Mary Pride

That Time Mary Pride Put the Modesty Survey on Blast

January 21, 2016May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team9 Comments

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

Mary Pride is considered by some to be “the queen of homeschooling.” She is one of the founders of the Quiverfull movement, the anti-feminism author of The Way Home, and the publisher of the wildly popular magazine “Practical Homeschooling.” I have previously covered problematic aspects of her worldview, including her thoughts on domestic violence and child abuse. Her belief that women’s use of contraception turns men gay is also bewildering.

That said, Mary Pride is also an expert at putting people on blast. Normally she puts her archenemies — child advocates, feminists, and LGBTQ people — on blast. But sometimes even her peers are not spared. The best example of this comes from her trash-talking of Alex and Brett Harris’ 2007 “Modesty Survey.” The following passage is from page 221 of the “Afterthoughts” chapter added to The Way Home‘s 25th Anniversary Edition in 2010:

Speaking of our daughters, I would like to say just a few words about the “Modesty Survey” and other attempts to “encourage” young ladies to dress according to some ill-defined, ever-shifting male standard of “modesty.”

The bottom line here is the belief that women’s dress can cause men to fall into ungodly thoughts. If I had the space, I would have plenty to say about this. For now, consider just this:

The only female features that the Bible says cause potential male downfall are “eyes” (Prov. 6:25): literally “eyelids,” as in the KJV.
The “strange woman” (KJV) or “adulteress” (NIV), who is by no means a Christian sister, leads a young man astray by her smooth speech (Prov. 5:3), not by her outfit.

Those arguing for the “Burqa Lite” standard of Christian dress also fail to explain how young men who faint at the sight of a Christian ankle are supposed to control themselves when out in the world.

Doctors see naked women. Missionaries see half-naked women. But we don’t expect them to go insane with lust.

Proverbs 7:6-27 describes a woman leading a man astray. She is loud, defiant, dressed like a prostitute, and deliberately talks him into committing adultery. Even so, the passage is all about how he should have known better.

I’m all for modest dress, but not because Christian men are going to fall into temptation left and right if various arbitrary skirt lengths, etc., are not met. In the New Testament, “modest” dress refers to “spending a modest amount on clothing,” not to the amount of cloth and where it is draped. “Modest” dress is contrasted with ostentatiously expensive clothing and hairstyles—and the passage is talking about how to dress for church (1 Tim. 2:8-10)!

This preoccupation on men’s part with women’s modesty is misguided and proto-Islamic. Once again, the older women should be teaching the younger what is appropriate. Neither older nor younger men are responsible or authorized to instruct the younger women in this area.

There are, of course, problems within this passage, including Pride’s penchant towards Islamophobia. But still…

burn

How Christian Homeschool Leaders Have Addressed Domestic Violence Isn’t Ok

May 15, 2015May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team21 Comments

CC image courtesy of Flickr, Jeffrey.

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

While many homeschool leaders have dismal records in how they discuss and respond to child abuse, their lack of understanding abuse dynamics also extends to other forms of abuse. The following are examples of how homeschool leaders have failed tragically to understand the realities of domestic violence, or spousal abuse.

Michael Farris

The following excerpt is from HSLDA founder Michael Farris’s 1996 book How A Man Prepares His Daughters For Life. Farris has his patriarchal beliefs on full display in this book, including such passages as: “I am very supportive of the concept of the authority of fathers in their home…It’s important to be right…It is appropriate to simply say to your daughter, ‘Because I’m the dad, that’s why‘” (page 21); “a woman should be submissive to her husband” (page 96); and “husbands are ultimately responsible for family decisions” (page 101). He defends “a very traditional view about the role of women in churches” (page 27) and later explains that he means “a doctrinal position of male-only elders” (page 55).

But what stood out the most to me was the following 3 paragraphs with which Farris begins Chapter 5, “Guiding Your Daughter Toward Positive Friendships.” The tone-deafness, minimization, and victim-blaming Farris engages in regarding this very clear situation of domestic abuse — and the fact that he provided legal defense for a domestic abuser — goes to show that child abuse is not the only type of abuse Farris does not seem to take seriously. (For those unaware, a quarter-size bruise is a serious indicator of abuse, both for child abuse as well as domestic violence cases.) From page 77:

When I was a very young lawyer in Spokane, Washington, I was assigned to defend a case in which two professing Christians, “Steve” and “Lana,” were getting a divorce. Lana was seeking a divorce because of the advice of her “friends.” She and Steve, my client, got into an argument one evening and he grabbed her by the arm and squeezed. He left a bruise on her arm about the size of a quarter. He was ashamed of the action—as he should have been—and he apologized. But it was a far cry from the “battered-woman syndrome.” Lana was told by her friends, however, that she was a victim of wife abuse and she should seek a divorce. Believe it or not, she did.

A few weeks later her friends advised Lana that she should start dating, even though Steve was actively seeking to reconcile the marriage. One night when Lana was out on a date, their two-year old son fell behind the bunk bed and died from strangulation.

Lana knew what God expected of her regarding forgiveness and reconciliation, but she listened to her friends instead. She paid a terrible price for the wrong advice from the wrong kind of friends.

Bill Gothard

The following passage is from Bill Gothard’s 1979 Supplementary Alumni Book, Our Most Important Messages Grow Out of Our Greatest Weaknesses. Recovering Grace notes that, “Throughout the publication there are several self-contained Q&A boxes addressing common questions on divorce, such as ‘If two Christians marry and one persists in being unfaithful, does the other one have “Scriptural grounds” to get a divorce?’ (‘Answer: No.’) One Q&A appears to address domestic violence,” which is as follows:

QUESTION:

What if the wife is a victim of her husband’s hostility?

ANSWER:

There is no “victim” if we understand that we are called to suffer for righteousness. “For even hereunto were you called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that you should follow His steps.” 1 Peter 2:21 Christ was not a victim! He willingly gave His life for us. “By whose stripes you were healed…likewise you wives…” 1 Peter 2:24; 3:1 Christ’s life teaches us how to suffer.

James Dobson

The following passage is from James Dobson’s 1983 book Love Must Be Tough. The book claims to address “disrespect in marital relationships, describing its role in the drift toward divorce for millions of couples.” Dobson examines a number of potential marital conflicts, including (but not limited to) infidelity, substance abuse, domestic violence, and child abuse.

Chapter Thirteen of the book is “Loving Toughness in Other Situations,” and it addresses the topic of spousal abuse. Dobson begins the chapter with a letter from a woman named Laura, who tells Dobson her husband has “a violent temper that is absolutely terrifying” and “beats me with his fists.” Laura then asks Dobson what she should do. “I’m so tired of being beaten,” she says, “and then having to stay home for days to hide my bruises” (p. 146-7).

Dobson begins by stressing that, for Christians, “Divorce is not the solution to this problem,” because “Our purpose should be to change her husband’s behavior, not kill the marriage.” His solution is rather to have Laura directly agitate her husband: “I would suggest that Laura choose the most absurd demand her husband makes, and then refuse to consent to it. Let him rage if he must rage.” Dobson hopes this will shock the abusive husband into acknowledging “he has a severe problem” so that he will agree to “competent Christian counseling” that can lead to “reconciliation” (p. 148).

Not once does Dobson recommend calling the police.

