Doug Phillips and Vision Forum Ministries were prominent in the Christian Patriarchy Movement, so their recent scandals have brought fresh attention to the movement. On October 30th, Doug Phillips resigned from his position as president of Vision Forum Ministries, and shortly thereafter, Vision Forum Ministries shut down. Somecommentators have used the scandal as an opportunity reflect on how Christian Patriarchy ideology unfairly silences women, fails to hold men accountable, and creates a world ripe for hypocrisy.
Unfortunately, one commentator seemed more interested in defending Christian Patriarchy ideology than reflecting on what went wrong at Vision Forum Ministries.
In a November 13th commentary at Blog & Mablog, Doug Wilson discussed the closure of Vision Forum Ministries following Doug Phillips’ October 30th resignation. He called the closure “fitting and appropriate”, admitting that “the effects are devastating” when a man like Phillips fail to behave responsibly.
Unfortunately, he devoted much of his column to defending the supposed virtues of patriarchy, in spite of Phillips’ misconduct. Wilson dismissed feminists who criticized patriarchy, accusing them of “screeching”. He lamented that the word “patriarchy” has been tarnished in the eyes of “saps” who have absorbed “feminist indoctrination”.
“Feminists diligently labor to represent any form of father rule as inherently bad, or at least as bad as a relativist can make it out to be — which is pretty bad since the case need not be based on careful reasoning, but rather just screeching. Screeching goes a long way these days.
So, after a generation of saps has gone through the feminist indoctrination that we call the university system, all you have to do is use the word patriarchy in some unapologetic way, and everybody stares at you like you were a six inch cockroach or something.”
Wilson defended patriarchy at length, citing Bible passages that gave husbands authority over wives and fathers authority over children. He called patriarchy “inescapable”, arguing that our only choices are for men to act as responsible patriarchs and receive “blessing”, or to fail at their calling and bring down “humiliation and chastisement” upon themselves.
Throughout the commentary, Wilson refused to admit that male dominance in and of itself was problematic.
He admitted that some “machismo patriarchalists” may have “gravitated to Vision Forum circles, and found what they thought was adequate cover there.” However, he quickly added that “many marriages have been saved as a result of the things learned from Vision Forum”, clinging to his belief that it is abuse of patriarchy, not patriarchy itself, that is the problem.
When a powerful man “with lots of testosterone” takes part in adultery, Wilson sees a sleazy, manipulative Delilah at work.
“A man with lots of testosterone is in a position to start a dynamic ministry that speaks to thousands, that fills conference halls, and that rivets people to their seats. Taking a hypothetical, that very same man is also in a much better position to succumb to the blandishments of a stripper with a stage name of Foxy Bubbles, and all in the settled conviction that his sin will not find him out. How could his sin find him out? He rivets people to their seats.
Samson eventually had his eyes put out, but even before he lost his eyes he was not able to see what Delilah was doing with and to him. The thing that God was using against the Philistines, his strength, was also the thing that Delilah was using in a series of sexual jiu jitsu moves against Samson. It is an old trick, and it still works very, very well.”
Phillips was not a shaved, blinded Samson, but a man who made a conscious choice to engage in infidelity.
What message does this send to the world about the woman Doug Phillips was involved with?
We don’t know who she was or what the nature of her contact with Phillips was. To boot, Phillips was a powerful man in his subculture, and we don’t know what, if any role that power played in his inappropriate relationship. (HA note: We know more as of yesterday.) If his misconduct involved force, threats, or relations with a minor, rhetoric about Delilah and “sexual jiu jitsu” would be victim-blaming.
Let’s get all the facts before assuming that the woman in question was some wily Delilah.
When an institutional crisis strikes, it’s sadly common to see people circle the wagons rather than admit that systemic problems may exist. Any ideology, including Christian Patriarchy ideology, that arbitrarily gives one group vast power over another group will produce injustice and lack of accountability. Patriarchy is intrinsically unjust, and it becomes doubly toxic when propped up by religion. The Phillips scandal demands that we confront patriarchy.
I’m disappointed that Doug Wilson fails to understand this.
HA note: The following story is written by lungfish, a formerly homeschooled ex-Baptist, ex-Calvinist, ex-Pentecostal, ex-Evangelical, ex-young earth creationist, current atheist, and admin of the Ask an Ex-Christian web page.
“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?“ I Corinthians 6:19
I had always believed that, when someone accepts Jesus as their personal savior, the Holy Spirit begins to live within that person.
Everyone is born into sin and, without the Holy Spirit; everyone is controlled by that sin. It is the Holy Spirit, living within a Christian, that sets a Christian apart from the evil of the world and it is this fact that made Christianity the one true religion. This organization that I worked for was largely employed with people who called themselves Christians. Each of them constantly bickered and gossiped. A constant power struggle existed between the departments and no one believed that the other could do their job correctly. I believed that Christians are supposed to love and support each other, not pull each other down and this was not the behavior of people in which the Holy Spirit resides.
When I saw how these people behaved, I began to really doubt the Biblical teachings for the first time.
More specifically, I doubted the teachings about the Holy Spirit. I realized that I had never met a Christian that lived up to my idealized conception of what a believer truly is and I began to consider that the Holy Spirit might not even exist. And, if the Holy Spirit did not exist, I wondered what that meant for my own spirituality? So I began to take a hard look at myself and I found that everything I found disgusting in these people existed in me as well. I was just as arrogant.
I was just as self righteous.
If these people were not a temple in which the Holy Spirit could exist, neither was I.
“For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and they shall show great signs and wonders; so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.” Matthew 24:24
Also, I always believed that we are living in the end times and the Bible teaches that, during this time, many false prophets will lead God’s children away from Him. This weighed heavily on my mind – I did not want to be deceived. I was teetering between belief and disbelief and I wanted to make a decision based solely on the contents of the Bible – and that is what I did. My head filled with doubt, I opened the book. I first began to search for verses of guidance on how to identify a false prophet, but I found nothing of practical use. So I turned to Genesis and just started at the beginning. I never expected what I would find: the dehumanization of woman, rape, murder, and genocide.
I had read these passages many times before, but this time, I could not justify their presence in my holy book.
God killed and commanded his people to kill each other and the people of other nations as if humans were less than that of insects in the eyes of God. This God was far from the loving God I thought I knew. Cognitive dissonance was no longer able to dictate the understanding of what I read and, eventually, I could not go on reading the Old Testament any longer. So I skipped to the New Testament and found something even more disturbing to me: contradictions. The amount of contradictions and gaps between the four gospels alone became painfully obvious. I could not imagine that the loving, infallible, perfect God, I had once believed in, could have inspired texts that I could now so easily find such obvious fault in.
My de-conversion had begun and I found myself in a daze.
I walked each day from my car to the university building feeling detached from my body. A mixture of sorrow and rage filled me as I thought back on my life. I looked at the other students around me and found myself unbearably jealous of the normal lives I assumed they all had led. People, walking with their friends, talking about their social lives – a luxury I could never seem to hold on to.
I began to think of them as the enemy – evil people who could never understand me.
My life began to flash before my eyes like a cascade of images simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. Memories I had long blacked out began to resurface. I began to remember all the ways the Christians in my life had wronged me. I remembered rejection, isolation, and molestation. I looked within myself and saw a person void of confidence, petrified of social interaction, depressed, and suicidal. And I remembered all the ways I had wronged others. I was supposed to have the joy of the Lord in my heart, not these vile emotions. My own arrogance, my delusion, had blinded me from these things.
But I could see clearly now and I could no longer look at myself in the mirror.
Relief came in an unlikely form. I was approached on campus by a traveling Hindu monk. He said that he had seen an unsettling look in my eyes. We talked for a long time. He told me how he had come from a fundamental Catholic family and understood my situation.
He gave me a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and told me that I should not lose my religion.
He said that all religions and all people can live in harmony as long as we believe that each religion provides its own path to heaven for its believers. He had a peace in his voice that I found strangely comforting. He was a Hindu, an unbeliever, who seemed at peace with his life and that went against everything I was ever taught about unbelievers. I found myself regaining hope in people. It did not take me long to read his book but, I did not find it compelling. Strangely, I found this comforting and my anger began to subside. I became able to focus and my mind able to function again.
“. . . the fool has said in his heart, “There is no God.” They are corrupt, they have committed abominable deeds; There is no one who does good.“ Psalms 14:1
I began to get to know a hand full of university professors. These people believed in evolution and a few openly identified themselves as atheists. I always believed in young earth creationism and was taught that evolution was an evil doctrine promoted by God hating atheists that made people savage, immoral beasts who cared only for survival. But this could not have been farther from what I observed.
These atheists were self sacrificing, honest, and caring people – much more so than any Christian I have ever met.
Furthermore, there were all these things while not seeking heavenly reward or fearing an angry God. I could not understand how it was possible that an unbeliever was seemingly more moral than a believer.
I was in a state where I still did not know what to believe and often thought myself crazy or deceived. I quickly realized that life was too short to study all the world’s religions deep enough to would reveal if they were truth and I did not have time to read books between my university studies. So I began to listen to radio programs. I got a new job in a greenhouse at the university and, as I often worked alone, I had much time to myself to listen to podcasts on my new cell phone. Conversations with some of my professors sparked a curiosity in me about atheism. So that is the first thing I search for when looking for a podcast to listen to.
