Author: Eleanor Skelton

Eleanor Skelton is a freelance journalist and educator. They were homeschooled kindergarten through senior year of high school within the high-demand subculture of fundamentalist Christianity during the 90s and 00s before completing their bachelor’s degree at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Eleanor speaks about their experiences in leaving a cult to advocate for other survivors. They are currently enrolled in a journalism graduate program at the University of Alabama. They write about deconstruction and mental wellness at www.eleanorskelton.com.

Book Review: Spiritual Sobriety by Elizabeth Esther

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on June 2, 2017.

I love so much of Elizabeth Esther’s writing because what she says fits my experiences in unhealthy churches.

I preordered her book Spiritual Sobriety: Stumbling back to faith when good religion goes bad in spring of last year, around the same time that I interviewed her on my blog.

Recently I re-read my copy before sending it off to a couple of friends who are also unpacking unhealthy spiritual things they learned.

Elizabeth talks about how belief in God can become an addiction, and worship just another way to get a high–she calls this a “transactional use of God.”

She also doesn’t blame us, the religious addicts, for this.

“We didn’t make a conscious choice to treat religion this way. At whatever age we veered off track, we were just doing the best we could.” (p. 11)

“How were we supposed to know there were healthy ways of approaching God when the people we admired taught us that living intentionally with God looked like anything but freedom?” (p. 12)

She argues in the first few chapters that it’s basically a process addiction–an addiction to a behavior rather than a substance.

Elizabeth also says we should pay attention to that drained feeling, the letdown after religious services and events.

“This letdown is an important indicator that something is wrong. If we behaved in healthier ways, we wouldn’t feel the gnawing despair of having spent ourselves on a mirage.” (p. 8-9)

She says that a loving God will respect our boundaries (p. 61), and how she is learning to embrace a sense of mystery and be okay with not knowing everything. And she cautions us against buying into the American idea that our self-worth is tied to our productivity and how that leaks into our spiritual practices, too.

Religious addicts, according to her research, often have problems with excessive daydreaming and living in obsession, fantasy, and magical thinking.

This really resonated with me since I used to use fiction as my drug. Being a bookworm in an unhealthy household wasn’t just me being an adorable, academic kid, it was an escape when I felt like my home was a prison.

Elizabeth also writes about recovering from the shame of a legalistic upbringing, learning to acknowledge a mistake, and move on.

“When I feel myself saying ‘I am a bad person,’ that means I’m internalizing my mistakes,’ she says. ‘I have to remind myself to stop the Shame Brain.'” (p. 78)

“Shame tells us that we are lovable only when we are performing well. Admitting a mistake means admitting we aren’t worthy of love.” (p. 77)

Religious addicts also have the tendency to demand that others believe exactly the same way that they do and feel responsible for saving the world.

“Driven by fear, the religious addict feels responsible for the eternal salvation of every soul. Different beliefs must be confronted (and eradicated!) because they signal a hellish trajectory. In the pursuit of saving the world, the RA behaves as if the ends justify the means. Judgemental rhetoric is a small price to pay for snatching sinners from the fires of Hell, amen?” (p. 89)

We get drawn even further into religious extremism through this thinking.

“For Christians, being lukewarm is almost as bad as not believing at all. We’d rather burn out for Jesus than take the seemingly lazy road of moderation.” (p. 98)

She takes a similar approach to other addiction recovering programs, encouraging recovering religious addicts to avoid trying to fix everything all at once but and resist believing that we have to recover quickly to meet God’s approval.

She references Nadia Bolz Weber, who said, “the sacred rest that is yours never comes from being worthy.”

Once we learn to move away from relying on high intensity feelings and unstable extremes, we can learn healthier ways to cope. Sometimes too much structure is bad for us, too. Elizabeth says that she was raised with so much rigidity that her twelve step recovery program began to harm her (p. 106).

