, but they only fall back on their position regarding “junk DNA” and don’t engage with the evidence satisfactorily), and then they went on to call into question my salvation, my faith, my relationship with Jesus, my intelligence, and my dedication to creationism.

They didn’t even bother answering my question.

They sent back an irrelevant blog post and then told me that my actual problem was not having enough unflinching, blind, unquestioning faith in the creationism model.

If I really believed in creationism, then my confidence should be unassailable and no amount of evidence for common ancestry should bother me, they said.

That was when the house of cards come crashing down. I’d spent the last few years struggling with other aspects of my faith, struggling to believe in God, struggling to believe that Christianity was true. I’d clung to creationism like a lifeline because if I could prove creationism, then Christianity was a fact no matter my doubts about the matter, and I didn’t have to go through the excruciating process of asking questions I didn’t want to think about.

I’d turned to AiG in a literal moment of desperation because they were my intellectual stronghold. AiG supposedly encouraged learning, thinking, engaging, criticizing, evaluating. They represented the last reserve I had in keeping my fundamentalist faith intact, of believing in Christianity as a literal, falsifiable, provable fact.

What I received from them was the opposite of everything I’d trusted them to be. I thought my question would be received warmly, my willingness to engage with evolutionary arguments praised.

Instead they shamed me for daring to do what I’d always believed was a central part of creation science: asking questions.

At that moment, I could no longer in good conscience defend creationism or any other part of my fundamentalist faith—the only faith system I believed had an ounce of integrity or truthfulness on its side. I was rudderless.

It’s been five years since then and I’ve managed to reclaim my identity as a Christian, although Ken Ham would probably condemn me and my progressive beliefs in the harshest language possible. In a way, I should probably thank him. Without such a colossal failure on his part, I might never have had the opportunity to really start questioning everything I believed.

My Life as an Unmarried Woman Among Fundamentalists: Katia’s Story

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CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

Scripture talks about the great sower sowing the seed of the word of God.

When I look at my journey away from fundamentalism, I see that same sower preparing the soil of my heart in preparation for that “lightbulb” event that set me free from fundamentalism.

The great sower began preparing the soil of my heart before I was born.

On Mom’s side, I am descended from Anabaptists, Quakers, and other free thinkers. Mom grew up in a Grace Brethren church that encouraged its members to study the Bible, and when she became an adult, she did. The more she studied scripture, the less she wanted to go to church.

On Dad’s side, most of the fathers were either absent, sick, or died young. Both his maternal grandparents were illegitimate, a fact his mother concealed. Eight years after her death, I learned the truth, and it helped set me free from the purity culture.

How could I breathe fire on fornication when I would not have been born had it not been for fornication?

In addition, the story of how my paternal grandmother’s paternal grandmother basically died of a broken heart after the father of her baby paid a fine and fled seized my heart and has not let go.

Mom and Dad were engaged the day Jim Jones murdered* hundreds of his followers in Guyana. In processing the tragedy, Mom noticed how Jim Jones’ followers had blindly followed him and decided that it was dangerous to blindly follow religious authority. Partially as a result, I grew up knowing that it was okay to question religious authority.

As I grew up, I began dislike religious authority aside from the knowledge that it was okay to question them. The pastors I knew were heartless, arrogant, lazy, fake, and distant. They only seemed to care for us if they wanted something. Dad is a genius with his hands, and the only time any of the “men” in the churches he attended took any notice of him was to get him to do something.

Growing up, my family never fit in church and the homeschool community because Dad is not a leader and was not involved with my brothers and I spiritually or educationally. I desperately wanted to fit in, to belong. Besides, the outside world scared me.

According to everything I heard and saw from the religious community, the only way for a woman to do that was to be a wife and mother.

And being a wife and mother would protect me from that scary world.

The year I turned 18, my older brother left the GARBC Baptist church my family was part of, and I followed him to his new church. Then Mom left the GARBC Baptist church, and Dad refused to attend without her. Several weeks later, a series of circumstances forced older brother to work on Sundays. Without a driver’s license, I had no way to attend church.

Even when I did get my driver’s license nearly a year later, I refused to attend church because I did not think organized religion was Biblical and I was hurting from previous bad church experiences. For three years, I refused to attend church.

In those three years, without me realizing it, an amazing thing happened.

My walk with Christ became something I wanted to do, vs something I was expected to do. My faith grew far more in those three years than the 18 before them.

A desire to be part of a community drove me back to church.

In the years that followed, I had one bad church experience after another.

In addition, I was struggling to find a career and live the unexpected life of autism, singleness and childlessness. During that time, without me realizing it, God was releasing fundamentalism’s grip on me.

Finally, in 2010, I asked God in desperation to either give me a husband or make me content to be single.

God gave me contentment to be single and much more. Via J Lee Grady’s books 10 Lies the Church Tells Women and 25 Tough Questions About Women and the Church I was introduced to the egalitarian truth along with some blogs God put into my path. Because of God’s careful preparation of my heart, it was truth I joyfully received.

Yet I was not fully convinced.

Every year, I read through my one year Bible. At the beginning of 2011, I decided to write down every reference I could find regarding women to see what the Bible really said about women. On July 29, 2011, I read Rom 11:29: “For the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable”. The verse hit me like a rock between the eyes. I had seen how some women had the gifts of teaching and leadership while some men did not.

That verse showed me that God would never give a woman gifts and callings he did not expect her to use.

I felt like a bird set free.

I was every bit as valuable to God as a single, childless woman as a married with children woman!

I had a voice in the church and could be a church leader! It was okay to be assertive and independent!

Later in 2011 I said my final goodbye to organized religion. I could not find it in scripture and could not endure feeling like a freak and misfit in church because of being single, childless, and autistic.