After making this suggestion to agitate, Dobson then offers the following “qualification” to his advice (a “qualification” that is, mind you, longer than his actual advice to Laura). The emphases are in the original:

I have seen marital relationships where the woman deliberately “baited” her husband until he hit her. This is not true in most cases of domestic violence, but it does occur. Why, one may ask, would any woman want to be hit? Because females are just as capable of hatred and anger as males, and a woman can devastate a man by enticing him to strike her. It is a potent weapon. Once he has lost control and lashed out at his tormentor, she then sports undeniable evidence of his cruelty. She can show her wounds to her friends who gasp at the viciousness of that man. She can press charges against him in some cases and have him thrown in jail. She can embarrass him at his work or in the church. In short, by taking a beating, she instantly achieves a moral advantage in the eyes of neighbors, friends, and the law. It may even help her justify a divorce, or if one comes, to gain custody of her children. Remember what the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor did to American morale and unity? It solidified our forces and gave us a cause worth fighting for. There are those who believe President Roosevelt ignored warnings of the Pearl Harbor invasion for the precise purpose of unifying our resolve against a rising Japanese imperialism. In the same spirit, I have seen women belittle and berate their husbands until they set aflame with rage. Some wives are more verbal than their husbands and can win a war of words any day of the week. Finally, the men reach a point of such frustration that they explode, doing precisely what their wives were begging them to do in the first place.

I remember one woman who came to church with a huge black eye contributed by her husband. She walked to the front of the auditorium before a crowd of five hundred people and made a routine announcement about an upcoming event. Everyone in attendance was thinking about her eye and the cad who did this to her. That was precisely what she wanted. I happened to know that her noncommunicative husband had been verbally antagonized by his wife until he finally gave her the prize she sought. Then she brought it to church to show it off. It does happen. (p. 149-50)

Love Must Be Tough has been reprinted numerous times and this passage remains. The most recent reprint was 2007 and the passage is still there, unchanged

Michael and Debi Pearl

The following passage is from Michael and Debi Pearl’s 2004 book Created To Be His Helpmeet, as reprinted in 2012. It is under the section “Enduring Suffering Wrongly,” in which Michael Pearl argues that “the Bible is so clear” that “we are commanded to submit to every ordinance of the government that we are under—even to ignorant and foolish men.” Pearl first argues that even if slavemasters cause their slaves “unjust suffering and grief,” slaves must “endure it, and take it patiently.” Pearl justifies this by saying that, “It is acceptable with God (God’s will) for the underling to suffer wrongfully and take it patiently” (262-3). Pearl then applies this principle to a woman being threatened by her abusive husband:

Has your husband revile you and threatened you? You are exhorted to respond as Jesus did. When he was reviled and threatened, he suffered by committing himself to a higher judge who is righteous. You must commit yourself to the one who placed you under your husband’s command. Your husband will answer to God, and you must answer to God for how your respond to your husband, even when he causes you to suffer. (p. 263)

Debi Pearl demonstrates this principle in action when she writes about a young woman named Sunny. Sunny faced a horrific situation of domestic violence:

[Sunny] was soon pregnant with their first child, and in a matter of weeks, the violence began. Over the next seven years, Sunny was regularly subjected to his alcoholic rages and beatings, and she endured his flaunted unfaithfulness… When Sunny was pregnant with their third baby, Ahmed came home drunk and tried to kill her with a butcher knife. (p. 132)

Debi Pearl never suggests to Sunny that law enforcement be called, nor does she even suggest that Sunny approach her church’s leadership. Debi also never condemns Ahmed and his actions. Rather, she exhorts Sunny to “stay with him and begin a campaign of winning his heart” by ceasing to “blab about his sins” and begin to “reverence him” because that is “God’s will” (p. 133).

The following passage is from the 2010 “25th Anniversary Edition” of Mary Pride’s seminal book The Way Home: Beyond Feminism Back to Reality, originally published in 1985. The emphases are in original:

The reason the church is getting lax about divorce is that we no longer understand marriage. If a spouse has problems, such as drunkenness or fits of temper, the other one concludes it is not a “good” marriage and moves on. Those who take this perspective end up allowing divorce “for any and every reason,” just as the Pharisees were doing in Jesus’ day. Jesus answered the Pharisees that destruction of any God-ordained marriage is always wrong… Only adultery, which breaks the partnership by pouring its resources into a spiritually fruitless extramarital union, as well as (in the case of an adulterous wife) jeopardizing the children’s legitimacy, and desertion, which nullifies the partnership, are biblical grounds for divorce… Christians may never, never, never divorce Christians. (p. 21-22)

Heidi St. John

The following image was posted by popular homeschool convention speaker Heidi St. John on her Facebook page, with the explanation that she “thought it would bring a smile today”:

The image, the text of which St. John altered, comes from an old comic that depicts a chauvinistic man sexually assaulting his frigid boss (an action that leads to her marrying him). A close-up of the image makes clear the woman is terrified and crying:

Libby Anne does a great job of explaining the problem here:

The image is photoshopped from an old comic that depicts an employee sexually assaulting his “frigid” boss (see here and here or view the full comic here). Sure, one could try to argue that the image has been removed from that context, what with the new words in the bubbles and all, but that fails given the tear on the woman’s cheek and the fact that she is clearly trying to fight the man off (notice her pounding fists). Whatever the words, the image clearly depicts a woman futilely trying to fight off a stronger man’s advances. In fact, in the context St. John provides the image, it appears to be depicting attempted marital rape…

The trouble is that an image like this, in the Christian homeschooling community St. John is very much a part of, arrives in a context already influenced by writers like Debi Pearl and the teachings of Bill Gothard and others. These leaders explicitly teach that a wife should never say “no” to her husband’s sexual advances. These leaders do not recognize the existence of marital rape, because they see sex within marriage as the husband’s right.

Coming in this cultural context, St. John’s image is not “funny.” It’s a problem.

It normalizes coercion and marital rape.

As demonstrated by the previous statements by Farris, Gothard, Dobson, the Pearls, and Pride, Libby Anne’s critique of St. John is spot-on. The biggest names in homeschooling have communicated truly shameful messages about domestic violence — messages that will only add further guilt to victims and make them feel trapped and unable to escape. It’s not a laughing matter, and it’s something that we all need to speak up about and push back against.

Note: if you are a victim of domestic violence or know someone who is, please call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE) or visit their website here. There is help available and you are worth it.

Mary Pride: Don’t Divorce Your Drunk, Raging Husband

January 6, 2015May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team13 Comments

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

Image from page 21’s excerpt of the book:

Christian Homeschooling and Child Abuse Denialism

June 4, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team1 Comment

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on June 2, 2014.

If you’re a long-time reader, you’re likely aware my series on HSLDA and child abuse, which includes their fight against child abuse reporting, their stonewalling of child abuse investigations, and their defense of child abuse. You’ve probably also read my viral “HSLDA: Man Who Kept Kids in Cages ‘a Hero.’” If you read Homeschoolers Anonymous, you probably know that Doug Phillips, former HSLDA attorney and founder of the now-defunct Vision Forum, stated in 2009 that “We understand that the core problem with Child Protective Services is its existence.”

What you may not be aware of is that in 1985 Mary Pride published a book titled The Child Abuse Industry: Outrageous Facts About Child Abuse & Everyday Rebellions Against a System that Threatens Every North American Family.