“Whenever we find ourselves slipping into extremes, we need to realize we’re headed toward an unstable state that could compromise our spiritual sobriety.” (p. 107)

These extremes, she explains, might manifest in our lives as

black and white thinking
catastrophic forecasts of the future
attacking tasks with a vengeance
trying to change things that are entirely out of our control
staying up too late because we need to get more done, not exercising (or overexercising)
starving ourselves, overeating
not letting ourselves reach out for help, not talking about what we’re going through
paranoia

Religious addicts may be especially prone to relapse when hungry, angry, lonely, or tired.

Here’s some little pieces that resonated with me.

If you are recovering from a legalistic, cult-like church, I’d say read Elizabeth’s book. She’s been there herself and she understands that recovery is a journey.

Significant Quotes:

“I was consuming God. I didn’t have access to chemical substances – we were intensely devout, conservative Christians – so I used what was available: religious beliefs. I habitually “used” God and all things church to numb pain and feel good.” (p. 3)

“Maybe we identify so closely with our sick selves that we don’t think we even deserve merciful loving kindness. Maybe we agree with those who say we need to be punished (especially if we’ve begun to seek spiritual sobriety). Maybe we’re so tired of trying to stop our addictive behaviors that we figure we might as well go full speed ahead.” (p. 28-29)

“Accepting help for my depression was also the first step toward accepting my religious addiction.” (p. 29)

“I saw that my relationship with God wasn’t a partnership, but one based on fear of punishment. No wonder I’d felt abandoned by God: I couldn’t trust Him enough to let Him love me. No wonder I sought relief in secretive behaviors: when I couldn’t find the love I needed from God, I tried to find it elsewhere.” (p. 50)

“This idea–that a human being represents God for you–is a dangerous lie, because if someone controls your concept of God, he controls everything. But all the control and scrupulosity didn’t take away my deep, real need for love. Once out of the cult, I turned my focus to relationships: seeking friendships and romantic love that would fulfill, heal, and make me whole. My emotional intensity enabled me to become deeply intimate with people very quickly. But when someone got too close, I pulled away–true intimacy was terrifying. I was afraid everyone was abusive. Over time, I transferred my abusers’ traits to my concept of God.” (p. 51)

“We feel safe in the presence of nonjudgmental compassion.” (p. 54)

“If we are to achieve spiritual sobriety and live successful, productive lives, we need to meet a God who tells us we’re unconditionally loved and infinitely valued, no matter what we do, accomplish, or feel in one particular moment.” (p. 55)

“Now I know very little about what there is to know about the true God, and I’m learning to accept that reality. I no longer believe there are simple answers to complex questions, but I’m still sure that God is somehow good.” (p. 73)

“But if our mistakes are strong enough to compromise God’s acceptance of us, isn’t that the same as saying our mistakes are stronger than God? This is similar to believing we are born inherently evil. If that were true, then it would mean God created depravity. But just as it is impossible for God to create evil, so it is impossible that our mistakes are stronger than God’s hold on us.” (p. 78)

“Religious addicts are especially prone to self-neglect because Scripture texts are frequently misinterpreted to equate self-hatred with godliness. Calvinistic doctrines like ‘total depravity’ reinforce self-loathing. God intended for us to need Him because the beautiful plans he has for us to find their fulfillment in communion with Him—not because we’re bad.” (p. 104)

“Frankly addicts expend a lot of energy on not feeling their needs. RAs feel guilty for being human. We believe others are worthy of having their needs met but we aren’t.” (p. 108)

“We learn to hold relationships loosely, lightly. We discover that other people are not ours to manipulate or control—even when we think we know what’s best for them. A spiritually sober person respects the personal boundaries and inherent dignity of others. By unclenching our hands, we actually enjoy our relationships more.” (p. 115)

“We may feel really uncomfortable with the terms self-forgiveness and self-love because people in many religious circles mock those terms as empty pop-psychology.” (p. 116)

“Verses like Proverbs 3:5—“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding”—were used to warn us that trusting ourselves would make us vulnerable prey to Satan. But usually, the people quoting these verses to us weren’t teaching us to put faith in the Lord, they were teaching us to trust our church leaders. Ironically, placing blind trust in other humans is exactly what made us vulnerable prey—not to Satan, but to addiction. These leaders didn’t have to earn our trust. We just had to believe in them because, well, they were the leaders.” (p. 117)