Today Christ and women’s equality are my top passions in life. I still suffer from the scars of fundamentalism, but they are nothing compared to what family members and others are suffering from it.

Despite the struggles, I have much to be grateful for.

One of those blessings is being set free from fundamentalism.

*Contrary to popular belief, most of those who died at Jonestown were murdered and did not deliberately commit suicide.

But For One Mistake: Samael’s Story

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CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Samael” is a pseudonym.

My homeschooling experience was fairly positive, almost in spite of itself. My sister, who had long since moved out and was working on her doctorate by the time we started homeschooling, voiced concerns at the time, and when I look back, I too can hardly believe that it all turned out reasonably well. One of my parents was abusive, and the other either didn’t understand what was happening or else was simply too apathetic to do anything. I was socially awkward before we started homeschooling, and the isolation resulting from the switch only exacerbated the problem. And yet, I came out the other end with some of the best friends for whom I could ever ask and a truly world-class education (along with a host of personality and mood disorders, but that’s another matter). This submission is not about any of that. Instead, I should like to examine for a moment what I would call simultaneously the best and worst thing about my homeschooling experience: a truly unfortunate curriculum choice on the part of my mother.

I’m sure that many of you are familiar with David Quine’s Worldviews of the Western World curriculum, but I shall try to summarize briefly for those who are not. At its core, WotWW is a three-year course (four years if, like me, you also take Starting Points, which inculcates you with what Quine insistently calls the “Biblical Worldview,” though to my mind it is more akin to “Biblical Idolatry” and lacks any real support in the Christian Scripture) in intellectual history, beginning in pre-Classical Greece and ending in Postmodernity. It chews through a prodigious amount of Western literature, philosophy, and history, pointing out what is wrong with each work and why it is wrong.

There are a whole host of criticisms I could make about this curriculum—not least of which is its airy dismissal of anything not European in origin as not even worth mention, let alone study—but I should like to focus particularly on the concerted effort it makes to close the minds of pupils to anything outside the (militantly Calvinist) form of conservative, Evangelical Christianity that it espouses.

It must be said for this curriculum that it does involve the pupil reading books with which he or she disagrees—indeed, books with which the author of the curriculum disagrees—which makes the use of this curriculum marginally better than outright book-burning, but the way in which it guides the pupil to read them is highly problematic, and, what is worse, it creates a habit in the pupil of continuing to read everything that he or she ever reads in the same way (I still catch myself doing it now and again). Quine’s curriculum tells the pupil that he or she already possesses all the Answers to the great questions of life (prime reality, human nature, ethics & evil, etc.) and then instructs him or her to read these works to figure out why the Answers that the works provide are Wrong.

To put it in simple terms, Quine teaches pupils to see the devil in every human thought or word (excepting, of course, Quine’s own interpretation of the Holy Writ).

But this does not only color the pupil’s interactions with new media; it affects how he or she relates to fellow students and even professors when he or she attends university. He or she seeks to proselytize the other person, to convince the other person that his or her Answers are absolutely and totally correct and that the other person’s pre-existing Answers are absolutely and totally incorrect—except insofar as they coincide with his or her own Answers.

He or she does not wish to exchange with other people, to swap information and refine his or her own Answers in light of new data (and hopefully help the other person refine his or her Answers as well).

In essence, such a person becomes impossible to teach or reason with. Unless. Unless something intervenes somewhere along the way and causes the pupil to suspect that they may only be getting part of the story, that the facts touted to them by the curriculum may not be entirely accurate or the interpretations thereof may reflect no more than a surface understanding.

Looking back, it’s really quite a minor thing. The curriculum got a date wrong. A date I had known from previous study. It told me that the Filioque clause was officially added to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed in the See of Rome in 1054, but in fact, that had already been done in 1014 (1054 is the year that the Pope and Patriarch excommunicated one another over, among other things, the Filioque, so the mistake is at least somewhat understandable).

But all of a sudden, I was forced to admit the possibility of an error in what I had been taught: either my prior knowledge was incorrect or Quine was incorrect.

As it turned out, I was correct. And I wondered: “What other errors have I been led to believe?” Possessed of a, frankly, prodigious intellect and a powerful thirst to know, I almost immediately set about a lengthy program of doing my own research into all the historical details and making sure to read everything that the Quine curriculum “helpfully” summarized in their syllabus, rather than asking that I read (not to mention quite a few works not even mentioned in the curriculum). More importantly, though, I read them with an eye to find the truth, not with an eye to find lies.

A year later, the curriculum had me reading Camus’ The Plague, a work which the curriculum claimed to center around the question, “How ought one live in a world without God?” (While this question is certainly found in the book, to say that it is the sole focus of The Plague is a grave insult to the book itself and to the author). The curriculum also tried to tell me the answer to this question, namely, “This question is stupid, because God does exist.” But that is to entirely miss the point. Even if God were to exist, that wouldn’t invalidate the question. I myself believe that God exists—and that Jesus of Nazareth was and is the Incarnation thereof—but I learned a great deal about ethics and human nature from Camus, lessons I do not believe I could have learned without considering the hypothetical and (in my belief, anyway) counterfactual question, “How ought one live in a world without God?”

In the end, this curriculum is responsible for giving me a better education than I expect I could have gotten at any “regular” institution anywhere (and I lived in one of the best school districts in the country); my father (who was never quite on board with the use of the Quine curriculum anyway) saw my frenzied attempt to supplement the Quine curriculum and decided henceforth to buy me as many textbooks or other books as I desired and leave me to my own devices to read and learn from them (being available to help, of course, if I ever got stuck, which did happen at times). But sometimes I consider how close I came, and it frightens me terribly.

But for one error—indeed, an error which could plausibly have been no more than a misprint—I could have had my mind completely closed by that curriculum.