Who is Mary Pride? If you’ve ever homeschooled, you’ve almost certainly heard of her. She has had so much influence in homeschooling circles that has been dubbed “the queen of the homeschool movement.” Historian Milton Gaither has dubbed Pride as one of homeschooling’s two most influential curriculum reviewers. Pride first published her Big Book of Home Learning in 1986 and has updated it regularly since. It now has four volumes. Pride is also the publisher of the “wildly popular” Practical Homeschooling magazine, with as many as 100,000 subscribers, and has published numerous other popular homeschooling how-to books. Pride is also the author of The Way Home, published in 1985 and credited with launching the Quiverfull movement (not to be confused with the Patriarchy movement).

And then, of course, there is The Child Abuse Industry. According to R.L. Stollar, the book is “a remarkable read that calls for a ‘Second North American Revolution’ — namely, having babies, abolishing no-fault divorce, going to church, eliminating foster care, homeschooling, re-instituting “biblical” executions of criminals, and getting rid of abuse hotlines.” Stollar is currently writing a multi-part review, which I will definitely promote when it comes out.

Here are ten quotes from Pride’s book, courtesy Stollar’s post on Homeschoolers Anonymous:

10. “The major problem is that the public has been convinced that child abuse is a major problem.”

9. “Are one out of four adult women (or one out of three, or two—the statistics keep getting wilder) really the victims of savage lust perpetrated in their youth?Isn’t it possible to organize a bridge party without staring at an abused woman across the table? Where do these wild statistics come from?”

8. “Never vote for a candidate whose campaign promises include ‘doing more for children.’”

7. “Child abuse hysteria is a self-righteous coverup for anti-child attitudes.”

6. “If [child abuse prevention programs] are allowed to proliferate, we will produce for the first time an entire generation of males who have been trained to consider raping their sons and daughters as passably normal behavior.”

5. “If sex has nothing to do with having babies, you can have sex with anyone or anything. Including children.”

4. “We need to stop allowing the unsupported testimony of childrenwho are of an age where they can barely distinguish fantasy and reality.”

3. “Don’t hotline anyone.”

2. “A retarded daughter told contradictory tales of sexual abuse by her step-brother and other male relatives… So here we have a girl who probably made up the story in the first place.”

1. “Age segregation increasingly alienates children and adults. Children are the ‘new n*****s.’” (not censored in Mary Pride’s version.)

My interest piqued by Stollar’s quotes, I cracked open my copy of HSLDA’s Chris Klicka’s 2006 book, Homeschool Heroes: The Struggle and Triumph of Homeschooling in America. I opened to the chapter on social workers.

At Risk from Social Workers

. . . Homeschoolers are at risk. They are not at risk because they have big families or teach their children at home or neglect their children in any way. They are at risk because the child welfare system has lost control. Many social workers are trained in a philosophy that is antiparent, antifamily, and antireligious.

I can’t say I’m surprised, but here it is again. Look, I know that social services isn’t perfect, and that it’s badly in need of better funding. But that’s not what this sounds like it is about. According to Klicka, the issue isn’t that social services is underfunded and understaffed, but rather that social services is antifamily. This is the same sort of line Mary Pride was promoting in her book.

HSLDA is both a policy advocacy and legal defense group. HSLDA defends member families if they have any problems in their interaction with local public schools or social services. The organization’s website describes it like this:

Why does HSLDA help member families in the initial stage of a child abuse investigation?

HSLDA’s mission is primarily to advance homeschooling rights. Sometimes homeschooling parents get reported to CPS because people misunderstand homeschooling. They may see children playing outside during school hours and think that the parents are allowing them to be truant. Other times, families are reported for other types of suspected abuse or neglect. Investigations of all such allegations begin the same way: a social worker visits the family’s home, or contacts them requesting to set up a visit.

HSLDA advises our members in these initial contacts with social workers in order to ensure that their constitutional rights are protected. Once the allegations are revealed, we continue to represent our members if the allegations relate to homeschooling.

In other words, according to HSLDA’s website, they advise member families any time there is a social worker at the door, but only represent member families going forward if the allegations involve homeschooling. Along these same lines, an announcement on HSLDA’s facebook page last year asserted that “HSLDA does not and will not ever condone nor defend child abuse.” But some of the stories Klicka relates from his years working for HSLDA tell a different story.

There’s this one, for instance:

A homeschool father in Michigan picked up his two-year-old child by the arms, taking her into the house while she was crying and was reported for child abuse by a nosy neighbor. I set up a meeting with the social worker and counseled the family on what htey should say. I told themI told them to explain their religious convictions concerning raising their children from “a positive standpoint” avoiding Bible verses like if “you beat him with the rod, he will not die.” Or, if you “beat him with the rod,” you will “deliver his soul” from hell. Not a good idea. Social workers just don’t understand those verses.

Instead I told them to explain their beliefs by emphasizing verses such as Matthew 18:6 that states that if you harm or offend a child, it is better that a millstone be tied around your neck and you be thrown in the deepest part of the ocean. In other words, their religious convictions demand that they not do anything that will harm their children. When the family began presenting these religious beliefs to the agent, he became visibly uncomfortable, and suddenly announced that he would close the case.

And this one:

In Fairfax County, Virginia, a pastor gave a seminar on child discipline that included the requirement in the Bible to spank. A parishioner had to discipline her child while a neighbor was visiting a few days later. She spanked the child in the other room and then explained to the neighbor a little of what she had learned from the pastor.

The neighbor, who happened to be against spanking, reported the pastor to the child welfare agency for “bruising their children and for twenty-minute spanking sessions.”

To clarify, this suggests the pastor spoke in his sermon of bruising his children and carrying out twenty-minute spanking sessions.

The social worker who then initiated the investigation told me she thought she might have a religious cult on her hands that abuses children. I expressed my disbelief to the social worker that she was seriously investigating what an anonymous source claimed she heard from a person who heard it from another person. That is thrice removed hearsay. I told her that her evidence was flimsy and set the parameters for a meeting.

In preparation for the meeting, I told the homeschooling pastor and his wife not to recount any specific incidents of spanking since the social worker had nothing on the family that would stand up in court. I told them that they should emphasize again the positive verses such as Matthew 18:6. Since the social worker had no evidence, the only evidence she could acquire would be from what information she could gather from the pastor and his wife. Since the parents carefully avoided all specific examples and spoke in general terms, the social worker had nothing and had to close the case.

Perhaps those at HSLDA would argue that they never defended someone against child abuse in court. But in this layman’s eyes, this constitutes defending child abuse. I mean, did they even ask the pastor if it was true that he bruised his children and spanked them in twenty-minute sessions? Or did they de facto believe he was innocent and not bother checking, as seems to be their habit? I’ve expressed my frustration with this before.

And there is a similar distrust of children’s testimony with Klicka as with Pride:

Another family in Bradington, Florida, was visited by social workers. Allegations were made by one of their seven adopted children, who was the only one not being homeschooled. He had made up a story and told it to his science teacher, who had then passed the information to a social worker. I was able to talk to the social worker and keep them out of the home and away from the children. The case was finally listed as unfounded. The mom said, ‘This is why I spend twenty-six cents a day. People are crazy not to join HSLDA. I have an attorney ready to help me at a moment’s notice.’

There is also advice on how to hide abuse and avoid being reported:

Know Your Family Doctor

We have had numerous situations where doctors turned homeschoolers in to social workers because they found a bruise or mark on the child . . . I learned early on that each family needs to know their doctor well. If the doctor is familiar with the patients and trusts them, they do not have to turn them over to a child welfare agency, even if they have a mark or bruise. It is completely the doctor’s discretion.

