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Somehow in Pentecost I got the idea that if someone complimented you, you should remember that you “aren’t all that.” When a visiting pastor would compliment my former pastor, he would duck his head and say “Nah,” and maybe that was part of it.

I’ve caught myself lately- when someone would say something nice- ducking to keep them from seeing my eyes light up. I learned to hide my joy at compliments to keep someone from knocking me down right after. Something was said the other day that got me thinking though.

God never told us we couldn’t be happy when we’d done well. He never said we shouldn’t enjoy a compliment or deny our accomplishments. Those aren’t bad pride or haughtiness. Even God, when He made everything, stopped at the end of each day and saw that it was good.

It’s the Bible, right?  It’s a church, how wrong can it be?

I think the most insidious thing about beginning my Christian life in a United Pentecostal Church is all the things I missed out on – the pure joy of knowing Jesus Christ as my Savior and the goal of the Christian life, which is to grow up in Christ, go on to maturity.  I missed out on knowing all the treasures that I have in my new identity in Christ – I am deeply loved (John 3:16), completely forgiven (Ephesians 1:7), totally accepted (Ephesians 1:6), and complete in Him (II Peter 1:3, Colossians 2:10).

So when the trial came fourteen years later, I wasn’t equipped.  I was still an infant.  I remember saying to members of my family, “I thought trials were supposed to make you better.”  I felt I was growing worse by the day.  I was crying out for help but there wasn’t any.  All those black dots on the map, I was one of them.

All I knew was, I must have done something wrong, I was bad.  God was getting back at me; I had been weighed in the balance and found wanting (one of the pastor’s favorite sermons).  This was the kind of God I learned.  Why had God zeroed in on me like one of those dots to be pinpointed like a destination on a map?  I had no truth to cough up, no words of wisdom to hang on to; it was just me, singled out for the trial of my life.  And I failed.  I didn’t draw closer to my faith.

Wait, Faith?  Faith, they didn’t even call it faith; faith was just a word to describe what you needed more of to see miracles, it was one church service to the next, one emotional high to the next.  It was faith in – faith, an outer garb, and in a man and his church.  Faith was not the very word used to describe this marvelous salvation in which we stand.  There was no substance, no solid ground to stand on.  Instead of standing, persevering, I just wanted to run, to do whatever it took to get out of the trial.

It would be two more years before I would leave the UPC and twenty more before I would leave the last vestiges of the scars that its false doctrine would leave on my heart and mind.

Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.  And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.   James 1:3-4

Original post here.  This is continued from Three Steps Part 3: The First Step. This was about 1975.

So what do you do when it seems like your birth parents, your adoptive family and your church tell you that you, the individual person, are worthless? You start looking for other ways to make progress.  In the 1970s there was another way that had made astounding progress in recent years, and that was through collective action and identification with a movement.  Perhaps that could work for me.  If I was not allowed to help myself as an individual, perhaps I could work for the advancement of a group that would benefit me in the long run, such as feminism.

By the mid-1970s my family was settling in to a new life in Birmingham and it seemed like my country was settling in to a new life as well, one that seemed sincerely interested in using reason and compassion to fix the errors of the past.  Progress had been made on ending racial and gender discrimination, and more progress was coming.  These developments were hailed as Good Things by our leaders and in the press.  There were a few people grumbling about the changes in private conversations and letters to the editor, but never in public.  It didn’t seem important.

School started to become interesting when they decided to start one of those newfangled “gifted” programs.  I was ostracized by my peers for reasons I did not understand (high IQ and trauma), classes were deadly dull, and I had stopped paying attention and just sat there reading whatever I had checked out of the library.  My reading teacher fought to get me tested for the program even though my grades were poor because I was reading a different book every day.  The tests revealed that I was gifted, and I was put into the new class on probation over the strenuous objections of the principal, who apparently thought being bored in his classrooms was somehow inherently immoral.

I learned the two most important things I would learn in elementary school about that time, and oddly enough both of them were taught to me by male military veterans.  The first lesson was taught to me by my new gifted-ed teacher, a 50s-era Army veteran who had used his benefits to earn a Master’s in Psychology.  He taught me that the things which made me look at the world so differently than everyone else and isolated me from my classmates were matters of psychology, not moral failings on my part.  They were in the process of being named, studied, and understood.  I took a great deal of comfort from this fact.  In the lifetimes of my adoptive parents and grandparents these same types of researchers had worked diligently to eradicate so many of the great plagues that had swept over mankind, like smallpox and polio.  Surely they would be no less diligent in finding productive ways to deal with depression and anxiety.

The second lesson came from my new P.E. coach, a Vietnam-era Navy veteran who had been stationed in San Francisco and learned about yoga and meditation while he was there.  I don’t think the school approved of such things, but he would mix in as much yoga and meditation as he could with the soccer and gym hockey.  He taught us meditative breathing, and practicing that form of stress relief helped keep me from cracking under the stress.