Indeed, it remains an arduous task, trying to keep my mind from ossifying, and the balance between holding true to one’s convictions and bearing in mind that one might be wrong is a very difficult one to strike (but absolutely essential if one wants, as I do, to engage in an exchange of ideas rather than a war). It took me an embarrassingly long time to get my head screwed on straight about some things. But though I remain Christian, it is a very different sort of Christianity than the one my parents and their peers tried to force on me, and many of them have levelled accusations of heresy or apostasy, but I’m no longer afraid of that. I’m learning, and I’m going to keep learning, as much as I can, whether they like it or not.

The Warrior: Drew’s Story

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CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Drew” is a pseudonym.

My lightbulb moment was more of a straw moment. The straw that broke this camel’s back. As a part of a homeschooling/fundamentalist group for my entire life, I had already gone through a lot of things that shook up my worldview: church-splits, friends who had been abused, bitterness and judgement from people I felt I should trust, and crumbling fundamentalism in the face of good questions from non-fundamentalist friends. Many of these things have been talked about at length elsewhere. So I just want to cover one thing: the moment where it all sort of snapped into place for me.

I was in church one day and the band played a new-ish song. I had been in services when they played it before, but hadn’t paid attention. Suddenly though, everything seemed to slow down as I took in the lyrics.

“Your hand shall find out every foe
And as a fiery furnace glows
With raging heat and living coals
They will feel your wrath upon their souls

Oh the warrior will conquer all
The world will fall before His feet.”

I looked around the room. I saw my fellow church-goers raising their hands, closing their eyes, swaying to the music, looks of joy on their faces.

And I just didn’t get it.

Why would we celebrate this? Why would we celebrate the fact that God is going to totally obliterate people who don’t believe in the same stuff we do?

The congregation’s celebratory response to this vengeful, violent message nauseated me.

I realized that this song represented two beliefs that had been major players in the community where I had spent my life.

  1. You should fear and/or despise people who disagree with you. In fact, you should do your best to stay away from places where you could encounter them (avoid public school, secular art, or making friends with non-Christians).
  2. You can rest assured that the lost will meet the horrible fate they deserve. In fact, you are even allowed to be a little smug about it sometimes (as long as you are usually sad about it).

I almost instantly realized I didn’t buy into that fearful and bitter worldview anymore.

In college, I had started to meet people and make friends who were not fundamentalist Christians (or even Christians at all). They were wonderful people, and I didn’t want to be part of a culture that pushed them away or just tried to shove a belief-system down their throats.

In that moment, I knew I needed to step back from the fundamentalist Christian homeschooling circles I had run in for so long and start looking for a worldview that made room for nuance, open-mindedness, and graciousness.

I consider the search for this new worldview to be ongoing- an awesome journey that takes me further and further away from that room where people are celebrating The Warrior.

What Fundamentalism Taught Me About Being a Good Mom: Evie’s Story

HA Editorial Team9 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Evie” is a pseudonym.

After becoming a new mom, I have been realizing how many bad mom- good mom rules have been thoroughly ingrained into my being because of my fundamentalist upbringing – whether intentionally or unintentionally. While some of these are complete foolishness, I can see the love but misunderstanding that many of these started with.

Yes, I have taken many of them to the extreme to emphasize my point- but I feel like many of the beliefs were extreme, and although very few people actually stated them verbatim the undercurrent of the messages was definitely present. This realization led me to compile the list below.

I’d love to hear what others remember and realized.

GOOD MOM

• Looked good/attractive – did not cause her husband to have an affair/use porn
• Always responsive and available for her husband
• Soft, submissive, gentle
• Cooked from scratch as close to nature as possible (i.e. garden, grind wheat for bread)
• Kept house clean
• Dutifully taught kids’ school. If she didn’t know the subject she was teaching, spent her time reading ahead to learn it.
• Only needed college education so that she could teach her children better – [and, really, is that a good investment of money?]
• Didn’t spend money on herself or her family [all the way down to groceries] so that she didn’t stress her husband – the sole breadwinner.
• Didn’t cost anything and, instead, found a way to make money while staying at home.
• Got up early and went to bed late to take care of her family.
• Quietly agreed with everything
• Never missed church
• Only had one emotion – joy
• Just a tiny bit less intelligent than her husband and never “rubbed it in” [accidentally let it slip that she might know something]
• Did not run for any leadership position – unless it was only females
• Was careful to phrase everything she said so that she didn’t accidentally teach a man anything

BAD MOM

• Made her children eat “unhealthy” [not home cooked] because she was lazy.
• Let her body go
• Looked overly feminine
• Sent her children to organizations where they would be abused or indoctrinated (i.e. daycare, regular church)
• Did not properly protect her children and let them get abused
• Allowed their daughters to get raped
• Spent money on “expensive” [new/ good quality] clothes.
• Was too busy to take “care” [always be in the physical presence] of her children
• Had a dirty house
• Was confident and competent in the workplace
• Worked for any other reason other than her husband left her or died [in which case she would be pitied]
• Had an opinion on anything other than the appropriate church doctrine
• Disagreed
• Had personal boundaries
• Became exhausted (because she wasn’t trusting God” – who will give you the strength you need to do what He [aka the men and/or church] needed you to do)
• Struggled with depression or mental illness
• Was smarter in anything than her husband
• Sought intelligence (although this was ok as long as she didn’t learn more about anything than husband because this would be prideful)

The Dawning of Day: Gary’s Story

HA Editorial Team4 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Gary” is a pseudonym.

I like to think of my awakening as the sun rising rather than a light bulb being turned on.
I think of my awakening in this way for several reasons.

First, because it wasn’t one moment in time I can pick out that changed it all, no one event or interaction. It was instead a dawning, a slow realization spread out over the space of about 14 years.

