My earliest childhood memories are all good. Playing “cave spelunking” in our basement with my dad and siblings, the big climbing tree in our backyard, playing Indians with shell-face-paint at the beach with my cousins, going fishing with my dad, capturing fishflies and keeping them as pets: a collection of small childhood pleasures like those most of us have stored away in memory somewhere. I liked my early childhood. It was good. I liked my family. My life was safe and happy, and I don’t take those two things lightly! By some odd quirk of personality, I was one of those kids that lived to please. I was not only happy to do my own chores but other people’s as well, and I used to get scolded for using up whole boxes of Kleenex to wrap miscellaneous small things to give as gifts to all and sundry (no laughing, Kleenex is the imaginative child’s wrapping paper!) My mom would call me “her little sunshine”, and I think in many ways I was my parent’s golden child. My older sister, R, was a free spirit, quite mischievous, with just enormous quantities of energy that she had to expend every waking moment! She was in constant motion for at least 8 straight years. With such an energetic first child, having a second-born who was quiet and lived-to-please must have seemed like a godsend to my parents! My little brother B, who arrived two years after I did, took after my older sister. So that made it two to one and probably wore my parents out good and proper, while making my halo glow even brighter by comparison!
I was probably about 6 when I came to the dawning revelation that my eagerness to please and do things for everyone was leaving me with quite the unequal work load.
I would make my own twin bed in the morning…then my sister’s…then my brother’s…then my parent’s big double-bed, which was quite a feat for a small 6-year-old! I was also a budding perfectionist, so sometimes I just re-did everyone else’s work after they did it, just so it could be done better, to my own strict and exacting standards. In retrospect I sound rather obnoxious, even to myself! In any case, I noticed that I was the one always getting asked to help with everything, while my sister and brother got out of work by virtue of complaining. My good nature was being taken advantage of! This unpleasant discovery rankled in my small soul. I decided it was unfair, and from now on, I was just going to do my own work and no-one else’s.
I always looked at this decision as the moment when I started to “go bad”. I don’t know if I remember the exact moment or not, but it was kept fresh in my memory, because my mom was always asking me about it, for years and years afterwards. “Do you remember the day you decided to stop being sweet and helpful?” she’d ask, sighing a little. “You used to be such a sweet little girl.”
She would heave another sigh, and then ask, “Do you remember why you decided to stop being sweet and good? Did Satan talk to you, and put that idea in your head? That was when you turned into a selfish girl.”
I think this was just my mom’s way of complaining for the good ol’ days when she had at least ONE easy child to deal with. But at the time it instilled all sorts of guilt in me and left me wondering if I had, indeed, made a pact with Satan that day, because certainly I didn’t act as nice afterwards. This actually became a major point of doubting my own salvation for me, because I had “said the sinner’s prayer” at the ripe old age of 3, and wasn’t I supposed to keep getting better and better after I was saved? But here I was, turning selfish and bad at the age of 6, when I should instead have been comfortably far down the road of righteousness! These doubts and guilt plagued me for years; I’m sorry to say. I always think one should explain salvation a little better, even to young children, so they don’t fall into these sorts of theological pitfalls. Over-simplistic theology definitely never helped me as a child, and I bet I’m not the only one. Anyway, after I “turned bad” at the age of 6, I went on still enjoying my life despite being the selfish little sinner that I now knew I was. Then, when I was about 7, we met Joe and Mary LaQuiere.
CC image courtesy of Flickr, Pedro Szekely. Image links to source.
Pseudonym note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Tirzah” is a pseudonym.
I was homeschooled my entire life. As were all my brothers and sisters. I actually don’t mind at all that I was homeschooled. I enjoyed it, a lot. As an educational method I think it can be remarkably effective, giving children an unhindered environment to learn at their own pace and truly develop their own talents.
That being said, I still feel compelled to write and share my story. It’s not as bad or traumatic as some, but not as happy and rosy as others.
A few years ago my mother looked at me with a mournful and wistful look and sadly asked, “What happened to us? You used to trust me and confide in me so much, then when you were about 11 that all changed. Why did you stop trusting me?”
I didn’t know how to answer that at the time.
I was still sorting through my childhood and I genuinely believed that the change our relationship had taken was somehow my fault. I didn’t think it was all my fault, but surely a large portion of it was mine, because my mom loved me, and I was the one who was annoyed by her.
My family is LDS (you know, those controversial Mormons?). As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints we have a doctrine that is distinct and very very different from any evangelical Christian denomination. But for a family that wants to homeschool for religious reasons back in my day there really weren’t any LDS oriented curriculums. So my parents did what many Mormon homeschoolers did: they branched out.
Abeka was the first inclusion I can remember. The books were vaguely creepy to me, with randomly placed Bible verses that had no bearing at all on whatever the subject matter was. Gradually more items worked their way in. Books about Amish and Mennonite children who learned valuable life lessons about greed, vanity, and perfect immediate obedience. They were also creepy, but I loved to read so I read them occasionally out of sheer boredom.
My dad was extremely abusive. He was large, frightening, and he thrived off of intimidating people. Especially us. He kept my mother in a constant state of fear and desperation, so as very small children we were largely unmonitored, my mother desperately cleaning one room after the other as we moved through like a storm of tiny Tasmanian devils. My mother eventually gathered the courage and resources to leave him and she gained full custody of all of us in the divorce. I came out of that experience with some deep rooted trust issues with men. I didn’t want to be left alone near any man.
My mother didn’t help in that matter, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
Now a newly single mother my mom faced a lot of pressure to put us in school. She didn’t feel like that would be the right thing, so she figured out ways to make money while staying at home. She also needed to figure out how to undo the years of bad habits we had learned when it came to our cleaning habits. And that is when she discovered the Pearls and their masterpiece of parenting wisdom “To Train Up a Child”. Suddenly her mind was opened- children were like horses who needed guidance and careful training, who needed to learn instant compliance in order to learn obedience to God. If they didn’t receive that training then their souls would be in peril and they would wander off into the lost paths of darkness, and be pulled into the hedonistic world of Babylon.
I got the horse analogy a lot as a child and teen. I was the oldest at home, my older brother having been sent off to live with our father, and as the oldest she not only needed me to be the example, but to also make me the example. So I got lots of switchings. Sometimes it was a switch, others a belt, once a wooden spoon but she broke that on me. Then I was in more trouble because I made her break the spoon.
