‘But for us, God is not that tiny’: Why I’m #withMalala

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 8, 2016. 

Usually the documentaries I enjoy are about religious fundamentalism and cults or evangelical culture. I watch to learn and for research.

The other night I rented two movies from Redbox: the new live action Cinderella and He Named Me Malala.

I thought I’d learn something from Malala. More about the culture of Pakistan and the war on terror, more about equality for women in other parts of the world. I thought I would learn about someone vastly different than me.

Instead, I realized that Malala and I have more in common than I’d guessed.

1.) Isolation in a high control group and disagreeing with the conservative factions of your religion.

Malala’s father explains that when the Taliban first came to the Swat Valley, “We thought they were good people. They promised to follow the Quran.”

The Taliban took over media and had book burnings in the streets. The only information the villager could access was the radio broadcast every night, blaring throughout the whole village. People listened every night to hear their neighbors’ sins. Then the Taliban started killing the people named. They shot and slaughtered people in the square, saying that this could be you tomorrow.

They were anti-government, saying that any police or soldiers who attacked Muslims were infidels.

They said girls could not attend school. Three schools were bombed in one night. The Taliban singled out the women, telling them what they ought to do and be. “The women only have one window open and only one man is speaking.”

“if you don’t follow the real Islam that we are showing you, then you can be the next person like this man.”

And the destructive mentality of the Taliban leaders just fed the cycle. Malala’s father said, “When I am willing to kill myself, others are nothing to me.”

The Taliban is more like the subculture I grew up in than most are comfortable admitting. I’m not the first to notice this.

There’s some odd similarities.

  • Limiting educational access for women, telling them their place is only in the home and using religion to justify this.
  • Controlling information about the outside world. The Taliban radio broadcasts sounded eerily similar to tapes of Prophet Warren Jeff’s sermons that the FLDS people listened to regularly.
  • The government is wrong, not the group. Backlash is dismissed as persecution.

2.) Ideologies are more dangerous than individual people.

Malala’s father named her after a folktale about a woman killed in battle in the Swat Valley. The invading enemy seemed too great, but according to the story, the women told her people, “Live like a lion for one day or be a slave for a hundred years.”

She led them into battle. They were victorious, but she was fatally wounded.

Malala’s family watched the changes taking place in their village.

“I was feeling if I don’t speak, then I would be the most sinful and most guilty person in this world,” her father explained. “If you keep silent, you lose the right to exist, to live.”

Her father started calling out the Taliban publicly: “They have tarnished the beautiful face of Islam.”

Malala corresponded with a journalist on the outside and kept attending school.

“He didn’t push me. He let me do what I wanted.”

Malala’s mother doesn’t approve of all of her daughter’s boldness and activism. She is still too afraid that it’s not something a woman does.

“My father only gave me the name Malala. He didn’t make me Malala. I chose this life.”

Pakistanis and Taliban leaders try to discount her because they think that her father is behind this, that “Malala is just a character.” They can’t believe that a woman could actually do this.

“There is a moment when you have to choose whether to be silent or to stand up,” Malala said. “I’m not a lone voice, I am many. And our voices have grown louder and louder.”

Then Malala and two other girls were shot by the Taliban one afternoon on a school bus.

Her father feared that even if she survived her head injury, she would blame him: “I was a child, you should have stopped me, what has happened to me was because of you.”

But Malala says she would still make the same choice. “It does not matter that the left side of my face does not work.”

When the documentary makers asked her about the shooter, Malala said:

“It was not a person. It was an ideology.”

“The Taliban is a small group of people. They think that God is a small conservative being. But for us, God is not that tiny. We think that God has sent us to this world to see if we choose a good way or a bad way.”

This is why I stand #withMalala, why I can empathize with her story.

I also believe that it was fundamentalism that harmed me. My parents and conservative colleges like Bob Jones operate under a similar abusive system.

Often individual people have empathy, but they believe they must do destructive, terrible things to obey God. This is how they silence their own conscience.

They miss their country. Malala wants to go back and see their old house just once.

Sometimes, I miss my country, too. Some days I feel like I have no roots.

Malala is not that different than me. We actually have a lot in common.

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Outside the Box: We are less fragile

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 2, 2016 as part of a series. 

Continued from I Wish I Didn’t Know

My friend Mary Nikkel, who I once knew by the online nickname Elraen, was the first blogger I started regularly reading while I was still trapped in the cult my family was in, the Independent Fundamental Baptist movement. She blogs at Threads of Stars. Here is what she wrote about recovering from spiritual abuse.