“If we are to recover trust in our gut instinct and our ability to sense truth, we must practice owning, honoring, and validating our experiences as true and real. We don’t have to wait for others to corroborate our experience before we trust what we experience.” (p. 118)

“And yes, learning to trust ourselves might mean making some mistakes in relationships but making mistakes is okay, too. It’s how we learn.” (p. 119)

“This is how we forgive abusers: we allow ourselves to see their humanity. I forgave my abusers because I realized that they weren’t evil; they were simply terribly sick people.” (p. 132)

“It seems that some Christians attend church meetings disproportionately to the amount of time that’s actually spent serving others—you know, being the church… Many have become keepers of the aquarium instead of fishers of men.” – Pastor Michael Helms (p. 138)

“This is because true religion and true spiritual sobriety, can never be bought or sold. Spiritual sobriety is the slow, difficult work of walking the narrow way.   Of course, the addict in us may want to make a grand, splashy gesture and commit everything to Jesus. But here’s the thing: Jesus doesn’t want our big, showy, public surrenders. In fact, emotionally fraught, stadium-style altar calls and gospel meetings can do more harm than good because they make a grand, public performance of what should be a private, inner transformation.” (p. 139)

“They simply shouldn’t have so much power that they are free to shame, threaten, and manipulate the flock. The greatest danger to a church’s spiritual health is a pastor-centric church model.” (p. 141)

“If you want to know whether a church is healthy, look at how it treats people who have little or nothing to offer. Are the homeless welcomed? Are the disabled offered a front-row seat? Do children look forward to going to church? Does the socially awkward college student get invited to coffee? Would members of the LGBT community feel safe attending services? If you’re looking for a spiritually sober church, look for grace.” (p. 141)

“The christian church’s ongoing obsession with sex and sexuality, the centrality it has put on controlling and forbidding sexuality in its message of sinfulness, is a suspicious sign that religious addiction and sexual addiction have been regularly reinforcing each other.” (p. 159) – Richard Minor

“It might seem wise to punish ourselves into sobriety; but as we’ve learned, punishment isn’t love. Punishment can teach us an important lesson about real life consequences, but it can’t rehabilitate our souls; that’s what grace is for.” (p. 166)

“Sobriety is about gentle self-examination and, most of all, a desire to stop living in pain.” (p. 158)

You can order Spiritual Sobriety here on Amazon.

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Book review: Stolen Innocence by Elissa Wall

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on May 24, 2017.

I got this book from a giveaway over at SpiritualAbuse.org a couple of summers ago, when I was blogging about leaving fundamentalism.

Stolen Innocence is Elissa Wall’s memoir of leaving the fundamentalist Mormon church (FLDS) as an adult. She was told to marry one of her cousins when she was only 14.

Elissa gives a good history of the FLDS in her book. She explains that the FLDS owns compounds in Utah, Texas and Arizona. Warren Jeffs has been the prophet since his father, Rulon Jeffs died. Warren Jeffs was arrested on August 28, 2006 after being on the FBI’s most wanted list and he is currently incarcerated.

I grew up in churches that taught QuiverFull doctrine, having as many children as possible and training them up to be good little culture warriors to take back America for Christianity.

My friends and I weren’t raised in the FLDS polygamist cult, but rule-based religions tend to have similarities.

Here’s some parts that stood out to me.

Significant Quotes:

“Marriage was meant to be the highest honor an FLDS girl could receive, and I was devastated to admit to myself that I didn’t feel that way.” (p. 2)

“This is what the prophet has told me to do. I have no choice but to do it. Now is not the time to cry, I must keep sweet.” (p. 3)

The whole “keep sweet” concept is very familiar and creepy, although we used different words to describe it. My fundamentalist family and the churches we went to had a strong emphasis on being “joyful” and “uplifting” and not negative.