I had no privacy for my thoughts. “Murmuring” was not tolerated, because Laman and Lemuel murmured (book of Mormon people) and that ended up creating an entire civilization that rejected God. I wasn’t allowed to feel any anger towards her for the sudden changes in my life, and anything but perfect respect and admiration was unacceptable.
My mom didn’t use the spanking philosophy for long, she couldn’t bear to continue to inflict bodily harm on her kids (gee, I wonder why…..) but the attitude and mentality behind it remained. Seemingly overnight I had gone from being decently self sufficient and independent to being unbearably incapable and never to be trusted. The siblings that I had spent my entire life protecting from my father and mentally ill brother suddenly needed to be protected from me. Suddenly I was a pathological liar who bullied and harmed them out of spite and malice. I was never to be believed, because I was older and bigger, and they all told the same story. My younger brother was the perfect and honest one who would never lie to her… Only me. I was the liar, I was too rebellious, too unruly. I was leading my siblings astray.
I was always made to feel self conscious of my body.
My mom once pulled me aside at the public swimming pool to inform me that any time I stepped out of the pool I needed to wrap the towel around my waist because men might think my legs were really sexy. I was only 13, and wasn’t even close to puberty. Once at 17 a boy in my youth group cruelly called me a “corner girl” to hurt me, they all knew that I had never so much as kissed a boy, so that was an especially painful barb. When I told my mother about it, instead of defending me she told me it was because my shirt was too tight and they could see the curve of my breasts. We were always warned about sex, but never taught anything. It would lead us to immoral acts, and if I learned anything about it then I might say something to my siblings and that would cause them to be immoral too. Every decision I made had to be weighed against how it would affect them.
But her lessons on my responsibility as the oldest and the counseling we had received in our abuse survivors group sunk in, and not how she had hoped. I knew that it was my responsibility to teach “the youngers”, as I referred to them, how to move into adulthood in spite of my mom’s desire to go back in time and re-raise us. So I pushed on. I persuaded her to let me get an email account. She was very worried about allowing me on the computer, and told me that I could become addicted to pornography from the junk mail, or kidnapped by a stranger who would try to “get me” from the chat rooms. After establishing some rules I got one. Within a few years the others each has one as well. The same went with phone usage, then cellphone use, then Facebook.
Eventually I decided to serve a mission for our Church. But because it was several years before the age change our church recently had, it meant that I lived at home till I was in my 20’s to save money and prepare for my mission.
It was during that time period that my mom discovered the Christian Patriarchy movement.
She feel in love with the notion of “stay-at-home daughters” carefully protected and guided by their wise and loving parents. My mom had remarried by this time, and desperately wanted to take back the abuse and neglect we had receive from our biological father. What better way to do that then having sah-daughters? Oh she thought it was lovely and refined. But still unreasonably expected us to function as adults. But her vision of adult daughters was one of daughters who were wise enough to submit to their parents.
At the time I went along with it, but with a great deal of reservation. I tried to be humble and submissive and recognized that I was still living in their house so I needed to respect their rules. I worked for my step father and “contributed” to the family. Don’t get me wrong, I had some pretty decent perks as well, lessons in music and other sports that I valued highly, but it was still miserable.
CC image courtesy of Flickr, Lee Haywood. Image links to source.
Pseudonym note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Alianne” is a pseudonym.
We’re both in our twenties now, but my brother and I were homeschooled from elementary school through high school graduation. To put it simply, the entire experience was an absolute nightmare. However, it didn’t appear that way to other people nor did it appear like that on the surface of the image our mother and father tried to present to everyone.
When I was a child, people would comment on my writing or math skills and would give credit to homeschooling or my parents who happily bragged about it. But the reality was that my mother taught me absolutely nothing. She wasn’t even remotely skilled in either math or essay writing. I taught myself how to be very skilled with math and writing techniques, without any help from my parents whatsoever.
In my older brother’s case, the “education” he received was also absolutely zero and he didn’t fare as well as I did. Our parents rarely tried to help him, and hardly mentioned him or any skills he had to anyone, let alone bragged.
Our mother and father epitomized the braggadocio of homeschool parenting:
Always mention the “good” side that’s beneficial to them, and lie and stretch the truth of anything negative that would prove the opposite of the image they’re trying to present to everyone as truth.
Now that we’re older and we’re more capable of understanding what our mother and father really did to us, we’ve both realized that many of the common phrases and rationalizations that homeschoolers use simply aren’t true. To keep it simple, I’ll only post the main three misconceptions we came to realize:
1. Socialization:
Homeschool parents will use the excuses that their children are socialized because they join groups, have many activities, even have friends from public school, etc. However, parents will often neglect to mention the fact that in many families these activities only happen occasionally or just a few times per week. Many children don’t have any real interaction on a daily basis with other children and are only allowed to interact at the parent’s convenience, not in the way what the children really need.
My main point aside from that, though, is that many children are not being socialized properly or learning how to deal with regular social situations, or aka the “real” world. For example, the majority of the people my brother and I grew up around (we lived in a middle class, nice neighborhood, not a terrible one) had addictions, and were dangerous people who had many issues (although neither of us really recognized that until we were in our teens). Being surrounded by dangerous and unsafe people all day isn’t what I would call a safe, healthy, or normal environment for a child to grow up in, let alone the “real” world. Public school may be bad in some instances, but at least the kids will be surrounded mostly by other children (and also, not all public schools are huge terrible places of bullying or drugs/alcohol/sex, now that I’ve heard the stories of people who actually went to public school, I understand that) and not grown adult men and women coming off drug and alcohol highs first thing in the morning.
2. The parents know their children better than anyone:
No, many parents think they do, but they certainly don’t, and neither did our parents. I had anxiety issues and anxiety attacks all throughout my childhood, and was very shy until my late teens. In my brother’s case, although he was very social, he was bullied in elementary school, and had been a target for other children since the day he started. However, once we both reached late teens/adulthood, our issues went away for the most part. Why? Because we were away from our parents’ influence for longer periods of time than before, so their own anxiety and emotional issues no longer had any effect on us. We were both able to act normally for the first time in our lives.
So while our parents would have said that they knew we both had different issues and that’s why we had to stay at home, our issues came directly from being around them. So their decision to homeschool the two of us did absolutely nothing to benefit our lives. We honestly would have been far better off in public school and with two working parents.