The orientation toward social services is the same in Klicka’s book as in Pride’s—one of opposition. They are the enemy. In fact, Klicka began his chapter on social workers with I Peter 5:8-9—”Be sober; be vigilant; for your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” The assumptions about the veracity of the parents’ and children’s testimony is the same—parents’ word can be trusted, children’s cannot.

We need to be careful not to assume that all homeschoolers engage in this sort of denialism and defense of child abuse. I do not know whether the themes explored here extend beyond the leaders of the conservative Christian homeschooling subculture, and we should not assume that we do. But with that subculture, this is a problem. With these sorts of narratives, how can we expect those within this subculture to even self-police, much less report suspicions of abuse?

From Pride’s The Child Abuse Industry to Michael Farris’s thrill-horror novel Anonymous Tip, this is a problem.

Oh, and also? If there are Christian homeschoolers out there who are upset by what I’ve said here, the correct response is to go about condemning the words of these Christian homeschool leaders and creating a new narrative, a narrative that affirms reporting suspicions of child abuse and doesn’t de facto trust parents’ word over that of their children. Condemning me for saying these things or arguing that I am anti-homeschooling would be the incorrect response.

11 Homeschool Celebrities Explained With GIFs

June 4, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team23 Comments

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

Homeschool celebrities.

They run our lobbying organizations, write our books, and garner all our blog views. Our parents thought they were God’s messengers and we thought we should keep our thoughts to ourselves. Now that we’re grown, our perspectives have changed a bit. So we think it’s worthwhile to look at 11 current and former homeschool celebrities — and explain them using gifs.

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1. Michael and Debi Pearl

The Pearls have a unique approach to communicating the love of Jesus to children. It goes something like this:

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2. Doug Phillips

Last year Doug Phillips realized his most Hazardous Journey wasn’t a vacation. It was the public backlash against revelations that he had an extramarital relationship with a woman that involved — well, we weren’t sure exactly what it involved.

When Phillips first admitted infidelity, he spun it as just some species of “emotional fornication” or something:

But then it came out that, no, the relationship wasn’t just “inappropriately romantic and affectionate,” as he originally stated. The “relationship” was Doug Phillips repeatedly sexually abusing a young woman. As far as his original statement went, Phillips was suddenly like:

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3. Bill Gothard

Bill Gothard, like Doug Phillips, has discovered that sexually abusing young people doesn’t make you popular. However, unlike Phillips, Gothard faces over 30 individuals accusing him of abuse. At this point his attempts to explain his situation are sounding like this:

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4. James and Stacy McDonald

As the media and homeschoolers are circling the wagons around Bill Gothard and Doug Phillips, their former fans with crushes on Patriarchy are doing everything possible to now hide that fact. People like James and Stacy McDonald are pulling previously written posts and urging Patriarchy advocates to change the words they use. The McDonalds’ response here boils down to:

“No Patriarchy to see here. Move along!”

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5. Doug Wilson

Then of course there’s Doug Wilson. When he’s not too busy with obsessing over the latest blog post by Rachel Held Evans, Wilson is fighting the biggest threat Western Civilization has ever faced: women playing unladylike basketball.

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6. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar

Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar have a TV show. The plot of that TV show can be described by staring at this gif for approximately 19 seconds… and counting…

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7. Ken Ham

No homeschool celebrity list would be complete without a shout-out to Ken Ham. If you find it somewhat difficult to believe Adam and Eve enjoyed candlelight dinners on the backs of dinosaurs while trying to avoid talking snakes, well, Ken Ham has one message for you:

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8. Kevin Swanson

Kevin Swanson is like the Drunk Uncle of Christian homeschooling. From defending child marriage, comparing child abuse to “dead little bunnies,” warning people Frozen is Satan’s attempt to indoctrinate children into “the lifestyle of sodomy,” to his actual statement that “There’s a contrast between the feces-eaters and the church,” sometimes we wonder if he rocks himself to sleep at night screaming,

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9. Mary Pride

Mary Pride found her way home in 1985. It involved outbreeding non-Christians and calling children “the new n*****s.” When it comes to people and organizations working tirelessly to protect children from abuse, Pride is all,

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10. Michael Farris

In the midst of all the drama in the homeschooling world, Michael Farris stands in the foreground leading the charge against Obama, Common Core, and the not-Nazi Germans who hate homeschooling as much as he loves freedom. And Michael Farris loves his freedom:

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11. Matt Walsh

Ah yes. Finally, there’s Matt Walsh:

The 10 Best (AKA, Worst) Quotations from Mary Pride’s “The Child Abuse Industry” (With Gifs)

June 2, 2014May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team18 Comments

By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator

Most Christian homeschoolers know Mary Pride as “the queen of homeschooling,” one of the founders of the Quiverfull movement, the anti-feminism author of The Way Home, or the publisher of the wildly popular magazine “Practical Homeschooling.” But she also wrote a lesser known book in 1985 entitled The Child Abuse Industry: Outrageous Facts About Child Abuse & Everyday Rebellions Against a System that Threatens Every North American Family. It is a remarkable read that calls for a “Second North American Revolution” — namely, having babies, abolishing no-fault divorce, going to church, eliminating foster care, homeschooling, re-instituting “biblical” executions of criminals, and getting rid of abuse hotlines.

And that’s just scratching the surface.

I am currently writing an in-depth, multi-part review and analysis of The Child Abuse Industry, which I will publish on Homeschoolers Anonymous as soon as it is finished. But in the meantime, I want to share with you the 10 best — and by “best,” I mean most disturbing — quotations from this book. (And just to make this more tolerable, I added some gifs.)

Trigger warnings for abuse apologism, abuse denialism, and a racial slur.

Also: As a child abuse survivor myself, I find the gifs make reading these ideas more tolerable. However, another child abuse survivor told that, for him, the gifs make the ideas feel more intense. I want to respect everyone’s different ways of processing, so: if you’d like a gif-free version of this list, click here.

And now, without further ado, I will let Mary Pride speak for herself…

*****

10. “The major problem is that the public has been convinced that child abuse is a major problem.”

*****

9. “Are one out of four adult women (or one out of three, or two—the statistics keep getting wilder) really the victims of savage lust perpetrated in their youth? Isn’t it possible to organize a bridge party without staring at an abused woman across the table? Where do these wild statistics come from?”

*****

8. “Never vote for a candidate whose campaign promises include ‘doing more for children.'”

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7. “Child abuse hysteria is a self-righteous coverup for anti-child attitudes.”

*****

6. “If [child abuse prevention programs] are allowed to proliferate, we will produce for the first time an entire generation of males who have been trained to consider raping their sons and daughters as passably normal behavior.”

*****

5. “If sex has nothing to do with having babies, you can have sex with anyone or anything. Including children.”

*****

4. “We need to stop allowing the unsupported testimony of children who are of an age where they can barely distinguish fantasy and reality.”

*****

3. “Don’t hotline anyone.”

*****

2. “A retarded daughter told contradictory tales of sexual abuse by her step-brother and other male relatives… So here we have a girl who probably made up the story in the first place.”

*****

1. “Age segregation increasingly alienates children and adults. Children are the ‘new n*s.'”

(Not censored in Mary Pride’s version.)

