Browsing Tag

spiritual abuse

Feminism

a new normal: the aftermath of recovery

[content note: trauma, recovery, PTSD]

I’m almost twenty-nine years old. For fourteen years, around half my life, I experienced abuse in various ways. I was physically abused as a child and teenager. I spent my teen years in a spiritually abusive church where I was emotionally, verbally, and spiritually abused by almost every significant adult in my life. I was sexually assaulted twice as a teenager. As an adult I was in an abusive intimate relationship– the emotional and verbal abuse was intensified, and sexual assault and rape became the backdrop to my life. I went to a fundamentalist Christian “college,” where the spiritual abuse continued.

I didn’t escape abusive environments or relationships until I was twenty-three. I’ve been out for almost six years, but didn’t really start attempting to work through everything until four years ago, and I didn’t start making any real progress until two years ago. The healing process is slow, and sometimes excruciating. One of the counselors I went to a few times– the one who told me I was a “poisoned well” and I shouldn’t consider dating Handsome— said that healing would be like “unkinking a hose,” and a more understated metaphor I’ve yet to find.

Over the past few years, I’ve met a lot of people with stories like mine. For many of my friends, peers, and colleagues, we spend a lot of time looking for help, looking for things to help our lives make sense. In that search, I’ve frequently bumped into books, lectures, seminars, tapes, YouTube videos, blog posts, etc, that all talk about healing from abuse and trauma. The problem I’ve encountered is that many of those things aren’t honest about what this process looks like.

They’re not deceptive, by and large, but they do tend to leave one with the impression that healing is a gradual slope upward, and that it leads to peace and recovery. They paint a hopeful picture filled with grace, compassion, and love– and to be perfectly honest, I think those sorts of resources are needful.

But, when I’m looking in the eyes of one of my dearest friends who feels utterly lost and confused because “hasn’t it been long enough? Shouldn’t I be better than this?”– or other women who are beating themselves up one side and down the other because they “don’t want to be a victim,” and they want to “move on” … I have to look at them and say that

I don’t think better looks like other people’s “normal.” I don’t think you can move on.

Better looks like me cleaning out my bathtub. A fleck of mold got on my hand, and I started screaming. Handsome came into the bathroom to find me curled up in the fetal position with my hand stretched out as far away as I could get it. He carried me out of the bathroom and washed my hand for me in our kitchen sink while I sobbed, then tucked me into bed and cuddled with me for an hour before I could even talk.

Better looks like me washing my hair before every road trip and packing dry shampoo. It looks like me standing in the shower at a hotel, shaking and trying not to scream when the shower curtain touches me, while Handsome washes my body and I keep my eyes screwed tight trying to pretend that we’re at home.

Better looks like Handsome and I getting ready for bed, and he takes off his belt and folds it in half to he can hang it up– and I jump away from him and cringe. I don’t know what, but something about his hand movements has my body convinced that I’m about to be hit. He’s never even remotely done anything that could make me think he’d ever hurt me– not with his words, not with his hands. But it doesn’t matter. I jump away from belts.

Better looks like me turning off the subwoofer during Jurassic World because the throbbing bass makes my chest hurt and my anxiety spike.

Better looks like me searching all over my house desperately searching for my cat during my Fourth of July barbecue because as much as I know that she’s afraid of the outdoors and wouldn’t have run away while the door was open, I also know that I won’t be able to convince JerkBrain that she’s ok and still home until I see her for myself.

Better looks like reminding myself to eat even when I’m sick, even when I feel like I don’t deserve to eat. It looks like me playing Farm Heroes Super Saga while I chew and swallow the meatloaf for dinner last night while I try not to think about what I’m doing– hoping I’ll manage to clean my plate this time. It looks like taking small portions when I’m out with family so they won’t ask questions.

Better looks like a nightstand crowded with meds that I take, every day, even though every time I swallow the miracle that makes my days survivable a sliver of myself whispers that if I were a better, more consistent, more hardworking person, I wouldn’t really need them.

Better looks like getting toward the end of the day and telling Handsome “I can’t make any more decisions.” I can’t decide what I want to do, what show I want to watch, what game I want to play, what book I want to read, what snack I want to eat, what blanket I want to cover my legs … so he makes all those choices for me because he cares about me.

Better looks like being thankful for flexeril because I don’t seem to have night terrors anymore, at least not that I can remember. I can’t remember nightmares, and I’ve never been so thankful that I don’t have to relive my rapes once or twice a week any longer.