I came across a show called “A Matter of Doubt” that was interviewing a de-converted Laestadian Lutheran by the name of Edwin A. Suominen. He told his story which held many similar elements to my own and I found that striking. I had led an extremely sheltered life and had never heard anyone’s reasons for leaving Christianity. I had never considered the possibility of a full de-conversion from Christianity. I never knew a Christian who completely left the church or even expressed doubt in Christian doctrine. After listening to this podcast, I felt my concerns about Christianity might be valid and that I might not be crazy or completely deceived by the devil for the first time.
Months passed by and I listened to every podcast on religion and atheism I could find.
I found the arguments for atheism much more compelling than those for religion. Between the podcasts and my studies in biology, I stopped seeing people as deprived, sinful beings created by a god – but, instead, I began seeing the human race as a species, unique in its level of self awareness, trying desperately to make peace with the continual cycle of death and rebirth that is existence on this earth. I began studying science more deeply – the collective observations of the great human minds of both the past and present. I realized the scope of human accomplishment and saw it with a new level of amazement. I began to realize how humans have unlocked so many of the secrets of biology, technology, and philosophy – cured disease, walked on the moon, and developed aspects of nearly globalized morality – all accomplished without the guidance of a supernatural deity.
Through readings of academic theology and podcasts by former Christian and current theologian Robert M. Price, I began understanding Biblical texts as recordings of myth and history that showed a testament to the progress we, as humans, have made in thought, reason, and the way we treat each other. How our ancestors once sacrificed their first born to the gods they saw manifested in the grandeur of nature; and now, how we attempt to treasure every human’s life as if it were our own. And I began seeing evolution with new eyes. How our ancestors developed from the first single celled organism to complex biological organisms and the first self aware humans, who conjured up the idea of an all-powerful god. How our ancestors reproduced and struggled to survive for millions of years – so that I could be here today.
And I began to feel at peace with the world.
But one last matter remained: my wife whom I, myself, had converted to Christianity. This kept me awake at night. How was I to explain to my wife that the one who convinced her to accept Jesus no longer believed in Him? We had a son and I wanted nothing more than for him to grow up in a healthy home. We still attended church as a family, but the sermons were like torture. I could pick out lies and misinterpretations in every one. I wanted nothing more than to expose my disbelief but, afraid of the repercussions on my marriage, I could not bring myself to do so. Six months passed before I finally hit a breaking point.
I didn’t spill it all out at one time, but did so with as a single drop of sarcasm.
I don’t remember the exact situation. It may have been during a discussion about a sermon or it may have been in reaction to a meme on the internet. What I do remember is the look on my wife’s face when she heard what I said. Her eyes widened, there was a long pause, followed by a look of complete relief. She completely agreed with me. We began to talk and what I found, I did not expect.
This entire time, we were lying right next to each other, going through the same process of de-conversion at the same exact time – but we were to afraid to tell each other.
We had both been attending church solely for the sake of the other. If only we had known, we could have gone through this together, we could have helped each other, but the extreme taboo the church puts on simple doubt forced us both to go through this process completely alone.
HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Heather Doney’s blog Becoming Worldly. It was originally published on November 13, 2013.
I did a couple things I never expected to do yesterday. I had a thought-provoking conversation that left me thinking about how it is easy to decide that someone is an enemy, a jerk, a selfish person. It is easy to determine that people are unworthy, undeserving, maybe even unclean. It is easy for them to decide that about you too.
Yesterday I found myself talking about my blog with my Dad.
He’d found out about it a month ago. It hadn’t mattered to me. We hadn’t spoken since before Father’s Day. I expected we might never speak again and it might be for the better. But I got off the phone from that thought-provoking conference call and sat in my chair for a bit, thinking. Then I called my Dad.
Why? Well, sometimes you find out information that humanizes people a bit more, that explains why, and that makes you realize you attributed motives to them that weren’t exactly accurate or that didn’t contain some missing pieces of a bigger picture.
The more adults I talk to or learn from who are walkaways from the Quiverfull and Christian patriarchy stuff, or even ostensible leaders or former leaders within it, the more I see them as not abusers and power-grabbers per se, but also victims. They often had harsh upbringings filled with authoritarianism and loss or were constantly uprooted, never knowing what to expect next.
My Grandad, the man I looked up to and loved so much, was not the same man when my Dad and his siblings were kids. He’d just gotten back from Vietnam back then.
He was a tyrant.
He beat his kids, like his father before him.
Even my Grandad said it, telling me “I was a son of a bitch, and I was a son of a bitch to my kids.” He realized later in life that kids need something different then what he’d gotten and what he’d given. He told my Dad, “Don’t raise your kids like how I raised you.” My Dad thought he had found a different way. Except it wasn’t really all that different.
Him and my Mom got sucked into extreme religion like a drug when they were just kids, each not yet 20 years old. They became true believers. They more or less still are. That sort of faith easily attracts young people from dysfunctional families who are looking for guarantees, assurances that family life will be different, better, and that heaven awaits if they follow what I have occasionally referred to as “the faith equivalent of the Nutrisystem diet.”
They were trying and failing and starving away on the inside and it was as hard growing up with them as if they had been on drugs.
I thought of Dr. David Gil, a social policy professor I had at Brandeis, in his late 80′s and a holocaust survivor, a man who had testified before Congress against corporal punishment of kids back in the 70′s and had spent much of his career working on fostering reconciliation after atrocities. He’d spoken of society’s ills all coming back to unmet human need. That we have kick the dog syndrome, we have substance abuse, we have wealth hoarding, we have people treating other people (generally weaker people) like objects, and almost all of it is due to stunting – people not being able to reach their full potential during their formative years because the previous generation has hurt them, and the fact that they were born into a society that did not meet their needs starting at a young age. Dr. Gil talked about how people-led movements for equality and social change were all that could alter this dynamic. That it was about interpersonal interaction, sharing, and giving, collaboration rather than competition.
I am not a Star Trek nerd, but this video really moves me. Patrick Stewart’s father was an abuser. He watched his mother get abused as a small boy and couldn’t do anything about it. Later on he learned that it was untreated mental health problems from wartime experiences that caused his father to have so many issues, and while it did not excuse the abuse (because nothing does) it did help him develop empathy for his father. So he is doing work to help veterans and work to help battered women, in order to honor them both, in order to help others avoid beingthem both. I thought it was so moving because this is someone who gets what the cycle really is like. Hurt people hurting people.
We can sit here loathing each other, re-wounding each other, blaming each other, but an eye for an eye truly does make the whole world blind.
I thought about how people often try to improve a dysfunctional world by creating little Utopiasand about how people do what they can with the tools they have and sometimes when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, and sometimes you get caught up in hammering away at everything only to get stopped in your tracks when you least expect it and find that you do have empathy for where someone is coming from simply because you see humanity there. Even if they’ve done things you think are shitty and even if you don’t agree with their outlook much at all. You remember that they are a person too, and if you remember that they are a person they just might remember that you are a person and then as two people you can do the hardest and most special thing that people can do, which is to be people, together.
So many homeschool parents who got sucked into the Quiverfull and Christian patriarchy stuff are still hurting.
They secretly bear so much shame. So much self-loathing. So much guilt and fear and they are tired and worn down. They often have too many kids and not enough resources or answers. They are trying to pick up the pieces of their lives, decide where their boundaries are, figure out what’s right and what’s wrong and what’s bullshit. I don’t think a lot of them are doing as good of a job as I’d expect, but then again I do have pretty exacting expectations, very little tolerance for the sort of brokenness that reminds me of my childhood. It’s pretty triggering.
But I am trying to be more forgiving. I am trying to bear in mind that once safety has been ascertained, that forgiveness is an option and sometimes recovery, rehabilitation, and reconciliation are too.
I try to remember that at one time they were all babies – they were all cute and innocent little children making mud pies or pushing their peas around their plates. They were all pimply teens trying to figure out what to do with crushes and first loves and first kisses and broken hearts and whether their friends liked them and their clothes conveyed the right message about who they were on the inside. They were learning about education and vocations and how to pay the bills in a world where none of those things were simple (and still aren’t). They were learning how to be parents and what it meant when nobody had ever taught them how. None of it was easy.
They went through hardships, too.
Hardships that caused damage and misconceptions and harms that they passed down to the next generation and sometimes the people around them in one form or another.
I expect most of the time they didn’t mean to cause hurt, but they did and we can’t change the past. We can only look to the future and try to do what we can with what we’ve got. I’m not a fool. I know the odds of my Dad and I having the sort of quality relationship that I would desire in an ideal father-daughter sense is unlikely bordering on neigh impossible. But maybe our relationship can be more than nothing.Maybe it can be more than him getting old and dying and me not seeing him for years before that day. If it has to be nothing I’m ok with that. But something would be better.
And that’s why I called my Dad. I told him that he was worthy of forgiveness. I told him that I forgave him. I told him that I had two rules. He couldn’t tell me what to do and he couldn’t try to rewrite the past. He said ok. Then we talked.
We talked about an old family photo my sister had texted to all of us, when I was just a baby and my parents were young, starry-eyed, and impossibly good looking, and how the picture reminded him of when I was small and he took me to the University of New Orleans once. He said he remembered how happy I was there. I said yes, that I’d remembered that visit, walking up the liberal arts building stairs, him buying me a Coke (a rare treat) out of the vending machine, and seeing adults poring over their books and listening to lectures in classrooms.
He said, “I did good things too, you know. I did good things too.”