Second, because it is not some small illumination that can be broken or switched off again, but rather an all-encompassing, earth warming, life giving blast furnace of truth that rises into the sky.

Third, because it starts small, from total darkness. I was stumbling, groping in the dark, blind, being tripped up by things I could not see.

Then comes the faintest of glows, far off, or, if you face away from the sunrise, you see first faint outlines of objects, the slightest differentiation of light from dark, form as different than the formless, the earth from the sky.

Little by little the light grows; the things I stumbled on in the darkness are shown to be small stones easily avoided…..now that I can see them for what they really are.

Did it start the day I realized, while reading my father’s old psychology textbook, that my father had been intentionally manipulating us children with Pavlov and Freud based tricks? That he KNEW what he was doing? That his bizarre behavior was not just him “being crazy” but was based off actual theories and practices he had studied in University?

That he was intentionally and with malice trying to make us children afraid of the outside world using psychological manipulation?

That when he spoke of how everyone but himself were “sheep” that could be so easily manipulated he was including myself and my siblings in that number?

Did it start when I realized at age 15 that I was the intellectual equal to my father? That I wasn’t an “idiot” or a “simpleton” as he so frequently told me but rather on par with him in every way? That he could not come up with a single form of manipulation, a single trick, that I did not see through like a pain of glass?

Was it at the age of 20, sitting in the seats of a prominent fundamentalist College and hearing raw hatred spewed from the pulpit day after day after day?

Hatred for Catholics, hatred for LGBTQ people, (thinly veiled) hatred for other races, and thinking…..”these people are crazy”….not just average crazy, but completely, 100%, to the very core, crazy. Dangerous crazy. Wild eyed, clenched teeth, foaming at the mouth NUTS, that they WANT the apocalypse to happen, desire it with a rabid hunger and dream about the end of the world like a little kid dreaming about going to Disney World.

Was it at the age of 21-22 when I started reading actual science textbooks and articles for the very first time and realized that there was no global conspiracy of scientists working to cover up the modern day existence of living dinosaurs left over from the flood?

That the Loch Ness monster wasn’t real? That even other Christians believed in evolution? That the “scientific truth” I had been taught was the collective fantasies of just a handful of complete crackpots who had absolutely zero credibility?

Was it at the age of 23, hearing Neil Young’s “Keep on Rocking In the Free World” on the radio, and hearing for the first time the lines: “…so she puts the kid away and she’s gone to get a hit, she hates her life and what she’s done to it, that’s one more kid who’ll never get to go to school, never get to fall in love, never get to be cool…” and realizing so very clearly that I was essentially that child?

That my parents’ addiction to the sense of superiority they got from radical fundamentalism was more important to them than my chance to have any semblance of a normal or happy childhood?

That they were juicing up with “hits” of radical ideology and paranoia as fervently and regularly as any addict? That all else, every other thing in the world, including the health and mental well-being of their children, would always come second to their need to feel superior?

I can’t pick a single instance when I woke up completely, but I can clearly see the end result.

A stronger, more educated, clear headed, less fearful human being.
A person no longer groping in the darkness.
A person striding ahead into future, the path ahead finally illuminated, not by light bulbs, not by candles, but by the all-encompassing light of day.

Lightbulb Moments: Small Glimpses, Part 2

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Some of us, when thinking about our “lightbulb moments”, didn’t have long stories to tell. Maybe there wasn’t an exact moment we could pin-point. Maybe it was one, very simple event. Maybe it was a decade of dominoes, falling one by one, each knocking over another piece of our former belief systems. We compiled some of these comments here, no less important stories merely due to brevity. Small glimpses into the journeys of the people who told them.

Continued from Part 1

 

Levi: 

I was struggling with depression and looking for answers, so [a friend] took me out to lunch. He was the first person who understood when I told him my background. He was able, in a very gentle, kind-hearted way, to cut right to what my doubts were. “The problem with ATI and the Basic Seminar, Levi, is that in that system you would never have to have an intelligent thought for yourself. You just ask the next authority what to do and never do any thinking for yourself.” That statement was the beginning of the end for me.

 

Katrina:

I asked one PCA pastor some questions about communion and Sunday services not being in the Bible. He said, “Oh, we made it up.” And I could accept that because there is something calming and safe about an organized time to grieve, which is what services were for me. Then I asked other pastors later and they bullshitted about how I just didn’t understand and their way was in the bible.

If it’s honest, self-awareness that church is made up of, then I can participate and get something out of it. If the leaders are bullshitting themselves that their way is prescribed in an ancient, divine book, then I can’t participate.

 

Mary:

When Debi Pearl spoke of their daughter, Rebekah, it was with much adoration — she is a musician, composer, author, missionary, etc. Debi attributed Rebekah’s passion and drive to the fact that R. had never been sexually molested. She then followed up by stating that no one who has been sexually molested can live up to their spiritual potential.

After I was raped, I realized with great clarity that this was an enormous lie. A lie so large I couldn’t even see the end of it. Then I realized that the entire premise of their teachings was a lie. Finally, I came to the conclusion that my entire belief system was based on lie after misconception after hypocrisy after more lies… and I needed to throw it all away.

 

Warbler:

But in many ways it was my bully father himself that made me question things. There were certain people I either liked, thought were nice or intelligent, or at the very least good people, and then I would hear him tear them apart, either behind their backs to whatever family member or audience he was addressing, or to their face in quite a few instances.
His unchecked rage and hatred of seemingly paltry details and character traits or actions made me double-check my unquestioning obedience.

Didi:

I am writing this from the mind/viewpoint of who I was then, not necessarily who I am now.

