HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Abel” is a pseudonym.
Growing up in my homeschool world, I heard constantly from everyone around me about the importance of modesty and purity. Women were supposed to dress up like Victorian-aged puritans because men are so susceptible to lust and we just can’t control ourselves. I never understood this. But I accepted it because everyone else around me seemed to and I never felt I had the right to question it. If I tried to question it, wouldn’t that just be the sexual freak inside me trying to fight God?
Oh. Yeah. I kinda got ahead of myself.
There’s a sexual freak inside of me. Or, well, there’s a sexual freak inside of every male. According to my culture, all males are sexual freaks waiting to happen.
We’re like ticking time bombs of atomic hormones.
You don’t want to let those time bombs out until marriage. And it’s really easy to let them out. That’s why women should all dress so carefully. If a man happens to see a woman readjusting her bra strap, all hell could break loose and men could turn into savage beasts. There is a rapist inside of all men, including me.
I never thought there was a rapist inside of me. I never felt a desire to force myself onto a woman when I accidentally saw a bra strap peaking out of a woman’s denim jumper. But I still felt sick to my stomach when I caught myself looking one second too long at that bra strap. I felt that indicated my inherent dirtiness. I felt nothing but pure disgust for my body. I felt God staring at me from that bra strap, as if he was about to turn me into a pillar of salt, just like he turned Lot’s wife into salt for looking back at Sodom.
I’d stay awake at night, begging God to forgive me.
I’m surprised there’s not a whole generation of homeschooled males that have fetishes about bra straps.
But really, what I took to heart from all this talk about how obsessed men were with sex was not just that there was a rapist inside of me. It was that apparently I had a broken rapist inside of me. Because, honestly, I never felt so overwhelmed by semi-exposed skin that I couldn’t control myself. I spent years thinking there was something wrong with me. Men were supposed to “stumble” when they saw a midriff, or a shoulder, or too much leg. But I never “stumbled” like that — meaning, I never saw a midriff and went home and masturbated about it.
So I decided when I was sixteen that I must be gay.
In retrospect, that only made me feel worse.
Because men never made me “stumble,” either.
Because I’m not gay.
I was actually straight. And as far as straight people go, I was actually normal, too. Apparently normal people — straight or gay or whatever you are — don’t obsess about sex as much as homeschooling parents do.
I was conditioned by all these myths that pervade homeschooling that males are so overwhelmed by sex that they can’t exercise any semblance of self-control. But you know what? We can. And we’re not only hurting women by saying that women are responsible for mens’ thoughts. We’re also hurting men by making us all out to be monsters with uncontrollable sexual urges.
Rape is a horrible thing that should be opposed by everyone. Normal human sexuality is completely different. And I am sad that I grew up in a world that saw no problems with blurring the lines between the two.
It took me years to figure that out. What I used to think was me being gay eventually became me wondering if I just had a really low libido. But then I went to the doctor and found out, no, my libido is fine, too.
Apparently my problem was that I’m not a stereotype manufactured out of thin air by the I Kissed Dating Goodbye courtship cult.
But after everything I’ve gone through, that’s a problem I am ok living with.
There are two versions of me: my parents’ version of me and my version of me. Before my high school years, I don’t think there were two versions of me. Instead, there was just the version my parents wanted. This is probably true of most children, but my parents were fundamentalist Christians involved in ATI – a homeschooling cult.
In my middle school years (I can’t really tell time by years, or by grades, my youth is blurred and marked by big events or debate resolutions), my parents plunged me into the patriarchal/men-must-be-leaders movements of the 1990s. They saw homosexuality, single women, women in authority, and feminism as threats to traditional gender roles. So they trained me to be a warrior for godly men. ATI’s version of this was called ALERT (Ralph has written about it here) and they liked to play Boy Scouts – but with less fun and more Bible study. I became a biblical scholar around this age, constantly studying passages, their Greek and Hebrew meanings, cross-referencing those passages in lexicons and study tools, and recording my observations on something called the “Meditation Worksheet.” Ironically, these worksheets prepared me deconstruct my cultic worldview and to rebuild my own worldview– whoops!
I was that really Christian kid that probably drove you nuts. I preached to my Christian neighbors that they shouldn’t be reading the NIV because it was Satan’s tool to undermine the divinity of Jesus. I passed out tracts at restaurants. I was not afraid to judge everyone, as a thirteen year old, and inform them about the Straight and Narrow Path to Holiness. Some of my closest friends became the pastor of our small Southern Baptist church – we would regularly discuss theology.