I said, “I know, Dad. I remember the good things too. I remember them.“
He told me that when he watched the Al Jazeera video he agreed with Pat Farenga’s perspective more than mine, that he felt I did a good job but my framework was off, that he figured modern technology and online schools solved a lot of the homeschooling issues I was concerned about, and with my skills (and here he sounded proud) that I should work towards bigger issues, things that could do more for society, that homeschooling was small. I replied that Pat was a nice guy and we just disagreed about a few things, and I figured if I used my education anywhere, I should start close to home, in an area I know, and so that’s what I was doing.
I said I didn’t do it to shame him. I did it to help other kids.
So I’m gonna call my Dad again in a few days and see if we can start small, start with more good things, attempt to be family to one another, and meantime I’m gonna work on some child abuse prevention resources so that other families can stop the cycle before it gets as bad as it did in mine.
I’m not going to whitewash everything and act like its peachy keen now (because there has been a lot of damage done and a lot of work still needs to be done to bring things in a positive direction and it’s a pretty tall order) but I am hopeful. There is still room for redemption. There is still room for improvement. We are all still alive. Or most of us are anyway, and those who aren’t should be held in our memories, their stories and hardships learned from, their lives honored, the lessons not forgotten.
It is a punitive, careless, and authoritarian culture that hurts us.
This issue isn’t about Christianity. It isn’t about homeschooling. It isn’t about families. It isn’t about faith or love or loyalty. It’s about power. Power that the fearful grasp onto or lash out with. That is what we need to try so hard to end, to use our own power to do.
Sharing is still caring. There is still room to learn and grow and try to make the best of the present, using what we know from the past. There is room to accept broken people and wounded people and people who have done serious harms that are not able to be erased but who are trying to do better now, even if they don’t hardly know the way. We don’t have to do it. We don’t have to do anything. But we can. If we want to.
I’m still pretty early in my career, green in the public policy profession, but today I wanted to share this lesson that I learned, that hit home, that I hope to always remember.
We think we’re just working on metrics, policy issues, and stakeholders and then we run into raw humanity – unmet human need, trauma, and people trying to find a way to get by and make it better than they’ve had it. Maybe this shouldn’t change our goals but our methods.Remind us that it’s never “just business.” It’s always personal.
The following was posted today on Vision Forum Ministries’ web site:
Clarification on Resignation
by Douglas Phillips, Esq., November 14, 2013
I would like to express my gratitude for the great kindness so many have shown to my family in the wake of my stepping down as president of Vision Forum Ministries. My family has been greatly encouraged by many loving notes we have received. With that in mind, I want to be so very clear about the rightness of this transition, and I want to clear up some matters which have been brought to my attention. My sin has resulted in great pain within the Body of Christ, some confusion, and has given the enemies of God reason to rejoice. This is heartbreaking to me. Some have suggested that my sin was not sufficiently serious to step down. Let me be clear: it absolutely does merit my resignation. My resignation is sincere and necessary given the weightiness of my sin. Some reading the words of my resignation have questioned if there was an inappropriate physical component with an unmarried woman. There was, and it was intermittent over a period of years. The local church, not the Internet, is the proper forum for overseeing the details of a man’s repentance, but I just want to be clear for the sake of peace within the Body of Christ, that the tragic events we are experiencing, including the closing of Vision Forum Ministries are my fault, and that I am sincere that I should not be in leadership, but must spend this season of my life quietly walking a path of proven repentance. Please pray for the Phillips family, the Board, and the men who have made up the staff of Vision Forum Ministries.
Doug Phillips
(HA note: we have archived a PDF of the above statement here.)
Also, Spiritual Sounding Board has more information on what we know about what happened. Apparently this was ongoing for 10 years, the woman, well, I hesitate to use the word “woman,” “girl” is more accurate, worked closely with the Phillips family and Doug initiated a relationship. It’s not clear whether she was underage when this began but she was young.
If you know the identity of this girl, please do not post it anywhere on the Internet.
She deserves her privacy, she’s absolutely the victim in all of this. There are not enough words in the universe that could convince me that a relationship between Doug Phillips and a stay-at-home daughter who had been indoctrinated into Vision Forum’s ideology all her life is one where she is capable of giving consent.
I’m not talking about the legal age of consent or whether Phillips committed a crime that could be proven in a court of law. No matter what the laws on the books may say, the girls who grow up in that world have the emotional and mental maturity of a child even into their twenties. Their parents deliberately keep them as sheltered children because that way they’re able to control them into being stay-at-home daughters who follow and obey their father’s and other male authority figures’ every word. Girls in that world can appear mature and capable to outside observers because they’ve been taught to run an entire household from the time they were small children. But it’s a world that squashes all sense of autonomous self and produces sheltered, emotionally immature woman-children.
Doug Phillips, one of the most powerful men in fundamentalist quiverfull homeschooling, a lawyer/pastor/leader, took advantage of a girl who had been taught all her life to submit to her father and to male leadership. This was not a relationship between two consenting equals.
The power imbalance is staggeringly huge.
Don’t blame her, don’t go around trying to discover her identity, and if you know who it is, by all means keep it off of the Internet. Allow her the chance to disappear and rebuild her life away from the oppression and abuse.
If you’re looking for someone to blame, blame Doug Phillips and blame the system that does this to women. That system needs to be destroyed.
HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on October 24, 2013.
Dear Debi,
I was very excited when I read your article of this past August, titled “The Roland Study.” In that article, you began with this opening paragraph:
My grandson Roland, who just turned one, has taught me more about the development of babies and toddlers than I learned my first sixty-plus years of life. It is not that he is such a fine teacher; it’s just that, now that I’m a grandmother, not responsible for meeting the daily needs of my children, I can seriously focus on what makes him tick: how much he understands, what causes him joy or anxiety or fear, his interests and responses—and, most importantly, what a child is capable of learning at various ages.
I am glad to know that you, like me, have become fascinated by listening to children and trying to understand what makes them tick.
It’s amazing, isn’t it? I am writing because I am concerned about your husband’s book, To Train Up A Child. I understand that he stands by what he wrote there, but I have read the book multiple times and feel that the central messages of that book run contrary to what you wrote in your article.
Let me offer some examples.
First is the way one views the natural behavior and needs of infants and toddlers. You urge parents to “always assume your cranky baby is sleepy, sick, or bored, and do something to alleviate the problem or meet the need.” This is wonderful advice! Yet in to To Train Up A Child, Michael has this to say of a cranky baby:
As the mother, holding her child, leans over the crib and begins the swing downward, the infant stiffens, takes a deep breath and bellows. The battle for control has begun in earnest. Someone is going to be conditioned. Either the tender-hearted mother will cave in to this self-centered demand (thus training the child to get his way by crying) or the infant is allowed to cry (learning that crying is counterproductive). Crying because of genuine physical need is simply the infant’s only voice to the outside world; but crying in order to manipulate the adults into constant servitude should never be rewarded. Otherwise, you will reinforce the child’s growing self-centeredness, which will eventually become socially intolerable.
In other words, you say that cranky babies should be assumed to be sleepy, sick, or bored, but Michael urges parents to view a cranky baby as selfish or rebellious.
Which is it? Should a parent respond to a cranky baby with love and compassion, as you urge, trying to find a way to meet that baby’s needs, or should a parent view a cranky baby as “self-centered” working to “manipulate”?
Next is the issue of actually listening to your children. In your article you write that, as a result of “studying” your grandson Roland, you felt as though you were “quietly listening to him speak before he could actually talk.” Yet nowhere in To Train Up A Child does Michael focus on teaching parents to parents to listen to their small children, whether they can talk or not. In fact, the word “listen” appears only three times in the book. It once refers to a girl listening to train whistles, and once to a father listening to his daughters sing, and the third time it is the child who must listen, not the parent:
However, if you are just beginning to institute training on an already rebellious child, who runs from discipline and is too incoherent to listen, then use whatever force is necessary to bring him to bay. If you have to sit on him to spank him then do not hesitate. And hold him there until he is surrendered. Prove that you are bigger, tougher, more patiently enduring and are unmoved by his wailing. Defeat him totally. Accept no conditions for surrender. No compromise. You are to rule over him as a benevolent sovereign. Your word is final.
In other words, you urge parents to listen to small children, to try to hear what they’re trying to say, but Michael focuses on forcing them into submission without ever mentioning listening to them.
Which is it? Should parents listen to their children, even young babies and toddlers, or should children be the only ones to listen, required to “surrender” because the parent is “bigger” and “tougher”?
Finally, when speaking of your study of Roland, unable yet to walk, you state that “I could clearly see that he knew what was happening and wished he could join the parade of feet running here and there. This baby boy was frustrated by his baby body.” Yet nowhere in his book does Michael point out that children might be frustrated, whether by the limitations of their bodies or by anything else. For instance, Michael states this:
How many times have we observed the grocery store arena? A devious little kid sits up in the command seat of the shopping cart exercising his “childhood rights” to unlimited self-indulgence. The parent fearfully but hopelessly steers around the tempting “trees of knowledge of good and evil.” Too late! The child spies the object of his unbridled lust. The battle is on. The child will either get what he wants or make the parent miserable. Either way, he conquers.
In other words, you urge parents to consider that they’re children’s actions may be the result of natural frustrations, but Michael seems completely unaware that this could be the case —
— or else he simply doesn’t care.
Which is it? Should babies and small children be assumed to be rebellious and selfish, or should parents consider that their children’s behavior might be the result of natural frustration, like Roland’s frustration with not being able to walk? Why does Michael not address the fact that the child in his anecdote might be hungry, or overstimulated, or tired?
