Browsing Tag

ATI

This is what ATI teaches families like the Duggars

A few months ago, when the news initially broke about Josh sexually abusing his sisters and others, I wrote a post that examined some of the reasons why his parents were able to cover up what he’d done so effectively: the purity culture they raised their children in blames women for their own assaults. Specifically, they used a program created by Bill Gothard, a man known for sexually harassing women and minors (Josh Duggar received his “counseling” from Gothard’s ministry). This program is known as the Advanced Training Institute (ATI).

I was able to include some of the material that laid out ATI’s approach to counseling abuse victims, and it is horrific. Well, today I’d like to share a few more pieces of information, because it lays out all the reasons why the Duggars (or anyone like them) should not be allowed within spitting distance of TLC’s upcoming documentary.

Salient quote:

Do you know what provokes attacks?

Evaluate Dress
Choose friends Wisely

Salient quote:

God has established some very strict guidelines or responsibility for a woman who is attacked. She is to cry out for help. The victim who fails to do so is equally guilty with the attacker.

I decided a long time ago that if that is who God is, I want nothing to do with them. That God is an absolute monster, but that’s the sort of God that fundamentalist families like the Duggars believes exists.

Salient quote:

A woman was startled one night by an intruder who broke into her apartment. The attacker stated his intentions, and she replied “You’ll have to kill me first because I’ve given my body and my life to the Lord.”

In this culture it is actually preferable for a woman to die than to “lose her virginity,” even through rape.

~ ~ ~

The Duggars aren’t the only family in America to follow and believe these ideas. The ATI annual conferences see thousands of attendees, and the intersections between fundamentalist Christianity and conservative politics are numerous and influential. This isn’t something we can hold up as an example of extreme fundamentalism gone so wrong it’s easy to make fun of. This shit is serious, and important, because the people who believe these things aren’t fringe. Misogyny and victim-blaming are part of the core values of the homeschooling and Tea Party movements, and that shouldn’t be dismissed.

August 6, 2015 by SamanthaField

Theology

learning the words: wisdom

Today’s guest post is from Physics & Whiskey, who blogs about his journey away from absolute certainty and toward endless curiosity at Science and Other Drugs. “Learning the Words” is a series on the words many of us didn’t have in fundamentalism or overly conservative evangelicalism– and how we got them back. If you would like to be a part of this series, you can find my contact information at the top.

As far as fundamentalist homeschooling families go, mine was fairly average. We saw a lot of families that were definitely more extreme. Growing up, I felt like my parents had balanced everything out fairly well. They swallowed the Pearls’ teachings on discipline hook, line, and sinker, but they shied away from the patriarchal teachings. All of us envied the sense of community in the local ATI group, but we knew there was something a little off about the whole business. My dad preferred the KJV, but we recognized that the KJV-only dogma of most Independent Fundamental Baptists were ridiculous.

We sampled a little here and a little there, never entirely diving into any one system or group or ideology. Perhaps that’s why the word I’m most thoughtful about is wisdom.

“The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight.” (Proverbs 4:7)

Growing up, this passage always seemed tautological. “In order to get wisdom, get wisdom.” Boy, that sure tells us a lot. Of course, the presupposition of Biblical Literalism obscured the poetic depth of many such passages, but still, it was puzzling.

In our family, wisdom had a very specific meaning. Wisdom was a special piece of knowledge or insight provided by the Holy Spirit apart from any epistemic process.

Epistemology is the study of how we acquire knowledge our information. For example, empirical (observational) epistemology says that we use our senses to arrive at most or all knowledge. An epistemic process is a pathway to making a claim; it follows the basic principles of logic and reason and includes both premises and arguments. Because it has all these elements, a statement based on an epistemic process can be questioned, debated, and ultimately understood.

But wisdom was something different. A piece of wisdom couldn’t be questioned or argued or analyzed. It came from God, so it just had to be accepted. You weren’t allowed to understand wisdom; you just had to follow it.

