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Alecia Pennington, you are not alone

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on February 15, 2015. 

Homeschool alumni Alecia Faith Pennington’s Help Me Prove It campaign went viral on social media this last week.

She explained that she can’t vote, can’t get a job and can’t get a driver’s license, all because she can’t prove that she was born in the United States.

Because she was born at home and her parents allegedly never filed for a birth certificate, she said she cannot prove her US citizenship. Her parents also never filed for a Social Security number and never took her to a hospital, and she has no school records because she was homeschooled, according to her now-viral YouTube video.

“This leaves me with nothing to prove my identity or citizenship,” Alecia said in the video. “I am now 19 years old and I’m unable to get a driver’s license, get a job, go to college, get on a plane, get a bank account, or vote.”

Her YouTube video was viewed over 500,000 times and reached Reddit’s front page within a week, according to Homeschoolers Anonymous.

But as the survey conducted by Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out (HARO) a few days ago demonstrates, she is not alone.

And the majority of survey respondents whose parents denied them their identifying documentation were also members of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), which is an interesting correlation.

Source: HARO.

My parents were members of HSLDA.

They kept a card with HSLDA’s hotline number taped beside our front door when we first started homeschooling in the early 90s. (I’m the oldest child in my family.)

My parents told me if anyone from Child Protective Services showed up at the door, we needed to call that number right away and not answer any questions until we talked to their legal representatives. They taught me that our ungodly government was looking for reasons to persecute good Christian families who just wanted to raise their children according to Biblical teachings.

They said spanking wasn’t abuse, even if it left marks, because it was all part of the plan to raise children to fear God and obey authority. If anyone asked if my parents spanked, we were to lie and say they didn’t.

When my parents gave me an ultimatum between moving out and transferring colleges to Bob Jones University summer 2012, I left with only my driver’s license.

Earlier that year, my mom gave me a folder marked “Eleanor.” She kept one for me and each of my siblings that she planned to give to us when we turned 18.

This folder had everything from baby footprints and my birth certificate to my social security card and passport to x-rays and health records for my growth hormone treatment as a teenager.

But the one of the most destructive wildfires in Colorado’s history, the Waldo Canyon Fire, started one sleepy Saturday in June 2012. By the next Tuesday, the winds rolled it down the mountain into the city, destroying around 300 homes, and my family and neighbors were planning to evacuate.

My dad took the folder with all my identifying documents for safekeeping in a safe deposit box. I reminded him I would need it later.

I moved out on August 1, 2012. Before and after moving out, I asked for that folder and my documentation over and over.

I applied for jobs off-campus for additional income, but could only provide my drivers’ license for the I-9 documentation for employment to prove my US citizenship and ability to work legally, which wasn’t enough since the document requires two forms of identification.

My mom finally gave me a few copies of my social security card and passport. But not before I’d already been denied one tutoring job after an interview because I couldn’t produce proper identification.

They kept telling me they were holding my documentation in safekeeping for when I changed my mind and decided to go to Bob Jones University instead of “rebelling” and moving out on my own,

About six months after I left home, they finally gave me my social security card.

I continued asking them for my passport.

Text messages from 11/17/2013:
Me: May I please pretty please have my passport?
Mom: Passport applications are available at the post office. […] I will continue to pray for you. Goodbye.

Later, my dad said I had to repay large amounts of money that he claimed I owed him before he would give me my passport. As a college student with part-time employment, I didn’t have extra money to replace my passport or my other identifying documents.

I didn’t get my passport back until October 2014.

So this week, the Help Me Prove It campaign reminded me that I still don’t have my birth certificate or health records.

I emailed my parents again two days ago.

My dad replied the same day:

Have not seen your BC (birth certificate) for quite some time. Your best bet there is to contact Jefferson County in Texas. They can likely give you a copy. Very busy these days. Best regards, TS

Mom answered the next day:

Dad and I had to request birth certificates when we first applied for passports. It was not something that [your grandparents] had. We wrote Harris County and Duchess County for our birth certificates. You won’t need one to renew your driver’s license. Just proof of address and take the eye test. Mom.

