Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 6, 2015 as part of a series.
Continued from The Trouble With Freeing People.
Editorial Note: I re-wrote this post in January 2024 to better reflect what I now know about social justice and systemic oppression in the last decade since I left fundamentalism.
When I moved out of my restrictive home environment and was kicked out of the cult my family was in, other friends in similar circumstances told me what they were dealing with.
I realized I wasn’t alone in my experience.
Unfortunately, there were many other young adults and college students in their early 20s from Christian fundamentalist or other religious backgrounds in Colorado Springs who lived with their families in high-control situations, just like I did.
I would alert the same network of friends who supported me, enlisting their aid. We offered them emotional support and resources or actually organized a plan to help them move out on their own.
My best friend in college, Cynthia Barram, who is black, said our network of friends helping friends to escape abusive situations was like an “underground railroad.”
However, we did not want to appropriate that name from the BlPOC community, although we shared a deep admiration for people from marginalized communities who risked everything to find their own freedom.
Our experiences were definitely not the same as those whose ancestors experienced enslavement and the generational trauma of racism.
Although ex-fundamentalist Christian homeschool alumni may experience the marginalization of disability, neurodivergence or chronic illness as the result of childhood toxic stress from living with long-term abuse and having a high score of adverse childhood experiences (ACE), we wouldn’t want to compare our experiences to other marginalized groups.
Homeschool kids often read a lot of history.
Unfortunately, we often were taught incorrect or biased history, but we also grow up resonating with historical figures like Harriet Tubman or Corrie Ten Boom or other people that we are told are heroes of our faith. People who made brave choices against all odds. My siblings and I often pretend re-enacted scenes from history that we read about. This experience I’ve found is common among those who grew up homeschooled.
Before bedtime, my mom used to read us Laura Ingalls Wilder books (yes, we now know these books have issues) and Christian historical fiction set during the Civil War like the Between Two Flags series. I read biographies about Corrie Ten Boom and the Hiding Place, did a research project on Underground Railroad in 6th grade, and devoured historical fiction like the deeply problematic and patriarchal Elsie Dinsmore series.
Two of my homeschooled friends at the Independent Fundamental Baptist church that my family attended in Dallas wrote their own Civil War historical fiction novel during our early teen years, distributing serialized chapters after church each Sunday.
I grew up wanting to lead people to freedom like Harriet Tubman or hide people in my own home like Corrie Ten Boom. None of us faced oppression like the enslavement or massacre of an entire people group.
But I had always connected with these narratives, and my friends did, too.
We weren’t immersed in popular culture, so we felt closer to people we read about from long ago more than our own time.
We liked the idea of people who couldn’t tolerate the injustices they observed and helped other regardless of the cost or risks involved.
In dealing with the abuses in our own community, we wanted to give shelter to those who needed it, until they found their own freedom.
My friend Kyle, who worked at a non-profit to prevent human trafficking called The Exodus Road, said that the number of young adults from this type of background being denied agency by overbearing parents is troubling.
We ended up calling our network The UnBoxing Project because my friends and I nicknamed the Christian fundamentalist homeschooling cult environment that we left behind “the box.”
Sometimes I’ll say things like, “back when we were in the box, they used to say that any music with a syncopated beat was demonic” or “People in the box think that Cabbage Patch dolls are evil,” and my friends know exactly what I’m talking about.
It’s a convenient way to refer to cult-speak and teachings of the cults that we escaped.
Helping others to leave abusive fundamentalist Christian environments is undoing what “the box” did to them.
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