His Quiver Full of Them: Jeri Lofland’s Thoughts

July 11, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team12 Comments

His Quiver Full of Them: Jeri Lofland’s Thoughts

Jeri’s post was originally published on her blog Heresy in the Heartland. It is reprinted with her permission. Also by Jeri on HA: “Generational Observations” and “Of Isolation and Community.”

Decades ago, I cross-stitched a scripture motto for my parents from Psalm 127, the favorite psalm of large families.

“Lo, children are a heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.”

The psalmist goes on to say: “As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them…”

The term “quiverfull” is now used as both a noun and an adjective to describe a theology and lifestyle that glorifies human fertility while maintaining that God will provide the resources to raise as many children as he allows a couple to conceive. Contraception is held to be “playing God” and a violation of the command to be “Be fruitful and multiply”. The ideal Quiverfull couple are always open to “more blessings”, regardless of financial situation, health concerns, housing limitations, or needs of existing children.

I’m not certain when my parents decided that contraception was immoral. As a high schooler, Mom was an advocate of zero population growth and intended to adopt rather than bear children. A few years later, she graduated from a strict Catholic nursing school and married my dad. I was born a year later, my brother two years after that, and so on for the next 20 years.

Mail would arrive periodically from the Couple to Couple League and my parents had a couple of books by Catholic authors John & Sheila Copley explaining the practice of abstinence and/or breastfeeding as a means of birth control. Of course, even “natural family planning” (NFP) sounded too much like the evil “Planned Parenthood” so it was usually referred to as “child spacing”. Somewhere along the line my parents abandoned NFP (turns out it’s not all that effective at preventing pregnancy!) and the babies began to come even closer together.

Certainly Mom was influenced by Mary Pride’s 1985 book The Way Home, a story of the author’s journey from feminism to what she calls “reality”. Mary had just three young children when she wrote the book, in which she blasted away at contraception, lingerie, Marabel Morgan’s The Total Woman, and even Christian schools.

“All forms of sex that shy away from marital fruitfulness are perverted. Masturbation, homosexuality, lesbianism, bestiality, prostitution, adultery, and even deliberate marital barrenness–all are perverted.”

“Since the word used for female is connected so strongly with the idea of nursing babies, whereas it has no connection at all with the idea of sexual activity, I believe that God is saying here that when women exchange their natural function of childbearing and motherliness for that which is ‘against nature’ [that is, trying to behave sexually like a man], the men tend to abandon the natural sexual use of the women and turn to homosexuality. When men stop seeing women as mothers, sex loses its sacredness. Sex becomes ‘recreational’, and therefore the drive begins to find new kicks.” (Mary Pride, The Way Home, 1985)

(Pride’s position against family planning was more extreme than even the Catholic Couple-to-Couple League’s, prompting a correspondence between her and John Kippley, president of CCLI, and leading Pride to grudgingly endorse NFP in some situations in her sequel to The Way Home.)

Pride went on to birth six more babies and became a powerful force in the new homeschooling movement. My mom used to share The Way Home with all her friends and donated it to church libraries when she could. (When she encouraged me to read it, I was confused. Especially by the story about the lady wearing saran-wrap. Sexually naive young women raised in patriarchal, homeschooling isolation were definitely not Pride’s target audience.)

Mary Pride’s views fit rather well with the teachings of Bill Gothard–a middle-aged bachelor who handed out plenty of sexual and parenting advice at his seminars and encouraged couples to have surgeries to reverse previous vasectomies and tubal ligations. One of Gothard’s books informs us, “Labor in childbirth… was given to the woman for her spiritual benefit…” and points out that the God of the Old Testament “cursed several women by closing their wombs.” Attendees of Gothard’s conferences learned to associate infertility with God’s judgement. A full quiver, on the other hand, was a sign of God’s favor, a spiritual status symbol.

In 1990, a Nebraska couple published A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ. In this book, Rick and Jan Hess (homeschooling parents of ten) invite the reader to imagine a world where no one has ever had more than two or three siblings, effectively eliminating many historical figures. This exercise concludes with visualization of a future where enormous families are normal and God provides spacesuits for a missionary family moving their brood to evangelize a colony on the moon. My parents had this book, probably purchased at an IBLP seminar and still available on Gothard’s website.

Then there was Nancy Campbell’s occasional magazine for moms, Above Rubies. Nancy is a fierce promoter of anti-feminism from her compound in Tennessee. Her website includes multiple articles by women who felt guilt and regret over “the biggest mistake” of their life. After they repented, they went on to expand their families by four, five, six more babies. What mistake is reversed by more pregnancies? An abortion, perhaps? No, as it turns out, the biggest mistake of these women’s lives was a tubal ligation. Nancy also sells a book, A Change of Heart, encouraging couples to have surgeries to reverse both vasectomies and tubal ligations.

Vickie Farris, whose husband Mike is president of the Home School Legal Defense Association, homeschooled their ten children and lived to write a book about it. She encourages other women to reject birth control methods and embrace motherhood. Quiverfull women like Farris, and Michelle Duggar of “Nineteen Kids and Counting”, have built their lives on the mantra “God won’t give anyone more than they can handle”, sometimes phrased as “What God orders, he pays for”.

My parents were opponents of both birth control and sterilization. They even encouraged some of their friends to have reversal surgeries, resulting in many more babies. My mom had eleven children over 24 years, including ten [unassisted home]births. Pregnancy was not easy for her–she often referred to herself with the phrase from St. Paul, “a living sacrifice”. She spent most of my childhood breastfeeding, diapering, potty-training, and homeschooling on top of that. I understood that this was not culturally normal, but sought to convince myself that God was pleased with this self-sacrifice. I spent my teen years watching my mom’s body swell and deflate, and changing thousands of diapers.

In my twenties, as I waited for my turn to become a wife and mother, I quietly ticked off how many children I could have in x years. I may have been ideologically persuaded that contraception was wrong, but I didn’t want to spend twenty years lactating either. When I got impatient for God to bring me a husband (no boyfriends on the horizon), I consoled myself by guessing how many fewer children I would bear in a shorter window of fertile sexual activity.

Fortunately, when I did get married, my husband and I quickly began to realize that many aspects of Quiverfull thought and practice were contradictory to our values. Not before taking NFP classes from a Catholic certified trainer, though. When we got pregnant anyway, we were told the method worked fine–we’d just had sex when [it turned out!] we were actually fertile. Well, what do you know?

I think my relationship with the Quiverfull movement finally ended a few years ago as I was perched on the end of an exam table in my doctor’s office. Looking up from my chart, she compassionately observed, “You’ve been raising kids for a long time,” and I burst into unexpected tears.

These days, stories of ex-Quiverfull moms and their “quivering daughters” are multiplying on the Internet like rabbits in the spring. The fruit of the movement has not turned out to be sweet; we deal with health problems, poverty, anxiety, depression, PTSD, eating disorders, cutting, sexual abuse, emotional incest, and divorce. (You can read far more than you want to know at the Homeschoolers Anonymous blog.)

In spite of these firsthand horror stories, Quiverfull continues to enjoy wide support in America and is gaining traction in other nations. Earlier this year, the BBC reported on the movement’s growth in the United Kingdom. You can listen to more, including scary-sounding clips from Nancy Campbell, here.