I grew up believing that I could break other people, break myself, break the world, with the smallest of missteps.

There was a list of movies I couldn’t watch and music I couldn’t hear because they would break my mind.

There was a list of things I couldn’t wear because they would break the minds of others.

There was a list of words and opinions I couldn’t say because they would break someone else’s perception of the Christian faith.

There was a corresponding list of words and opinions I had to say because I would be sending someone to hell if I were to omit them.

The lists of the way I could break things seemed endless, and I lived by the letter of their law with an awful holy terror. But there are terrible consequences to believing you live in a world so breakable, with a soul so fragile. I began to feel like I was, at best, a weak excuse of a human for being so unable to meet the list of requirements, and at worst, a weapon designed only to damage the world. Better if I be removed for the sake of safety, my mind whispered on the dark nights. Better if I erase myself before I break anything or anyone else.

When grace opened the door to a wider world and I learned to walk in it (certainly with my fair share of bruises and skinned knees along the way), I would quickly be startled by a few truths. First was that the world was more elastic than I had imagined, that sometimes when I fell, rather than shattering beneath me like brittle glass, this wild life embraced me and bent around me and became a new kind of beautiful. Second was that sometimes even when something did break—my heart, a friendship, some corner of my innocence—my spirit had the ability to mend, like grace had planted this resilient life in me that outlasted even the death of dreams, the death of my strength, the death of all the porcelain pictures I once thought defined “good enough.” And really, perhaps these truths are no surprise in the end, for I believe in the truth of a Christ whose Spirit overcame death—who gifts that same Spirit to me.

On the other side of laws and fear-based protective prisons, I have certainly loved the freedom to enjoy things. I have the freedom to immerse myself in rock and roll, the freedom to dye my hair blue, the freedom to wear shorts and tank tops in the summer, the freedom to watch (and even laugh with) movies that currently matter in pop culture. But perhaps the freedom I have loved even more is the freedom to make mistakes along the way, knowing each small choice will not save or condemn me.

I have certainly found consequences and heartache out here. But I have outlasted them. And the steady hands of friends who have stayed with me, even when I say the wrong thing or say nothing at all, even when I’m feeling too small and dim inside to spark any kind of response to their lavish light, has taught me that maybe I can’t break others as easily as I once believed either. Maybe there is a staying power in our souls beyond anything we could possibly imagine. There is more grace out here than I ever knew.

I believed I was an ember, struggling to stay alive from my place embedded in the ash and dirt. Imagine my surprise to find a spirit like a star burning in me, relentless, impossibly bright, alive though it wander through the coldest walks of the night.

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Leave/Vacations and the Church

Other bloggers mentioned how difficult it was to take vacations or even visit family in abusive churches. My experience, especially when I was in the Navy, wasn’t any different.

For those unfamiliar, the military offers 30 days paid leave per year. Compared to civilian employment, it’s a sweet deal. The church I attended saw this as a golden opportunity to use its military parishioners as “free labor.” The leadership would exhort us to place the needs of the ministry first when it came to taking leave. In fact, we were told that if we spent two or more weeks away from the church on leave we were in danger of backsliding and we weren’t placing God first.

Special emphasis was placed on the Christmas holidays. We were encouraged to wait until the second leave period (usually December 30-January 15) to go visit family. The first leave period (December 15-30) was meant to “be available” for service members who “weren’t able to go home for the holidays.” While this by itself was a noble gesture, and even an effective outreach, forcing parishioners (in particular the single men) to sacrifice time with loved ones was a wrong approach.

For most of my 16 years in that church, I sacrificed my Christmas leave to participate in the activities and give visiting sailors and other service members a place to get away from the base. I only went home for Christmas twice when I was in the church; one such time was in 1991 when my brother, who was in the Air Force, had returned from a tour overseas and was visiting my parents and other brother in West Virginia. It was a strain on my family because they would have loved to have me home to visit more often.

Indeed, I spent a lot of leave time puttering around the church instead of visiting my family and even traveling and enjoy some personal time. Looking back, was I truly sacrificing my vacation to fulfill the gospel or was I simply another pack mule for the leadership? It’s painful to realize I was duped. If Jesus is truly the same yesterday, today, and forever, wouldn’t He be the same in a small town in West Virginia as in a church in Norfolk, Virginia?