No answer about my health records.

At least I’m registered in the county system, so I can get another birth certificate if I need to get a driver’s license in another state, and I can request copies of my health records from my doctors.

Alecia Pennington can’t.

So yes, some of us (story 1) (story 2) who moved out years ago are still fighting to get our documentation.

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Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Should I stay or should I go? When we debate leaving anything, we wrestle with this. Leaving means loss. So does staying. And there are likely a few things to gain either way as well, at least from the perspective we have at the time.

I have recently faced this question in another situation, and I was a bit surprised at the similarities there were to leaving the church I left 14 years ago. There are a few people who want me to stay. And I want to stay if only to please them, because I like them and I realize if I leave we’ll grow more distant probably. I’ve been encouraged to stay to help others who stay. A few seem to think I’m showing I wasn’t dedicated or committed if I leave. Just like in the unhealthy church, most will never notice that I’m gone, and just like in the unhealthy church, a few will likely even say “good riddance!”

And if I leave I’ll miss people. I’ll miss what the organization/group could have been, what it seemed to be. BUT.. I’m not happy. The few who want me to stay could leave and most did think about leaving at one time. Instead, they chose to stay. Their choice doesn’t have to be my own. Also, as I consider the situation fully, I realize we weren’t that close. A good friend would encourage me to do what is best for me, not attempt to persuade me to stay in a situation they, too, considered leaving.

Leaving doesn’t mean I’m not dedicated or committed. It may mean I’m wise, or it may mean I’m committed in a different way. It could even mean that I’m committed to myself – and there is NOTHING wrong with that. As for the rest… what others think is not my concern. They should do what’s best for them, but I must also do what is best for me and what I believe is right. Though I’m not sure what’s right, I know staying isn’t right for me.

The situation I’m in isn’t healthy for me. I’ve lost sleep. I’ve shed tears. And I’ve done what I can to repair the situation and bring care and community. Nothing has changed. Staying will do two things: it will continue to make me unhappy and stressed and it will potentially make others think they should stay or are alone in leaving, too. I’ve decided to make one final attempt and give myself two weeks to see the outcome of this attempt before making a decisive move to finalize my leave. In the meantime, I will act as though I’ve left already as much as possible.

This is an opportunity to adjust more than reconsider.

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Movie Review: Mars Hill Church’s ‘Good Friday’ film

Source: Mars Hill Church

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on October 3, 2013.

Note: I wrote this post before The Seattle Times reported on Mars Hill Church’s senior pastor Mark Driscoll’s spiritual abuse in 2014, and long before the 2021 release of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast by Christianity Today. After I read the victim’s stories describing Driscoll’s demeaning statements about women, it’s not surprising that his version of Jesus is domineering, hypermasculine and heartless.

For centuries, churches have used various mediums in attempts to recreate Biblical stories, to make them come to life.

But the crucifixion is the story most frequently reenacted, usually with vivid, graphic detail.

From medieval Passion plays to modern productions like New Life Church’s The Thorn to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, we in the audience revisit the torture of Jesus over and over.

I have seen many forms of the story — theater, film, and dramatized radio theater. Although the same story is retold each time, the techniques employed by the scriptwriters, actors, and directors can potentially lend a new perspective, but with so many adaptations, it’s hard to tell the story in a new way.

Mars Hill Church, a megachurch based out of Seattle, made their own “Good Friday” film in 2010, and released it online in spring 2011. Since I was curious to see what the filmmakers did with the story, I watched the 30 minute short film last week.

The opening scene is chilling. A small child swings in the dust on a rope, then pauses to look at three empty crosses, which seems to embody lost innocence.

Mars Hill Church’s senior pastor Mark Driscoll gives a solemn introduction. He encourages viewers to continue “somberly, as if you were watching a funeral.”