Meanwhile here in the States, Hobby Lobby and Catholic hospitals gnash their teeth over their employees’ rights to use birth control. Texan teenagers are taught that contraceptives don’t work. (The result? Texas has more than 10% of America’s teen births.) And TLC continues to profit from shows like “Nineteen Kids and Counting”, promoting Quiverfull ideology to some unsuspecting viewers.

The show should include a disclaimer: For your own safety, don’t try this at home.

Homeschooling and Sibling Relationships

June 24, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team6 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Libby Anne’s blog Love Joy Feminism. It was originally published on Patheos on June 5, 2013.

The homeschool literature that my parents read promised them that homeschooling would create perfect sibling relationships among us children, and make us all especially close and really good friends with each other—unlike those public school kids’ distant relationships with their siblings, and rivalries rather than friendships, of course. I want to take a moment, then, to talk about sibling to sibling relationships in my family. This is kind of embarrassing, to be honest—I’m not going to come off so well here.

It’s true that we kids played together all the time growing up. We sort of had to—there wasn’t usually any other option. I mean sure, we had people over, but most of the time it was just us, and so we were each other’s playmates. I have so many memories of exploring creeks, building lego cities, and chasing each other across the pond. I could go on and on—we really did have great times. But here is my first caveat—I’ve found that most of my friends today who were public schooled also had great adventures with their siblings. Sure, they weren’t around each other for quite as many hours of the day, but it’s wrong to think that they didn’t also explore creeks together, build lego cities together, and chase each other across a pond or pool. In fact, come to think of it, I had cousins growing up who went to public school (and lived far away so we very rarely saw them), and I know for a fact that they did all of those things regularly.

Now, anyone who thinks that homeschooling magically eliminates sibling rivalry is sorely, sorely confused. I’m having troubles thinking of how to easily describe it, but we had sibling rivalries, and lots of them. There were literally three years when one of my brothers and I fought every time we had to spend more than half an hour together (which meant it happened multiple times a day, of course). We just set each other off, somehow. One of my sisters and I just had such completely different outlooks that we ended up permanently at odds—she resented me for being a goody-goody, and I resented her for not being the picture perfect Christian homeschool kid. There were several sisters in a row at one point, and this didn’t always work out that well—there were plenty of times when some of them tore down the others, continually, and with no real explanation. But beyond all this, as I’m going to explain, I actually think that in our case homeschooling served to exacerbate sibling rivalry.

For one thing, we kids fought over friends. See, rather than having individual friends our family generally got together with other like-minded homeschool families as families. So, say, the Smiths and their five kids would come over, or the Joneses and their nine kids, and we’d just play with whoever was somewhere around our age. In this process, I stole friends from my close-in-age-sister. Twice. And once I took a friend who by age probably should have been hers, but I got to her first and monopolized her. And no, this didn’t make for much happy-making between my sister and I. But, well, there were a limited number of friends available to us, so we fought with each other over them, and I usually won. If we’d been in school, we would have been in separate classes and had our own individual pools of friends.

In addition, because we were homeschooled we siblings had to spend 24 hours a day together. Sometimes this worked out great, but sometimes we got on each other’s nerves. A lot. A very, very lot. I suspect that if we had had more time apart from each other we might have grated on each other less. It would have given us a break. It would have meant that we could each have our own space and our own things—something we didn’t really have, and something we often sorely needed.

Next, bullying. Talking about bullying is rather difficult because, well, I was the bully. My parents followed the Pearls’ child training methods, which they came to after another homeschool family recommended them. Based on these methods, they gave us older kids the authority to spank the younger ones. I was never sadistic or anything, but I sure wasn’t very nice about it, and I learned after coming of age and leaving home that many of the younger ones saw me as a bully and had come to hate me. Only, in this case I had been a bully they couldn’t get away from. Normally, kids who are bullied at school have a respite at home. Not so my siblings. Sadly, I’ve seen this same pattern copied by others of my siblings, and even today, among those of my siblings still living at home, the older ones are authorized to spank the younger ones. In some ways, it’s rather like parent-approved bullying. As I’ve written before, I deeply regret my involvement in this. Sure, this pattern can exist without homeschooling, but in our case it was a pattern my parents implemented based on the literature and teachings of the homeschool movement, and not something I think they would have adopted had they not homeschooled.

There’s another issue I should probably discuss as well—as junior mom, I had my favorite among the younger kids. I favored her, and the other kids knew it. In fact, more than once when I was presiding as judge over an altercation the other children accused me of taking my favorite’s side just because she was my favorite. And it was probably true. What’s saddest to me about this is actually what happened after I left home—that special relationship didn’t last. My favorite felt I’d abandoned her when all I’d done was left for college—but she was too young at the time to understand. And then things blew up between myself and my parents and there was a long gap when I didn’t visit home at all, and was afraid to have too much contact with my siblings for fear of risking my parents’ disapproval. I wish I still had a special closeness to the girl I mothered as a teen, but it’s gone now and rebuilding it is hindered by a lack of trust. Perhaps this is something specific to me, but I think it suggests that the junior mother-favored little sibling dynamic common in so many homeschool families I knew growing up wasn’t really so healthy as we thought it was.

And now we come to today.

Today, I’m extremely close to several of my adult siblings—but I’m close to them not because of being with them 24/7 growing up but rather because we were bound together by adversity as young adults. These specific siblings also went through problems with my parents when they became adults and started making their own choices, and during this time we cried on each other’s shoulders, blew off steam in long phone conversations, talked about out our backgrounds have affected us, and just generally were there for each other—and we still do this today. The interesting thing is that these aren’t even necessarily the siblings I was closest to as a kid. As for the kids still at home, my relationships with each of them are weird because if I actively try to undermine what my parents are teaching them, my parents will likely limit my contact with them, and avoiding things that will undermine what my parents are teaching them means avoiding talking about basically everything I’m interested in.

I don’t think homeschooling enhanced sibling to sibling relationships in our family. I’m not saying there weren’t some good things—I did spend more time playing with my siblings than public schooled children do, and I have lots of positive memories from these times—but rather that I think the downsides outweighed what we gained. So when I read the following quote by homeschool pioneer Mary Pride, I just had to laugh. With this background, let me offer the quote and some thoughts I had on reading it.

However, in one respect these books do get it right. In school, kids learn to segregate themselves by age. Older kids learn to be embarrassed about spending time with younger kids. Schoolkids also quickly learn the art of the putdown, and all about “ganging up” on the victim of the day. When all these social fighting skills – which clueless folks refer to as “socialization” – are brought home, it can take sibling rivalry to a new level of meanness.

Does she seriously think sibling rivalry only turns mean when kids attend public school and thus learn bullying techniques and bringing those techniques home? Or, conversely, that public school kids naturally have troubled sibling-sibling relationships? Or, to ask a third question, that homeschooling can’t in certain ways serve to increase sibling rivalry? Because my experience and the experiences of friends I now have who were public schooled very much suggests otherwise.

Does she seriously think that homeschooled kids don’t learn how to put each other down or gang up on each other? Goodness, don’t get me started on the ganging up on each other bit—for a long time, my siblings and I were split into two groups and automatically took opposite sides when there was a fight. Sometimes one faction would gang up on one kid in the other faction, and the rest of that child’s action would rush to her rescue. Each faction viewed the other with some degree of suspicion.

Does she seriously think that homeschooled kids never get annoyed by kid siblings and, yes, even at times come to resent them? Let me tell you right now—they do! I wouldn’t say I ever felt actual resentment—though the same cannot be said of all of my siblings—but I did find some of the younger ones quite annoying at times. And sometimes we older ones—some more than others—wished we could get the little kids out of our hair so we could have some space, but when the little kids share a room with you, it’s rather hard to do that.