In other words, forcing the child to become the main focus of the parents doesn’t necessarily help them to grow.
It may temporarily stop the problems and it may even help their education to an extent, but it won’t really help the child to deal with situations on their own terms. How can you have your own terms, when the belief system you have and everything surrounding you is dominated by your mother and father?
To be fair, I’m aware of the fact that public school can have the same negative effects on children. However, I’ve met plenty of people who went to public school and who aren’t monsters, drug/alcohol addicts or terrible people by default. Public school doesn’t force every child on the planet to have issues and problems. There are many kids who go to regular school and turn out perfectly fine, don’t have bullying issues, are extremely intelligent, very self-motivated, etc.
I realize people use those same justifications to homeschool, but what I’m trying to say is this: When a child goes off by themselves and isn’t surrounded by the parents’ influences all the time, they will be exposed to different points of view, not just their parents’ main dominating viewpoint. They’ll also have the opportunity to develop their own selves when they are away from their parents. Thus they have the opportunity to choose by themselves to not do dangerous and unhealthy things. By finally being away from our mother and father, my brother and I were able to make safe and healthy choices and set boundaries with other people by ourselves, finally, and for the first time in our entire lives.
Also, I’ve read horror stories online about children who want nothing more than to be homeschooled because the bullying is so severe. Some of their stories actually sounded very similar to what my brother went through. I’ve also seen firsthand the emotional and physical effects of what he endured from other kids. So I’m not naive regarding what can happen to children in public school systems, or dismissive of what happened to my brother in the slightest. However, I’ve also talked with him about it, and as a grown man in his twenties he completely agrees with me that the homeschooling was a horrible idea that helped neither of us. It was all for our parents’ emotional benefit.
Furthermore, as an adult he’s now perfectly able to stand up for himself and will tell people exactly how he feels about something, even if it’s rude, might incite people, etc. He’s able to do so because as he got older he handled people by himself, without our parents influencing everything 24/7 and learned how to deal with it. Our mother and father were both very weak people emotionally, and that definitely rubbed off on both me and my brother.
3. Homeschooled children are almost always better, more educated, and amazing awesome kids — especially compared to public school children:
No, that’s not even remotely true. There are sites and forums where you can read many of the stories from homeschooled kids who had miserable and dysfunctional childhoods. And to make it clear, I’m not just referring to the religious families. My family was semi-Christian and semi-New Age. My brother and I had never attended a church or sermon a day in our lives. My parents never forced religion on us in the slightest manner.
Also, most of the Homeschool/Unschool blogs you see on the internet are written and promoted by the parents. There aren’t very many positive blogs written by the children, because whether anyone wants to admit it or not, the majority of homeschooled kids aren’t happy or well adjusted in society, so they can’t write something that isn’t true. Yes, I have read stories from graduated homeschooled kids who say they were happy the entire time they were homeschooled. Yes, they might honestly have been.
However, to have the audacity to deny and pretend that there aren’t many, many homeschooled children living and interacting in dysfunctional families is absolutely ridiculous.
Of course, you could say the same for public school, but at least in that situation the children can actually get away from their households. Contrary to popular belief, they aren’t always places where the families get along wonderfully well, or the children are always happy to be around them. Homeschooling may seem to work very well for a young child, but I’ve never in my life met a homeschooled teen who was happy. Some of them would put on a facade and pretend they were, but once I got to know them… Well, I’ll just say drugs/alcohol/having sex at a young age/depression isn’t only for public school kids, not even remotely.
The parents might not be aware, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
Many of the blogging parents will exaggerate how awesome the homeschooling is and leave out all of the negative effects, or how the children really feel about everything. In our case, my brother and I were miserable 24/7, but our mother and father never mentioned that to anyone. We didn’t mention it, because we were afraid at how angry our parents would have been if we told the truth about how we really felt. Also, we felt very isolated; we interacted with public school kids too, but for the most part we knew that anything we said would eventually get back to our parents. Having a close knit community, or living where your parents schedule everything doesn’t exactly give a good opportunity to be honest about anything. And for the record, our parents weren’t extremists who did the forms of abuse found in many of the stories on Homeschoolers Anonymous. For the most part, they acted fairly normally and mainly just had social anxiety issues.
Yet my brother and I weren’t more educated in the slightest. The only reason I was able to even graduate highschool was because I used an online school program. My brother wasn’t able to get past highschool level, and so he suffered a lot academically as well. One thing I can’t stand more than anything else I see parents write on the homeschooling blogs, is how homeschooling takes so much effort. That’s not true in every case, and it’s certainly not true by default of being a homeschooling parent.
Both of our parents didn’t put in much effort at all for our education. Our father put in absolutely zero of any kind of effort, and left everything to our mother. She stayed at home, and I can honestly say that she would spend 8-10 hrs of her day watching television, and taught us absolutely nothing. Also, there are many other homeschooled kids with similar stories, who suffered a lot academically due to being homeschooled/unschooled.
On the other hand, I have read stories of successful unschool graduates who made it through college. So, I’m not denying the fact that it can be done. However, my point is that if a child can survive being homeschooled/unschooled and still make out okay, and doesn’t have any severe issues to deal with, then public school would be effortless for them, and in my opinion that’s where they should stay.
Finally, I understand that public school doesn’t work for children with special needs, or who have more extreme issues to deal with. However, I absolutely believe that (aside from children in very complicated situations), homeschooling should only be used very temporarily, and not ever seen as a permanent solution. You can solve some issues with homeschooling, but that doesn’t mean you should just stick to it for the rest of the child’s life. Whatever issues the children have will need to be dealt with eventually.
Hiding them from the world and people for the rest of their childhood doesn’t solve or fix anything.
Public school may not be seen as the “right” environment, but it’s the main environment the majority of people grew up in. So if they haven’t dealt with their issues, when they finally reach the adult world people will still be acting and functioning the same way they were before, so trying to pretend that doesn’t have any impact later on isn’t realistic. Most importantly, it keeps the children away from other opportunities and situations that could have actually been good, and far better than the homeschooling.
I was once one of God’s elect, chosen to come to Earth in these latter-days to usher in the Second Coming of Christ.