In practice, this meant that whatever insight my parents gleaned (either from the Bible or from a fundamentalist parenting book or from a pastor or from special revelation during prayer) could not be questioned. According to fundamentalist belief, parents had a special connection to the Holy Spirit which allowed them to make the right decision 100% of the time, as long as they were “trusting God’s Word.” They didn’t have to understand it, they just had to apply it and believe that it would yield positive results. “No chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful; nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.”

Labeling intuition or church dogma as wisdom essentially made it God’s Word; since God is the source of all wisdom, questioning anything labeled as wisdom was tantamount to questioning God. Worst of all, not even my parents were permitted to question it. If my mom said something was wisdom, my dad was duty-bound to defend it; if my dad said something was wisdom, my mom had to do the same. Wisdom could be invoked at any time to end any discussion. If you continued to protest after wisdom had been invoked, the full weight of Proverbs was brought to bear.

“Fools despise wisdom and discipline.”
“He who disdains instruction despises his own soul, but he who heeds rebuke gets understanding.”
“A fool despises his father’s instruction, but he who receives correction is prudent.”
“A wise son makes a glad father, but a foolish son is the grief of his mother.”

Oh, and here’s my personal favorite. Any time we tried to defend ourselves: “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but he who heeds counsel is wise.” In other words, shut up and face the consequences; the more you try to explain, the more foolish you are.

I say “favorite” with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek, because nothing could be further from the truth. Even now, I’m having trouble glancing through the book of Proverbs. These passages bring back a lot of difficult memories. My heart is racing and I have a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Wisdom is hard for me to talk about. I can feel the nervous panic of sitting in my parents’ room waiting and waiting because I had made the painful mistake of “despising wisdom.”

The irony was that fundamentalists prize the doctrine of “solo“ scriptura to an extreme degree. Scripture is supposed to be 100% sufficient– except when it’s not, and you need to add wisdom to properly round it out. This practice is hard to spot, especially since most “wisdom” consists of Bible verses pulled out of their context and applied liberally to the current situation.

Wisdom was a way of cementing parental authority. “Do not despise the chastening of the Lord, nor detest His correction.” To question a parent’s wisdom was to rebel against God. It was our responsibility to simply pray until God gave us the same wisdom he had already given our parents.

So it’s easy to see how I might be a little hesitant about using the word “wisdom” now.

“The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds.” (Matthew 11:19)

Growing up, wisdom couldn’t be questioned. Wisdom was a guarantee of results. You simply applied it, and it always worked. No matter what.

But in Matthew 11, Jesus says: “Wisdom is justified by her deeds.” Even Jesus, who metaphorically embodied wisdom, didn’t act as though he was above question. He didn’t say, “I have divine wisdom on my side, so I’m right no matter what.” No, he said that wisdom was identified by what it actually did, not where it came from. If actions bear good fruit, they were wise; if actions bear bad fruit, they were unwise.

Wisdom isn’t magical. It’s the result of experience and reflection. If something works, it’s wise; if not, it isn’t.

If I want to be a wise father to my son, I can’t depend on “wisdom” as a fall-back that will guarantee the proper results if I don’t know what I’m doing. Finally, I understand what Proverbs 4:7 means: In order to be wise, I have to get wisdom. I have to pay attention to what works and what doesn’t; I have to be willing to change if my intuitions are leading me the wrong way.

“Test everything; hold fast to what is good.”

That’s wisdom.

May 31, 2013 by SamanthaField

Theology

learning the words: legalism

Today’s guest post is from Timothy Swanson, who blogs about his literary explorations at Diary of an Autodidact. “Learning the Words” is a series on the words many of us didn’t have in fundamentalism or overly conservative evangelicalism– and how we got them back. If you would like to be a part of this series, you can find my contact information at the top.

My family had been attending Bill Gothard’s seminars for a year or so, I believe, when my parents decided that we would join his home schooling program (we had homeschooled for many years prior to that– I had only one year of high school left by that time).