Better looks like fighting with JerkBrain every workshift because I know that my body needs me to be gentle with it, that working my fingers to the bone does not determine my value and worth as a person. It looks like reminding myself that my employer finds my contributions substantive meaningful, even though I have fibromyalgia.

Better looks like nearly jumping out of my skin every time I see someone who looks my rapist at an airport or national monument because as much as I know that the chances are vanishingly small that I’d actually bump into him anywhere, I can’t shake the idea that maybe just maybe he decided to fly somewhere at Christmas that would take him through that airport.

***

I’ve been afraid to paint this particular portrait of my life because I don’t want to be discouraging. What suffering person wants to be told some of this might be forever? I know all those studies that talk about the long-term consequences of child abuse aren’t exactly uplifting. My brain is fundamentally different because of the beatings I’ve received, because of the times he raped me, because of the hellfire sermons I had imprinted into my bones. I have PTSD, I’m an abuse and rape victim, and those realities aren’t ever going away.

This does look better though. It does. Not better looks like me drinking myself into numbness for three days straight and blaring rock music so loud I couldn’t hear myself think. Not better looks like a panic attack making me vomit in a school hallway. Not better looks like not being able to have sex with my partner. Not better looks like waking up screaming.

I am getting better. I’m not the somewhat-terrifying ball of rage I was a few years ago. Some wounds don’t bleed anymore, some scars have faded. I’m genuinely happier, more content, more at peace. But a large part of why my life is so blissful– and I do often think of it that way– is due to the accommodations I’ve made. I take medications. I play smartphone games to distract me from my anxiety and pain. I spent a ridiculous sum of money on my cat, who we nicknamed “Anxiety Sponge” because holding her makes something in my chest unlock. I walk away from my computer and my phone on the weekends and read fantasy books voraciously.

Healing, in many ways, looks like learning to cope. It means finding crutches and using them. I’ve learned, slowly and painfully, that I can’t meet an impossible standard. I’m never going to be like someone who wasn’t abused for fourteen years.

We got a little beat up by people, by life. If there’s one thing I want every survivor to know, it’s that your hurts are real, and they deserve to be treated. Maybe that means surgery, or walking with a cane, or cortisone injections, or whatever you find that works. Find what works and do it. Maybe, like me, it means smartphone games, taking Xanax with you everywhere, and packing dry shampoo so you don’t have to wash your hair in a strange place.

Whatever it is, it’s ok.

Photo by Mitya Ku

August 5, 2016 by SamanthaField

Social Issues

the smell test: 5 signs of a toxic church

This weekend we drove past a billboard advertising a “Christian Center” with one of those buzzword names, like Thirst or Resurgence or Ember or Pathway or Crossover (and, suddenly, these are also names for cars). I didn’t know what a “Christian Center” could be, so I looked it up thinking maybe it was like a Christian-themed recplex or something. Turns out it was a church, with trendy, mobile-responsive design, but the copy for the website was so bad it cracked me up. I started reading portions out loud to Handsome, but one phrase (“mode of dress”) pulled me up in my tracks.

Startled, I started digging, and my feelings were quickly confirmed: the website celebrates how the pastor and his wife both went to the same fundamentalist college (West Coast Baptist, which meant nothing to Handsome but sent up a red flag for me because they’re associated with PCC), and while the pastor’s wife clearly heads up several ministries in the church, she performs those duties under the “leadership of her husband” and with no formal title.

Check and check. They’re fundies.

That experience was disconcerting, because apparently fundamentalists have gotten sneaky in the past decade. They’re making themselves look like the slightly more harmless mainstream non-denominational evangelicals. In my opinion, this is the result of the mainstream evangelical movement becoming more fundamentalist and the fundamentalist movement getting a touch more “with it,” but the end result is that people are going to wind up in an environment where they won’t know what hit them until it’s far too late.

The leopard is trying to change its spots, so I’ve come up with a few you-don’t-have-to-have-15-years-of-experience-to-spot-them Signs of a Toxic Church. Before we begin, though, it’s important to keep in mind, like with my “signs of toxic people” post, that each of these markers should be considered possible warning signs. No post like this could possibly hope to be universally applicable, so you’ll have to use your own judgement.

1. They have “Bible” somewhere in the name or organizational associations.

After my family left our cult, I had a conversation with someone at PCC about the IFB movement, where she agreed with me about its general problems. “This is why I like Bible churches,” she tossed out. Me, having never heard of “Bible” churches, was curious. She defined a “Bible” church loosely– non legalistic, but rooted in an inerrant view of Scripture. I would bump into them myself after I graduated, since the church I attended after that is a member of the Bible Baptist Fellowship. It’s not anywhere in their name, though, or on their church website; I found out about it because I saw BBFI bulletins in the lobby and asked a deacon about them.