Now I’m a spiritual mutt, belonging to no religion, believing in no gods, and “speaking evil of the Lord’s anointed.” I’ve become exactly like Korihor, a Book of Mormon villain, who winds up smitten by God for his unbelief.
How did I fall so far? Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), of course.
The first time I heard about D&D, I yearned to play it. I was a homeschooled teenager with few friends. Even among my peers at church, I didn’t feel accepted. My one respite from constant loneliness was reading novels of fantasy and science fiction.
Dungeons & Dragons held an almost irresistible lure. Here was a game where you could pretend to be a different person. You could solve puzzles and explore mysterious and magical realms. It sounded perfect!
But D&D was forbidden. Like tarot cards, Ouija boards, and even ordinary playing cards, anything to do with magic or mysterious symbols was presumed to be imbued with evil forces. Wicked spirits clung to those D&D figurines, to the strange books and polyhedral dice. They lurked, waiting for a chance to creep into the minds of young people, to possess them, or worse — to drag them away from God and into a life of sin and sex, addiction, devil worship and human sacrifice (in roughly that order).
Such were the images of the game in my impressionable young mind: a collection of scripture fragments, urban legends and fearsome admonishments from my mother. The cover of the Player’s Guide revealed this truth: pictures of scary monsters! Scary things are evil. Because evil is scary.
I’d been told that D&D taught kids to cast actual spells. Someone was just bound to accidentally summon a demon; it only follows. As my mother always said, it’s all fun and games until someone joins a coven. (Then it’s just fun.)
D&D is the gateway drug to Satanism, I had no doubt.
The demonization of D&D started in the 1980s. Patient Zero is now thought to have been a woman named Patricia Pulling. The aggrieved mother of a teenaged suicide, Pulling blamed her son’s tragic death on a pretend curse which had been placed on his character during a role playing game he’d played at school. When her lawsuit against the high school was tossed, Pulling took a forty-hour course and became a private investigator. After much sleuthing, she discovered other murdered or suicided children who were also D&D gamers. With no other relief at hand, she resorted to the best possible course of action: write a pamphlet calling for a ban on make-believe-monster-slaying, fictional-spell-casting, and pedantic rules-lawyering with mysterious, multisided dice. (Does anyone even know what those things are for?!)
Al Gore had not yet invented Facebook, but mimeo’d copies of Pulling’s pamphlet spread like chicken pox at day care. Faster than you could click ‘Share’ on a cat-in-a-shark-suit-on-a-roomba meme, Pulling’s inventions became the one point of doctrine upon which Baptist, Catholic and Mormon moms could all agree.
Television networks broadcast credible-sounding news reports (like this 60 Minutes piece), saying that D&D caused suicide. They were ubiquitous enough that I saw at least one when it aired. The ‘logic’ usually went something like this: players became so involved with their characters that they lost all track of reality, and when their character died, they were left with no reason to live.
Or maybe, the deeply superstitious speculated, kids were actually being possessed by demons, who (for some reason), wanted to immediately kill off the host they’d just spent centuries trying to attract. Hey, you can’t expect demons to be any more logical than the religious leaders who invent them, right?
D&D remained forbidden fruit; just one more thing I wanted that I couldn’t have. Like wanting to stay up late enough to watch ‘Doctor Who’ on PBS. Or to date boys before I was 16. Or even to wear shorts in 105 degree summer heat.
Then life happened. I met a guy, and we got married. I got pregnant, then divorced, and I became the worst thing any Mormon girl could be: a divorced single mother. Divorced! I was used goods at the ripe old age of 20. All without so much as having ever rolled a natural 20. (Those cursed dice again! What are they for?!)
So there I was, a twenty-year-old with a wee baby on my hip. LDS singles who’d avoided me before my marriage now barely spoke to me. Afraid they might catch a bad case of divorce—or worse, sex!—people steered wide when we passed in the halls at church activities.
I needed friends.
My interest in science fiction drew me to RadCon, a fan convention. This outing would be risky: people would be playing D&D! By going, I’d place myself within temptation’s grasp. Burdened with the guilt of “crucifying Christ anew,” I went anyway.
Finally, after years of dreadful yearning, I walked among scattered tables festooned with nerds, stray game pieces, and cold pizza, trying to decide which would be my first tabletop role playing game.
Not D&D, of course. That was the Big One; a horror reserved for degenerates who’d surrendered to some demonic over-mind.
No. My first game would be something safe. To me, that meant science fiction. Fantasy games were inherently malevolent, with their wizards and monsters. But sci-fi would be totally okay.
No magic spells or demons; just robots and computers.
I lingered in front of the table for Cyberpunk 2020. Finally, I decided: This is the one. Nerves jangling with fear and excitement, I sat down. Immediately, my conscience screamed: This was the top of the slippery slope that I’d been warned about!
But I needed human connection. I needed a sense of belonging. I needed fun. So I played. And I had a blast. I connected. With people! People who liked me. People who didn’t make me feel like a freak.
I wanted more. But not D&D, no way! Rather, I found a weekly Shadowrun campaign with an open spot. It had trolls and elves and magic, but also guns and bombs and computer hacking. I felt fairly certain that the inclusion of technology would make it safe from the influences of the devil.
I almost lost my nerve. One dark night, in fitful prayer—the kind that Mormons call “wrestling with God”—I told the Lord that I was going to do this, because it made me happy. It was the one fun and fulfilling thing in my lonely, stressful and depressing life.
I was gripped by an overwhelming sense that I was about to cross a forbidden line. Was that the Holy Spirit, telling me not to go? Was he saying that this would separate me from God? Was it possible that I would surrender my soul to Satan, between rolling dice and downing potato chips?
I imagined a rope tied round my waist, the other end connected to God, as I jumped into the black pit of Outer Darkness. If things get out of hand, I told Him, you yank me back.
Then I willfully, pridefully (a dirty word, for a Mormon), joined the Shadowrun game.
After Shadowrun came SLA Industries, a far-future space cyberpunk game that was disturbingly violent and completely screwed up. No demons or magic there (psychic powers don’t count, right?), so I was still safe!
I’d heard about the Camarilla, a live-action role playing game. Players didn’t just sit around at a table; they dressed like their characters and walked around, interacting, pretending to be vampires, which had been a shameful fascination of mine since I was little. What could be more exciting? Or more risky? (Well, besides D&D.)