Meanwhile I was noticing some discrepancies at church.  People talked about gender equality in church, but like the Queen’s jam in Alice in Wonderland, it was always equality tomorrow, never equality today.  Women would be allowed to preach any day now, but somehow never today or any other day on the schedule calendar.

By now I had noticed that most people didn’t come to hear the preacher speak in the first place, they came to take part in the activities going on in the Fellowship Hall.  These activities were organized by the church ladies.  Therefore the big draw at the church was the work of the women, not the work of the all-male clergy.  Yet, when the preacher called out the names of the notable members who had helped the church at the beginning of the service and asked them to stand and be recognized he only called on men.  After they were honored there would be a general platitude about the “wonderful work done by the ladies of the church”, but no women would  be named and recognized, and no individual woman’s work would be  held up for commendation.

There were also definite differences between “women’s work” and “men’s work”.  Women in the church cooked, cleaned, decorated, organized events, and took care of children.  Men in the church wrote and administrated.  Even at that age I knew that my God-given gift was writing.  There was no place for a women writer at my church, even with a gift coming from God.  God had not seen fit to gift me with any talent at all for cleaning, decorating, organizing or anything else which women were allowed to do.  In fifty years I have picked up some very slight skills along those lines, but nothing that will ever approach my ability to string words together.  So if God truly meant for men and women to occupy different spheres, why had He given me a gift that did not fit in with my gender?  It didn’t make any sense.  Either God had made a mistake, or the church had.  The latter seemed far more likely.

Meanwhile our preacher was getting ready to retire.  A new minister had been found by the steering committee, and exciting new things were being planned by the church organizers.  Maybe it would finally be the day for that equality jam.

I had a lot to learn.

Three Steps Out the Church Door: Leaving the Southern Baptist Church – Introduction

Three Steps Part 1: Recollection, Remembrance, and Discovery

Three Steps Part 2: That Old Time Liberal Religion

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This is for those interested in seeing the top ten read blogs from November 2016.

The blog section of the spiritual abuse website had 4036 visits, with 1526 being unique. At present, most of the referrals have still come from Facebook, Twitter and search engines. If some who have similar blogs or websites would be so kind as to link to us, it would help increase our exposure. Also, sharing the blogs and/or commenting on them are also helpful and encourage the authors.

Below are the top ten read posts for the month. Thanks so much to all our readers and authors!

I can’t save my siblings – author Eleanor.

Of Sheep and Shepherds, from a member’s perspective – author Mary.

Signs, Signs, Everywhere A Sign – author Lois.

When your parents stalk you – author Eleanor.

Cry Baby – author Susan.

Examining Teachings #5: Faith Without Works Is Dead – author Lois.

Three Steps Out the Church Door: Leaving the Southern Baptist Church – Introduction – author Crabby Lioness.

Three Steps Part 1: Recollection, Remembrance, and Discovery – author Crabby Lioness.

I was very bad today… – author Mary.

Examining Teachings #3: Peculiar And Separate – author Lois.

Original post here.  This is continued from Three Steps Part 2: That Old Time Liberal Religion. This happened about 1974.

1974 – A few months before we had moved from Vicksburg to Birmingham, from a small ranch house to a split-level ranch house, from a traditional elementary school to an “open format” elementary school, from the big Southern Baptist church in a small town to a big Southern Baptist church in the suburbs of a city.  The least turbulent transition was the church.  There was a distinct change in decor — the Vicksburg church had a huge mural of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden behind the baptismal font, quite unusual for a Protestant church but very welcome for wandering eyes to rest on.  The suburban church had varnished pine boards, with nothing for a bored child to do but resist the urge to count them, for once they were counted, what else was there to do?  Fortunately there wasn’t much boredom at that time, as the services were very similar.  There was an emphasis on free will and God’s love to provide an answer to all our problems, on God’s expectation that we would stand on our own feet, work together, and get things done.  The ideal relationship with God was the one described in the song above, although the song itself wouldn’t be composed for almost another decade.  With intellect, love, and will-power, any problem could be solved.  I had just turned eight; and I believed, I believed, I believed.

But church wasn’t only the calmest place in my life, it was the most intellectually stimulating.  School was deadly dull, and there was no other place around me where people were having interesting, open-ended discussions about life’s problems.  In the early 70s there were a ton of problems to discuss, and many people were getting all gloomy about them.  But not the church, which was a haven of optimism and reason.

When we joined a few months ago, the preacher had welcomed us individually, shook my hand, and told me that if I had any problems I could come see him.  When I felt comfortable there, I took him at his word. I must have just turned eight.  My sister and I had been dropped off there for some children’s function, and I found the opportunity to speak to the minister alone in the sanctuary.  I told him that Mom and Dad were doing things to us that they shouldn’t, and, maybe, he could talk to them and make them stop? The preacher thought for a moment and then asked if my father sang in the choir.  Yes, he did.  He asked if my mother was the treasurer of the PTA.  Yes, she was.