“Even if it hurts, you were to act happy. Even if you’re uncomfortable. That was how you conquered the evil inside of you.” (p. 399)

“At that time, the church was still known as the Work, and Dad and Audrey’s plan was to scrutinize The Work’s teachings and find its flaws, but instead found themselves swayed to its views.” (p. 11)

“Church rules forbade us form outwardly showing displeasure, so the bitterness remained just below the surface. We were taught to always put on a good face, even when things are going poorly. We were told to ‘keep sweet,’ an admonition to be compliant and pleasant no matter the circumstance. Since we couldn’t reveal our angry words and feelings, they got bottled up inside, and often there was no communication at all.” (p. 17)

Well, this is painfully familiar.

“The remote sites appealed to followers because they’d long been taught to be suspicious of all outsiders and to regard them as evil.” (p. 20)

This was basically my reaction to attending a secular university after being homeschooled in a religious household kindergarten through high school.

“…the prophet had ordered that all the books in the school library that were not priesthood-approved be burned, claiming that those who read the unworthy books would then take on the ‘evil’ spirit of their authors. The library was then restocked with books that conformed to priesthood teachings.” (p. 37)

“The fact that many in my family were smart, strong-willed, and unafraid to ask questions when things did not feel right made it hard to keep a tight hold on us. Warren didn’t like having to deal with disobedience and questions concerning the priesthood. Our religion left no room for logical reasoning and honest questioning. Warren made no attempt to understand or tolerate any of this, deeming it as absolute rebellion.” (p. 44)

“The prophet can do no wrong.” – Warren Jeffs (p. 51)

My friend Ashley’s dad said something similar about their pastor in the Apostolic Pentecostal church.

“I have literally heard my dad say that if John Burgess asked him to stand on his head for 6 hours a day, in the middle of I-25, that he would do it without hesitation.”

“‘Put it on a shelf and pray about it.’ This was Mom’s and the FLDS’s standard response to questions that had no easy answers.” (p. 55)

This was basically my mom’s response to my dad’s controlling behavior. That we had no choice but to obey and respect him.

“Unapproved pictures were removed from textbooks and anything that had to do with evolution or human anatomy was excised. In fact, anything that did not conform to our strict religious teachings and beliefs was removed from the lesson plans, and pages of books that dealt with conflicting subject matter were simply ripped out.” (p.72)

My homeschooled friends used to do this, too. Glue black construction paper over pages about halloween in craft books, staple together pages of literature textbooks that had Greek mythology.

Warren banned wearing the color red, not unlike Shyamalan’s film The Village, where red is “the bad color.”

Elissa explains that the marriage ceremony sealed wives to their husbands “for time and all eternity,” but some are only sealed for time.

When Warren Jeffs, using his father’s authority, told her to marry her cousin Allen, she prayed desperately that he would only seal them for time and not for time and eternity.

Wives could be removed from husbands that fell out of line and were deemed unworthy of the priesthood. Her mother and all her children were reassigned to their Uncle Fred.

“Fred demanded to see our entire music collection and threw out any titles he deemed ‘worldly.’” (p. 106)

Elissa writes about preparing a family meal on her own at 14 and being proud that Uncle Fred said that she would make some man very happy one day.

“I knew that this was the best compliment a girl could get. Becoming a wife was the ultimate goal and dream of all FLDS girls.” (p. 120)

I used to feel so much pride in doing housewifely or motherly things, which isn’t bad on its own, but it becomes harmful when your religion demands that your identity is to bear children and nothing else.

“Many people viewed my actions… as immature, and their attitudes made me feel like a child throwing a temper tantrum. To them, accepting the will of the prophet was simply what you were required to do. There were no questions involved, no other options.” (p. 133)

When she questions her marriage to her husband, Warren asks her if she has been praying about it. That’s also what my pastor told me when I told him that I didn’t want to transfer from my state college to Bob Jones University.

The aging prophet, Rulon Jeffs, tells her, “You follow your heart, sweetie, just follow your heart” and “God bless you and keep sweet.” She said afterwards, “The prophet told me to follow my heart and my heart is telling me not to do this.” But then Warren said, “Elissa, your heart is in the wrong place. This is what the prophet has revealed and directed you to do, and this is your mission and duty.”