I know this may be hard for you to hear, Debi, but many parents who read To Train Up A Child come away viewing their children’s normal behavior as sinful and interpreting their children’s natural needs as selfish as a result. They don’t come away with the idea that they should listen to their children or try to understand what makes their children tick, because that’s not in there.
Let me take a moment to tell you a bit of my own story. When my daughter Sally was ten months old, she discovered some potted plants on our coffee table. I told her “no” but she would not give up her interest in them, and, as a result of reading To Train Up A Child, I saw that as disobedience and the beginning of life-long rebellion. So I began to switch her hand every time she touched the plants. Nothing worked, and our relationship suffered. It was only when I called the contest off and took some time to try to understand Sally’s perspective—something never suggested in To Train Up A Child, by the way—that everything changed and my relationship with my daughter began to blossom. Rather than viewing her actions as disobedience or sin or selfishness, I sought to meet her at her level and understand what made her tick.
You said in your post that you have learned more in the last year about the development of babies and toddlers than you learned in the entire first six decades of your life.
Debi, I’m asking you, please reread To Train Up A Child and examine the advice given there with your new understanding in mind.
Ask yourself what message parents will take away from the way babies and toddlers are portrayed, described, and represented. Ask yourself about how articles like this and this and this teach parents to view and understand children. And then ask yourself whether it might be time to pull production of the book.
HA note: The following story is written by lungfish, a formerly homeschooled ex-Baptist, ex-Calvinist, ex-Pentecostal, ex-Evangelical, ex-young earth creationist, current atheist, and admin of the Ask an Ex-Christian web page.
“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father . . . Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows.” Matthew 10:29, 31
As a Christian, I was taught that God desired a personal relationship with each of His individual children – including me.
God spoke to me in that still, small voice in the back of my mind – giving me prophetic words and protecting me from danger. He even knew the exact number of hairs on my head. Nothing was more valuable to my God than this relationship. It was this arrogant idea that led to me to the path of doubt – but the log in my eye was too big and it was not my own arrogance that I first noticed.
But it sometimes takes noticing the faults in other people to notice the same faults in yourself.
It was during a prayer concert, that I noticed something strange that I had not noticed before. I found myself being moved by the praise music. It was a loud musical production accompanied by loud passionate prayers shouted from behind microphones on a stage. An hour in, the praise leader announced that he could feel the spirit of God moving through the room. People raised their hands and scattered shouts of amen swept across the congregation. My euphoria immediately dissipated, my heart sank, and, for the first time, I experienced a moment of clarity.
I suddenly began to wonder if this was truly the spirit of God or merely an emotional reaction to the music.
That is when a church elder stepped up to the pulpit. He and his wife were both medical doctors. He began talking about the importance of being thankful. I remember what he said as vividly as if it had happened today. He told a story of how he was merging onto the highway on his way to work when he realized that this was the tenth time in a row he had done so and no other cars were in his way. He then expressed his thankfulness to God for the small things in life and urged the congregation that we all should do the same. People shook their heads in agreement all over the sanctuary and loud cheers could be heard from across the room. My jaw dropped.
Why would God care about anyone merging onto the highway in their expensive car while driving to their high paying job when there are children all over the world starving to death?
It was this experience that eventually allowed me to open my eyes and see past the cover that Christianity held over my mind. I could not believe that this was the attitude of a true Christian. A few months later, that man’s son attempted suicide. I was never told why. I became confused. The Holy Spirit could not be in people like this. I began to believe I was surrounded by Christians who were not true. I remembered the vision of the beast that the pastor’s daughter shared at my previous church and decided that I needed to get out of this town.
I needed to find a community of Christians that truly held the Holy Spirit.
“The earth is the LORD’S, and all it contains, The world, and those who dwell in it.” Psalms 24:1
A few years later, I got married.
Our wedding was not our own. The ceremony was focused completely on God. We used it as an opportunity for the church youth pastor to present the salvation message to everyone attending. We included prayer and praise songs anywhere we could. After the wedding, my mother promised to us a rental house – but first, she wanted to finish fixing it up. She said it would take only a month. We moved into my parents’ house while we waited.
This was the beginning of the end of my faith.
While we lived there, every word my wife said was harshly judged by my mother. Every morning I was confronted about something my wife said that was taken out of context. My wife was constantly ridiculed and her faith questioned. Adaptation to a harmful environment is not difficult. Adaptation sometimes can be so extreme, that a person does not even realize a problem even exists – until the person perceives that environment affecting somebody else. My mother’s religion was no longer just negatively affecting me, but now my wife as well.
I was extremely disappointed in my mother. This was not how someone who held the Holy Spirit was supposed to behave. My wife was raised in a nonreligious family and my mother was the only example of a Godly woman that she had – an example she no longer could look up to. This event did not cause me to doubt Christianity. I still strongly believe in the existence of a God. However, I stopped praying, I stopped reading my Bible, and I began to push my Christian walk to the back of my mind.
“Commit thy works unto Jehovah, and thy purposes shall be established.“ Proverbs 16:3
I took a management position at work and my wife and I had a child. I lost interest in my previous plans to attend seminary. After three years of contemplation, I began to gain an interest in biology and finally moved away from my hometown to pursue a degree in the subject. Here, in this new town, I prayed the last prayer I would ever utter to God. What I prayed was to be shown a community of true Christians so that I might know how to serve God as a true Christian would serve God.
Soon after, I received an interview at a local greenhouse run by a nonprofit organization. The organization’s goal was to provide respite and employment opportunities for people with mental disabilities. The organization wanted to begin raising fish in the greenhouse to be incorporated in a method of permaculture where the waste water from fish is utilized to fertilize a plant crop and re-circulated. It was the study of the biology of this method that brought me to the university in this town and I had applied to this organization completely unaware of their plans.
The greenhouse manager decided to hire me before she even met me due to my knowledge in the operation of this method and my previous volunteer work at churches. We hit it off immediately. We were both Christians and even attended the same church in town. It was as if God Himself had orchestrated events and interests in my life to bring me to this place. Finally, I could do God’s work and support my family while doing so. I was certain that my prayers were answered and my faith was rekindled. But what happened next was a barrage of events and realities that so vividly contradicted my beliefs.
I was left with no choice but to question my faith.
I have always wanted to use my life to help other people and, here at this organization, I believed I could do this. So I gave all my knowledge to the greenhouse. Everything I knew. I began to get to know my manager very well. We spent many hours in the greenhouse talking about our faith. After months on the job, I was told that the greenhouse had been seeing financial losses since it had started more than a year ago. I came to realize that this was because our methods were highly inefficient and I began to believe that we should be relying on university research in horticulture to maximize the greenhouse’s efficiency, thereby, maximize profits that would then be donated to the organization’s cause.
I consulted my manager on this idea and she agreed – but when I provided her with hundreds of pages of research data suggesting the use of methods that harshly contrasted our own, she refused to read any of them. I asked her why and she told me that pharmaceutical companies pay off scientists to falsify data for financial gain and this is true of every branch of science. I failed to see how this applied to our situation.
When I heard her say this, I realized that I had said these same exact words to others in the past and I could not determine how I came to believe this.
A few weeks later, she admitted to me that she did not know how to manage a garden or a business, but kept the job because she wanted the paycheck. Her husband had a very high paying job and they owned a small business together. She was draining the finances of this nonprofit organization for a paycheck she did not need. I also soon found that she had lied to me during my interview about the organization’s plan to raise fish in the greenhouse. This was, in fact, solely her plan, and the organization had already declined the proposal. She was using me to convince the board of directors to change their minds – and, although they did change their minds after receiving a sizable grant, I found this to be a disgusting act.
She also began telling me about her son. He had a chemical imbalance in his brain that often caused him to act out. She was taking him to a neurologist who prescribed him a medication that greatly calmed his behavior. She told me of success stories that the neurologist shared of former patients. He talked of a former football player who began suffering from a sex addiction after a severe head injury. The areas of this man’s brain that controlled the sex drive were found to have become over-active. With medication, the over-activity was able to be cured and the man was eventually able to end his medication and live normally once again.
I found this confusing.
There was no mention of such a possibility in the Bible.
How did this fit into the doctrine the Bible? I wondered about all the people that lived before the age of science. People that were excommunicated, or even killed, in the name of religion because they suffered from similar curable brain afflictions. Would not an all-knowing God include this knowledge in his book so that his children would not persecute each other over these curable imbalances?
Her son came to help out at the greenhouse one day. She continually spoke down on him. She assumed the worst in everything he did. She complained and apologized for his behavior all day when he did nothing wrong in my eyes. She was very inconsiderate of him. He had come to volunteer for an hour in exchange for time at the skate park. But he ended up being forced to stay for three hours and had to give up his park time.
I saw myself in this kid. I saw the way I was treated as a child.
I began to see many aspects in my manager that reminded me of my own mother. It was as if they were the same person. I began to see her arrogance, self righteousness, and the same mistrust of all things scientific. Every attitude, every world view seemed to be identical. And I realized that this is the attitude of most of the Christians that I knew.
“Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God.”Romans 13:1
There was also a pastor that volunteered at the greenhouse. He often talked about God and about politics.
As most Christians, he held very conservative views. There was a recall election over a conservative governor happening at the time. The governor was attempting to bust the teacher’s union and take away their benefits. I believed this to be a huge mistake because it might cause an exodus of qualified teachers from our state and students, such as myself, would be negatively affected.