I was a senior in high school sitting in my first “Worldview Academy” with Bill Jack. He was doing one of his infamous “Q&A with a Non-Christian” sessions, and this one was him pretending to be a “gay guy”. As soon as he started talking the entire front row of teenage boys jumped back and moved their chairs, to get away from him. Everyone was laughing at Mr. Jack’s over the top interpretation and “effeminate” behavior. When he finished I expected him to scold the boys for reacting that way, but instead he applauded them and told them that was the right response. I felt sick to my stomach. Sure, it was a “sin” to be gay, but that didn’t mean we had to treat gay people as gross or vile or make fun of them. Did we?

I remember this was one of the first times I started to think that maybe we had it wrong. Maybe Jesus didn’t act like a conservative Christian.

There were definitely many moments over the next 13 years of my life up until now, but that was one of the first times I looked at an adult who I was supposed to respect and take his word as “truth”, and I just knew in my gut he was WRONG.

 

Eden:

It was my parents. They were hypocritical and abusive. They had impossible standards for me to meet and didn’t even meet the lowest of bars for themselves. My dad sexually molested me as a pre-teen and into my teen years, but that was no big deal according to my Mom, because “God Forgives!”. Yet I held hands with the man I was in love with as a 20 year old, “Shock and horror!!”

My dad would watch porn, and he would make lewd comments about actresses bodies while we were watching movies, but I wasn’t allowed to “give my heart away” because that was emotional impurity!

As a teen I jumped through all their hoops and followed all their rules, and they still didn’t trust me, didn’t respect me, didn’t believe me. My word was mud and yet I had never given them a reason not to trust me. I was living under a microscope. My father told me he could see my Heart (funny, I remember reading in the Bible that only God sees the heart?)

When I met my husband and fell in love with him, they were so angry because I didn’t submit to their will to marry the son of their long-time friend. They tried to control everything, including my heart. They thought they could tell me when to give my heart away, and to whom.

I remember watching The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship of the Ring and Arwen says (about her necklace) “It is mine to give to whom I will. Like my heart” and I suddenly woke up from the courtship crap I had been fed for years. A movie taught me that my own heart belonged to me!

While I was growing up, each of my older siblings in turn would have strained relationships with our parents because of “rebellion”. My parents would badmouth the “rebellious” sibling and I resolved to never be like that, never be rebellious. Then I grew up and it was my turn to be the Black Sheep and I realized “rebellion” was code for “Becoming their own person”.

I was in my 20’s when my mother turned my entire family against me, because I was in love with a man my parents didn’t approve of. I wanted to make my own decisions in life and I was an outcast for it.

After my wedding, I got pregnant and my child was born, and I fell in love. How much I loved my child made me realize how little my parents cared about me. They didn’t ever care about me, not really. They liked me when they could parade me in front of their friends at church, how respectful and useful I was, how devoted I was to my faith. I was their trophy daughter, the one that followed all the rules. They liked me when they could control me. But once I found my mind, and my spine, I was less than nothing. So if Christians, who are supposed to be the Salt & Light, can’t even treat their own children with any respect and anything resembling real love, why should I look to them as being morally superior? Everything I experienced in my childhood and teen years has shown me that they are not. I would be willing to believe that my parents were an isolated case, if I didn’t know for a fact that they told many others in our churches about my father’s abuse, and nobody lifted a finger to help. They had lots of grace for the molester but not so much as a second glance for the victim. And Jesus wept.

Living with Cognitive Dissonance: Sonia’s Story

HA Editorial Team2 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Sonia” is a pseudonym.

My mom told me a while ago, “It seems impossible to live it [the Gothard/fundie lifestyle] in moderation, although that’s exactly what I was trying to do. I didn’t buy the whole program. Instead, I took from it that which I thought was useful and healthy. I rejected a lot, but maybe you don’t have any way of knowing that. There were many women who perceived me to be a great ‘compromiser’, and I mean that word in a very negative sense.” She was right. I didn’t have any way of knowing that. (This reminded me of other posts I’ve read such as “PICKING THINGS UP FROM THE CULTURE, HOMESCHOOL EDITION” and Libby Anne’s “THEN WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL US THAT, MOM?” from a couple of years back.) What I did know intellectually and intuitively ended up producing a considerable amount of cognitive dissonance,
fear, and anguish that has plagued me for years.

My parents didn’t understand that even if THEY didn’t wholeheartedly buy into the entire program, the fact that for the most part they would only let us spend our time around other families who DID buy into the entire program gave tacit approval to the entire program.

Oddly enough, my mom was the one to teach me to think critically, though I don’t think she really expected me to use that skill to the extent I did to think outside my little box. She told me two things when I was young that eventually led to my most significant “lightbulb moments.” First, she told me very clearly that she was educating me as well as my brother because I was smart and it wasn’t responsible to do otherwise on the off chance I had to support myself. (Incidentally, she also said she got a lot of flak for doing this.) Second, when I asked why I was allowed to wear jeans/pants when the other girls weren’t, all I can remember is getting a response to the effect of, “Well we aren’t THAT strict.”

So, after a few years when I started noticing things weren’t adding up, I asked more questions and assumed, logically, that if my parents could bend the rules and pick and choose where they saw fit, I could too as long as I had a logical, reasonable explanation for wanting to do so.

Lightbulb. Obviously, we all know this wasn’t true, but I didn’t know that at the time, so I was very confused. This is where I ran into trouble. Whenever I had ideas that ran contrary to “popular” belief and I brought up those issues, I always came armed with a list of very respectful but coherent reasons as to why there were major holes in what we heard at church. I simply could not understand how my parents, who made the logical decision to ignore two VERY big parts of the dogma, i.e. female education and modesty, did not see the other gaping holes. Most of the time, I felt like my concerns and opinions were brushed off and treated as a nuisance. My speaking out was attributed to youthful rebellion and I was not taken seriously.