Her mom tells her that the marriage can’t be that bad. (p. 142-143)

My mom used to tell me that one day I’d be married to someone and to remember that not all men are like my dad.

Allen tells Elissa after their engagement when she says she doesn’t love him that “God will change your feelings as long as you stay faithful. In time, you will feel differently.” (p.148)

Her Uncle Wendell says, “Someday thousands will flock to hear your story of faith and courage.”

When Elissa later tells the prophet that she is unhappy and her cousin (now husband) is hurting her, he tells her to ignore those feelings and just obey.

“You are doing insane things that will lead you to be unfaithful. Sometimes in our lives, we are told to do things that we don’t feel are right. Because the Lord and the prophet tell us to, then they are right. You need to put your heart and feelings in line. You need to go and repent. You are not living up to your vows. You are not being obedient and submissive to your priesthood head. And that is your problem. You need to go home and repent and give yourself mind, body, and soul to Allen because he is your priesthood head and obey him without question because he knows what’s best for you. He will be directed by the priesthood and the spirit of God to know how to handle you.” – Warren (p.189)

“I was keeping sweet just like they’d always told me to, and in the process I started to forget some of the doubts that I’d had about the FLDS as my wedding approached. For the first time in months, the questions I’d been asking myself about why God forced us to marry and broke apart families became to subside. Finally I was learning how to smile for the camera.” (p. 196)

Parents in the FLDS church are required to abandon “unworthy children.”

“What had once been a community of industrious people who lived by the motto ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ had slowly shifted to become a society of paranoid and fearful souls. Everyone was looking over his shoulder to see what his neighbor was doing and Warren was encouraging people to report any wrongdoing.” (p. 243)

High control groups do this with their members. They encourage turning in anyone who is not considered faithful and obedient enough.

Her mom says she won’t let this happen to her sisters, but Elissa wonders if there is really anything her mom could do. I often feel this way about conversations with my mom, too.

“She sounded sincere, but I had a hard time believing that there was anything she could do to stop it from happening to Sherrie and Ally—not unless she was willing to forego her eternal salvation and leave the religion with my two little sisters.” (p. 245)

“Her staunch support of the religion and inability to extract herself from that mindset put me in a position where she couldn’t protect me. It is for this reason that I have resolved to make it my mission to help my little sisters and others like them in any way possible.” (p. 429)

Elissa remembers being told not to question authority, that rebellion would cause her to lose her faith.

“Your problem is that you are questioning Allen and the priesthood itself. And when you question the priesthood and your priesthood head, you are questioning God. … You need to be careful about what you do because you will lose your faith.” (p. 250)

“You’d be much happier if you just allow yourself to follow the prophet.”

“The work of God is a benevolent dictatorship. It is not a democracy.” (p. 285)

I was also taught theology like this.

When she meets her now husband, Lamont, a former FLDS kid who left, he tells her to make a choice in her own heart. He is probably the first person in her life who encourages her to trust herself.

Once she finally talks to a victim’s advocate in the court system, she realizes most people believe what happened to her was not okay.

“Even though I was older than most of the victims she usually interviewed, I was still very childlike. What came out of this meeting was the realization that what had happened to me was wrong in the eyes of the world.” (p. 351)

“I’d been taught to fear people like them my whole life, but in such a short time, all that had changed.” (p. 359)

“All they know about people on the outside is what they have been taught; that they are evil, and the thing that had surprised me most in my transcendent journey from the FLDS to the life I live now is that good, honest, and respectful people lived out here and are nothing like what we’d been taught they are.” (p. 421)

This is how I felt when I met people on the outside, too.

Like many other unhealthy churches, sexual abuse was hidden because the authorities feared it would make the church look bad.

“He was told that the priesthood would take care of it and was not to go to the authorities because it would cast a bad light on the people. Of course, we heard that the young man’s parents had been informed of the incident, but from all accounts nothing else was ever done.”