In high school, I started to think for myself and form my version of me (I’ll call it “me-me” and my parents’ version “parent-me”). Whenever me-me would discuss his thoughts with my parents, I would come into conflict with them. Their Christian worldview permeated every sector of knowledge – biology, geology, and especially politics, history, and religion. Throughout my high school years I vacillated between me-me and parent-me. At will, I could “turn off” all the parts of myself that my parents disliked. However, when there was something me-me really wanted that I couldn’t just “turn off” my desire for, it drove me crazy. Usually it was girls. It wasn’t a sexual thing, I just loved the intimacy and having someone I could share all my teenage angst with. My parents and I fought for probably five years over girls.
My parents decided that I needed some relationship indoctrination, so I got to learn all about “courtship.” Courtship is about as traditional and stupid as it sounds. I was told that I was supposed to “guard my heart” against “serial dating.” They made dating and breaking up sound like this violent emotional crime that left people with long-term scars. This meant that, before I entered into any relationship, I was supposed to ask my parents’ permission before I asked the girl’s father for permission to date her. Mind you, all power and authority over women was supposed to flow through men. Like any good patriarchy. Physical contact during a courtship is almost always a strict no-no. You are not allowed to hold hands, kiss, hug, or even be together alone. Some of the courtships I have seen have ended in terrible marriages and, in one case, double homicide.
This idea of courtship was huge and fixated on sexual purity and emotional purity. It grew huge after Joshua Harris’ book I Kiss Dating Goodbye and it was advocated at basically every homeschooling event and by most institutions. Some groups formed solely for the purpose of educating people about courtship and Patrick Henry College (started by Michael Farris to train homeschoolers to be influential in Washington, D.C. politics). ATI was huge about courtship, they even advocate betrothal! That’s where the children have even less power in their romantic lives and the parents “pick” out a decent mate for them, then they are forced into a marriage because it’s “God’s will.” Of course, only fathers, and occasionally mothers, know God’s will
So commitment in my romantic relationships was usually propelled by the guilt of needing to be in a “courtship.” Of course, you aren’t supposed to court until the man is financially able to support a woman, which meant I was supposed to avoid romantic relationships til my mid-20s. This was unacceptable, so I just engaged in quasi-courtship with three different girls through high school – sort of promising to marry them all, planning our lives and futures together, and then usually they broke up with me because God told them to (though I was an ass).
I remember I would form a lot of what would become my identity on the car rides home from something. My truck became my only escape on a daily basis – with my truck came the first time in my life I had literal freedom. I could go where I wanted, when I wanted. That freedom usually provoked thoughts and I would work big issues like courtship in my mind listening to music. I’m always amazed at how my parents will dismiss me-me and try to guilt and shame parent-me out of the shell. De-construction and re-construction your identity is not easy and my parents always acted like it was fun for me to rebel. Yes, when I was a teenager it was fun to let the immature me-me out for a joy ride, only to be clamped down on and repressed. But that excitement ended in college. I slowly came to a peace about myself that did not depend on my parents, or their affection. Finding the me-me was one thing, but synthesizing that into my emotions was much more difficult.
I say all this to try and explain both of the versions of myself. I can be parent-me, I can turn it on, and turn off my own desires and personality. It took years for me to even find out what me-me wanted from life and I found a tremendous peace when I discovered my desires and not my parents’. Throughout college, I would go home and I would let a little more of me-me come out – it was a very slow “coming out,” to borrow a phrase. I admitted to smoking tobacco. That I wasn’t a libertarian anymore, I was a liberal – lots of these involved political discussions where my parents felt almost as betrayed that I no longer shared their political beliefs than if I had renounced the faith. I never did renounce Christianity, only the corrupt vessel of the Christian church. Admitting I was dating took awhile – I just recently admitted I believed in evolution. Usually, each admission of the me-me ended in a fight or conflict. Even in college, they could not let go.
When I first started dating my wife, I asked if she could stay the night in my parent’s house because I needed a ride back to school. My father said he wasn’t comfortable with that because it would give my younger sister a bad example of “serial dating. To put this in perspective, this would be the second girl I brought home to my family ever. I said that I was really serious about this girl and if they chose to act like this, I would tell my girlfriend, and I would understand if she didn’t want my children around them. This sobered them up quickly and they agreed to let her stay. But it demonstrates the types of conflicts that would occur when me-me contradicted parent-me.
When my parents manage to convince me to attend their church, my mom always expects me to sing. My mother and I spent a lot of time bonding in the church choir when I was younger, so she expects me to find the same joy in it now as I did then. It simply does not work like that. Me-me does not enjoy church because it reminds me of all the negative feelings of guilt, shame, and intense pressure to be good. These days when it comes to spirituality, me-me cannot compromise.
