Lightbulb Moments: A Series

Beka Horton’s Theology: Eleanor Skelton’s Story

HA Editorial Team14 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

By Eleanor Skelton, HA Editorial Team. Eleanor also blogs at The Girl Who Once Lived in a Box.

Beka Horton wrote and edited most of the A Beka Academy curriculum, produced by Pensacola Christian College. And she’s also the reason I started questioning fundamentalism.

Christianity seemed so simple in the early days.

I was born in Southeast Texas, in the Bible belt. At two years old, I prayed to accept Jesus into my heart with my mom before bath-time. She cried over my folded hands.

I was on the right path; I lived in light and not in darkness.

If only life had fewer complexities.

I was homeschooled from preschool to high school graduation, primarily with A Beka Academy Video School and some BJU press and Weaver curriculum sprinkled in. My mom told me the stories of Adam and Eve, Daniel and the lion’s den, David and Goliath with flannel-graph cutouts and the A Beka Bible flashcards.

This was what we believed, and we had the truth.

We were not deceived like the poor Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Pentecostals. We had the True Doctrine™. And my churches and homeschool textbooks mostly agreed, until high school.

In 10th and 11th grade, A Beka reveals why all the Scripture their students had been memorizing since kindergarten comes only from the King James Version.

That’s because Arlin and Beka Horton, the founders of Pensacola Christian College, believe all other translations are part of Satan’s plan to confuse the church.

I asked my pastor at our IFCA church in Colorado Springs who graduated from the Bob Jones University Seminary about it. We used the New King James Version in our services, but Beka Horton said this was sinful and contributing to the downfall of modern Christianity.

KVJ tampering
From Jesus and His Followers, A Beka Book, p. 22
KJV infallibility
From Jesus and His Followers, A Beka Book, p. 24

The same textbook also argued that abstinence from alcohol was the most moral decision for modern Christians, because Jesus only drank alcohol because the water in first century Palestine wasn’t safe.

wine
From Jesus and His Followers, p. 67

This argument bothered me.

My parents and pastors had always told me that alcohol itself wasn’t sinful, but alcoholism hurt others. And we had a duty to not cause our brothers in Christ to stumble.

But Beka Horton was telling me the only way to follow Jesus was to be a teetotaler.

Something was wrong here. My textbooks disagreed with my parents, my churches. My parents bought me this curriculum so I could have a better education, so I could learn True Doctrine™.

I asked my pastor about these discrepancies. He told me, “I like Pensacola Christian College, but they are also legalistic. This is why young people lose their faith when they go to college, because they are told things like this, and then they learn it’s not true. So they question their entire faith.”

And he wasn’t wrong.

So in senior year of high school, I questioned when Beka Horton said that Adam and Eve never saw death before the Fall, not even dead plants.

leaf
From Genesis: First Things, p. 61

And arguing that the letters to the churches in Revelation was prophesy outlining the ages of the church throughout millennia seemed like an awfully convenient way to scare me into believing the Rapture and Tribulation were imminent.

revelation
From The Book of the Revelation, p. 5

I kept questioning, looking for more subtle legalism within what I’d thought was the safety of True Doctrine™.

Three years into college, I wondered if syncopated music was really evil or not.

My high school youth group textbook, published by Proteen / Positive Action for Christ, reasoned this:

Syncopated music is disorderly.
All disorder is of the devil.
Therefore, syncopated music (most modern music) is of Satan.

holywar
From The Holy War, p. 79

I made Christian friends in college who came from evangelical but not fundamentalist backgrounds, and their love for Jesus seemed genuine. I couldn’t believe they weren’t True Christians™ because they sang contemporary worship songs and listened to CCM.

Then the point of crisis came.

I read Harry Potter. I didn’t believe it was evil. I asked my parents to extend my curfew to midnight instead of 7:30 p.m.

My parents said I was being influenced by the world, that I had to move out or attend Bob Jones University. I told them I had prayed, and I felt like God wanted me to stay at UCCS.

They involved our pastor.

My pastor said I was disobeying God’s will for my life by moving out as an unmarried young woman.

He said it was wrong for me to leave because I was still under my parents’ authority if I wasn’t currently experiencing physical or sexual abuse.

And he said that God had clearly provided another option for me in transferring to BJU, a way to both obey my parents and gain independence.

He said, “If you are going to be obstinate and let Satan confuse you from following God’s will for your life, then I have nothing more to say to you.

And he walked out.

