HA note: Vanessa blogs at Fiery Skull Diaries. She “recently uprooted [herself] from kentucky to florida,” where she enjoys “fresh springs, the magical fragrance of orange groves, and copious amounts of sunblock daily.” Vanessa considers herself “an exchristian, atheist, and antitheist, unapologetically.” This post was originally published on August 26, 2013 and is reprinted with her permission.
it’s difficult to talk about the abuse that went on in my home in the same breath as my deconversion process.
based on the nature of their beliefs — the foundation of their beliefs — believers are quick to pounce on this as evidence that i turned from god because of a hard time i went through; that my faith was, apparently, weak.
language falls dreadfully short at encompassing how cruel an insult that is.
because i have first-hand understanding of why they say this, i am never caught off guard or react angrily when they dismiss a real and substantial part of my life with such callous ease, citing that i was never truly one of them (1 john 2:19 they went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us);
that i was the seed that fell on stony ground (matthew 13:5-6 some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth: and when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away).
my faith was indeed nothing short of real to me, and for many years, i viewed god and my faith in him as the underlying force that got me through those painful times of abuse, abandonment, betrayal, fear, uncertainty, poverty, and loneliness.
i held onto the bible verses i had already learned by heart, thanks to awana (see part 2 for explanation about awana).
i searched the bible, especially psalms and proverbs, for more comforting verses. i clung to the verses my friends and church leaders would write down or point me toward. i heard, “god won’t give you more than you can handle” more times than i can count — and i believed it. i didn’t understand why god was letting all this hurt and confusion happen to me and my family, but i trusted that he knew what he was doing and was with me through it. he’s the one that can see the big picture; every piece of the puzzle; every thread of the tapestry. his ways are higher than ours; his understanding high above ours.
he was in control and he had a plan.
jeremiah 29:11 for i know the plans I have for you, declares the lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
when my dad left, i was reminded endlessly by my friends and mentors (all christians) that god was the true father of us all; that god could be my daddy. in fact, in one of the many diaries/prayer journals i filled in my teen years, i addressed every entry to “daddy” (god).
HA note: Vanessa blogs at Fiery Skull Diaries. She “recently uprooted [herself] from kentucky to florida,” where she enjoys “fresh springs, the magical fragrance of orange groves, and copious amounts of sunblock daily.” Vanessa considers herself “an exchristian, atheist, and antitheist, unapologetically.” This post was originally published on July 22, 2013 and is reprinted with her permission.
awana is a highly developed scripture memorization program originally modeled after the boy/girl scouts, that starts kids as young as two years old. in my eleven years in awana, i read the entire bible twice (many parts of it much more than that) and memorized over a thousand verses.
a thousand.
memorized. by heart. word for word in the king james (sometimes new king james) version. recited in reference-verse-reference format.
i attended awana camp for five consecutive summers, starting my eighth grade year. it is no exaggeration to say that the awana camp experience is overwhelmingly similar to jesus camp.
awana taught me far more about the bible than any other source in my life. it grounded me, rooted me, solidified my faith more than anything else.
my name is engraved and hangs proudly on a wall for all to see inside the awana headquarters in chicago because i earned the citation award, the highest award awana offers. it takes ten years to achieve.
awana accomplished its mission with me.
2 timothy 2:15 study to show thyself approved unto god, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.
HA note: Vanessa blogs at Fiery Skull Diaries. She “recently uprooted [herself] from kentucky to florida,” where she enjoys “fresh springs, the magical fragrance of orange groves, and copious amounts of sunblock daily.” Vanessa considers herself “an exchristian, atheist, and antitheist, unapologetically.” This post was originally published on July 16, 2013 and is reprinted with her permission.
this process is difficult for me to write about because there’s so much to it. i’ve been putting it off for too long, feeling overwhelmed.
no more excuses. i need to write this story for my sake and the sake of others. i will be doing it in small, to-be-continued pieces until i get it all out. no more waiting. no more feeling like i have to write the entire thing before i can share any of it.
let’s get started.
my parents both grew up pretty poor in the same town in western kentucky their parents had grown up in, and their parents before that. neither was raised very religiously.