Even now that I am married, my parents still want and expect parent-me. I don’t like the same things, I’m not the same person, and when they laugh and reminisce about the great times they had with parent-me, I can’t help but feel uneasy inside. They reminisce for parent-me because they know they may never see him again. They still try to draw on the guilt and shame they instill in me by saying things like “that’s not what we wanted for your life.” Or telling me the consequences of my sins, then questioning why I don’t think certain things are sins. When they pressure me-me to revert to parent-me, I get angry, defensive, and emotional. So I just stop expecting anything, sharing anything, being vulnerable. I don’t want parent-me for my life – that should mean something. And I don’t take spiritual advice from cultists.
HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Judah” is a pseudonym.
I consider myself fortunate compared to most because I was not raised in an oppressive household. With a few exceptions, mostly those dealing in forms of magic, such as Power Rangers for example, I was not restricted on what I was allowed to watch, see, or listen to. My parents just made sure I had a firm grasp on my faith and were open to talking about things I had questions about.
“It wasn’t until I deployed to Afghanistan that I truly became my own person who could stand up for myself.”
It wasn’t until I started doing speech and debate tournaments that I saw the oppression other families placed on their kids. Some of my experience is second-hand, simply observing what other people went through. Some of my experience was first-hand in things other families did that directly affected me. There were times when my mother had to stand up for me because other parents did not approve of me for reasons I never understood and still do not understand to this day. This most affected my friendships with people in such families as they were forced to cut off contact with me.
One very prominent family in particular had a special hatred of me. They tried to get their youngest daughter to cut ties with me and it seemed they would stop at nothing. One of the family member’s threatened a restraining order against me on the girl’s behalf. For years I tried to understand and ask why they hated me but they would never give me an answer.
I eventually gave up and stopped asking.
In another instance, I was in a relationship with a young lady who had a similar family. I was required to meet with her father before we were even allowed to consider ourselves in a relationship and even then it was very restrictive. It was also short lived as the girl’s parents took to lying about me because they wanted her to be in a relationship with someone else, whom she did not even know.
After I graduated highschool, I went a little ways off the deep end and ended up living with former drug dealers for about a year before I moved in with my mom for a few months until I joined the Air Force in June 2008. Despite having lived with some questionable characters, I was still very much sheltered and had little knowledge about the world around me except for what could be seen on paper.
I spent a little over a year at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA which is where I was thrown into a culture shock. Not only was I in class with people form all walks of life, I was now learning about life in Afghanistan, along with its culture and religion. Previously, I had nearly no knowledge of Islam and now I was immersed in it. Still, I wasn’t able to completely break free of the stigma my homeschooling experience had placed on me. Namely, the idea that if I dared to make waves of any sort, the hand of God would smite me.
It wasn’t until I was deployed to Afghanistan that I truly became my own person who could stand up for myself.
Today I fully believe in God and Christ and everything the Bible teaches. However, as Ghandi once said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” This is precisely how I feel toward the majority of Christians, and those in the extreme homeschooling subculture in particular.
HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on March 7, 2013.
After I wrote my posts on academics and socialization, I realized that there is another way homeschooling affected my life—and it’s no less significant. In fact, it’s a whole lot more significant. Quite simply, homeschooling affected my life because it changed my parents. When I was born, my parents were fairly ordinary evangelical Christians. That didn’t last. Their involvement in the homeschool movement introduced them to new ideas they had not before been exposed to—ideas put forward by people and organizations like Michael Farris and HSLDA, Michael and Debi Pearl and No Greater Joy, and Doug Phillips and Vision Forum. I simply cannot overestimate the affect this had on my life.
Libby Anne: “This is the real legacy of homeschooling on my life: the things that have left my family damaged and torn even today, temporarily patched back together but a shadow of what it could be.”
Somewhere in all this were these toxic ideas about control, and this insidious idea fed to my parents that they could, by homeschooling, completely determine the way we children would turn out. The homeschool literature my parents read urged them to see themselves as gardeners carefully pruning and shaping us, tying us here and clipping us there, gradually turning us into their ideal Christian men and women. My parents were promised a result, promised perfect children if they followed the perfect homeschool formula. In some sense this entire ideology robbed my siblings and I of agency, turning us into mere projections of my parents, frozen snapshots pinned on the wall.