Mars Hill produced “Good Friday” through partnerships with Universal Studios and a makeup artist from The Passion and No Country for Old Men, which was evident in some of the film techniques, such as close ups of Christ’s hand gripping dirt in Gethsemane and then releasing it and flash forwards to the impending scourging.

The gory detail is unflinching, especially the scene in which Jesus’ bloodied body falls into the mud after the beatings.

Yet despite attempts to draw the audience in with these graphic depictions, the acting falls short, rendering most of the special effects meaningless, particularly with the casting of the main character.

The actor portraying Jesus fluctuates between stoicism and bitterness, which feels like he is lacking love. He foretells his death and betrayal at the Last Supper without almost any emotion. He seems angry and disappointed with Judas and Peter, defensive with the high priests Annas and Caiaphas, enduring the torment with strength, but without love, which is the essence of the real Jesus.

The gruesome beating in a torch-lit underground dungeon reminds the audience of a sinister horror film, in stark contrast to the scourging scene in The Passion where Jesus whispers to his Father that his “heart is ready” even as the torture begins.

Also, the actor playing Jesus looks like just any guy off the street randomly wearing a tunic. Even though I have my own conception of what Jesus looked like, I can accept an actor of any description playing Christ if he is rooted in the role. But this Jesus doesn’t have the passion to adopt the part.

Perhaps this lack of love is partly due to the focus of the film.

In both the film’s introduction and the church’s blog post about the film, Driscoll said he wants viewers to realize that “the cross is something done by us: we murdered God. Then on Easter Sunday, we remember that the cross is something done for us: God died in our place to forgive our sins.”

While that idea is a central part of penal substitutionary atonement, which is also the dominant theological view of salvation in American Christian evangelicalism, I think we need to not divide what we did to God and what God did for us into separate events—the two are concurrent and inseparable.

The Mars Hill film also attempts to distinguish itself from its predecessors by focusing more on theology than history.

“Whereas The Passion may have tried to tell the story with chronological and historical accuracy, we’re trying to make the theological weight of the event—the substitutionary death of the Son of God in our place for our sins—as vivid as possible,” Mars Hill Church media relations director Nick Borgardus said in an 2010 interview with the Christian Post.

But theology is not a cold, hard exercise. Theology may be based on logic and philosophy, but because of its focus on spirituality, it should also be inherently emotional.

When love is removed from sacrifice, the sacrifice becomes a nauseating, guilt-ridden experience. As the apostle Paul wrote, “Without love, I am nothing.”

When the central theme is removed from a central event of a religious worldview, only dead men’s bones are left.

The Biblical Jesus knew pain in its deepest forms, but he never lost love. The Mars Hill Church Jesus seems to have lost the meaning behind his sacrifice.

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The UnBoxing Project: Surviving and thriving on the outside

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on April 7, 2015 as part of a series. 

Continued from How You Can Help (Eleanor’s thoughts)

Although I had very little when I was kicked out of the cult and moved out of my family’s house, I came from an upper middle class, well-educated family. I grew up privileged.

I moved out as a college student with a couple of on-campus jobs after my parents emptied my savings account. Many of the people that we helped were in similar circumstances.

A week after I was kicked out, someone at the LGBT resource center at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, known as the MOSAIC office, told me about resources for people with low income. 

My upbringing in a fundamentalist Christian cult had taught me that accepting assistance from the government or non-profits like food pantries was morally wrong. If you didn’t earn your own food through your own hard work, you shouldn’t get to eat, they said. 

Slowly, I learned to accept help when it’s offered and allow the help to stabilize me. 

Resources like these helped me and my friends to stay independent from our parents and the cults we left while living on a tight budget.