at the age of sixteen years and six days, my mom left her abusive childhood home to join in holy matrimony with my abusive father, age eighteen and six months. i was born twelve years later. i am the eldest of two girls; my sister is almost to the day two and a half years younger than me.
for reasons still unknown to me, my parents became fairly religious between the time they got married and the time i was born.
for my mother, i think it was about finding comfort. for my father, it was about appearing to be a stand-up guy in the community and getting to look at teenage girls in the youth groups, in which he somehow was always heavily, though superficially, involved.
most of my earliest memories are from the church we went to until i was three. after i turned three, we moved to a house outside of town and started attending a different church closer to our new home. like the one before, this was also a southern baptist church. we were there every sunday morning, sunday night, and wednesday night. i went to preschool at this church. my mom painted and wallpapered the bathrooms and several sunday school rooms in the church. my dad was on the volleyball and softball teams (i learned to rollerskate on my own in the church gym at age four by going with him to “bolleyball” practice on tuesday nights), and, of course, he was involved in the church youth group.
one sunday afternoon, when i had reached the age of reason at seven years old, my mom helped me pray the sinner’s prayer in our bathroom before she even got off the pot.
yes, you read that right. she could not bear to make the soul of her tearful, distraught seven year old, who had realized her sinfulness and eternal destiny, wait a second longer to accept jesus. so, sitting there on my mom’s lap, who was sitting on the toilet, i asked jesus to forgive me and come into my heart.
much to my extended family’s never-ending dismay, my mom decided to homeschool my sister and me when it was time for me to start kindergarten at the age of five. part of that decision was that she couldn’t stand the thought of putting her smaller-than-average five year old on a big, scary school bus at six in the morning.
the other part of that decision was to shield me from mean kids and unbiblical secularisms (*ahem*…EVOLUTION) taught in public school. (“public school” was a bad word in my vocabulary for my entire childhood.)
in other words, though she did not realize it, my mother chose, in part, to homeschool me to ensure my indoctrination.
Note from Faith: I originally wrote this article and posted it on my old blog in November 2012. I’d been meaning to revamp it for Roses & Revolutionaries, but was finally catalyzed to do so when I found that Katelyn Beaty at The Atlantic linked to my original post in the article “Toward a New Understanding of Modesty.” This is the updated version of my original blogpost.
*****
Sometimes it can be hard for men to understand why women are so upset about rape.
What’s the big deal? Rape’s not that much of a thing, right? Mostly it’s just cues being misread or hysterical prudes who just need some dick or unsatisfied women after a night of bad sex crying “rape” because they didn’t like the guy, right? And if even one person suggests rape shouldn’t happen, or that rape had happened to them, or that someone shouldn’t tell rape jokes, or so forth, they should get raped to teach them a lesson, right?
And this is what is known as “rape culture,” defined by Wikipedia as:
Some men are very upset by the claim that rape culture exists. But I promise you it does. I know it does every time I can’t walk alone at night. I know it every time I’m walking to my car at night with my key stuck between my fingers in case I need an impromptu weapon. I know it when every rape survivor has to answer a litany of questions about where she was, who she was with, whether she was drinking, what she was wearing. I know it every time a guy thinks “no” means “just convince me a little more,” which is disturbingly often. I know it every time I hear of another leader (religious, political, atheist) who faces rape allegations being unquestioningly supported by his fans, followers, fellow leaders, and mentors.
The idea, in our society, is that if you’re a woman, your body exists to be exploited by men. The burden is on me to defend myself, not on men to be respectful of my privacy, my bodily autonomy, my right to say no, my right to live a life free of sexual violence and my right to present myself however I choose without being judged, shamed, or taken advantage of for it.
Christian purity culture is in many ways a reaction against sexual permissiveness masquerading as a reaction against sexual predation.
This shirt counts as modest by most evangelical standards – note the formlessness and high neckline.