One of the issues I kept bringing up because it made no sense was courtship (or arranged marriage as I like to refer to it). For years, I had closely watched all the happy smiles, wedding day first kisses, and subsequent babies that magically appeared nine months after the wedding. I followed the ins and outs of The Courtship Files at my church with rapt attention. I was curious to see what my future looked like. Something in my gut told me that there was something amiss, and I was quite vocal about it to my parents. These marriages seemed to materialize with next to no input from the XX-chromosomed party and after the wedding, all the new brides had this glassy-eyed, “totally blessed” look. Oh, and they would quote Proverbs 31 and Titus 2 and Ephesians 5 ad nauseam and have their members-only Bible studies for newly married couples.

Nonetheless, I really tried hard to buy into it despite the cognitive dissonance because I didn’t have a choice.

I really did try until I encountered a classic, “let’s abuse Hester Prynne” incident during church that resulted in lightbulbs going off all over the place.

This girl from our church had gone away to a conservative Christian college and ended up coming back pregnant. They made her stand up in church on a Sunday morning and apologize for her “sin” when she was probably five or six months pregnant. Even as young as I was (probably 8 or 9), I was acutely aware there was something very wrong about the whole thing. I do have to admit, much to my chagrin, that my first response was to hop on the stone-throwing train everyone around me was gleefully riding because that was the “right” response to “sin.” However, two lightbulbs blinked over my head as I sat there. First, a little voice in the back of my head gave me some advice regarding my own future self-preservation. It said, “You better never do anything this bad because you know that if you did, they would turn on you too in a second. And if you do anything like this, you better damn well keep it hidden.” Lightbulb. Second, I wondered why the pastor and elders standing behind this woman on the podium didn’t also have to apologize in front of the church for their sins too. Lightbulb. I remember feeling much more guarded after that point.

Back to the subject of my own future, the last serious conversation I remember having with my parents regarding courtship happened at bedtime one night sometime during my preteen years. Inevitably, conversations about this courtship thing had begun to take place more frequently. My parents explained, yet again, what courtship meant and what its implications were for my future. I presented every logical objection I could think of as I had done many times before. What if I go to a college in another state? (Remember the educating me thing? Yeah…that.) What if I never move back home after college? What if I meet “the one” before you do? What if I don’t tell you about him? What if “him” is a…HER??? How do you plan to police me that carefully?

To my parents’ credit in this instance, my objections were handled calmly and without anger. However, the conversation concluded with, “We will deal with it when it happens and at that point, you’ll understand how important courtship and this transfer of authority over you are.” I remember very clearly telling them, “I’m not doing it.” They calmly responded that I would feel differently later, and it’s ok that I don’t feel like that now. I responded flatly with, “No you don’t understand. My feelings about this aren’t going to change. I am not doing this.” I was resolute. My parents said that that was ok for now and bid me sweet dreams. What they really didn’t factor in was how deadly serious I was. It is difficult to overstate the degree to which I meant what I said. If my parents had continued on the oppressive courtship track later in my life, I guarantee I would have staged some sort of massive, storm-the-Bastille style revolt. If I had had to choose between courtship and losing any relationship I had with my parents (or God for that matter), I would have chosen the latter in a heartbeat.

After all, I wasn’t just a walking uterus.

I had a brain too.

Fortunately, I was never pushed to make this choice because my parents ended up divorcing. This set off by far the biggest lightbulb. Over the years, I had “appealed” to my parents time and time again and presented coherent, logical objections to a wide range of topics as a result of the many little lightbulbs that were periodically going off in my head. I don’t even remember most of these encounters, but I do remember having the feeling consistently that my parents didn’t really hear me or take me seriously. 

And since I didn’t have the agency to make my own choices regarding my own beliefs, I had to live with what was there.

However, with the divorce came the freedom to start to carve my own path and with that freedom, I had to start reexamining everything I’d ever been told. There were some physical abuse issues involved preceding the divorce which I was witness to. The elder board and pastor of our church said that my dad should move out of our home temporarily, pending biblical “counseling.” Once the church said that both my parents had been sufficiently “counseled,” my parents were instructed to “reconcile.” My mom refused. Such began an extremely tumultuous few years for all of us and the unraveling of the proverbial carpet for me.

I knew instinctively that my parents needed to go their separate ways and that this was the best outcome for all of us.

I simply didn’t understand all the theological discourse that said that people couldn’t divorce for any reason whatsoever, even in cases of abuse.

On the heels of that came the next logical question: if divorce wasn’t unequivocally wrong in every circumstance, as I had been told, what else wasn’t unequivocally wrong? Lightbulb. My entire world was turned on its head and I felt like I couldn’t trust anything I had ever been taught or thought I had known. This was very traumatic, and I spent most of the decade following and more trying to sort out what exactly I believed. I have wondered in the years since why my parents didn’t listen to me or why I felt like they didn’t.

I have wondered why my concerns, opinions, and expressions of distress were not interpreted as red flags or catalysts for change.

For years I felt like I didn’t have a voice and even now, I have a pathological, anxiety-attack-inducing fear of not being heard.

I am, however, very grateful for the lightbulb moments and the conversations they inspired. I hope I remember more of those moments as I grow older and I am grateful for the moments of mental clarity along the way I do remember that allowed me to navigate the twilight zone of my growing up years. Those moments of clarity kept me sane and kept me from being fully brainwashed. They kept my spirit alive to fight, and when I think back on them now they give me a sense of peace that I can find my way in the world, and I can trust what I know is right.

Why I Am a Radical Activist for All Things Evil: R.L. Stollar’s Story

HA Editorial Team8 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from R.L. Stollar’s personal blog. It was originally published on January 12, 2014.

I’ve never thought of myself as a radical activist. I’ve never fought for something that I thought was “evil.” What I value most in life are compassion, love, and respect. Compassion for the abused, love for my neighbor, and respect for marginalized voices. I fight for these things, so I guess in that sense I am an activist.