And I’d lost all trust for the label True Doctrine™.

I realized that fundamentalism is colorblind except for black and white. That fundamentalism uses fear to coerce obedience, that fundamentalism makes no exceptions, because that would be questioning Divine Will, and that is what Satan does.

My questions grew.

Did my purity ring actually remind me to stay pure, or did it just seem arrogant to my friends who weren’t virgins? I stopped wearing it.

Why did we use a handful of verses describing pagan temple practices to condemn the entire LGBT community? I remembered many more verses about loving our neighbor as ourselves.

Is creationism versus evolution actually a “salvation issue”? One of my chemistry lab instructors, who happened to be a Christian herself, pointed this out to me.

I took two semesters of Koine Greek, and I learned that museums have copies of scribal errors from the medieval period, something Beka Horton told me never happened, because the scribes destroyed an entire manuscript over slight errors.

scribe no error
From Jesus and His Followers, p. 5

Could I still be a Christian if the Bible wasn’t inerrant? My friend Cynthia Jeub reminded me that the disciples and the early church had no Bible. All they had was their experience.

I’ve been moved out since 2012, and I’m still questioning.

Still sorting through what I was told was True Doctrine™ and what the early church practiced historically, how I was told to treat “sinners” and what Jesus said about loving people.

Because I don’t believe Beka Horton has a monopoly on truth.

 

Created to be His Doormat: Wende Benner’s Story

HA Editorial Team13 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

By Wende Benner, HA Editorial Team

My lightbulb moment began at the age of sixteen. My family was a part of Bill Gothard’s Advanced Training Institute (ATI) homeschool program. This was the year my father received the call inviting me to live and work at a training center and to also be a part of a brand new training program especially for girls, EXCEL (Excellence in Character, Education, and Leadership). Every ATI teenager knew that receiving a personal invitation to work and participate in an Institute event meant that someone important had seen the light in your eyes and recognized your devotion to God. I was thrilled to be thought worthy to help prepare the newly acquired Ambassador Hotel in Dallas, TX for the first class of EXCEL girls and to also be able to participate in this groundbreaking program.

Once I arrived at the beautiful, historic Ambassador Hotel I worked long, hard hours with little sleep preparing for hundreds of girls to arrive. We were to spend eight weeks learning how to be godly women. Since this was a brand new program, I was unsure of what subjects we would be covering until I received my giant, white binder. Some of the things we were going to learn were the womanly arts of sewing, dressing, hospitality, courtship, and submission. But the most exciting thing to me was the discovery that Elisabeth Elliot would be coming to speak with us. Mrs. Elliot was a bit of a hero of mine. She was a woman who God used through writing and speaking to reach others. And she would be talking to us about how to write, something I dreamed of doing one day. Her sessions with us were scheduled for the second week of EXCEL, and I couldn’t wait.

Our sessions began with learning about God’s design for us as women. God created us to be wives and mothers that raised the next generation for God. Then we moved to all the ways that we could mess up God’s plan for us.

There were so many sins women were prone to falling into it seemed, and just one of them could not only destroy our lives but the lives of our husband and children.

Things such as having expectations from life or loved ones only led us to be contentious and ungrateful. This of course could destroy a family or lead to something even worse- bitterness. Bitterness would give Satan a piece of our soul and was even known to be the cause of certain illnesses (like arthritis) and depression. We finished the week of sessions by concentrating on how wrong priorities could destroy our lives. But first we needed to understand God’s priorities for women were a relationship with him first, then to put the needs of our husband’s second, and the needs of our children came next.

These sessions made it clear to us God’s only purpose for women was marriage and children (as many children as possible).

If we had any other desires or dreams we were sinning.

Of course these weren’t exactly new ideas for someone who had been in ATI for a while, but hearing these things everyday with verses to back them up started to take a toll. From the time we got up at 5:30 in the morning till we went to bed at 9:30 we only studied verses instructing women on how to be godly wives and mothers. That with the added knowledge that my parents had never once disagreed with anything said through Gothard or ATI began to make me feel as if my future was already decided for me, and it was a future that had never really been a part of my dreams or even what I felt had been God’s calling for my life. It was a future where my desires and thoughts were never to be considered, a future where subservience not partnership was required.

I felt trapped.

And then I felt shame and guilt. I felt I was so selfish to have other dreams and to not want what God’s design and purpose for me.