I objected to this decision for several reasons. One was that I had only a year left and didn’t want to make a change (I was allowed to finish, thankfully). One was that the program, which purported to make all learning based on and flow out of scripture, seemed to lack any clear academic organization and vision. It was more about indoctrination than real schooling. These objections were easy for me to articulate. I had the words for these concepts.

My bigger, overarching objection was more difficult. There was a word for it, but I was not allowed to use it, because it had been re-defined.

That word was legalism.

In the ultra-conservative Christian world, legalism has been re-defined to apply only to an extremely narrow concept: a belief that salvation can be earned.

It’s not that this definition is exactly wrong, but that it excludes much of what legalism really is. Conveniently, the narrow definition allowed us to say that other religions were legalistic, because good deeds would be weighed in determining one’s fate after death. Perhaps even Roman Catholics were legalistic. But “true” Christians could not be legalistic, because they acknowledged that only Christ could save.

But.

There were all kinds of rules in the Gothard system (and in the similar ultraconservative systems). These rules were called principles or standards— and they were necessary to achieve “God’s best.” So, Christians should never send their children to public or private school; girls must wear skirts, not pants; women shouldn’t work outside the home; Christians should only listen to certain music and read certain books; and on and on. Of course, this wasn’t legalism. We just wanted “God’s best” in our lives. Never mind that we were encouraged to judge those that did not adhere to all our standards as probably not being real Christians.

So, I couldn’t use legalism to describe a legalistic system or belief. The closest I could come was rigid. That word was inadequate because it allowed the focus to shift from the problematic system, which insisted that “God’s way” included many man-made rules beyond the commands of Christ, and placed the focus on other people within the system who were perhaps a bit “rigid” in their practices. We could be a little less “rigid” than them.

The real problem was the legalism, which insisted that following Christ was really a bunch of rules and cultural preferences. But I couldn’t say that, because legalism had been taken away from me.

May 23, 2013 by SamanthaField

Theology

whole

I imagine many survivors of an IFB cult could sympathize with what I’m about to say. Probably anyone who’s come out of any cult, actually.

The cult is your extended family.

Part of that is the abusive system– the leader often encourages abnormally tight bonds between members as a form of manipulation. If your church-cult is your family, you are far less likely to do anything to “hurt” your family, and what comprises a “hurt” is usually defined by the cult leader.

This held true, on a smaller scale, at my crazy fundamentalist college. I honestly don’t know if what I’m about to describe happens at secular colleges, but from the conversations I’ve had, I don’t think so. Here’s what happens:

Freshmen arrive on campus.
Freshman start making friends. Their friends make friends.
Freshmen start forming friend-groups that are usually a solid group by mid-October.
Friend-groups hover around six people for the rest of the semester (mostly because dinner tables could, at the most, seat either four or six– and it was against the rules to add more chairs, or to combine tables).
Friend groups expand to either 10 or 12– again, to accommodate dinner seating. It’s ridiculous the number of fight-discussions my group was in about who could be invited to dinner because of the forced seating arrangement.
This group exists until the end of sophomore year.
By spring break sophomore year, someone in the group decides they don’t really get along with another person in the group.
This decision is usually mutual.
Also, these two people are probably girls. Girls outnumber boys at this college 3 to 1 most of the time.
Ergo, this decision is usually related to some boy in the group, although, admittedly, not always.
Other people in the group decide they have to “fix” said problem.
Fixing this problem always ends disastrously, as usually the object of the crush decides he’s the one who needs to fix it. Also, he’s usually oblivious that he’s the cause of said problem.
The group splinters into two groups, and everyone feels really bad about it and they all have sore feelings through junior year.
Senior year: they’ve usually learned that no one freaking cares. Usually.

Does anyone have a similar experience to this? I can’t tell you how many times I saw this happen– even in my own group.