I joined the Camarilla, though I was very careful to play non-gothy characters. To be extra sure, I didn’t wear black. But I hung out with goths, and people who smoked and swore a lot. We listened to heavy metal music.
I made tons more friends.
Breaking the final taboo proved astonishingly easy. One evening, it just happened. I sat on a couch with friends and we played D&D. At this point, the cautionary tales seemed superstitious and silly. It was just fantasy role play, and there were far more hardcore games (I’d played them), and obviously there were no demons hiding under the odd misshapen dice. The worst thing I actually had to worry about were power gamers, with their obnoxious desire to kill everything in sight.
I was still a true-believing Mormon. Very much so. But now I had far more friends outside of the Church than in. This was a sin, in and of itself. Mormon youth and single adults are strongly “encouraged” to associate with other Mormons, and if you intended to make friends outside the Church, they should not be of the sort that came out of closets and wore T-shirts that said, “I only wear black till they make something darker.”
Worse, I’d met people from other faiths.
Not just non-Mormon Christians, either. There were Buddhists, Wiccans, and even a real-life Satanist.
They were all very nice people, who had interesting things to say. They tolerated my beliefs, and I tolerated theirs. They weren’t evil or scary. Not even the Satanist, in spite of his black fingernail polish.
I learned from them, which is even worse. The things they told me made sense. I discovered that prayers were answered for people of other faiths, too. Wiccans called this phenomena “magic,” but it didn’t involve summoning demons. In fact, aside from the addition of candles and incense, it didn’t seem all that different from my Mormon prayers. I learned Buddhists were really chill, relaxed, and very accepting of me. More accepting than most Mormons I’d met. Even the atheists were kind!
These people allowed me to be weird. For the first time in mylife, I could relax and be myself, talk openly about my interests, and even be liked for it.
Some part of me already recognized the true danger in role playing: exposing myself to “the world,” which tainted my mind with new ideas. Ideas that conflicted with, and even refuted, many LDS claims.
I made one last effort to get straight with God, to “Chose the Right” and rededicate myself to the Mormon Church. I still preferred the company of gamers and geeks, but God wanted me to find a righteous LDS husband. And I wasn’t going to find him among heathens. So returned to church, leaving most of my friends behind.
Only now I had something to compare my LDS life to. In stages, it dawned on me that I had never been happy at church. I’d never been worthy enough and I’d never had the kind of spiritual, uplifting experiences that I’d had with those supposedly “wicked” and “sinful” worldly people.
And I never would.
I wasn’t good enough for the Mormons, but I was good enough for the geeks. And I’d adopted a few of their beliefs. These were like tiny seeds, which I’d fit into the cracks that riddled the cinderblock wall of Mormonism.
From those seeds, green shoots sprouted, their roots prying against the foundations of my Mormon belief. In time, I discovered additional kernels, which fit those widening gaps in the LDS paradigm.
These new beliefs suited me better, and they were more compatible with facts and science. New thoughts lent me additional mental flexibility. Limber vines of reason began to eat at the brittle mortar of tradition, until eventually, the whole wall fell.
I no longer believed in God.
It could be said that my path out of the Church was inevitable. My heart never fit, no matter how closely I followed the Church’s commandments.
Perhaps D&D was merely a catalyst: the accelerant that sped the process of reframing my beliefs. But without it, without that window opening my mind to thoughts outside the stifling Mormon ideology, I might still be there, doing my best to pretend to be someone I’m not.
D&D led me down a path of temptation, until my heart became desensitized to the Holy Spirit, and I could no longer hear the gentle whisperings of God. Too late to turn back, I had been misled, brainwashed by the ways of the world. I am well ensnared in Satan’s grip.
Or so I would have once believed.
Today, I recognize that the path I took was one of liberation. By choosing to follow my heart in spite of the Church’s frightening conditioning, I made a saving throw that rescued me from decades of spiritual slavery.
So thank you, Gary Gygax, creator of D&D. Some might say that you summoned an elder demon, which is even now destroying the very fabric of American morality.
But in my story, you are the hero.
*****
Luna Lindsey
About the Author
Luna Lindsey Corbden was born into the Mormon Church and left the faith in 2001, at age 26. They now live in Seattle, WA and write about topics of interest to them, including psychology, culture, and autism. They also write science fiction and fantasy. When they’re not busy traveling to improbable worlds, or thinking hard about this improbable world, they’re enjoying life with their improbable family. Their new book, Recovering Agency: Lifting the Veil of Mormon Mind Control is available in e-book and print.
The Minnesota Association of Christian Home Educators (MÂCHÉ) brings you this collection of first-hand stories of more than a dozen homeschool pioneers. Sit down with a hot beverage and enjoy this conversational-style history of those who ventured to do what was considered less than legal and more than a little bit crazy. Learn why parents removed their children from public schools to educate them at home and how these pioneers fought for that right before local courts, district courts, the Minnesota Supreme Court, and in hearings before both the Minnesota House and Senate. Witness the birth of MÂCHÉ and its thirty years of growth and influence. Be informed, encouraged, and inspired by these mostly ordinary yet courageous people.
One of the “courageous” couples the book celebrates is Karl and Suzanne Solum. The Solums began homeschooling in Minnesota in 1982 (a year before HSLDA existed). In the book’s timeline of Minnesota’s homeschool “pioneers,” the Solums are the fourth family to begin homeschooling — so they are on the forefront of the pioneering. The Hoffmans write that the Solums “start homeschooling with a group before it’s legal and begin lobbying for legislation that would make homeschooling legal in Minnesota.”
The following is an excerpt from the Solums’ contribution to the book:
When we first started homeschooling in 1982, it was considered illegal to homeschool. Spring Grove Public School took one of the families of our Christian fellowship to court and charged them with truancy—we schooled as a group.
At that time, we decided as a fellowship to bring the superintendent and principal of Spring Grove to a few of the homes to show them the curriculum and prove the children were being educated and were well socialized. We also talked to them about our Christian convictions that led us to choose home education.
An attorney was hired to defend the family. On the basis of religious liberty, they won the case, which was watched by other counties because of all the people starting to homeschool.
…At that time, we joined Home School Legal Defense Association and Christian Liberty Academy, who both encouraged us and other Christians in Minnesota to lobby our state legislature for a homeschool bill that would make it legal to homeschool with the least possible restrictions.