But somehow, over the years, I have found myself maligned by old friends, distant acquaintances, and complete strangers. I am now anathema in many circles; I am one of the dreaded homeschool “apostates.”

Why?

Because my pursuit of compassion, love, and respect led me to cross the picket lines of the culture wars. 

I followed my conscience straight to enemy encampments — to individuals in poverty, women, LGBT* individuals, and abused homeschooled kids and alumni. For that, I am a radical activist.

The funny (and sad) thing is watching people explain why I became who I am today. It’s because my parents weren’t godly enough, because I didn’t read the right apologetics books, because I wasn’t spanked hard enough and often enough, because I went to college, because maybe I read too much Karl Marx or hung out with too many feminists or had premarital sex with one too many atheists while doing coke lines in a temple erected to Baphomet.

It’s funny and sad because, no, that’s not what happened. That’s not even close to the real story.

Let me explain.

*****

“Focus world attention on the plight of so many men and women who have been brutally silenced.”  

~ Gary Bauer

*****

I was 13 or 14 when I first realized how messed up the world was.

I blame Christian homeschool debate.

It was the first year I did debate. The topic was changing laws on U.S. businesses relocating overseas. I got swept away into a world of conservative Christian adoration for free trade and capitalism. Enamored with the Cato Institute, I earnestly sought out arguments in favor of granting China Most Favored Nation status.

In doing so, I discovered the Tiananmen Square massacre. I read about child labor. I heard testimonies of religious persecution. I began to doubt the goodness of humanity.

Then I came across Gary Bauer.

Observation one: I am a human rights activist today because of Gary Bauer.

I know, I know. 29-year-old me is also wondering how in the world I became interested in human rights on account of the former president of the Family Research Council, an organization now classified as a hate group by the Southern Law Poverty Center. But it’s the truth.

In a conservative Christian culture obsessed with capitalism, Bauer seemed like a lone voice in the wilderness.

I started questioning the universal goodness of capitalism because of Bauer. I learned about the horrors of the arms industry and weapons export trade because of Bauer. And I started looking more earnestly into human rights abuses because of him, too. Bauer seemed to be one of the only leaders in the Religious Right calling out his peers — and the Republican party — for not taking international human rights more seriously. As a kid, it seemed to me like the guy was a true maverick, knowing no loyalty to party lines to the point of picketing Chinese President Jiang Zemin alongside Richard Gere.

Reading Gary Bauer is what ultimately led me to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Which led me to realize the United States has played a role in a plethora of human rights abuses, imperialism, and genocide, too. Which made me doubt the “U.S. as God’s chosen nation” narrative. And so on and so forth.

Gary Bauer inspired that. Not a leftist, not a socialist, and not an atheist.

*****

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

*****

A few years later, I picked up a used copy of The Cost of Discipleship at the recommendation of a Christian friend. It was like my head had been underwater my whole life and suddenly I was breathing air for the first time. Here was a gospel that was not afraid to get its hands dirty. Here was a gospel willing to leave the white Republican suburbs of my youth and do more than summer Mexico mission trips.

I was raised thinking faith was the end all of religion, that “works” were what the oft-mocked Catholics were about whereas we noble Protestants, we had the Ultimate Truth. The Ultimate Truth was faith. Well, I lived my entire life in evangelical circles and I saw the emptiness of faith without works. Yet here was Bonhoeffer, boldly breaking down those inherited assumptions. Without discipleship, he said, grace was cheap.

In other words, Christians actually do need to care.

Observation two: I became a radical because of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

I say that, and even I don’t really know what that means. What does it mean to be a radical? Apparently today all you need to do to be considered a radical is call out people for racism and queerphobia. I personally consider that basic common courtesy. But no, calling people out for furthering oppression is the new radical. If so, then I guess I am a radical and no, I am not ashamed of that.

I prefer to think of radicals as people living extraordinary lives, risking body and mind to change the world. I don’t think of speaking out as extraordinary. But I also know that not speaking out is ordinary. And I learned from Bonhoeffer that to not speak is a form of speech. To not act is a form of action. 

So I refuse to be ordinary. I will speak out and I will act.

*****

“The denunciation of injustice implies the rejection of the use of Christianity to legitimize the established order.” 

~Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation

*****

During my junior year at college, I was trying to figure out the topic of my senior thesis the following year. I knew I wanted to write about sociopolitical activism and reconcile that activism with the idea of having a personal relationship with God. So, as I have written about previously, I took the patron saint of my alma mater, Soren Kierkegaard, and compared his ideas of inwardness with the ideas of outwardness I found in the patron saint of my Christian activist youth, Bonhoeffer.

But before I settled on Bonhoeffer to contrast with Kierkegaard, a friend of mine — one of the most brilliant people I know — suggested someone I had never heard of before: Gustavo Gutiérrez. A Dominican priest, Gustavo Gutiérrez was the father of something else I had never heard of before: “liberation theology.”

I was immediately intrigued.

I picked up a copy of Gutiérrez’s Theology of Liberation, and I found one of the clearest articulations of the ideas Bonhoeffer had so profoundly — yet so abstractly — articulated. Gutiérrez made me realize that to be in the world can and must mean something. It means not only must I live a life of discipleship, but that discipleship requires more than simply “feeding the poor.” It means moving beyond platitudes and soup kitchens and coming face to face with an entire system of injustice.

To be a Christian cannot mean neutrality towards injustice.

Observation three: I learned the importance of prophetic critique from Gustavo Gutiérrez.

Ironically, Gutiérrez changed my way of thinking on every matter other than economics. Which is ironic because he’s been panned for decades by the Catholic Church for being “too Marxist.”