The levels of sexual predation within the church give the lie to that claim. A special niche of purity culture is deeply concerned with modesty. The idea is, a really self-respecting woman will dress herself in such a way that her body will not be the focus at all. Sermons, conferences, books, even T-shirts all advocate this notion that modesty is a prime component of sexual purity and therefore (paradoxically) desirability (to the proper sort of Christian gentleman of course). There are endless debates on what constitutes modesty. The general consensus is, however, a woman’s clothing must not be too revealing of either flesh or figure (too scanty or too tight). Quibbling about inches and guidelines takes up an amazing amount of time and energy amongst modesty advocates, but the idea is the same: Good girls are modest.
And modesty is for everyone’s protection. Men are less tempted sexually when the women around them cover up. Modest women are less likely to be taken advantage of, whether just by ogling on the street, by men pressuring them to have sex, or by rape (so goes the story, anyway). Do you feel a little judged, a little meddled with, when a stranger tells you how to dress? Don’t. They really have your best interests at heart. They want you to “respect yourself” by doing your best to control other people’s reaction to your body. And they can’t be held responsible for what happens when you don’t dress modestly enough.
You should see some of the correspondence already.
Here’s the first ugly truth: as soon as a woman falls outside the standards of what is perceived as modest, those advocating modesty culture immediately join rape culture.
They shrug and say, “Whatever happens is on her. She’s asking for it.” They’re not actually concerned about all women, only women who are willing to conform to their standards of modesty. It gets worse: When a woman is a victim of sexual violence, it matters much less to “modesty culture” than to current American “rape culture” how she dresses or acts – “modesty culture” will assume much more quicklythat it is somehow her fault, probably because their standards for how “good girls” dress and behave are so much higher.
Second, both “cultures” have a very problematic stance on men; it’s not as bad as their view of women but it’s another of the shocking similarities between the two.
Why does “modesty culture” try to get all women to cover up? Because men, according to “modesty culture,” cannot help themselves. Since actually sincere Christians want their men to be sexually pure as well as their women (or at least they say they do, but of course the onus for keeping men pure is put on the women), all temptation must be removed. For even seeing a flash of skin he ought not to have seen will make a man think all sorts of lusty and rape-y thoughts.
That’s the gist of it – I’ve read modesty books that go into great detail on how men’s chemistry works, essentially saying that if he catches just a glimpse of a woman’s body he will be sexually turned on in an instant and after that he is incapable of controlling his mental/physical reaction. (and it is only a woman’s body that will create this reaction…modesty culture is heteronormative to the point of denying that real homosexual attraction even exists). So both rape culture and modesty culture envision men as drooling hound dogs with everlasting erections. (As a side note, modesty culture is also made up of people who think men ought to be the ones running the world, and that the male gender holds all spiritual authority. No wonder women should stay in the kitchen, we can’t have the lords of creation suddenly turned into slavering animals while they’re trying to do important political and religious leadership type things.)
But how can a “culture” that ostensibly seeks to protect women from sexual exploitation be fundamentally the same in assumptions as a “culture” that accepts sexual exploitation and violence as the norm? It’s simple —
Fundamentally, they are both based on the exact same principle: Objectification.
Just showing off a sand castle…and more skin than any modesty advocate would ever condone.
Here’s how it works. Imagine that I am on a beach on a very hot day, wearing a bikini. I look at some cool algae that’s washed up on the beach and I say to the two men standing next to me, “I didn’t know algae could be purple, I wonder what causes that?” Man number one is “rape culture man” and man number two is “modesty culture man.” Neither man really registers a word I’ve said. “Rape culture man” reaches for his camera (there’s a lot of people on the beach so he’s not actually going to rape me, just take a picture to post online later; he’d also totally love it if I were to lose my top whilst swimming in the ocean). “Modesty culture man” panics, looks around and while averting his eyes grabs a nearby towel and hands it to me, saying, “Cover up!” Neither man has reacted at all to the thought I had just expressed, to the fact that I, as a human being, was trying to interact with them, as human beings. They didn’t even see another human being, they just saw body parts. Rape culture man wanted to take sexual ownership of those body parts, while modesty culture man wanted me to hide those body parts from his view so that he wasn’t tempted to take sexual ownership of them. But despite the different end result, their initial reaction was the same.