When it comes to sibling to sibling relationships, my parents would have done better here if they had sought to read about and learn techniques for fostering positive sibling relationships rather than simply assuming that the act of homeschooling would turn us all into singing cherubs. But then, they bought what Mary Pride was selling hook line and sinker.

I want to be clear that I’m not trying to generalize from my experience—while there may be some similar patterns, I think the dynamics of sibling relationships will vary greatly from homeschool family to homeschool family (just as they vary greatly from public school family to public school family). I’m simply saying that the promise my parents were given that homeschooling would create close and blissful sibling relationships—and also would mean that none of us would face bullying—turned out to be false and grossly misleading. And yet, homeschool speakers and organizations are still out there making this same promise to unsuspecting homeschool parents today. Perhaps, in some small way, my story can help.

If you were homeschooled, I’d like to invite you to use this space to talk about how sibling relationships went in your family. And if you weren’t homeschooled, feel free to talk about your own experiences with sibling relationships and how they compare and contrast with the things I talk about here.

Making My Own Way: Matthew’s Story, Part Two

May 9, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team4 Comments

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

*****

In this series: Part One | Part Two

*****

High School Years

My first year in high school was wonderful for me. Finally, I was out of the house! I made friends and felt like I could finally breathe. I won’t go into great detail about my high school experience, since that isn’t the point of this story. However, I will point out a few things that I noticed over those four years:

• I discovered that I had a real problem with social anxiety. I’m not sure if this is hereditary or caused by my childhood. After reading some of the stories on this site, I’m thinking that it was a little of both.

• I was plagued by feelings of inadequacy. I thought I was not good enough, smart enough, athletic enough, witty enough… none of it. I did come to the realization that there are things that I’m good at, but it took years. In high school, I wound up trying everything since I had no idea where I fit in – I’d never had other kids around for me to gauge my own ability.

• I was plagued by guilt. Even if I hadn’t done anything wrong, I was often overcome by guilt over my (imagined and real) transgressions. This tied a lot into the messages we were receiving at church, which at this point were downright toxic.

• I had little-to-no self-confidence. As a homeschooler, you become so used to your parents’ authority, that you don’t really know how to make your own decisions, or when you do, you constantly second guess yourself.

So while getting out of the house was a welcome relief, I still felt like I was trying to overcome my upbringing.

At Home – Part 2

While I was off enjoying my high school experience, the “shit was hitting the fan” at home… oh, and how! My oldest younger sister had started hanging out with this girl she met at the homeschooling coop, and they decided they weren’t going to let being at home slow them down. I noticed one night that my sister and this girl, who was sleeping over, were acting really strange and goofy. Turns out, they were drunk! But how did they get the alcohol? After all, my parents didn’t drink. I later learned that my 12-year-old, shy-as-can-be sister stole it from a convenience store!

For my little sister, this would kick off what would become a six year blur of cigarettes, alcohol, promiscuous sex, drugs, and whatever else. To this day, I am convinced that the combination of home schooling and extreme Christian Fundamentalism destroyed her confidence. I remember her telling me, at 11, that she had given up and could never live up to the standard — I really think that she cracked under the pressure of that atmosphere.

She got pregnant at 17, got married, moved out, and hasn’t had issues with drugs or alcohol since. She and her husband now have 5 kids, all of whom are in public school, and her oldest daughter (13) is an exemplary student. All of her kids appear to be doing well.

Because of my sister’s meltdowns, I ended up getting away with a lot that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. So in a roundabout way, I owe her a “thanks” for taking the pressure off me and humbling our parents. I did take advantage of her recklessness and flew under the radar as I started drinking at 15.

College

The drinking continued on into college. I could never shake the idea that I wasn’t good enough and that I was in a perpetual state of sin, so the alcohol helped me to ease the anxiety and mentally “check out” for long periods of time.

Then I’d get sober, feel horrible, and go cry to my Christian friends about how I was going to hell. My secular friends would shake their heads and wonder why I was so conflicted. This pattern continued until I got sober at about 26 years old.

Other things happened in college as well. My drinking habits combined with my lack of any sort of sex education made me a sitting duck when it came to STDs and unexpected pregnancy.

But despite all that, I managed to graduate.

Adulthood

Today, I don’t harbor any resentment over my upbringing, as I realize it could have been a whole lot worse! There were actually several good things that came out of it:

• Since much of my learning was from reading books and not in the classrooms, I’m very good at figuring things out on my own. This has been a very beneficial skill to have as an IT specialist.

• I don’t mind being alone. This is something I’m starting to see as a blessing. During my four year marriage (yes… I’m divorced) I was miserable most of the time. I always had to come home to a spouse who was either angry with me or trying to drag me to some function that I didn’t really feel like attending. Once I realized that marriage is not for me, I’ve been able to enjoy being a single dad, making my own way. Since as a kid, I often went out and about to do things on my own, it isn’t really much of an adjustment to do things and go places on my own today. I don’t need a large social circle.

• I’ve seen the damage that religious extremism causes and I can spot the warning signs a mile away. While I still attend church, it’s a seeker-sensitive, theology-lite congregation that just loves everyone. I take my kids on the weekends when I have them, but I don’t preach at them. Their faith is between them and God. I expect them to make mistakes and refuse to hold them to a higher standard than the one I hold for myself. I have no idea if God is real or if the Bible is completely true. If he is and his word is true, then I’m sure he’ll get my attention one way or another. But after years of unanswered prayers, a failed marriage, kids from multiple relationships, and alcoholism, I find it hard to believe that he is actively involved in our lives.

• I witnessed first-hand the despair and hopelessness of many disillusioned homeschooling parents. These are people who, by and large, poured their hearts and souls into raising Godly men and women. Seeing this convinced me that it’s best to adopt a “live and let live” parenting model and to love your children unconditionally! Even if my son winds up marching in the local gay pride parade with his boyfriend and my daughter ends up working overtime at the Diamond Club, I will still love them and welcome them in my home with open arms. Life is too short for fallouts over lifestyle choices.

Summary

Homeschooling was really just one piece of the whole dysfunctional puzzle. I’m sure that if other factors had been different, but I was still homeschooled, I might feel differently about it than I do now. That said, it is very encouraging to read accounts from other homeschoolers to confirm that many of my experiences are shared by others.

End of series.

Making My Own Way: Matthew’s Story, Part One

May 7, 2013May 11, 2020HA Editorial Team5 Comments

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

*****

In this series: Part One | Part Two

*****

I have been reading the posts on Homeschoolers Anonymous with great interest for the past few weeks. After giving it some thought, I decided to share my own experiences. I can identify with much of what has been posted here, even though my story isn’t as traumatic as some of those I’ve read here.

Early Childhood

I was homeschooled from grades K – 8 and in public school for grades 9 – 12. I believe that it was my dad’s idea to send me to high school full-time. I give him credit for this since it left my parents open to criticism from members of the church we attended. Had it been solely up to my mom, I probably would have gone to public school for math and science only and been at home for all other subjects. She typically had her own ways of doing things, and her ways didn’t always line up with conventional wisdom.