One of the things I noticed was that the most tightly-bonded groups tended to be those who were made up of IFB freshman, or some other conservative denomination in Christianity– but, usually, IFB kids had the tendency to do this more often. Looking back, I think I know why. In my experience, children who are raised in the various fundamentalist movements are taught to prize the group over the individual. The church becomes hugely more important than any of the individual members. It is acceptable if an individual member is hurt for the sake of the whole. The church body must be protected at all costs.

We can see this playing out, now– countless stories of how fundamentalist groups have covered up routine, systematic abuse on the parts of members or leaders in order to protect the “group.” Many girls are stepping forward to tell their stories of abuse at the hands of people like Bill Gothard, and how the system where the abuse occurred encouraged silence. Jack Schaap, a man whose wife I knew personally, is finally being sentenced for, not raping a sixteen-year-old girl, but taking her across state lines. I have known two evangelists who left the country to escape sexual molestation charges, and were never brought to justice. Sovereign Grace Ministries is being investigated for covering up sexual abuse and encouraging the victims to remain silent. Multiple people have accused Bob Grenier and many of the churches in the Calvary Chapel network of outrageous abuses. Bob Jones University is also being investigated for its counseling services deliberately covering up multiple sexual abuse cases, and again, encouraging victims to remain silent– in the case of one young lady, expressly telling her she was “lying” for claiming abuse and she should “repent.”

I could go on . . . and on . . . and on . . .

To people who know, and can see the devastation being wrought on the innocents in fundamentalism, it is absolutely heartbreaking, because it is everywhere. Thankfully, more and more people are responding to the need, but that need is overwhelming at times.

But, it all gets started because of the dominance of the group over the needs and hurts of the individual. Western culture is a highly individualized one– to an unhealthy degree, as many have argued much better than I ever could. Rev. Katherine Schori called individualism “the great Western heresy,” and I rather agree with her. Fundamentalists tend to go to an opposite extreme in interesting–and disastrous– ways. After a fundamentalist becomes “saved,” individualism ends. At that moment, they are to see themselves as parts of unit– as a role in a family, as a family in a church, as a church in the body of Christ, etc. We are supposed to suppress individual desires for the needs of the group. Our talents are to be used for the furthering of the “church.” We are to sacrifice ourselves for the “church.” We are to serve the “church.” And we are absolutely forbidden from taking any course of action that could damage the church’s “witness.”

So, when abuse happens, we stay silent. We don’t rock the boat. We don’t want to be the one person who “hurts the church’s reputation”– because the church’s–or the pastor’s–image is more important than us. And because we all stay silent, no one knows that the abuse is probably systematic. That it is happening to all of us.

I didn’t see this until the end of my sophomore year. I had become a part of one of the many friend-groups, and all of my friends were from similar backgrounds in fundamentalism to various degrees of severity. By the end of the year, I had had it up to here with one woman, who, I imagine, has matured since then, but in my freshman and sophomore years was incredibly manipulative and shallow. I decided that I had no particular interest in enduring meal after meal and church service after church service listening to her.

I shocked all of my friends when I left the group.

I did so silently– I didn’t make some flamboyant declaration about how I couldn’t be their friend anymore– that happened, occasionally, from the outbursts you could hear sometimes in the cafeteria and the student commons– I just started declining invitations. After a few weeks, my friends were desperate to do something. My absence–my individual decision to put my feelings above the needs of the group–was changing the group dynamic, and they had no idea how to fix it. Three different people confronted me about me “leaving the group,” and how what I was doing was “hurting people,” and how I was “being selfish.”

I refused to come back. If anything, their accusations made it worse. None of them bothered to ask me why, even though my behavior was clearly abnormal. No one came to me in order to reconcile– they came to condemn, and judge, and rain down their fury at me because how dare I. How dare I think of myself. How dare I take care of myself. How dare I not run myself ragged, to the very edge of my sanity, to protect the whole.

How dare I indeed.

February 27, 2013 by SamanthaField