Karl and his brother John were both at the Capitol at different times, talking personally to as many senators and representatives as they could.
The inclusion of the Solums might not be newsworthy except for one thing:
The Solums founded a high-control cult. That’s the aforementioned “Christian fellowship.” And now they’re in the news because they’re suing that cult.
Last week CBS Minnesota reported the following story: “Lawsuit Exposes Southern Minnesota Religious Group.” CBS reports that,
For 35 years, Suzanne and Karl Solum were members of a Christian ministry called Maranatha in Spring Grove, Minn. They pooled all their money with everyone else in the group but when they left six years ago, they wanted their share and sued. In a Houston County courtroom in June, they testified about decades of control, abuse, and deceit from the man known as the group’s shepherd.
Those decades of “control, abuse, and deceit” were dark and troubling. The group’s “shepherd,” a man by the name of Tom Tollefsrud, has been accused by former Maranatha members of “beatings and punishment,” creating “a hell they were afraid to escape,” and “breaking the jaw of one Maranatha member to ‘teach him a lesson.'” Claims of forced financial and medical decisions have also been made.
But the Solums were not passive participants in this high-control community — in other words, a cult. Beginning in the 1970’s, the Solums actively built the community.
According to the Post Bulletin, Tom Tollefsrud and John Solum (Karl’s aforementioned brother John, who would later lobby for homeschooling rights alongside Karl) “started the group in Spring Grove in 1972, basing it on a ministry founded in 1971 by a youth pastor in Kentucky.” Karl and Suzanne Solum got involved in 1978 (4 years before they started homeschooling.) According to CBS, after “Suzanne and Karl Solum helped start the group,” they “picked a close friend, Tom Tollefsrud, to be their pastor.” The community had shared values, which included homeschooling:
The families all lived in separate homes but by the rules Tollefsrud set, like to homeschool their children, share bank accounts, and involve him in every decision they made, from what furniture to buy to what to wear.
Fast-forward several decades. After eventually becoming isolated and upset by the direction Tollefsrud was taking the group, Karl and Suzanne left the cult in 2008. And they are now suing their former pastor to “secure property that they say is rightfully theirs given certain financial contributions and other considerations over the 35 years of which they were members of Maranatha.” (According to The Post Bulletin says, their legal battles have “spanned five years, two trials, 13 lawsuits, 26 defendants and hundreds of thousands of dollars.”) All of Karl and Suzanne’s children “remain a part of Maranatha Fellowship and testified against their parents.” Karl Solum mourned this fact in court, saying that, “I taught them how to read the bible, but I failed at teaching them to be their own men.”
All this information puts the Hoffmans’ and MACHE’s “Homeschool Pioneers” book in a different light, especially considering that this information has been publicly available and known for several years. The Hoffmans and MACHE neglect to mention any of this. (And so do the Solums in their contribution to the book — which is unfortunate, because some honesty and transparency about their life’s path and mistakes would go a long way here.)
It definitely sounds much better to read
Spring Grove Public School took one of the families of our Christian fellowship to court and charged them with truancy—we schooled as a group.
than to read
Spring Grove Public School took one of the families of our cult to court and charged them with truancy—we schooled as an isolated, high-control group that absolutely believed God talked to our leader.
It also sounds better to read
[Our fellowship] won the case, which was watched by other counties because of all the people starting to homeschool.
than to read
Our abusive, high-control cult won the case, which was watched by other counties because of all the people starting to homeschool.
Finally, HSLDA would definitely prefer
We joined Home School Legal Defense Association and Christian Liberty Academy, who both encouraged us and other Christians in Minnesota to lobby our state legislature for a homeschool bill that would make it legal to homeschool with the least possible restrictions.
to
We joined Home School Legal Defense Association and Christian Liberty Academy, who encouraged our abusive, high-control cult in Minnesota to lobby our state legislature for a homeschool bill that would make it legal to homeschool with the least possible restrictions.
Minnesota Association of Christian Home Educators probably doesn’t want it known that some of their celebrated “homeschool pioneers” founded a high-control religious sect that fostered and hid criminal abuse. Nor does HSLDA want their members to know that the Twelve Tribes isn’t the only abusive high-control group they have supported.
HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Mara” is a pseudonym.
Part One
I grew up the oldest of nine children just barely inside the perimeter of Atlanta, GA. My earliest memory is my father coming in and telling my mother that Clinton had just won the presidency. My mother had been a teacher by profession before deciding to homeschool us. She had grown up in the middle of downtown Atlanta and had been bullied in school. She told us stories of spending most of her lunch break hiding in a bathroom stall and didn’t want us to have the same experience.
I remember sitting next to her and her teaching me to read and doing math with me. We didn’t have much money then, and she would get what school books she could second hand. For this reason, she helped me complete a 5th grade math book in the first grade and I was so proud of being able to tell my friends I was in 5th grade in math. Because there were so many children, she would give us assignments – 30 math problems at the end of the chapter, write this a paper on this subject, finish the assignment at the end of the grammar book, bible, and memorize this verse. Then we would go read the chapter, teach ourselves, and come back to her if we couldn’t figure something out on our own. We were supposed to finish by 12:30 if we wanted dessert after dinner, but if we finished before then, we were free to play. After we ate lunch, we would do an art or craft and music (everyone in my family plays at least one instrument). Once we completed a school book, we would go to the next grade.
I used to get so confused when anyone asked me what grade I was in. (Well, 6th grade in math, 4th grade in grammar, and 5th grade in writing!)
If we finished future days school work, she would give us a coupon for a “free day” in which we could redeem at any time and meant we didn’t have to complete any school on that day. We did school through the summer so we could afford to take more days off during the school year and my mom assigned each of us a day of the week called our “helper day” in which we would cook the meal of the day (mine was bread for the week and pizza for the day), complete a chore, and do our laundry with our assigned child if applicable. The day following our helper days was our “computer day” in which we could do Oregon Trail, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, type our verse, and play Math Blasters instead of school.
My mother felt it was important for us to be well rounded and would call local public and private schools to see if we could participate in some of their activities. For this reason, we would either do some kind of sport all of us could do with either local groups she found or with schools. My mom took us to a few homeschool groups, I’m not sure why we never joined – either they charged a fee we couldn’t afford or my mom thought the women there were too cliquey and judgmental (based on the home-school program they used).