  • Food pantries and food stamps
    When my paycheck barely covered rent and gas or three other girls were living out of our tiny apartment, we couldn’t afford food. Mercy’s Gate and other Care and Share pantries felt like small miracles. There’s even Colorado Pet Pantry for cats and dogs. And El Paso county provides SNAP benefits (food stamps).
  • Cellphone plans like Straight Talk, Wal-Mart Family Mobile, and Tracfone
    Our monthly bills were between $30-40, or we used pay-as-you-go plans, which helped us avoid higher costs from major cellphone network companies. 
  • Dollar stores
    During the first year after I left, my roommate’s boyfriend issued me a challenge: go to a dollar store and notice everything they sold. It was so helpful that now I take other ex-fundies to show them what  you can get with a few dollars in a pinch. Although some products are cheap or not good quality, it’s a good survival skill to see what supplies you can get at a discounted price. 
  • Thrift stores
    In Colorado Springs, we have the Arc and Goodwill, and local thrift stores whose profits benefit human trafficking survivors or disadvantaged teens that sometimes resell the leftovers from bigger thrift stores at even cheaper prices. 
  • Temporary agencies
    Our little band of cult survivors all needed jobs and often didn’t have much work experience to put on a job application. I didn’t know what temporary agencies did until one hard winter when I was down to only one of the three jobs I’d had the previous summer. Then I got a call from a temporary staffing agency that found my resume on Monster and wanted to hire me for a receptionist position at a pharmaceutical company, something related to my chemistry degree. They also gave me odd jobs like hotel housekeeping on the weekends for extra money. It wasn’t glamorous and sometimes the jobs I got were difficult, but it helped me survive short-term until I found something better.
  • Housing / utilities assistance
    Most cities have section 8 housing, although people often are on wait lists for several years and it’s difficult to qualify for. Colorado also has a Low-income Energy Assistance Program (LEAP), which provides heating assistance in the winter.
  • Internet
    Several major companies like Comcast and CenturyLink also offer low-income internet service. In Texas, Spectrum offers affordability connectivity programs. 
  • Mental health
    We wrestled with anxiety, self-harm, PTSD, and survivor’s guilt. But we found counselors both on campus at University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and within the Colorado Springs community who wanted to help us heal and worked on a sliding fee scale. 

We also found several non-profit and government organizations in Colorado Springs with resources for survivors.

On the outside, we formed our own little family, a chosen family rather than by blood.

Dale Fincher, who talks about recovery from spiritual abuse at Soulation, writes in The Exodus From Family:

“When our biological family puts a brake on friendship, we must look for friendship elsewhere. This year, I am no longer defaulting to blood and legal relatives as my ‘ohana.’ They will not lock me into a family orphanage until I conform to their demands. No. My family has become my Chosen Family, for we cannot live as orphans (John 14:18).”

A theme that resurfaces in the dialogue about spiritual abuse is that of Christian fundamentalism’s idolization of family values over the well-being of the individuals within the family. The family unit’s survival at all cost becomes idolized, enabling denial of abuse.

We learned we could all find freedom together.

No, we couldn’t save each other or support each other—we all had to ultimately find our own way because all of us are broken and hurting.

But we knew we weren’t alone.

Sometimes a hug, a shoulder to cry on, enabled us to just keep walking, to not give up.

Even if we were outcast, we believed our experiences were valid, we grasped for something better.

And we wanted to share this new life, this freedom with others.

R. L. Stollar, one of the founders of Homeschoolers Anonymous, wrote:

“I learned that Jesus of Nazareth was not content with 99 sheep when 99 sheep means that one gets left behind to suffer in silence and solitude. [….] But Jesus dealt with human beings, not statistics. Human beings are what I want to deal with, too. […] Us “bitter apostates” will be out in the wilderness, searching for the one you abandoned.”

And that is what we did, too.

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The UnBoxing Project: How you can help (Eleanor’s thoughts)

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on April 5, 2015 as part of a series. 

Continued from How You Can Help (Cynthia’s Thoughts)

When we started helping people move out, we learned that getting out and finding freedom is messy, and everyone’s situation is different.

When someone contacted us for help, we said that they went “active.” It’s like being on call for an emergency move 24/7.

They’ll tell us the situation is deteriorating, but we don’t know it’s going to happen until they call us, because we leave the choice up to them.