I was the only Christian I knew that believed this.
I shared this with the volunteer pastor and he disagreed. He returned the next day and shared with me a revelation he had the night before. He said that he realized Romans 13:1 meant that participating in an attempted recall of a government official was a sin against God. I thought this extremely narrow sighted and an obvious interpretation of scripture to suit his political ideal.
We also talked of social programs in the state. He believed taking advantage of these programs was also a sin and quoted II Thessalonians 3:10 as proof. I was on many social programs at the time. I wanted to gain a college education and better myself so that I could more effectively better the world. My parents did not contribute to paying my college tuition, so I worked many hours after classes in order to pay for school.
Even so, if it were not for food stamps, day care assistance, and our states social medical program, I would not be able to feed my child while in school.
In fact, I would likely not be in school at all and I would already be in debt from paying the hospital bill on my child’s birth – as I could not afford my employer’s unusually high medical insurance premium. Instead, I would be working my retail management job and living paycheck to paycheck for the rest of my life. How could I serve others when I lived a life that barely kept my own family fed? And why do they not consider these programs fulfillment of Jesus’ command to feed the poor? I knew that the Christian conservative majority was wrong on these issues and, if they were wrong about these issues, what else were they wrong about?
HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Caleigh Royer’s blog, Profligate Truth. It was originally published on November 11, 2013 with the title “When did Christian Culture become a culture of fake love?”
*****
Disclaimer: I realize this does not cover all Christians, I’m not writing about all Christians, I am writing about what I have seen and what I have an issue with. Do not accuse me of accusing all Christians of being like this.
*****
I am completely caught off guard when a post of mine gets shared over 10 times, but when it’s quite a lot more than that, I just don’t know what to say. I didn’t expect my response to the marriage post that has been disturbingly viral would get so much attention. For me, it was a lot of attention, and I say thanks to those who took the time to comment and share.
It’s always difficult to come back after a post of mine gets a lot of attention. I don’t write to get the hits, I write to process, I write to give myself freedom and permission for my own voice, and I write because I know I am not alone.
I know how important it is to have someone come alongside and say “I’ve been there too. I know what this is like.”
What I’ve been through has been hell for me personally and it’s the type of hell that makes me feel isolated from everyone and everything. To me, this is a fact. That’s all it is. The feelings aren’t as painful, the anger, blind pain, and suffocating brokenness aren’t my constant companions anymore. But, as I’ve said time and time again, I still have a long way to go.
My writing has been in a slow downward spiral of sorts, I’ve been really tired and not been sleeping well as my body struggles to adapt to sudden changes in the weather. This time of the year always affects me poorly when the weather goes from balmy fall weather to frigid temperatures in the course of a few days. Even though my body is struggling to stay afloat my mind has not stopped mulling over things and trying to continually piece things together. Something that keeps tripping me up is a culture/community I have a part of since I turned 7 1/2, was baptized, and took communion for the first time. I have serious concerns about the Christian community and the more I see the more I no longer want to be a part of it.
I can’t reconcile the fact of Christians turning away and not accepting people who do not believe their exact beliefs.
I can’t come to terms with how vicious Christians get when someone challenges their beliefs or practices, even if the challenge comes in the form of sincere genuine questions. I can’t get over how obscenely rude Christians are about putting down someone who finds a small strand of courage and admits they’ve been struggling with whether God exists or not.I cannot for the life of me understand how Christians, who claim to have the love of God, can so harshly shove verses at and shun someone who participates in an activity or practice that goes against their moral beliefs. Or the same Christians who say they love someone but then cruelly do not accept someone. I can’t reconcile the love Christians say they have with the very lack of acceptance that I have seen time and time again. I can’t reconcile how Christian culture treats those who come out publicly as homosexual.
I cannot reconcile tearing down someone who is speaking out about abuse and sharing their horrendous story. Those people who have been severely damaged by the church are the very ones who need true love, true acceptance, true willingness to come alongside and say“I don’t care what happened, I’m here now and will not leave.”
I don’t want to be a part of a culture where people claim the love of a higher being but who then horrifyingly rip someone apart who is ever so slightly different than them or who is asking questions.
Love is accepting someone unconditionally, their minds, their hearts, their very being despite what they think, despite not seeing eye to eye, despite their choices.
When I see parents say they love their children but then tell their children how pained and hurt they are over their children’s decisions, I see pride in the parents’ ideas of child rearing. I see pride that has been hurt and being taken out on children who are their own unique individuals who have to make their own decisions and live with their own life.I see parents who are not accepting or truly loving their children. “If you love God you will do what I say” is not something that seems to me to be true love.That’s manipulation of parents who are pushing their own agendas, not loving and accepting their children’s decisions and who their children are, body, mind, and soul.
When I see Christian snub and turn away people who are questioning their faith, who are working through seriously difficult questions about their own sexual identity,I see Christians who don’t want to get their hands dirty and who want to keep their own little sets of predetermined rules. I am still working through my own beliefs about same sex marriage and relationships, but I can say this at the moment:
I hate what I have seen among Christians on this matter, and I don’t want any part of their actions.
No part.
When I see Christians gang up and push down an abused child in order for the parents to gain further control over a nasty situation, I see children being silenced and people being shut down who need to have a voice. When I see Christians turn away people truly in need, I don’t see love, acceptance, I see uncomfortable people who don’t want to have their own beliefs shaken.
Want to know the truth of what I’m actually thinking?
I don’t really know if I want to believe in God anymore. I don’t really want to be associated with being a Christian.
I don’t want to be grouped with people who are known for their vicious attacks on people who need love and acceptance, not the strange version of so called love that spews from the mouths of those who claim to have love.I don’t understand how Christians can be so proud of their “defense” of their beliefs when they are razing hurting people in their path. I don’t understand why my own questions with my own beliefs have been so easily brushed aside as “just a season,” just something I’ll get over. I’ve been shunned by the very people who claim to have a “heart of love for those who are hurting.” I have been silenced and brushed aside by people who claim love but deny acceptance because I’m suddenly a black sheep for asking questions they would never think or even dare to ask.
There is a massive group of us who are trying to recover from the denied acceptance and love from the Christian community.
I just can’t reconcile any longer the very lack of real love from Christian as something Jesus did or didn’t do. I don’t see the connection between how the Christians I have been around and grown up with act and how Jesus acted/acts. I don’t understand where the disconnect happened, I don’t know where the puzzle piece is missing, but I do know i don’t want any part of it anymore. Maybe one day I’ll come back, and my opinion will change, but that’s not where I’m at right now. I make no promises.
I can’t understand how the Christian culture has become a culture of defending their faith like sociopaths and turning away people in need of real love.
HA note: The following story is written by lungfish, a formerly homeschooled ex-Baptist, ex-Calvinist, ex-Pentecostal, ex-Evangelical, ex-young earth creationist, current atheist, and admin of the Ask an Ex-Christian web page.
“But he who doubts is condemned if he eats, because his eating is not from faith; and whatever is not from faith is sin.” Romans 14:23
The doctrine of sin effectively maintains many Christians in a cycle of guilt and self denial that they cannot escape.
The Bible teaches that, whether a person is a believer or an unbeliever, everyone on this planet is a slave to sin. The Bible also teaches that a lack of faith results in sin – and sin results in evil and destruction in this world. In other words, evil exists in the world because of you. Destruction exists in the world because of your sin. People die of famine, disease, and natural disasters because your faith is not strong enough to avoid breaking God’s law. When this is the belief that you hold so closely, there is no choice but to drown in an unending sea of guilt – because, everything that causes sorrow and loneliness in this world, is your fault.
“If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” I John 1:9
But there is a dangerous loophole to this doctrine: forgiveness is available to anyone who merely asks for it. A sort of “get out of jail free” card that can be played – no matter the enormity of the sin that may have been committed. So you ask for personal forgiveness with little concern for those whom your sin may have affected and you pray for strength to deny your own thoughts and biological functions so that you may not sin again. With effort, this denial of self can often be accomplished and the guilt may even subside – but it is always only temporary because you are fighting who and what you are as a human being. All of this traps a believer in a continuing swell of rising and falling periods of guilt and self denial. This emotional roller coaster comes at a psychological cost that Christianity refuses to acknowledge and often even considers beneficial to the individual’s personal relationship with Jesus Christ – because the pain that this cycle causes is Jesus himself forming and shaping you into a person closer to His likeness. And to be more Like Jesus is the ultimate goal of a Christian.
Battered Person Syndrome is defined as the medical and psychological condition of a person who has suffered persistent emotional, physical, or sexual abuse from another person.
When Battered Person Syndrome manifests as PTSD, it consists of the symptoms: (a) re-experiencing the battering as if it were recurring even when it is not, (b) attempts to avoid the psychological impact of battering by avoiding activities, people, and emotions, (c) experience of being constantly tense and the need to maintain an increased awareness of the surrounding environment, (d) disrupted interpersonal relationships, (e) body image distortion and (f) sexuality and intimacy issues. Victims of Battered Person Syndrome often believe that the abuse is his or her fault and the abuser is somehow omnipresent and omniscient.
This is often the effect that Christianity has on many of its followers and the effect it had on me.