Whether the obsession is with seeing & exploiting a woman’s body or with the danger of being tempted by accidentally seeing it, it’s just two sides of the same coin. I become an object. I am considered not as me, not as a person with thoughts and feelings and ideas and a back-story, but as a simple trigger for lust.
Whether you are hoping to see a little cleavage or desperately avoiding the possibility of seeing a little cleavage, you’re still just focused on my cleavage, and you’re probably not hearing a word I’m saying.
I am still just an object, reduced to a body part, and by focusing so much on your own lust (feeding it or starving it), you’re reducing yourself to a body part too.
Though they’re based on the same view of humanity (men as lustful, women as objects), rape culture is still the worse of the two. But I dislike both. Objectification is just not okay and it’s happened for far too long. When will we see all people as people instead of just extras in the movie of our own personal life?
For the record, I’m just a little annoyed when it comes to me personally being objectified. Mostly, I’m like, whatever. How you react to me is your choice and it’s not my fault you’re making a dumb choice. (Not including sexual violence here; that’s completely different) But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to change cultural attitudes.
I’d love to see a world where victim blaming does not happen, where a woman is interacted with as a fellow human being no matter what she’s wearing, where no one assumes that anyone is “asking for” sexual violence.
I’d love to live in a world where assumptions about your ethics aren’t made based on your clothing choices or your personality. But I’m not going to let categories of “good girl” or “bad girl” change the way I act. I am not going to treat myself as an object; I am not going to listen to people’s judgments of me; my body is a part of all that makes up “me” and I’m not going to let any obsession with it take over my entire life.
And I’m also going to arm myself, because I do not yet live in a world where any woman can consider herself completely safe.
HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Rebecca” is a pseudonym.
Trigger warnings: abuse and mentions of suicidal thoughts and self-harm.
My homeschooling story has similar themes to many of the others on Homeschoolers Anonymous: religious indoctrination, abusive dynamics, and educational neglect. Overall I feel like homeschooling inadequately prepared me for adulthood.
I was fourth in a family of six kids and I was homeschooled for every grade except kindergarten. We used the Christian Liberty Academy Satellite Schools curriculum for most of my education but had changed to Switched-On Schoolhouse (Alpha and Omega) for the later grades. I had a couple of friends and acquaintances in the local homeschool group, I attended church, and sometimes took community classes such as gymnastics and swimming. Still, my primary friends were my siblings.
Educational Neglect
Our family was not impoverished but we were lower class. Having enough money was a continual concern and a source of household stress. My parents spent a lot of time working to make ends meet and maybe it was because of this that they didn’t really interact with me much or supervise my education closely. The usual routine was that I would wake up, do the assignments in my workbooks by myself, and spend the rest of the day left to my own devices. Most days I only needed help for spelling tests. Despite the religious slant to the books, I did learn a lot from them and I’m glad that at least I had the basics of spelling, math, history, and so on drilled into me.
The teen years were when I started running into educational problems. I had done all right in math so far–I needed help sometimes, but I could do the workbooks more or less on my own– until I hit Algebra 1 and I could no longer make sense of it without help. I had Saxon Math, which had been working for me until that point, but it was just not clicking anymore. Unfortunately my mom was burnt out by all the working and homeschooling and she didn’t prioritize my education very highly.
By that point I was perhaps several grades behind in assorted other subjects. I wasn’t doing that badly at most of them but I had been lazy about finishing the work on a schedule, my parents never put the heat on me to learn, and gradually I stopped bothering with the schoolwork.
My formal learning ended with a whimper. There was no graduation or diploma, we just gave up. As far as I can remember, I never got past the equivalent of Junior year. I am not sure though, since I was often clueless as to what grade I was supposed to be in.
Household Dynamics
My parents were converted to Christianity at the time of the hippie-led Jesus Movement, and they brought their relatively relaxed approach to life to our upbringing. Unlike many Christian homeschool families, we were not an authoritarian household. Since we were fundamentalist/evangelical Christians, there were definitely lots of little red flags you had to look out for (Harry Potter? Bad. Secular music? Bad. Spaghetti strap tank tops? Bad), but for the most part our parents let us have freedom. I was allowed to dress in punk clothing. We could listen to any style of music as long as it was Christian. We could be friends with whoever we wanted. Our parents tended to trust our judgment in these things even during the dreaded teen years. I’m glad that we were allowed to be individuals, and that the homeschooling gave us lots of free time to play and read.