First, of course, was the dominionism. A big word for a simple concept, but apt nonetheless. Michael Farris is easily the best known figure in the homeschool movement, and the promises that fell from his lips were sweet to my parents’ ears, their path greased by the still-raging rhetoric of the culture wars. I heard Farris speak several times, in addition to reading his literature, and one motif he was fond of was that of the Joshua generation. Farris told parents that the public schools were like Egypt, and that they were the Moses generation, taking their children out of Egypt and educating them in the wilderness. Their children, he said, would be the Joshua generation, who like the Israelites’ conquest of Canaan would retake America for Christ, creating a nation built on Christianity and God’s law. My parents bought it hook line and sinker, and looked at my siblings and I as though we were their golden ticket.
Based on this newfound ideology, my parents told us children that the reason dad was working an ordinary job rather than being a pastor, or a missionary, or a politician was so that he and mom could raise up a large number of godly offspring to go out and do all of these things a hundred fold. We were the arrows in my dad’s quiver, and they were raising us to shoot out into the world to make a difference for Christ. This is called Quiverfull, an ideology born and nurtured in the homeschool movement, passed from homeschool mother to homeschool mother and homeschool co-op to homeschool co-op like a disease. My parents were honing us and training us, they told us, preparing us for this mission. Did I mention that this could feel dehumanizing, and stifling? Oh, sometimes it could feel gloriously empowering. But the only dreams we were allowed to have were the ones our parents fed us. Step outside of that, and our parents’ smiles would instantaneously turn to frowns. And believe me, we all knew it would happen. We watched it happen, sometimes to us personally and other times to our siblings.
This leads into my next point—the utter amount of control my parents exercised over all of us offspring. Somewhere around the time I was eight or so, another homeschooling mother passed my mom Michael Pearl’s To Train Up a Child. This child rearing manual urges parents to see any disobedience as outright defiance and to see the parent-child relationship as oppositional. In fact, it goes so far as to instruct parents in how to break their children’s wills—and to threaten that those children whose wills are not broken will grow up to be miserable failures in life. This was all new to my parents, but once again, they took it in as gospel truth. Their homeschool friends all swore by the book, so it must be right—right?
The biggest thing I remember in all this was the utter rage of not being listened to. Back talk was not tolerated. In fact, any questioning of a parent’s word was out of the question. Obedience was to be immediate, complete, and without question. If it wasn’t, it was disobedience. Oh, and obedience wascheerful. Sour faces got us sent to our beds. Normal human emotions were curtailed. Dragging your feet? Complaining? Moping? A spanking, or a timeout, or a hundred sentences to write. You’re trying to explain your case? More swats, more time, more sentences. Shut your mouth, don’t talk back. Don’t question your parents. Obey.
During my teenage years my parents adopted another line fed them by the homeschool movement—that the concept of “teenager” was a modern invention, and contrary to God’s plan for the family. Rebellion was unnatural, and not to be allowed. Questioning was frowned on, and quickly answered with emotional manipulation—the dense fog of disapproval was enough to make the strongest of us buckle and give in. Further, during our teenage years we were expected to bear the responsibility and workload of an adult, but without being given the freedoms of an adult. It was like being two years old, and thirty, in a fifteen year old body. Where we went, who we were friends with, what music we listened to, and what books we read—all was still carefully monitored and controlled. And being homeschooled meant we could never get away. We were smothered under all of it.
But there was more. At a homeschool convention my parents came in contact with the marketing and literature of Vision Forum, a group whose influence has become pervasive in many homeschooling circles. Their literature is passed from homeschool mom to homeschool mom and their speakers get top billing at the main homeschool conventions. Their message is a patriarchal family order that encompasses not just husband and wife but children as well—especially daughters. Words like courtship became commonplace, and the idea that fathers should help their daughters pick their future spouses suddenly became natural. Dating was quickly off the table completely, and we awkward homeschooled teenagers eyed each other warily from across the debate table or co-op room. The idea that you could control and direct your own love life? Unthinkable. Absurd.
And suddenly the male arrows were being fashioned very differently from the female arrows. My brothers were to go out and do great things for Christ, but my sisters and I? We were to be stay at home homeschool moms raising large broods. We learned to cook, and clean, and care for children, seeing our daily lives as junior mothers as practice for our future lives. It was an odd sort of tension we girls inhabited. We were to change the world—but we were to do so by being homemakers and raising a dozen or more children. The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world. Choice? That’s a dirty word. All that mattered was your god-given role. Any earlier dreams I’d had were cut short and I was soon unable to dream beyond the future my parents so carefully laid out for me. And then there was the whole college thing. I got lucky. Through all of this my parents held onto the value they placed on education, and they sent me, a girl, to college in spite of the warnings against it they received from some quarters. I got an education. Other girls didn’t.