“The righteous chooses his friends carefully: but the way of the wicked leads them astray.“ Proverbs 12:26
We began attending a large Evangelical church. I knew many of the youth at this church from the Christian school I attended when I was younger; but I had developed a social anxiety I did not have before. I don’t know if I was afraid that if I made friends again I would lose them again or if I had just become used to a lack of social interaction. But it did not really matter. Most of the youth’s parents would not allow me to be friends with their children because my father was not a Christian. A fact made painfully obvious by his absence from our pew each Sunday morning.
The thought was if we could not convert our father to Christianity, then there was something wrong with our own Christian walk.
I was told this straight to my face on multiple occasions. No one invited me to events that took place outside of church or youth group. I often saw everyone at the sledding hill or the ice cream shop, but no one ever called me to ask if I wanted to join and that hurt me in ways I would not admit to myself.
However, there was one who did accept me. He was the pastor’s son. We were once friends at the Christian grade school we attended and we managed to rekindle that friendship. Together, we became the youth group video production team. He as the camera man and I as the actor. We filmed many videos for the youth group and this gave me purpose. Eventually, he invited me to teach sixth grade Sunday school with him. I found that I had a talent for Biblical teaching. I believed that the Bible meant what it said and, therefore, needed no interpretation beyond that. I began giving long talks in youth Bible study about the meanings of Bible verses. This sometimes brought out sarcastic remarks towards me from the other youth. But my clear and direct approach to the Bible impressed my youth pastor and he suggested I get further training in seminary. We toured Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and I loved it. I began fabricating plans in my mind to become a missionary to third world countries.
After a fund raiser for the church, the pastor’s son, my only Christian friend at the time, informed me that he and his family were moving to Texas.
The church elders asked his father to resign as head of the church. They believed him to be too liberal and wanted the church to travel more in the direction of fundamentalism. I was devastated. He was the only Christian that accepted me and he was being removed from the church by the Christians that did not accept me. Soon after, I was asked to resign from my position as Sunday school teacher and replaced. When the kids asked me why I was no longer their teacher, I couldn’t answer them.
I did not want to cause these kids doubt by making the church look bad.
“But Peter and the apostles answered and said, we must obey God rather than men.“ Acts 5:29
I became lonely and after constant begging, my mother once again agreed to let me attend public school. I attended full time my senior year. I consider this the best year of my life. I made many friends; but, I was still afraid to let them get close.
Although I had never felt as accepted in my life as I had been among these unbelievers, my indoctrination still held me tightly.
I thought their influence was a danger to my Christianity and my eternal soul. I was often invited to parties and small get-to-gathers but I would never attend them. I wanted nothing more than to let these people in. I wanted to drink and talk about life with them more than anything I had ever wanted before.
I just wanted to be normal.
But I wasn’t normal; I was a child of God. These desires were merely a temptation from Satan and I was a pillar of Christian morality. I knew that people must look up to my morality, even though no one ever told me this. I thought that if I faltered even once, someone who looked up to me would be devastated. That person, who may be considering accepting Jesus, might decide the teachings of the Bible are a lie. That person would be sent to hell and I would be responsible. But I soon found this not to be true.
Halfway through the year, one of the kids in my neighborhood, whom I had reconnected with that year in public school, committed suicide.
I still do not know why. I thought myself a failure. I could not understand how he could not see hope in the Jesus that I strived so hard to be like. I attended his open casket funeral, but I trivialized the experience and repressed any emotional response. Losing people I cared about had become a normal occurrence. So, instead of mourning, I sunk even deeper into Christianity. I became more devout, I become stricter, and I began to verbally evangelize for the first time in my life. Christianity had emotionally shut me down and I coped with it by adopting even more fundamental views of the same doctrine – avoiding the reality of abuse by becoming more abused.
It was around this time, I befriended a girl at school. She showed an interest in Christianity so I invited her to church. I became closer to her than I had ever been to anyone else. I took her to a presentation by Kent Hovind at a local church. He talked about faith and science – connecting the two in a way that never gave my faith more validity. On the drive home, she told me of how interesting she found the presentation. The talk had given me a confidence in evangelizing I had never experienced before. I pulled the vehicle over and told her all the reason that I believed the Bible to be truth over any other religion in the world. I told her how we are born into sin, separated from God; but He sent his son to die so we could be with Him in heaven. Soon after, she accepted Jesus and I began a romantic relationship with her.
She began attending church with my family every Sunday and, eventually, I asked her to marry me.
HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was a guest post by Rachel Lazerus and was originally published on Patheos on November 12, 2013. Rachel Lazerus received her MPP from the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago in 2012. She is currently researching comparative methods of reporting homeschooling achievement.
In his opening argument against the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Farris asserted that the pro-treaty side was not doing its due diligence and had not thoroughly analyzed the full legal effect of the law. “We don’t hear citations to articles of the treaty,” he intoned. “We don’t hear consideration of the reports, the concluding observations, by the Committee on the Rights to Persons with Disability. We don’t hear the kind of legal analysis that would be appropriate for analyzing the legal impact of this treaty.” Consistent with this criticism, Farris cited two experts known to be sympathetic toward the treaty in order to support his legal analysis: Columbia University’s Louis Henkin, one of the most influential legal scholars in the realm of human rights and international law, and University of London’s Geraldine Van Bueren, a leading human rights expert.
If you read my previous post on Michael Farris’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—and you should—you will know that prominent homeschool advocate Michael Farris is arguably the holdup to the Senate signing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Last week he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, arguing that the Senate should not ratify the treaty because doing so would limit parents’ rights to make decisions for their children and ultimately have a negative effect on homeschooling—even though Farris is essentially the only one to interpret the treaty in this way. When the Senate signs a treaty, it often also has to pass new laws for implementation, which will put the treaty into effect. This is not the case with the CRPD, because the CRPD itself is based on the Americans with Disabilities Act, which is already a part of U.S. law.
Farris denies that this is the case: he believes that ratifying the CRPD will inexorably lead to changes in US law.
During his testimony, he cited references to Henkin and Van Bueren, whose arguments he claims the Senators have neither read nor even considered. But the problem here is not the Senate: it’s Farris.
Out of my desire to understand his reasoning, I looked up Farris’s citations and read them in their original context. What I found was stunning: the simple reality is that Farris took both Henkin’s and Van Bueren’s statements out of context and misapplied them to his own twisted legal theory. By citing each quote out of context, Farris was able to, as Senator Menendez said, take “a noncontroversial statement and twist it into something that’s rather sinister.”
The very basis of Farris’s protestations against the CRPD, then, is a lie.
The Henkin Citation
In his opening statement, Farris quoted this line by Louis Henkin:
[…] the United States apparently seeks to ensure that its adherence to convention will not change or require change in US laws, policies, or practices, even when they fall below international standards. […] Reservations designed to reject any obligation to rise above existing law and practice are of dubious propriety: if states generally entered such reservations, the convention would be futile. […] Even friends of the United States have objected to its reservations that are incompatible with that object and purpose and are therefore invalid. The United States, it is said, seeks to sit in judgment on others but will not submit its human rights behavior to international judgment. To many the attitude reflected in such reservations is offensive. The conventions are only for other states, not for the United States.
Louis Henkin.
Note the bracketed ellipses.
For those readers unfamiliar with academic conventions, an ellipsis is used to indicate that text has been left out of a longer text. This is why a movie critic can write a review saying “this movie was no fun or good, you should stay home and spend the money for your family’s tickets on a new couch” and the movie producers can run an ad saying the critic said “fun…good…for your family”. Ellipses can disguise or hide what someone really said. Always take note when you see lots of ellipses.
Farris’s usage here was less egregious than the hypothetical movie producer’s ad, but did leave out important context. The full context of what Henkin said is found in an article he authored titled “U.S. Ratification of Human Rights Conventions: The Ghost of Senator Bricker,” published in The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 89, No. 2 (Apr., 1995), pp. 341-350. If you have access to JSTOR, you can read it here. The words Farris left out are in bold.
By its reservations, the United States apparently seeks to assure that its adherence to a convention will not change, or require change, in U.S. laws, policies or practices, even where they fall below international standards. For example, in ratifying the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the United States refused to accept a provision prohibiting capital punishment for crimes committed by persons under eighteen years of age. In ratifying the Torture Convention, the United States, in effect, reserved the right to inflict inhuman or degrading treatment (when it is not punishment for crime), and criminal punishment when it is inhuman and degrading (but not “cruel and unusual”).
You can see why Henkin—again, a leading human rights lawyer—would be rather appalled at the US ducking such a provision, which is indeed contrary to the “object and purpose” of the treaty. (Indeed, the Supreme Court later prohibited capital punishment for persons under the age of eighteen in 2005’s Roper v. Simmons.)
Farris admitted that while the context was different, Henkin’s “principle was applicable” to the treaty at stake. This is denying a rather major contextual change. The main difference between Henkin’s argument in 1995 and Farris’s argument in 2013 is that when ratifying the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the United States used a reservation in order to create a loophole, thus allowing the US to continue to execute juveniles under the age of 18 who were convicted of capital crimes. There is no such similar loophole being created by any proposed reservations to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Farris may genuinely believe that the reservations create such a loophole, but Farris also has a rather idiosyncratic view of both the phrase “the best interests of the child” and the purpose of the UN that is not reflected in mainstream thought and would not be supported by Henkin.