But it wasn’t the Marxism that hooked me. (I already doubted capitalism because of Gary Bauer). Rather, I was hooked by the call to shake the foundations of power structures. To wrest my faith from ruling orders and principalities and reclaim its revolutionary tone. Faith means a revolution of the soul, yes. But that revolution happens in a radically contextual moment: here, now, in this body, in this place, with this action, with these neighbors. Which means revolution of the soul must manifest itself beyond the soul.

Gutiérrez taught me that this revolution begins on the margins. To love your neighbor means more than calling your T-Mobile Fave 5. To love your neighbor means seeking out the margins, standing in solidarity with the marginalized.

“Marginalization” isn’t newspeak. It is the language of loving your neighbor. When you find the margins, you find God asking you, “Do you love me? Then feed my sheep. This sheep. Right now. This person. Right here.”

*****

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

*****

So there you have it.

I care about the rights of women, poor people, people of color, LGBT* people, and abuse victims because of Christians. I believe in human rights because of Gary Bauer. I believe in the radical power of actually living what you believe because of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And I believe in reclaiming my faith from the hands of dehumanizing world power structures because of Gustavo Gutiérrez.

Sex, drugs, and Nietzsche — and all the other windmills at which American Christianity tilts —  don’t factor into my story.

Granted, I am not the same person I was when I was 13 or 14. Today, Gary Bauer makes me alternate between wanting to cry and wanting to rage. I have changed, I have left many foolish things behind; I am always becoming, evolving, changing. I believe life is process and I am learning to embrace process.

But one thing has not changed: my passion for human rights, fighting for justice, and seeking the shadows and the margins. That passion has only grown. But what once made me the “cool” Christian now makes me the cautionary tale, because I now refuse to draw lines in my advocacy. Because I see compassion, love, and respect extending to each and every human being.

So yes, I am a radical activist.

But I learned to be one from giants of the Christian faith.

Lies Purity Culture Taught Me: Sam’s Story

HA Editorial Team3 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

HA Note: All names have been changed to ensure anonymity.

My lightbulb moment occurred in my sophomore year of college. I was 19 years old when I woke up half naked in my debate partner’s twin-sized bed with an astounding lack of regret. Using the word whirlwind to describe a romance is probably clichéd, but it definitely captures those first few months of that spring semester. Despite telling him that I was a firm believer in “waiting until marriage” and that “I wasn’t one of those girls who found loopholes – no sex, of any variety,” and despite him saying he would respect that belief, within a few days we were cuddling on his couch, toeing the line to second base. A few weeks in, I had come to campus on a Saturday – in popular homeschool fashion, I lived at home for the first few years of college – to do some homework. I had begun texting back and forth with Mark*, and he told me to get home before snow hit. I blew it off and went back to finishing up my paper. When I got to the parking lot, it had iced so badly my car started skidding before it even made it to the road. I tried calling a few girlfriends, but they had all gone back home for the weekend. I anxiously texted Mark, and he politely offered his couch. We spent the weekend in his dorm, and I lied to my mother saying I was at one of the out-of-town-girlfriends’ apartments.

I did not sleep on the couch once that weekend.

We did not have sex that weekend. However, we came close enough that I should have been racked with guilt. I wasn’t though. I was only worried about what consequences would come from me sleeping with (literally) Mark.

In the following weeks, Mark treated me the same as he always had – with respect, kindness and that playful banter people get when they’ve hung out for a while. This is not to say that we pretended the previous weekend hadn’t happened; we continued to have impromptu sleepovers.

You see, when I say that my now-boyfriend treated me the same way that he always had, I mean that in that moment I realized that the purity teachings my mother had drilled into me were wrong.

Purity culture obsesses over keeping your virginity until marriage. I won’t delve into the religious aspects of it, because keeping yourself pure for God, if you so choose to, is not something I like to denounce. However, purity culture has a number of almost “secular” reasons to exist. One of these is that if you remain pure before marriage, you won’t experience pain and heartbreak. (Because apparently, you can only have your heart broken if you’ve had sex with a person.)

Another secular reason to stay pure is that men supposedly don’t respect women who put out. I remember reading countless comments from teenage boys on the Rebelution Modesty Survey that said something to the effect that they had more respect for the girls who were saving themselves, for the girls who were modest. That girls who dressed immodestly and behaved indecently disgusted them. This was even said to be true for boys who weren’t Christian. (Dannah Gresh’s Secret Keeper had a little anecdote in it about how these two guys had a goal to sleep with a different girl every night, and yet these two guys still wanted “a different kind of girl” to settle down with.) So in my head, this atheist man who I was sharing a bed with was supposed to see me as less. All he was doing though, was seeking more of my company, asking my opinion on things, and letting me decide whether or not to initiate physical contact between ourselves. In a few words – respecting me. I even tearfully asked him one afternoon if he thought I was damaged goods, for I’d read many articles that day condemning what I was doing. His response was somewhere along the lines of “what the hell are you talking about?”

It was then that I realized that perhaps the things that I had been taught were not all-encompassing truths that could explain the universe.

And true, while before I had gotten involved with Mark, I was slowly warming up to the idea that homeschool teachings weren’t entirely true. I still operated under the framework of conservative Christian homeschooling – when arguing with my parents about letting me do certain things, I still used Biblical evidence, I still used homeschool teachings to finagle what I wanted from them. I was reading articles online, trying to find someone saying that you could be Christian and engage in premarital sex without losing some part of yourself. Forcing myself to adhere to this framework made me intensely unhappy – which was ironic to me, because my parents told me that in the end, I’d be happier for following these beliefs. It was only when I had my lightbulb moment, half-naked in Mark’s bed that I let myself build a new worldview for myself that was not based on what my parents had drilled into my head. It was then that I was free, and able to think for myself and create a new framework in my head that led to true happiness.