And then there was the huge problem when I began to question and leave my parents’ beliefs and ideology. Having been taught by the literature of the homeschool movement to see me as clay they could mold as they saw fit, they were shocked when I shook myself and chose my own direction. They had been promised the world, and were suddenly coming up empty on their investment. It was like the Greek myth in which Pygmalion sculpted a statue of his ideal perfect woman, and then it came alive. Or at least, it would be like that myth if Pygmalion had reacted with anger and rage when the statue came to life and dared move from the pose in which he carved it. When I began thinking for myself my parents reacted as though they suddenly saw me as broken, ruined. And in some sense I was. They had put everything into making me into this certain specific image, and then I dashed it all by asking questions and making up my own mind. I was like a mirror suddenly shattered into a shower of pieces. All of the plans they had built for me were ruined.
The homeschool movement took my parents, and it twisted them. The literature, the people, the groups, the rhetoric—my parents were drastically changed as a result of their decision to homeschool. The ideas that filtered into our home from the greater homeschool movement had an impact on my life the depth of which it is difficult to express. These ideas shaped how I saw myself, dictated my dreams, and created a fairy future that was dashed the moment I dared stop and really think about all of it. The triumphalist dominionism, the stifling authoritarianism, the all-encompassing patriarchalism—this was the stuff of my childhood. And the wake of destruction that followed was the rot produced by ideologies that so suffuse the homeschool movement that it’s a challenge for even the most independent-minded homeschooler to completely escape their sway.
This is the real legacy of homeschooling on my life. It’s not my academic achievement or the socialization issues I faced as a result of growing up in a bubble. It’s all of this, the things that have left my family damaged and torn even today, temporarily patched back together but a shadow of what it could be. The control, the conformity, the attempt to treat children not as individuals with their own agency but as beings to be molded into ideologically-perfect culture warriors. The emotional manipulation, the feelings of failure, the stunted and half-formed dreams. The pain, the tears, the way my blood pressure raises when the phone rings. The broken relationships, the fear, the anguish at what could have been. The ashes of a life so carefully built that burned down when I came of age, ashes blowing in the wind. I’m building something new today, yes, but the foundation I started on had to be razed and everything begun afresh, with echoes of the past still sounding in my ears, filling my dreams, and clouding my vision.
In some sense, none of this is the fault of homeschooling—but in another sense, all of it is. If my parents hadn’t homeschooled me, everything would have been different. This sounds like a huge claim, but it’s really not. My parents started homeschooling for educational reasons, not religious reasons. All of the stuff discussed above? It hit them after they entered the world of homeschooling, not before. And because my parents never stopped attending the evangelical megachurch that fit them well when I was small, and not so well as I grew, I can make a bit of a comparative study. By the time I was high school aged, there was a huge gap between me and most of the other kids who attended that church. They dressed like normal teens, listened to Christian rock music, and attended youth group. I didn’t associate with them or befriend them—for one thing, my parents felt the church youth group was too worldly, and for another thing, their social networks revolved around their schools and thus de facto shut me out. Instead, I stayed close to the homeschooled children of a few of my parents’ friends who had also attended the church from way back. We were different—they were like me. If we hadn’t been homeschooled, we would have been like those youth group kids. Evangelical, yes, but normal evangelical.
The most prominent leaders and organizations of the homeschool movement—the curriculum publishers, the speakers, the conferences—are currently awash in all of this toxic ideology. Courtship, and blanket training, and stay at home daughters, and the Joshua generation—it’s pervasive in many—if not most!—homeschool circles. Of course, there has always been dissent from this cocktail of ideas: you’ll find that while rural areas often only have Christian homeschool groups and co-ops, more liberal areas have two (or more) parallel networks—a larger Christian homeschooling community and a smaller secular one. The growing number of people homeschooling for purely practical and pragmatic reasons, combined with the advent of the internet, which has challenged the gatekeeper status of groups like HSLDA, may help turn the tide. But at the moment the messaging and the networking, all of that is still controlled by Farris et al., and that means that all of this—the dominionism, the authoritarianism, and the patriarchalism—is insidiously widespread among homeschoolers. And that means that when ordinary evangelical parents like mine enter the homeschool movement, they open themselves up to being pulled into a toxic cocktail of beliefs that may forever change their lives—and with them the lives of their children.
This is the true legacy homechooling has had on my life.
Homeschoolers Anonymous 