The problem was that this undisciplined parenting approach was at times neglectful, not only for my education but also my physical and mental health. I think I was undernourished as a little girl. I had chronic stomach pains that went unaddressed, and my parents were aware of my continual depression but didn’t do anything about it. My older siblings were the ones who most often paid attention to me, comforted me when my stomach hurt, and tried to help me cheer up. When they got jobs, they were the ones buying half my meals and I finally caught up to a normal weight level.
There was a pressing problem with my mother.
She had major personal/mental health problems that did not get treated adequately. Sometimes she would go into fits of rage and terrorize me and my siblings, or threaten to kill herself or my dad. When she was at her best, she was a laughing, curious person who loved to explore the world with her kids. When she was at her worst, I thought of ways to run away from home or kill myself to escape from her. Sometimes I did run away from home and self-harm. Rarely, the abuse was physical, but she only needed to sigh rudely for my heart to start pounding. I wish she had gotten help for her problems, and I wish she had not taken them out on us.
It has taken me a long time to realize how fucked up it was.
No Future
My major issue with my homeschooling experience is the fact that it didn’t seem to be progressing towards anything. My parents didn’t seem to realize that they were supposed to raise us to become adults, not just Christians. Instead my life seemed to exist in a warped kind of Never-Never Land in which I was rocketing towards adulthood equipped with only a child’s skill set.
I knew little or nothing about household maintenance, how to hold onto a job, how to work hard or make myself useful, fix a car or drive one, how to handle a romantic relationship, take public transport, talk to adults, or how to get a scholarship or apply to a college or even exactly what college was. It’s tough to raise kids on a shoestring budget, but there was no reason my parents shouldn’t have taught me this kind of stuff or helped me see a life beyond the four walls of our house. I was told on one occasion by my parents that they didn’t care what my future ended up looking like as long as I was Christian. That was the only time they gave me any guidance about my future. (I am now an atheist, incidentally.)
When I was a little girl I would talk about all the things I would grow up to be, but that stopped before long. There was a misogynist stigma in our family that women who had careers were evil (a job to make ends meet was one thing, but being a Career Woman was another). I did not have a good experience with the food-service job I briefly held when I was 14 and I have not been able to handle even entry-level jobs since. I get severe anxiety. In my teenaged years, I was aware of no way out of my parents’ house except to get married to someone with a job.
College was not on the table, since there was just no way for 6 kids from a low-class family to make it unless we paid for it ourselves (which only one of my siblings has managed to accomplish so far). There was also a sort of contempt for higher learning that I picked up on. Part of me wonders if this I-don’t-need-no-fancy-education attitude was based on a sense of inadequacy, like if it was out of our reach, we would pretend we were too good for it. When my friends graduated they all went on to college to broaden their horizons, leaving me in a small town with nobody to hang out with. I deeply resented and envied them because I was acutely aware that my life was going nowhere. I feel like if I had been public schooled, there is a chance that a teacher or counselor might have been able to help me see a bigger picture of my life. Instead the only option I thought I had was getting married. At 20, that’s what I did, and I moved out.
Catching Up
To this day, I still feel as if I’m 10 years behind my peers.
I’m 27 and only now exploring college options and figuring out how to get a diploma equivalent, which is something most other people are starting to look at when they’re still teenagers. I think this experience is familiar to some homeschoolers as well as some people who grew up disadvantaged, and I was both. My future is in my own hands now, and my success or failure depends on me, but I don’t believe I was given the best possible shot at life. I feel inadequate when people ask where I went to college, or what my career is.
The truth is, I don’t know how to explain that I was set up to have no future.
If you set out to educate 6 kids at home, you have to follow through all the way to adulthood with each and every one of them. You have to admit when you’re in over your head and put the kids first and not your ideology. I wish my parents had done that.
Now it’s up to me to pick up the pieces and make my life into something worthwhile.
Homeschoolers Anonymous 