Furthermore, the issue remains: why cite Henkin? Henkin’s legal opinion is that the US should ratify treaties with fewer reservations in order to increase accountability to other UN member nations and that the US should enact legislation that would bring it to the same human rights standard as other foreign nations. Farris, who wishes to “enact an amendment to the Constitution so the demogogues [sic] in Washington DC can never again subject this nation to the duty to follow the law of the United Nations”, clearly does not wish to cede any type of sovereignty or oversight to the UN. He certainly would not want the US to follow the same kind of homeschooling lawscurrently practiced by Germany. It is very strange that Farris would be citing Henkin’s views on this one particular issue even as he admits that he disagrees with the substance of Henkin’s views, as well as with the conclusions that Henkin draws: Henkin thought that the US should stop using RUDs to duck responsibilities to foreign nations, while Farris would apparently prefer that the US stop signing treaties altogether.
(Perhaps Farris is regularly sloppy, or perhaps he’s just not very good with details, but it’s interesting to note that not only did Farris misspell Henkin’s name twice in his written brief, he also continually referred to Henkin in the present tense during his testimony. He did not seem to realize that Professor Henkin had passed away in October 2010. In contrast, Senator Menendez properly referred to Henkin using the past tense, and noted that not only would Henkin be in favor of the treaty, the human rights institutions that Henkin had founded and participated in also support ratification of the treaty.)
The Van Bueren Citation
Geraldine Van Bueren.
I earlier mentioned Farris’s idiosyncratic views on the phrase “the best interests of the child.” It’s certainly one he uses often; he referred to it six times during his testimony. In Farris’s view, this phrase is the smoking gun that reveals the perfidious nature of the UN treaty and its sinister aim to steal children from their parents’ authority and place them under the government’s control. His citation for this claim is always the same quote from Geraldine Van Bueren, which he cites as “Geraldine Van Bueren, International Rights of the Child, Section D University of London, 46 (2006).
Best interests provides decision and policy makers with the authority to substitute their own decisions for either the child’s or the parents’, providing it is based on considerations of the best interests of the child.
This is clearly a passage that has imprinted on Farris’s brain, as he cites this exact quote in eight different documents on ParentalRights.org (in addition to citing various other quotes from different sections of the same document of Van Bueren’s).
Like the previous quote from Henkin, it is incomplete and taken out of context.
I found a more complete version of Van Bueren’s quote in her 1995 work, “The International Law on the Rights of the Child,” on page 45—46, in a section called “The New Principles of Intervention.” The fuller context of the quote, which I located, makes it clear that Van Bueren is providing a historical overview of the way that the best interests standard has been applied, rather than stating the definitive legal view of the position.
Although the best interest of the child is common in domestic legislation it is not expressedly incorporated into many major human rights instruments. So, for example, neither the European Convention on Human Rights nor the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights includes any such reference. This is partly because the rights approach of human rights treaties is at odds with the traditional welfare approach of best interests which undermines the child’s autonomy. Therefore, the inclusion of best interests of the child in a rights treaty, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, suggests that this traditional concept has been remoulded. In its broadest application the principle is articulated in article 3(1) of the Convention, which provides that, “In all actions concerning children whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration.” [ . . . ]
As has been frequently observed, although the question is viewed from the child’s best interests, the answer is frequently given from an adult perspective. Best interests provides decision and policy makers with the authority to substitute their own decisions’ for either the child’s or the parents’, providing it is based on considerations of the best interests of the child, Thus the Convention challenges the concept that family life is always in the best interests of children and that parents are always capable of deciding what is in the best interests of children.
Farris may not agree with this expanded version any more than he agrees with the limited quote he has been using, but by placing Van Bueren’s quote in context, it’s clear that she is discussing the way that one specific convention—the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC)—uses the phrase “the best interests of the child”. And in fact, an unbiased look at the full context of Van Bueren’s work would show that, far from Farris’s view of a static and nefarious concept, Van Bueren argues that the phrase “best interests of the child” is not a “legal term of art” but rather an evolving legal concept that has been interpreted differently over time by various conventions on human and child rights.
(Since Farris also opposes the ratification of the CRC, it is worth including a short parenthetical on that treaty. Contrary to Farris’s assertions on the subject, the CRC actually supports the child’s right to be raised by his or her parents and includes numerous other provisions on the importance of parental involvement and decision-making in children’s upbringing. Yes, the CRC challenges the idea that parents always know what is best for their children—and the existence of abusive and neglectful parents suggests that this idea very much needs to be challenged—but it does not in fact make children wards of the state as Farris would have his followers think. For more, see this fact sheet published by UNICEF.)
The attentive reader will wonder why I am using a different text than Farris did for this quote.
The answer is quite simple: the book that Farris cites does not exist.
Van Bueren has never published a book called “International Rights of the Child”, nor does she list any books published during the year 2006. Searching for the same citation that Farris used in his written testimony only turns up documents on his website ParentalRights.org, or articles referring positively to Farris and his views. Indeed, I may be the first person ever to check Farris’s citation for accuracy.
I suspect, though I cannot outright prove, that instead of citing Van Bueren’s work directly, Farris is citing a study guide from a class he took for his distance-learning LLM.
The circumstantial evidence for this conclusion is very great. The program that Michael Farris has likely enrolled in can be found here, and it advertises as a selling point that the programs “have been developed by academics within Queen Mary and UCL Law departments.” Van Bueren is a professor at Queen Mary College at the University of London, and a course called “International Rights of the Child” is listed in the course catalogue for the distance-learning LLM (page 40). The required text for the class is a book written by Van Bueren. The class is broken down into four sections labeled A, B, C, and D, which matches the citations Farris uses throughout ParentalRights.org. While I was not able to locate the study guide for Section D, I did find a study guide for Section C, which seems to be a summary of Van Bueren’s earlier work. It appears that Van Bueren took part in preparing or at least approved the adaptation of her previous work into modules for the course offered by the University of London, which would explain why an identical sentence shows up in two works dated 11 years apart.
I have reached out to Michael Farris on his Facebook page and asked if he could clarify his sourcing for the Van Bueren quote. He has not yet responded to me, though he has posted several links since I asked. I would welcome any clarifications he can provide, and I’m sure Libby Anne would give him space to reply to this and the other questions I’ve raised.
It is not clear to me that Farris is deliberately twisting the context of Van Bueren’s quote, at least not in the same way that he knowingly used Henkin’s quote to apply to a different situation than the one Henkin intended. It is entirely possible that Michael Farris, while doing the required coursework for his online LLM degree from the University of London, stumbled upon the truncated quote he cites so regularly in his articles. If the quote appeared on its own when placed in the study guide, he may not have realized the greater context of the quote, and thus may have interpreted it as a prescriptive guide for using the phrase “best interests of the child”, and not as a descriptive definition given at one point in time, by one particular convention on children’s rights. If this is so, then Farris, like many graduate students before and after him, simply skipped doing the further required reading. In this scenario, he is guilty of doing only the bare minimum reading in order to graduate, rather than being guilty of the odiousness of deliberately and repeatedly twisting the context of the quote in order to further his own agenda.
Or, as he did to Henkin, he understood the context of Van Bueren’s quote, but deliberately took her words out of their original context in order to mislead others.
In both cases, he has committed the very great sin of improperly citing an unpublished study guide or course module as though it were a published book, incidentally making it very difficult for anyone to find the original citation. It’s almost like Farris felt he had something to hide.
And while it is a great rhetorical device to cite the direct and unvarnished words of your opponent—the observant reader will note my fondness for the tactic—it works best when you understand your opponents’ arguments. Farris does not understand Van Bueren’s text, and is willfully misapplying Henkin’s argument. His appeals to authority and expertise are thus invalid.
Conclusion
Now let’s return to Farris’s testimony last week.
Farris said on his facebook page afterwards that giving his testimony to the Senate “wasn’t really any fun.” I must admit, tearing apart Michael Farris’s flimsy excuses for a legal argument has been great fun for me, though I do worry it is unsporting to be fighting a battle of wits with someone who shows every indication of having arrived unarmed.
Here’s the real problem, though. For all my snark here? Farris has won. And he is continuing to win.
Farris may have made himself look like a fool in front of the Senate, but he has shifted the Overton Window of homeschooling policy.
We are unable to talk about ratifying a treaty on the disabled—a treaty which we are already following all of the requirements of—without multiple reassurances that homeschooling will remain unrestricted. These are completely unrelated topics and they should never have been conflated in the first place. The only reason we are talking about them together now is because of the twisted and outright false legal reasoning of a man who cannot string a sentence together about why homeschooling and disability are being discussed together without resorting to fallacies, and a man who hours afterwards is already trumpeting how persecuted he was. He cannot tell the truth about an event, even when the Senate session is broadcast exposing him for what he is.
On his Facebook page, Farris posted the following:
The shots were cheap and it wasn’t really any fun.
But here is the point. When the left stoops to these kinds of tactics, it is a sign of two things:
1. They have no effective answers to the substance of my arguments.
2. I am having an impact.
I hope that these blog posts have demonstrated to you that there are indeed very effective arguments for Farris’s arguments, and that Senators Boxer, Durbin, and Menendez used them well during the committee hearing. But I cannot deny the truth of Farris’s second assertion. He is having an impact. He has an agenda. And he has been using the members of HSLDA to implement that agenda.
It is long past time to take control away from the abuser.
In the same Facebook post I cited above, Farris claimed that “the left” is targeting certain Republican senators who have previously voted against the treaty and ask them to change their vote. It’s now long past time for the left—and the center, and the right—to do just that. On PBS’s Newshour, Senator Menendez said that he counts 61 votes affirmed for the treaty, including Democrats, Republican, and Independents. For the Senate to pass the treaty, he needs 67. You can—and should—get involved. It’s as simple as picking up your cell phone.