In summer 2013, when Homeschoolers Anonymous posted Eve Ettinger’s Call For Help: A Quiverfull / Patriarchy Rescue, I wrote in an email to our network: “I think she is the first of many.”

The backlash is one of the most difficult things we all faced in leaving our cult-like churches and controlling families.

One morning in my apartment, right after Racquel and Ashley left their church, the First United Pentecostal Church of Colorado Springs, Racquel’s phone rang. She stepped into the next room for a private discussion.

She came back out looking troubled.

Ashley asked what was wrong, and Racquel said Sister H. from Louisiana just called.

Racquel started crying.

“Sister H. told me that the pastor may be wrong, our parents may be wrong, but not to give up on the Pentecostal church. But I just can’t do it. I can’t.”

“Did anything like this happen to you when you left, Eleanor?” she asked.

Yes. Yes, it did.

One of the pastors and his wife at our old church in the Dallas Metroplex, Rockwall Bible Church, called me and tried to convince me to attend Bob Jones University.

They agreed with my pastor at Grace Bible Church in Colorado Springs and they said the only way to honor my parents was to do this one thing, to obey them.

My friend Anna G. called me a few weeks after I moved out. She said she’d gone back to the church. The assistant pastor and his wife asked her to step into their office after an evening church service and asked her about two of my Facebook posts that she’d liked and commented on.

One of my Facebook posts that she had liked was lyrics from a song called “Keep Your Eyes Open” by the contemporary Christian band NeedtoBreathe (and the assistant pastor and his wife believed all syncopated music was of Satan).

The other Facebook post was a link to a Tumblr blog called Hey Christian Girl, a collection of memes with cheesy, silly pick-up lines with Biblical allusions. They said didn’t see the humor, and they thought it was sacrilegious.

Anna also said the pastor and his wife asked her if she agreed with me moving out, if she’d aided me in leaving the cult. They told her that they didn’t want her to influence their children to move out without their approval.

I caught my breath. I could see it now.

They can’t stand to lose one of their own, because that’s losing a soldier to the culture wars. You take one step back from fundamentalist Christianity and now you’re one of the outsiders, one of the “lost” that they evangelize. And they need your soul.

So when I hugged Racquel while she sobbed, I could say, “Yes, this happened to me, too.”

This is why leaving these churches and these homes is leaving a cult. And this is what it’s like to walk beside abuse survivors in seeking freedom.

I’ve waited through months of watching and making preparations before helping someone leave. I keep an emergency cellphone with an unlisted number in case a controlling parent blocks someone from calling my regular cellphone. I’ve carried pepper spray, a stun gun and a small knife, all legal to carry on my college campus, so I can protect myself and those who ask for our help if a situation turns confrontational and violent.

Our network of friends discusses alternate scenarios, backup plans with people who are wanting to leave. We plan for the worst while hoping that one day this won’t be necessary.

Here’s we learned about helping people move out:

Take the essentials, but stay safe.

TESSA, a non-profit in Colorado Springs that offers advice and support to spousal domestic abuse survivors, has a checklist of what to take with you when you leave that we found helpful.

  • Identifying documents
  • Clothes to last a week
  • Cash and bank information
  • Keys to car and work
  • Medications
  • Important paperwork and records
  • Personal items like photographs and jewelry

When Ashley moved out, five of us showed up because we knew her father was armed, he’d destroyed the inside of the car and the apartment, and we didn’t know when he’d return. 

Later, I learned anyone who feels threatened can request police protection while moving their possessions.

Sometimes we left something behind we valued.

I couldn’t take my heirloom violin from the 1890s or one of our family dogs I’d bonded with. Ashley left her dog Sasha and her bed because we couldn’t fit it in the van, and Racquel sold her horse when later she couldn’t pay board and her own living expenses.

We lost diaries, mementos, and valuables.

We decided our freedom was worth losing those things or that lifestyle.

We realized the important thing was keeping ourselves safe and learning how to heal.

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