He did not ask why I had requested an intervention.

Then he kindly explained things to me.  He explained that since my parents were members of the church in good standing, they couldn’t possibly be doing anything wrong, especially not to their own children.  If I thought that members of the church in good standing were doing something wrong, there could only be one explanation.  Somehow I had become possessed by Satan, and Satan was inside me making me believe lies about my parents that could not possibly be true.  Then he prayed to Satan to leave my body and stop plaguing my thoughts with such lies, and sent me on my way.

I was dumbfounded.  I may have just turned eight, but even then I knew the only thing I was possessed by was the good sense to realize how ridiculous the preacher sounded.  It was without question the single stupidest thing I had ever heard in my life, either in stories or in real life.  But if he took it seriously, then that could only mean — dangerous things. I remember staring at the thumbs of his clasped hands in shock, not daring to look him in the face.  Then my mind started to work.

This was a modern, liberal church in the early 1970s and he’s threatening me with Satan.  I don’t think half the congregation even believes in Satan!  It’s not a serious topic of conversation in or out of sermons.  Here people talk about using love to solve real problems, they don’t threaten people asking for help with stuff that belongs in old movies.  It’s like be threatened with leeches or water torture or — or footbinding or some other bit of antique nonsense.

But if there were even a tiny minority out there who actually believed such things, then I could never, ever tell anyone about my own spiritual experiences.  I had never told anyone about talking to God because I had never met anyone who would have a positive reaction to the news.  The negative reactions would fall into two camps, the ones who would want me shipped off to a loony bin and the ones who would want me burned at the stake.  Of the two I figured I could talk my way out of the loony bin easier than I could talk my way off a burning stake.  I seriously thought the latter camp only existed in old books, but apparently I was wrong.

That hurt.  I’d been looking forward to talking to someone about it someday.

Obviously I couldn’t talk to any spiritual ministers about anything else going on in my life.  And I had made a mistake not waiting until I knew someone long enough for them to trust me before asking them for help.  Next time I would wait longer.

That was what went through my conscious mind at the time.  For over 40 years whenever I consciously remembered it, that is all I thought about, that and the image of the thumbs of his clasped hands.  It was not until I finally committed to writing about it after years of dithering that I realized my subconscious had ruminated on it for a long time, and reached conclusions that I did not fully realize were connected to this memory.

In my subconscious I realized other things as well.  I realized that my parents could do anything they wanted to my little sister and I and no one would rescue us.  According to the preacher, they weren’t the only ones.  Any “member of the church in good standing” could do anything they wanted to us and if my parents didn’t stop them no one would.  That meant no one would protect me not only from my father but from any man at church who wanted to abuse me in any way.  It meant that the church would attract abusers who wanted to be “members in good standing” for the cover it provided for their abuse.

But it’s church, right?  There can’t be many abusers there.  At the time I believed that.  I didn’t have any evidence of any other abusers — other than the preacher’s disturbing response.

Time would prove me wrong.  The evidence would mount.  And I would have a hard time feeling safe in a church ever again.

Meanwhile I had a decision to make.  I was being abused at home, and apparently the larger community in the form of the my community’s spiritual leader thought that my abuse was the right and proper way of the world.  Where did that leave me?  At this point there were two things I could believe.  Either 1) there was something wrong with me that made people think they could get away with treating me like shit, or 2) the whole damn system was screwed.  I’ll take Door #1, Monty.

I can hear the chorus now.  “You just wanted to be a special snowflake!”  Nothing could be further from the truth.  I knew that what distinguished the scapegoat from the rest of the herd was the mark that others placed on it.  If I could figure out where the scapegoat’s mark was on me, I could wash it off and vanish into the crowd. If #1 was correct, that meant I could someday escape.  If #2 was correct I could never escape an entire world that saw all children as suitable playthings for monsters.  I originally chose to believe #1 not out of shame, despair, or any perverse pride; but out of a desperate, desperate hope.  In time that hope would fade, and despair would take it’s place.  In even more time I would realize that what I had refused to believe was true.  The whole damn system was screwed and no one was doing anything to fix it.

And then I would begin to get angry.

But I was eight and still in the grip of Persephone’s cruelest demon, hope.

(It would be 41 years later before my husband pointed out the most disturbing part of that conversation:  the preacher did not stutter or fumble his words.  To the veteran schoolteacher that meant only one thing — he’d had plenty of practice on other girls and boys.)

Three Steps Out the Church Door: Leaving the Southern Baptist Church – Introduction

Three Steps Part 1: Recollection, Remembrance, and Discovery

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