“Had someone done something to stop him back then, perhaps those other victims would have been spared.” (p. 361)

Elissa testified against Warren Jeffs during his trial and found freedom in it.

“I was no longer his victim, and with that realization I was liberated.” (p. 368)

“I looked like the person I felt inside, and this is a magical thing when it has been denied for so much of your life.” (p. 378)

“Somehow deep down I’d always thought he would get away with it. Now that he hadn’t, I didn’t know how to feel. All I could think of was that none of this would have happened if I hadn’t had the reminder of all my sisters to give me strength to stand up to do what I knew was right.” (p. 419)

She mentions the 2008 government raid on the Texas ranch at the end of the book.

“As hard as it has been to watch the events of Eldorado unfold, they prove that there are still so many young girls and women around the world whose faces I’ll never see and whose names I’ll never know, and that perhaps in some way my words will help them to use their strength to reclaim what is rightfully theirs—the power of choice.” (p. 431)

Elissa’s book was a quick read. She writes in a conversational tone that helps you relive her experiences with her.

The text could have been edited to be more concise and have more punch, but I also know she only had an 8th grade education because the cult prevented her from continuing school after marriage.

Overall, Stolen Innocence is compelling.

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You don’t have to look: Revisiting how we tell the Easter story

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on April 17, 2015.

I have problems with Easter.

My church attendance has been irregular since I left fundamentalism, which I’ve been told is normal for people who have suffered spiritual abuse.

This year, I tried to go to church on Easter Sunday. I drove to the parking lot. Panic rose in my stomach until I thought I might vomit. I left for Starbucks.

This is the beginning of realizing that my spiritual life never has to be an obligation, nor should it. I don’t have to try to show Jesus I love him through ritual, because now I believe Jesus would want us to love others and even Him by our own choice.

I’ve had a love / hate relationship with Easter since I was a small child, because of the intense guilt I had about the story.

Since leaving fundamentalism, I’ve wrestled with doubts and whether or not I’ll feel home inside a church again.

Last year, Cynthia Jeub wrote a blog post about why Christians should stop wearing crosses, and she wrote this about me:

One of my friends was obsessed with revisiting the death of Jesus. She watched films and plays depicting his torture and death over and over, and I asked her why the resurrection got so little time in such plays. The resurrection was short and the crucifixion was long in every story. She admitted to the problem, but didn’t have a solution for it.

I thought the only way to honor Jesus for his sacrifice, to love him, was to be a witness to his suffering.

After moving out, I watched movies like the Passion of the Christ and the Stoning of Soraya M., because the torture of my fellow humans troubled me and I didn’t know how else to show that I cared but to watch.

That’s how I demonstrate that my love and compassion is real, right?

I made a new friend this last fall. She’s had her own church trauma–she was at New Life Church when Ted Haggard left in 2006 and during the shooting in 2007 and later another pastor who turned out to be a con man.

We were discussing violence in media and how we deal with it one day. She said that she looks away during the scourging and crucifixion scenes in movies and reenactments.

I had an epiphany. I’ve never been able to look away, to choose not to watch.

I remembered what a high school pen pal once told me: “I think there’s a reason we weren’t there when Jesus died.”

At the time, I vehemently disagreed with her, believing extreme forms of remembrance to be a religious duty, something any lover of Jesus would desire. I understood, even identified with the flagellants of the medieval period.

I was in the Thorn cast again like last year, but that was my only church-related Easter activity. I’d thought, It’s Lent season, do you want to watch the Passion? No, not really. It hurts too much. And maybe it should. After all, I can feel my emotions now.

So I rested over spring break, hung out with friends.

I stopped reopening my old scars.

On Good Friday, a fellow blogger in the Homeschoolers Anonymous community, posted on Facebook:

And my heart said, Amen.

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Sidenote: I did love one of John Pavlovitz’s posts during Lent season, Waiting for Easter: A Eulogy for Jesus.

What passes as Christianity here in America often bears no resemblance to the humble, gentle Nazarene rabbi…. When I look around at the faith so often proposing to be Christianity these days, that Jesus seems gone.