The point of this first week of sessions was to help us understand the purpose of EXCEL and what we were there to learn. Now, we were going to begin “practical” training to help us meet these goals. And we were all excited that Elisabeth Elliot would be the one to start this part of our training. Learning about writing and ministry from one of the most respected Christian women of our time was something I knew would be useful. It was something that could even help me reach the goals and dreams I felt God had given me.

Mrs. Elliot first informed us that she only taught under the authority of the Institute leaders and of her husband, Lars. In fact, Lars stood to the side or in the back of the room every session to show her submission to authority. Then she spoke about loneliness and suffering. She told us that just as Jesus had suffered and died, we were called to suffering and to die “little deaths” by sacrificing ourselves for others. This was especially true in marriage she told us; we are “married but alone”. “It is the mercy of God that gives us the chance to die”, and for women this chance comes through marriage.

The picture of marriage Mrs. Elliot painted was one of loneliness and loss-a place where women were created “gloriously unequal” to men.

In fact, she informed us that equality was a political construct, but women were created to be “lesser than” men in order to symbolize the mystery of Christ and the church. The only way to be “truly womanly” was to “surrender” to Christ and our husbands. With that final pronouncement Mrs. Elliot handed out a page of helpful hints on writing and asked if we had any questions about her talks.

A few girls asked questions about specific situations in their homes. How does submission look when parents are quite possibly being abusive or even asking one to do something wrong? With each question Mrs. Elliot seemed to become more and more impatient. She reiterated the fact that God called us to submit and surrender. There were no exceptions. I became increasingly uneasy. Then, a very brave girl raised her hand and asked a question that is burned into my memory. In an almost challenging tone she said, “Mrs. Elliot, are you saying that God made women to be doormats?”
There was silence for a few moments. You could tell everyone was waiting to hear how she would respond to the confrontation.

Mrs. Elliot then replied, “Well, I have always said since God made me to be a doormat, I will be the best doormat I can be.”

I didn’t hear anything else that happened that night. I was too stunned. Never had I heard my role in life put that plainly. This world I was growing up in believed women were created to be doormats. Something within me rose up in protest.

I was not created to be a doormat, to be walked over, ignored, abused, and used.

My life was meant for much more than this. I knew in that moment their whole paradigm of how the world interacted and related was fundamentally flawed. Everything from now on must be questioned for truth.

It has been a long journey of unraveling the lies and truth since that moment. In many ways I have needed to tear everything down and rebuild my beliefs and views of life over again. But, every moment of hard work has been worth the freedom of knowing it is acceptable for me to be my own person, to have my own thoughts and desires, and to know I do not have to sacrifice my whole self in order to love my family.

*****

“A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid any more.” ~John Steinbeck, East of Eden

We’ve called these stories, “light-bulb moments”. They are stories of awakening….spiritual, emotional, and deeply personal. We were, every one of us, to some extent or another, asleep, in the dark, and complacent. Then, something happened to wake us up, turn on the light, stir our souls. Some incongruency that didn’t fit our boxes. We discovered a world far bigger and better than we’d imagined. People that were multi-dimensional and complex. Thoughts and feelings within us we didn’t know were there before or maybe we did and they scared us. We got angry, we grieved, we ranted to each other about how we were lied to, how we were sometimes complicit in our own darkness, choosing what was safe over what was true. Some of us walked a harder road than others, but we all walked them. We all, in one way or another, realized the world was open to us, in full color, and that, contrary to what we had been told, it was very good. And there are now no limits to anything. These are our stories. Glimpses into our awakenings. I’m sure we’ll have many more before we walk our last path.- Darcy Anne, HA Editorial Team

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

HA Editorial Team35 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

Samantha Field blogs at Defeating the Dragons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They didn’t even bother answering my question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet I was not fully convinced.

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

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

I felt like a bird set free.

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

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

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

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

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

One of those blessings is being set free from fundamentalism.

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

But For One Mistake: Samael’s Story

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CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Warrior: Drew’s Story

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CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I just didn’t get it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HA Editorial Team9 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

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

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

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

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

GOOD MOM

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

BAD MOM

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

The Dawning of Day: Gary’s Story

HA Editorial Team4 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lightbulb Moments: Small Glimpses, Part 2

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CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

 

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

Continued from Part 1

 

Levi: 

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

 

Katrina:

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

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

 

Mary:

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

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

 

Warbler:

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

Didi:

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

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

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

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

 

Eden:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living with Cognitive Dissonance: Sonia’s Story

HA Editorial Team2 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Ryan Hyde.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had a brain too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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