When I left that church, I had two years left in my naval career. My departure occurred at the same time I transferred from a ship to my final shore duty station. Unlike previous leave periods, I took a long trip home. It was a good visit as I got to share with my parents that I finally broke free of that church and was trying to make sense of everything. I spent the remainder of my leave at my place, just chilling out and relaxing, even going to the beach. It was a big adjustment, being in charge of my own vacation time instead of being told how to spend it.

God still is first in my life, but now I realize family is very important. No organization should ever force its members to diminish the importance of family.

Spiritual Abuse, or Insensitivity?

Back in 2011, my CelticAnglican’s Ramblings/Hanging by a Thread blog saw an interesting comments discussion that I thought I’d like to share. There’s a little bit of context-related explanation coming, so please bear with me.

I posted about what individual congregations can do to help make visitors coming from spiritually abusive backgrounds feel more at ease in a setting that was probably very different for them. One long-time member who no longer attended services shared that she felt that certain changes to how the Sunday service was done and no longer using the older type of service were abusive.

This gave me a bit of a pause because here I was addressing the struggles of Christians coming from cultic backgrounds and a visitor had a vastly different understanding of spiritual abuse. I did encourage her to discuss her concerns in another thread and hope that she felt that having a chance to talk about what had bothered her was at least therapeutic.

However, I did make a judgment call to treat this visitor’s church issues as something different from the spiritual abuse I’d written the post about. Undergoing the public humiliation, shame or harassment that so many others on this site have detailed over the years is a very different thing, IMO, from not wanting to attend services because of the music style, using You/Your instead of Thee/Thou  in prayers or passing the peace.

I seriously doubt this lady had been called an apostate or told she was going to hell for disagreeing with liturgical changes. Striking that careful balance between understanding the needs of spiritual abuse survivors and understanding the needs of those not attending church for other reasons is important, I think.

Church members are far from perfect, and there are enough among the walking wounded to serve as proof of that. There are some people who are simply not going to be happy with anything new or different – several groups that have split off from other denominations are perfect proof.

However, this doesn’t mean that people who stop attending because of change need to be written off. If the Church as a whole is to be one of Christ’s instruments of reconciliation in the larger world, maybe we need to remember those a little closer to home, too.

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When churches silence, part 3

I sat in service shocked and numb. The former pastor’s son had been convicted of molestation. Some of the families and some of those boys were in the congregation. The new pastor was preaching about forgiving and moving on. God would miraculously heal wounded hearts. Just come forward and pray and God will take care of whatever it is. It sounded too eerily familiar. It sounded too much like what the former pastor had preached, about how God would just take care of anything that he or his family was doing wrong, IF there was anything wrong at all. Don’t talk about it. Don’t do anything. Definitely don’t involve authorities. Just pray, and God will fix it.

God does fix some things. But God also made people with brains and hands and feet. He didn’t create puppets and he didn’t make us so that he could drag us around, doing everything for us. He wants us to think and to act. He never told people to remain silent in the face of injustice or wickedness. He never suggested that people should sit by and let sin continue while they waited for Him to miraculously save them from something they should have long since saved themselves from. And he never asked us to sacrifice our children – or ourselves, or HIM – by our silence.

1 Cor 5:1 I can hardly believe the report about the sexual immorality going on among you—something that even pagans don’t do. … 9 When I wrote to you before, I told you not to associate with people who indulge in sexual sin. 10 But I wasn’t talking about unbelievers…. 11 I  meant that you are not to associate with anyone who claims to be a believer yet indulges in sexual sin, or is greedy, or worships idols, or is abusive, or is a drunkard, or cheats people…..

I’ve had that passage used against me. I was convinced for about a year that if I ate with anyone from my church, I’d be causing them to sin, tainting them with some unknown sin in my life. But when I take out the parts that we heard emphasized in the preaching and look at the rest of the verses in the passage, and especially when I look at it in another version than King James, the words surprise me. Don’t keep company with abusive people? Did Paul reprimand anyone for talking about what the man in this passage was doing? No, he only told them they should not have boasted.

How many church leaders fit the description in verse 11? And should we remain silent?

Yes, there are good pastors. There are good church leaders. But there are also bad ones, and pretending they aren’t there will not make them go away. Someone needs to speak.

When churches silence, part 1
When churches silence, part 2
When churches silence, part 3
When churches silence, part 4

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