At this point in time, my father was in the marine reserves and would frequently travel for both work and the marines. I remember him and my mother arguing occasionally, but they waited until we were asleep and kept it to themselves. We ended up moving outside the perimeter, and went to several churches that my mother never felt were the right fit.
One day, through the big-family-connection (that sixth sense big, homeschooling families have that allows them to instantly know if someone else is a big, homeschooling family when they meet in public), my mom met a family that was part of a 1 Cor 14 home church and immediately fell in love with this type of church. They believed in “letting God decide how many children you have” a.k.a. no birth control. They also believed there women should have long hair “as a covering” while praying, they believed that women should submit to men and that men should love their wives. They believed in church discipline for anyone in “rebellion” to God’s will, and that women should “keep silent” in church. They also believed strongly that a woman should not teach a man anything and I remember being told time and time again, that I had to phrase anything I said to a man in such a way that he couldn’t learn anything from what I said.
Shortly after he finished the reserves and began working from home, I remember quite vividly at the age of 12 after about a year and half at this house church, being sat down in the living room with the current 6 brothers and sisters (2 weren’t yet born) and being told by my dad that mom was in rebellion and that the church was bad and wrong because he had had a disagreement with them over doctrine. My dad had been a sergeant in the marines and was every bit the stereotype.
I remember everyone in that room crying after a couple of hours of him repeating this again and again. I learned that day what the doctrine of Calvinism was. My great-aunt who had become my mother’s mother lived next door at that time and I remember going next door and seeing my mother crying. She told us she wasn’t in rebellion, that she was supposed to be under God’s authority when anything her husband told her conflicted with God. She said that the church is supposed to be run in the way 1 Cor 14 describes (no pastor, all the men talk, no women speaking) and because that little paragraph ends with “ If anyone among you think that he is a prophet, let him acknowledge that what I am writing to you is the Lord’s command” (v. 37), that going anywhere with a pastor would be a sin. We were told to stand up for our mother and go tell dad the truth.
For the next 9 years, we lived in a constant state of arguing. My dad would begin by dropping some remarks to my mother who would be all-too-happy to pick anything up and start an argument, which would lead to doctrine and a shouting match about our rebellion. The sister next to me and I would draw our father’s attention to us while the other one physically pushed my mother out the door to go cool down. She would go next door and fall apart crying and asking us if what she should do and if she should divorce our father. She would make hundreds of plans that fell apart by the next day and would ask anyone she could get a hold of to “help.” Every time we met someone new, within 5 minutes she would be talking about how abused she was at home and asking them to help.
My parents loved to get children on their side, because if they had a child, they could use them to hurt the other spouse.
The girls went with my mother and the boys went with my father. For a reward, my dad would take my brothers out for ice cream and movies and give them gifts to stay on his side and then taunt us asking if we were sure we didn’t want to come with him. I remember my dad having my brothers tape some of his rants on me – another debate on Calvinism – so that he could rewind it and play it to me in case I accidentally admitted to something that meant I believed in predestination and consequently his authority.
The NSA must have taken tips from my father. Nothing in our house was private.
There were key logs on all the computers, and he could watch the screen from his computer at any time. We found hidden cameras in the living room and, god-forbid you write something on paper. My mother used to journal in French before she met my dad and I remember my dad translating all her journals to use against her. If my dad found anything you had written in secret he would use it against my mother. Any failure on my part was a weapon against her. If she found anything, she would use it to guilt us and to help keep us on her side and taking care of her. I developed a secret code — a short-hand cipher — so that I could have thoughts that everyone couldn’t spy on and I only I could read.
As I’ve said before, I’m really growing weary of the charade I have to keep up in order to remain in the atheist closet. I had been talking to my fellow ex-fundamentalist bloggers on Twitter about whether I should come out to my sister, who has always been there for me throughout my life (she even helped to raise me as a young boy, long story there I won’t get into right now.
My sister, in recent years, has gone from the Independent Fundamental Baptist cult to what would be considered more mainstream beliefs in the fundamentalist/evangelical world (beliefs more along the lines of the Southern Baptist denomination).
I’m glad she’s out of the IFB. She fell into that group because of the influence of the IFB ran “school” I went to in my elementary years. She was there too — though, because of the age gap between us, she was in her high school years at the time, and fell prey to them pushing Hyles-Anderson College as a great place to go.
Still, I wish she would give up fundamentalism altogether, especially for the sake of her kids. Right now, she is homeschooling her kids with ACE.
I talk to my nephew and two nieces on the phone, and when I’m visiting her in northern Indiana. It kinds of breaks my heart to see how they just seem more childlike, than other children their age.
They do get to spend time with other children at their church, and with some young neighbors, but still, the isolation inherent in fundamentalist homeschooling is taking its toll. She doesn’t even realize it. She doesn’t realize the effects of that because she wasn’t home schooled herself.
I’m wondering that if in 10-15 years, I’m going to be getting that coming out call from one of her kids. She means well, and isn’t hostile or abusive towards her kids by any means, like our mother was. She just doesn’t know the difference. Really, it’s unfortunate. I wonder how many young fundamentalist mothers like her are out there.
I called her, and I just spilled it to her. I didn’t use the dreaded “A word” (Atheism). I didn’t know if that would distract from the whole conversation. She was surprised as I expected, and she said that it would have “blown her socks off if she was wearing them”.
I started from the beginning, from the nervous breakdown, being told that my depression was “guilt” and not having a “right relationship with god”, the unfortunate falling for that cruel lie, doubling down on Christianity, soaking up as much as I could about the Bible again, studying it and the works of various theologians, and eventually coming to realization that I couldn’t believe in it anymore.
It worried her to some extent, she seems to think that it’s just a time of questioning, despite me repeatedly telling her that it’s been 4 years now since I came to the conclusion that I can no longer believe. She told me to be sure before I eventually have to approach my mom and dad about this, and warned me about how that she is likely going to throw all she has been doing recently for me in my face.
She knows what my mom is like.
My sister had the worst end of the abuse growing up, because she was the only one willing to stand up to my mom.
I just tried to survive as best I could, staying out of her way, avoiding anything I knew would trigger her anger. Though it didn’t often work. She would invent any excuse necessary to take out her anger on us.