Jesus isn’t just dead, but he’s had his identity stolen posthumously, too…. So yes, for far too many of his people, this is a eulogy for Jesus within Christianity.

Yes, we grieve a religion that often seems dead, and yet still cling to the slimmest of hopes, that an Easter Sunday is still within reach.

Isn’t this why we don’t send them to public school?

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on December 14, 2015.

I was four years old.

We were visiting my dad’s childhood home in New York, and we went to the house of an elderly lady who used to be his neighbor. She had a caretaker, a single mom homeschooling her son, who was around my age.

My favorite TV show was Barney the Dinosaur, my only 30 minutes of live television once a week. I also played my Barney’s Favorites cassette tape every day and I knew all of the songs by heart.

The little boy and I started chattering and playing on the floor, and I sang “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” for him and his mom, very enthusiastically, with all of the hand motions and marching.

“Do your ears hang low?
Do they wobble to and fro?
Can you tie ’em in a knot?
Can you tie ’em in a bow?
Can you throw ’em o’er your shoulder
Like a continental soldier
Do your ears hang low?”

His mother turned to my mom and said, “Isn’t this why we don’t send them to public school, so they won’t be exposed to garbage like this?”

I remember this deep sense of shame and wanting to crawl under the carpet. I felt like I’d humiliated my mom and I wondered what was so terrible about my song. I think the little boy’s mom called him to come sit on the couch next to her, away from me, and we weren’t allowed to play together the rest of the visit.

This was the first time that I was that child, the bad influence.

Usually it was my parents keeping me away from other children that could lead me astray. This time, they hid their children from me. My mom didn’t understand at all why the other mother objected to the song.

The fear would follow me for years.

Later on in my teens, we ended up in a church with mostly other homeschooling families, some of them Quiverfull. All the other churches we’d gone to before were mainline denominations, and their children went to public school. But homeschooling was becoming more common by 2004.

I’d hear stories from the other families, pick up things in snatches of conversation.

My sister got a craft book for her eighth birthday party, the only party she ever invited friends to since we stayed to ourselves. The other children said, “Oh, look there’s a witch on this page! We’ll have to cover that up.” Their mom glanced over and said, “Oh yeah, you can just cut out black construction paper and glue it over those pages like we do at our house.”

I called my Bible Buddies partner during the week, we got into a theological discussion, and I asked, “Well, have you ever read Narnia?” “No,” she answered. “My parents don’t like that they talk about magic, and they think it’s too confusing for children to read about Jesus as a lion.” I explained that magic is like a substitute for divine power both in creation and redemption, and I read her some dialogue between Aslan and the Pevensie children. She said she thinks it’s probably safer not to read it and seemed uncomfortable, and I dropped the subject.

A homeschool mom traded some used A Beka textbooks with our family. The pages of the only Greek myth in the 8th grade literature book were stapled together.

“Why should they learn about pagan literature when they could be reading the Bible?”

My dad bought clearance books and films from the Focus on the Family bookstore. He sent the kids Ten Commandments VHS series to a Quiverfull family we knew with 13 kids. My mom explained to their parents that the only time there is music with a beat in the series is the scene where the characters worship false idols.

I was always watchful around the other families, struggling to balance being honest about the books and movies I enjoyed but with the fear of not being allowed to talk to the other teens if I’m considered a “bad influence.” In this patriarchal world, if one of the parents decided I’m not spiritual enough or too worldly, I might not be given space to defend myself.

I know because it happened to others. Teens and young adults were called into the pastor’s office and questioned about their music preferences, asked to stop hanging out with their children.

Because, you know. This is why we don’t send our kids to public school.

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Child abuse prevention in the church is not big government

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on January 3, 2016.

Back in high school, I used to love Andrée Seu Peterson’s column. I read her pieces first when our copy of World magazine arrived in the mail every week. She always made me think because she was less conservative than my homeschool textbooks, and I admired her writing style.