To quote Farris himself in a fashion he may agree with, “If we let [Farris] get away with these tactics—our movement, indeed our country is doomed.” Truer words.
HA note: The following story is written by lungfish, a formerly homeschooled ex-Baptist, ex-Calvinist, ex-Pentecostal, ex-Evangelical, ex-young earth creationist, current atheist, and admin of the Ask an Ex-Christian web page.
“I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth.“ Revelation 3:15-16
Some Christians come to the faith by using God to overcome a hardship in their life that they believe to be too difficult to overcome on their own. Others come in reaction to an extreme emotional response to the message of salvation. But when the hardship is overcome and the emotion fades, many of these Christians often return to their secular lifestyles and push God to the back of their minds.
This was never an option for me.
My indoctrination had caused my mind to be engulfed in a sort of monothematic delusion. A monothematic delusion is a delusional state that concerns only one particular topic. Victims often do not suffer from any obvious intellectual deficiency nor do they have any other symptoms. For my entire life, everyday, from morning to night, I was surrounded by Jesus. Morning devotionals were followed by seven hours of Christian themed home school curriculum. The walls in our home were covered in Christian themed posters and, every evening, I took part in a second devotional. All of which, plunged me deeper and deeper into this delusion that almost nothing could pull me out of.
Somatoparaphrenia, a type of monothematic delusion, is a delusion where one denies ownership of a limb or an entire side of one’s body.
As a Christian, I had extended this denial of ownership to my entire being.
I was clay in the hands of the Maker who could shape me as He pleased. I believed that life was a test of hardships and, as long as I stayed faithful, God would never put me through more than I could handle. It was this belief, along with the fear of hellfire and the pain it might cause others, that kept me from ending my life the many times I considered doing so as a Christian. In this sense, the same delusion that was destroying me also saved me. But it trapped me in a state of mind that kept me from healing or seeking help – even though I sometimes realized there was something wrong. And, ultimately, against all reason and observations of reality, it caused me to form for myself a sort of personal cult that no one else was a part of based on the doctrine of Christianity.
When the Calvinist mission church disbanded, we returned to the Baptist church we had previously attended; but I continued to attend private school in an Evangelical church. I was in for grade and loved school. I loved the friends I made. Nothing was more important to me. I was the class clown and came to be listed in the yearbook as the best friend of every boy in the class. But this period of my life was short lived. Half way through my fifth grade year, my mother had an argument with the class room teacher. She pulled me out at the end of the month and I began homeschooling again. I was devastated. At such a young age, when your social life is dictated by your parents, it became difficult to keep in touch with the friends I had made.
I retained only one of those friends.
By this time, my older brother had moved out of the house. I was now the oldest boy in the house, so my mother began to confide in. The continuing arguments between my parents were now almost always followed by my mother furiously stomping up the stairs. She would come to my room and angrily complain for hours about how terrible she thought her life was. She would often curse God while she talked to me – saying that God was in heaven laughing at her and that she was like an ant and God a mean kid with a magnifying glass.
I hated when she said those things.
I would frequently have mental breakdowns while she complained and my muscles would tense to the point of sharp pain in my neck and shoulders – a coping mechanism known as somatization. I tried my hardest to hide my pain because I thought it was my responsibility to listen my mother.
I often cried myself to sleep afterwards, escaping into the headphones of the Walkman radio that I hid between my mattresses. I was not allowed to listen to music, whether it was secular or Christian. Satan was the angel of music before his fall from heaven and, therefore, music was his preferred method of influencing people. But music was my only comfort. My mother eventually found the Walkman and took it away – claiming that I wanted to listen to this music because I was possessed by demons.
The pastor of our current church arrived at our door the next day and they performed an exorcism on me and on my bedroom.
“And these signs shall accompany them that believe: in my name shall they cast out demons; they shall speak with new tongues.“ Mark 16:17
During my sixth grade year we switched churches once again – this time, to a small Pentecostal church. The passion of the people at this church was sometimes over whelming to me. They had such an outward desperation for Jesus that I had never witnessed before. After all the time spent in the Baptist church, singing stiff, slow moving hymnals to a single organ, I had become a very reserved in worship. I often become sick to my stomach when trying display such outward emotion myself. My inability to raise my hands, dance, and cry while worshiping, like everyone around me, made me angry at myself. I thought I did not have enough faith or I was subconsciously ashamed of my relationship with Jesus Christ. But I often cried out in desperation and worship for Jesus alone at night – trying to overcome this barrier.
I also had never felt compelled to speak in tongues and I did not have visions like many members of the congregation did. At this church, we believed that interpretation of tongues and personal visions were God’s method of communication to the most faithful among us. One vision that I remember was had by the pastor’s daughter. She claimed that she saw a beast hovering above the city. This beast had thousands of tentacles with which he controlled people and daily events in the city.
The name of our city was an old Native American word that meant ”place of evil” – so we believed her.
When I was fifteen, my youth group at this church attended a small Pentecostal Christian youth summer camp. Worship at this camp was the most emotional experience of my life. As the music played, everyone raised their hands high in the air without exception. Everyone would stand on the highest tips of their toes, sobbing until red in the face, bouncing on their knees, springing their bodies inches from the ground. It was as if Jesus was hovering above them, just out of reach, and all it would take is one single touch of His garments by the very tips of their fingers and they would be whole – but they were too exhausted to jump high enough to reach Him. Everyone worshiped this way – except for me.
I was petrified of worshipping in this environment.
After some time, a camp leader noticed that I did not worship like the rest of the youth and began pressuring me to do as they did – as if my outer state was a reflection of my inner state. Afraid of being judged, I gave in easily. That is when a song with lyrics about jumping for Jesus began. We were all encouraged to jump and spin in circles. After a few minutes of this, I came down hard on my ankle. I could no longer stand so, I sat down. A camp leader noticed and approached me. He asked me what was wrong and I told him that I think I had sprained my ankle. He laid hands on me and prayed for healing. I felt a warm sensation enter my leg. It moved down past my ankle and seemed to leave through my toes. The pain was gone. I looked up and quietly announced that I was just healed. Everyone cheered and congratulated me for having such faith. But, I did not feel the joy that should be felt in a moment like this. Instead, I felt only confusion.
I did not feel in the least like I was touched by the divine hand of a god.
I wondered if I had even hurt my ankle at all. I wondered if I fabricate the pain in my mind because I did not want to jump – and then I fabricate the healing. I knew that there should be more to a healing than this empty feeling that it seemed to leave me with. As the week-long camp came to an end, people congratulated me on my faith once again as I sat in the big blue youth group van window looking down towards them. They spoke of the encouragement they received from witnessing the strength of my faith and my healing. I did not know what to say- so I just thanked them for their words. I didn’t want to spread false claims of healing, so I filed the event to the back of my mind and never spoke of it again.
Upon returning home, I began to become fed up with my life of homeschooling and being witness to my parent’s broken marriage. After constantly begging my mother to allow me to return to school, she made me a deal. The local high school had a program that allowed homeschoolers to send their children to two hours of classes that might not otherwise be available through home school curriculum. I signed up for this program and my mother, sure that I would not enjoy the experience, agreed that, if I still wanted to attend full time public school at the end of that academic year, I would be allowed.
At the same time, I began a courtship with one of the girls at church and we became very close. We often heard from the adults that she and I would likely be married someday. We spent the majority of our free time with each other. I arrived at school early every morning that entire year to spend time with her and people I had met from around my neighborhood. My house had become the neighborhood hangout and my front yard was filled with kids skateboarding and just hanging out every day.
“Do not be bound together with unbelievers; for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness?”II Corinthians 6:14
The year was coming to an end and I told my mother I wanted to attend school full time the following year.
She became furious.
She determined that it was because of this girl and the unbelieving kids from the neighborhood. She told me that I could not see any of them anymore and we once again switched churches. I did not want to fight my mother, but I did not want to give up my friends. I wanted to be a good Christian and I wanted my mother to be proud of my spirituality – so I decided to give up my friends. But I became very distressed. I started failing exams for the first time in my life. My mother saw my failing grades and began to accuse me of being on drugs. That is when something snapped in my mind. I began to have difficulty holding onto basic thoughts, I began to forget basic vocabulary while speaking, and I my short term memory began to fail – especially under stressful conditions.
This is a condition known as dissociation amnesia.
However, I did not have plans to stop seeing this girl with whom I had become so close. We were both Christians and I did not believe I could be influence negatively by our relationship. When I was with her, I did not feel as lonely and isolated as I had come to feel everywhere else. But, for over a month, she did not answer her phone when I called or come to her door when I knocked. Eventually, I received a package from her. It contained every gift I had ever given to her. A letter was also inside. It read that she believed I had betrayed her. She thought it was my decision to cut off our friendship. She told me that she was glad our friendship was over and accused me of corrupting her Christian walk.
I did not know what she meant.
I tried to find her and explain what really happened – that my mother thought us unequally yoked and it was her, not I, that was trying to separate us. But rumors about our breakup were spreading faster than I could reach her. I heard a new lie about us almost every day. She accused me of breaking into her email and sending all her friends hate mail – which I did not do. At the beginning of the next school year, I was homeschooled full time again. Alone in the solitude that homeschooling had become for me, I retreated within myself.
I became a stranger to everyone I knew and no one would hear from me for over a year.
Homeschoolers Anonymous 