My sister doesn’t seem to understand what it going on, that this is not something I came to lightly. But the important thing is, she’s standing behind me. She has made it clear that she will stand behind me, even after this, and won’t let her beliefs get in the way of family.
In some ways, she can see how I reached this point. She said at times that he has questioned everything. She says at times she doesn’t feel as close to God as she used to feel, but she always ended up coming back.
I had told her, looking at it now, when I’m “undercover” in the church I am in, (the one I am a member of still, and have attended since I was 12), that I hear what people are saying around me, and I can’t understand how I possibly believed it in the first place. She said it was because that was all I ever knew from birth, had I been raised in another nation, the predominant faith there would have been all I knew.
In some ways she gets it, and in some ways she doesn’t. I hope that the more open I become with her, that it will help her gain more of an understanding of why I came to this point, and that it’s who I am now. I told her that I’m growing weary of all this, I can’t keep hiding who I am now, and that I’m not looking forward to dealing with my mom.
It really will show my mom’s character (or more than likely, lack thereof), when I finally come out to her. I could lose the financial help and help with rebuilding my house, and taking care of my dog that she is currently doing, which would be hard to deal with. But I can learn to cope, the rough road ahead will be worth it.
I want to finally be able to live openly — and if that means losing the relationship with my mother, or being forced to cut her out of my life for my own sanity, then that is worth it.
In fact, it sounds horrible, but that’s probably the best outcome in the end, the one that will help me to heal over time.
I wish my mom could be more like my sister, willing to accept me for who I am, even if she doesn’t understand it. In fact, I wish more families, and parents especially, would follow her example.
You don’t have to agree with your family members in order to love them, and if you are putting your faith, your dogma, over love for your family, it’s showing that your religion (or more than likely, your interpretation of it), is more important to you than the people you are supposed to love.
It reveals to me, especially if you are a parent, that you are using your faith as means to control and manipulate people, and that if your children/family members are rejecting that, then they are worthless to you as a human being.
If someone feels this way, then they are not someone I want in my life, and I have no respect for them at all.
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 can see my indoctrination clearly in each of Robert Jay Lifton’s Eight Criteria for Thought Reform. Most strongly in that of Milieu Control – “the control of information and communication both within the environment and, ultimately, within the individual, resulting in a significant degree of isolation from society at large.” And in Dispensing of existence – “the prerogative to decide who has the right to exist and who does not. This is usually not literal but means that those in the outside world are not saved, unenlightened, unconscious and they must be converted to the group’s ideology. If they do not join the group or are critical of the group, then they must be rejected by the members. Thus, the outside world loses all credibility. In conjunction, should any member leave the group, he or she must be rejected also.”
This was the normal for me when I was a Christian.
The world was, indeed, black and white, good and evil, and I had the fortune to be on the side of righteousness. Now that I see the world with different eyes, I am both ashamed that I once held to such a blind faith and frightened that countless people continue to be held by a doctrine that can so easily be proven false.
A common Christian reaction to a de-conversion story, such as mine, is to accuse the ex-Christian of being a prodigal who is only angry at God.
They believe that fallen Christian will always return to God because life without Him is purposeless and completely void of joy. They cannot understand a de-conversion because they have never experienced a de-conversion. No, I am not angry at God. Anger towards God is something I had never even considered. As a Christian, I believed that one does not have the right to be angry at their creator. I believed that God owned me and could do with me as He pleased. Any trial or tribulation I was put through was part of His plan and, even if I could not see how, He was making me better by it. I did, however, hold anger towards other Christians in my life for a time. People who I thought had wronged me because they could not keep their own sinful nature under control.
Now that I do not believe in God, I still hold no anger towards Him.
One simply cannot be angry at someone or something that he does not believe exists. I also hold no anger towards the Christians who wronged me. I view them only as deceived, repressed human beings. Human beings that bottled up their desires, their needs, and their functions until they burst into a spray of shrapnel that resulted in the collateral damage that I am today. If I am to be angry at Christians, it seems only logical that I must be angry at myself as well – and that is not how I want to live.
Where I once devoted my life to Christianity, I now set aside only a small part of my free time to fighting Christianity – a religion that, although once necessary for our survival, has long outlived its usefulness and now acts only as a source of social regression. In my activism, I adopted the internet moniker “lungfish” because, although I now identify myself as an atheist, some aspects of Christianity will always be a part of me. The stories and the characters of the Bible will always be in my head – but I now longer see them as examples of morality to follow. Instead, I see them as the history and myth of an ancient human beings less evolved and less socially developed then today. And I now recognize the psychological manipulation with in the pages of the Bible that has allowed Christianity to survive long after its usefulness has run out.
On the walk from my car to the university science building, my stomach would occasionally drop out and I would think to myself, “I am going to hell for this…” —
— but knowing that the Bible was so obviously written by mere men and not a god, I have largely overcome this hurdle. A Christian might think that this is the Holy Spirit trying to pull me back to God – but I know, without a doubt, that the Holy Spirit cannot exist. I was taught that the Holy Spirit lives in the heart of anyone who accepts Jesus. Humans are inheritable evil and it is the Holy Spirit that allows Christians to act morally against their own evil nature. Unbelievers are incapable of true morality because God is the source of all morality and unbelievers do not know God. Throughout my Christian walk, everything in my life was screaming of the falsehood of these claims; but I would not listen because I was told not to listen. Until a single sentence, so arrogant and nearsighted, uttered by a church elder behind a pulpit, shut down my faith and laid the ground in which doubt would eventually take seed.
This doubt allowed me to take the filter of Christianity off the lens through which I viewed the world and see my faith for what it truly was.
I know that this feeling of hell that I would often get is not the work of the Holy Spirit. This feeling, instead, is the result of the religious psychological manipulation of the indoctrination that held me for twenty years. Each time I quickly recover from this feeling because I now know too much about the Bible, its history, and the history of the people who wrote it. And, it was only recently I realized that it has now been years since ending my own life has even crossed my mind – an action I considered almost monthly in the last ten years of my Christianity. Without Jesus, I find myself to be more confident, happier, and more in awe of the world around me and the universe than I ever had been when I called myself a Christian.
The stories in the Bible will always be a part of me.
I will always be a fish.
But this fish grew lungs and can finally breathe the open air. And if this is possible for me, it is possible for anyone. Email me and we can talk.
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 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?
Homeschoolers Anonymous 