I haven’t read World magazine since I moved out–the subscription is expensive and I’ve had too much reading for college. Last year, though, I read about her problematic column on bisexuality in posts from Libby Anne and Samantha Field.

But in her article “Houses Taken Over” in the Nov. 14, 2015 issue, Peterson argues government oversight like food safety guidelines and background checks for child care are intrusive. She even suggests following such protocol is equivalent to Nazi Germany’s laws against Jewish people. Here we go again with Godwin’s law.

It was not long ago that the state cracked down on church homemade desserts here in Pennsylvania. The year was 2009, and as an elderly parishioner of St. Cecilia’s began unwrapping wares baked by fellow church members, a state inspector on the premises noticed that they were not store-bought and forbade their sale. It was the end of Mary Pratte’s coconut cream pie, Louise Humbert’s raisin pie, and Marge Murtha’s “farm apple” pie, as well as a tradition as old as church socials.

We Christians are a good lot, by and large. We know Romans 13 and desire to be model citizens. Would we have been sad but obedient when the 1933 “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” barred people of Jewish descent from employment in government? Would we have had searchings of heart but complied with the 1935 “Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor” that interdicted marriage between Jew and German? Would we have sighed but acquiesced in 1938, when government contracts could no longer be awarded to Jewish businesses, and in October of that year when Jews were required to have a “J” stamped on their passports?

If the local church cannot be trusted to know its people well enough to decide who is fit for nursery duty, there is nothing much to say, except that we had better get back to a New Testament model where pastors knew their flock. If bakers of coconut cream pies are notoriously dangerous people, then we have brought these statist regulations on ourselves, and more’s the pity.

The woman sitting to my right at the ESL meeting said (not disapprovingly) that from now on if a junior high event takes place at someone’s house, a person must be present who has state clearance. I hazarded at that point that it looked like government intrusion, and no one said a word, as if I had passed gas and everyone pretended I had not. As if I were the kind of person who did not care about the children.

Peterson’s article fails to differentiate between Hitler’s laws, which discriminated against Jews based off propaganda, and laws to prevent child abuse, which only restrict people convicted of a heinous crime. She also sounds defensive, as if she finds regulations burdensome and cannot understand why no one else at her church agrees with her.

American Christianity protests the removal of religious symbols from public parks, but pleads for separation of church and state when any government regulation affects church functioning. This is hypocritical. This attitude also ignores the very real problem of child abuse in both Catholic and Protestant circles.

When I know that a church is following state and national guidelines, I feel safer being with that group of people. The church I recently joined requires a background check and a child protection training course for any volunteers, and I did not protest.

I actually told the nursery workers, “I’m really glad you do this.” childprotectiontraining1

The 12 page booklet provides extensive definitions and examples of sex offender patterns and contrasts it with cultural stereotypes, as well as defining what is and is not appropriate protocol when working with children. childprotectiontraining3

Peterson says in her column that background checks would mean less available childcare at her church.

The far-seeing ESL director realized the implications and judged that it would be prudent to scrap the baby-sitting: Fewer people would be willing to take the extra step of filling out the necessary forms. The resulting smaller pool of workers would mean that our ESL cadre would be in competition with the Women’s Bible Study ministry and the Sunday nursery ministry for manpower.

But the quiz at the end of my church’s child protection course is clear that the intent is not to prevent people from volunteering. Protecting children is the first priority.
childprotectiontraining2

Christians believe that Jesus said “If anyone causes one of these little ones–those who believe in me–to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” (Matthew 18:6) If the church wants to follow this teaching, we need to be preventing child abuse through the best methods currently known.

Homeschool parents often argue that government involvement is a bad thing, and HSLDA actively encourages this. Slate magazine, the New York Times, and the Daily Beast have all reported on the lack of regulation. No accountability enables child abuse and educational neglect. This past Thanksgiving, KGOU’s article about homeschool regulation in Oklahoma was met with so much backlash from the homeschool lobby that an entire interview was withdrawn.

Societies have rules, at least in theory, so that their people can live in peace and be treated justly. Every community needs to protect the children and disadvantaged.