My parents started homeschooling me in the early 80’s (I’m 33). If I had to guess, I would say that they were influenced to do this by James Dobson’s Focus on the Family ministry and Mary Pride’s book, The Way Home. Back in the mid-80’s, there weren’t nearly as many groups and organizations for conservative, Christian homeschoolers. However, our family managed to link up with a church that had a few other families that were educating their kids at home, so we would get together with these other families on a weekly basis for a homeschooling coop.

Our curriculum was a hodge-podge of Saxon, Bob Jones, and Abeka. My memory is a little hazy on what curriculums we used for each subject, since my mom typically mixed and matched our text books from year to year. I am certain that my parents’ primary reason for homeschooling my three younger sisters and I was to pass on their religious beliefs. It may have had a little to do with my mom’s belief that she could give us a better education than the local public schools, but the main reasons were definitely religious in nature.

The church we attended started off as a group of charismatic, non-denominational Christians who just loved Jesus. Practically every member was a first generation “believer” and many had really traumatic pasts. There wasn’t too much emphasis on theology or formulating a consistent, Christian worldview, but the members were undoubtedly in love with the Lord. The pastor of this church had a particularly abusive childhood and had accepted Christ in his early 20’s. From there, he just started preaching. I don’t believe that he had a formal education at a seminary, but he was very sincere and spent his life studying the Word.

My early childhood was fairly pleasant. I didn’t mind homeschooling, mainly since I didn’t know any different, and because all my best friends were at church. Things were good up to the age of about 9 or 10. But then, slowly and subtly, the environment at church and at home began to change.

At Church

Our congregation started to get heavily involved in the Pro-Life cause and, in particular, Operation Rescue. We became very active in pickets and protests and even started sitting in front of abortion clinics. For a 10-year-old kid, the scene at these early protests and sit-ins leaves a real impression. On one side, you had the Christians, who were singing praise and worship songs while walking in a slow circle or sitting in front of the clinic. I never witnessed any of them behaving in a confrontational manner (although I did witness how they would go limp when the police would start hauling them into patty wagons).

On the other side were God’s enemies – the feminists, liberals, and atheists. These people would spew all kinds of hate and vulgarities at the Christians. As a kid, the contrast was stark. I couldn’t understand why these people were so angry at the Christians who were just trying to save the babies.

(Getting a little off track here… so back to the story.)

Not too long after getting involved in Operation Rescue, our church split up. About half the members stayed at the original church and the other half planted a new one that began meeting at an elementary school. Soon after the split, a new assistant pastor came on board. The new pastor was staunchly reformed and, within a few years, the church adopted a Reformed, Christian Reconstructionist theology. Christian Reconstructionists are fiercely post-millennial, meaning that they believe Christ will not return until all aspects of culture and government are under his “Lordship.”

What does this look like exactly? The book of Leviticus should give you some idea. The pipe dream of this movement is one where the constitution is replaced by Old Testament case laws. Public executions by stoning, slavery, and extreme patriarchy would be the “norm.” Separation of church and state would become a thing of the past. RJ Rushdooney was the patron saint of this movement.

Once our church adopted this theology, homeschooling became the main method for raising up our nation’s next generation of foot soldiers to usher in a theocratic “utopia.” Suddenly, evangelism was replaced by activism and joy was replaced by anger and paranoia. Rather than serving the community, the members became focused primarily on getting the right candidates elected into office, including a few from within our small church.

For years, my family had been the standard by which other homeschooling families in our community were measured. But then all these new homeschoolers started showing up. These families made my parents look liberal by comparison. They adhered to the courtship model and truly believed that public education was a tool of the devil. I did witness one marriage via courtship between an oldest daughter and one of the men in the church. My parents praised them as a shining example of biblical courtship.

They were divorced within a year.

At Home – Part 1

At about age 10, I started to realize that I was “different.” Kids in the neighborhood started asking me why I didn’t go to school. I’d probably give them some canned answer that my parents told me to recite when asked this question. But it still made me feel like an outsider. It also didn’t help that I had weak hand/eye coordination – I couldn’t hit a baseball! I’m sure if you’re a natural leader and athlete like, say, Tim Tebow, being homeschooled isn’t too bad. But for me, it felt like I was getting a double-whammy.

When you also take into account the fact that I was spending every day, 24/7, with my domineering mother and three younger sisters, well… let’s just say the fact I’m straight makes me living proof that homosexuality is not rooted in one’s upbringing.

Around grade 6, I had some sports-related activities going on at the local Middle School. I got to see kids goofing around, having fun, and just being kids. I was incredibly shy and did not know how to join in, but I really wanted to! I was tired of feeling like an outsider. I wanted to jockey for position in the middle school social hierarchy. I wanted to get teased or get in a fight. I wanted to flirt with girls. I was tired of spending my afternoons and summers cooped up with my mom and sisters. I wanted my own life – one that wouldn’t be under the constant supervision of my parents.

A few days later, I mustered up all the courage I had, and told my parents that I wanted to go to school. I’ll never forget my mom’s response: “NO WAY! OUT OF THE QUESTION! THAT’S FINAL!” I was crushed and cried for a few days. On top of this rejection, her and my dad laid a massive guilt trip on me for even wanting to go to school in the first place. Saying things like, “I can’t believe how ungrateful you are for all the sacrifices we have made so that your mother can stay home with you kids” or explaining to me “how disappointed God must be in me for being so ungrateful.” Then my mom would force out some tears to drive the point home.

Of course, whenever we were around my dad’s work colleagues or anyone else who was skeptical of homeschooling, I was expected to suck it up, be sociable, and tell them how great my homeschooling experience was. And I did… every time.

That rejection and those next two miserable years were the worst of my life. My parents used to be fond of telling us that we “have no idea how good we have it” as kids. But I’ll tell you, nothing I have encountered in adulthood rivaled the misery of 7th and 8th grade. It was like I died a little inside. However, worse than the initial hurt was the fact that the seeds were planted for my distrust and animosity not just of my mom, but of women in general. I really believe that those 13 years spent being micromanaged by a controlling, overbearing mother turned me off to ever wanting to live with a woman full-time again.

To be continued.

Michael Farris

Bill Gothard

James Dobson

Michael and Debi Pearl

Mary Pride

Heidi St. John

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1. Michael and Debi Pearl

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2. Doug Phillips

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3. Bill Gothard

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4. James and Stacy McDonald

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5. Doug Wilson

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6. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar

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7. Ken Ham

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8. Kevin Swanson

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9. Mary Pride

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10. Michael Farris

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11. Matt Walsh

10. “The major problem is that the public has been convinced that child abuse is a major problem.”

8. “Never vote for a candidate whose campaign promises include ‘doing more for children.'”

7. “Child abuse hysteria is a self-righteous coverup for anti-child attitudes.”

6. “If [child abuse prevention programs] are allowed to proliferate, we will produce for the first time an entire generation of males who have been trained to consider raping their sons and daughters as passably normal behavior.”

5. “If sex has nothing to do with having babies, you can have sex with anyone or anything. Including children.”

4. “We need to stop allowing the unsupported testimony of children who are of an age where they can barely distinguish fantasy and reality.”

3. “Don’t hotline anyone.”

2. “A retarded daughter told contradictory tales of sexual abuse by her step-brother and other male relatives… So here we have a girl who probably made up the story in the first place.”

1. “Age segregation increasingly alienates children and adults. Children are the ‘new n*****s.'”

1. “Age segregation increasingly alienates children and adults. Children are the ‘new n*s.'”