You can see the historical roots of fundamentalism in these “Bible” churches– clinging to a fundamentalist understanding of Inspiration and Inerrancy, for one–but, if you go to BBFI’s website, you’ll note a heavy emphasis of supernaturalism in their articles of faith, a classical fundamentalist stance, which was a response to anti-supernatural scholarship.

Bible churches are a different flavor of conservative non-denominationalism. They’re not exactly “seeker friendly,” they may not have modern services or worship bands, but they’re ideologically fundamentalist and that’s going to come with baggage … baggage that will damage its members in large or small ways.

2. The leadership structure is homogeneous and isolated.

If every single last leader in the church is a white man (with the exception of “Children’s Director” or “Secretary”), I’d stay far away. Even if it’s all men but some are racial minorities I’d still be leery. My last church went out of their way to include people of color in their leadership but excluded women, with one pastor justifying that decision as “biblical” (although an elder contradicted him, and said it was politics).

More important than the gender and racial makeup, though, is how the leadership operates. The red flags I’d been seeing became a blazing inferno of run run run run when I realized that every time I raised a question about the executive pastor’s decisions the only response was to Circle All the Wagons. It took me forever to even figure out how to raise a question, because the church leadership was largely invisible– most people in the church had no idea who the elders even were. Other former members were frustrated by the fact that there was no public way to get in touch with the leadership if you had a problem or a question– all we had was a directory to the various volunteer ministries (they have since updated the website to include the names and pictures of the elders).

When we confronted the staff about this problem, they said it was intentional, that the executive pastor was “easily overwhelmed” and “needed space” and “has to be shielded” from the congregation.

If the leadership is inaccessible and warded against good, balanced dialogue and/or criticism, it is not a healthy church.

In contrast, although I can’t attend the local ELCA congregation, I e-mailed back and forth with the pastor and had a fairly extensive phone call before we even darkened the church door. My conversations with multiple pastors assure me that being engaged and willing to communicate is an important part of their pastoral role.

3. Their “About” Page is really, really long.

And by “really long” I mean “longer than a few paragraphs,” although I’ve seen a few that were large booklets. This sign should be taken with the appropriate grains of salt. A long “about” or “statement of faith” or “what we believe” page could simply be the sign of an enthusiastic nerd or an aspiring theologian, and nothing more. However, long “about” statements tend to be focused on laying out in exacting detail everything the leadership/pastor thinks is “correct doctrine.” If their list of “correct doctrine” is longer than “God loves you,” I’d become wary (although that’s me. I’m jaded and suspicious).

If you see lots of tertiary things on this list– like veiled references to Creationism (my last church has “nothing in nature ‘just happened’. God made it all”) or getting vaguely confrontational about dispensationalism– caution might be warranted. Maybe they’re just trying to honest, which is good, but if it seems like its all worded to weed you out rather than offering you information about them …. ehhhhh.

Also, extensive histories of their building projects, unless their church is a historical building, just seem weirdly off-putting and, in my experience, tend to be associated with narcissistic leadership. But again. Grains of salt.

4. They use language about being “called out” or “separate” or “set apart.”

Other phrases, from the research I’ve done over the past few days can be: “discernment,” “salt of the earth,” “distinctions,” “avoiding reproach,” and possibly even “sanctification”– although that last one only popped up a couple times in the context of being separated in a traditionally fundamentalist sense.

I’ve explained some about the Doctrine of Separation as viewed by fundamentalists. It’s a concept that deserves a more complete treatment than I can give it here, but in short I think it’s poison. Jesus was never separate– in fact, that was The Reason why the religious establishment targeted him in the first place! He ate with “publicans and sinners” and oh the pearl-clutching. Aside from the orthopraxic reasons for why I have a problem with Separation, it (almost) inevitably leads to isolating the membership, creating an insular and self-perpetuating environment that is ripe for abuse. The more withdrawn a church becomes from its community, the more power the leadership has over the congregation. Actively seeking that sort of power by insisting that being a “faithful follower” means cutting yourself off from the outside world … that’s dangerous.

5. They use a “membership covenant” and/or practice “church discipline.”

I had to explain “church discipline” to my grandfather once, after we’d gone to a Wednesday night service where we’d shunned a woman. The more he asked questions about it, the more I grew disgusted at what they’d done. I wasn’t a voting member so I didn’t have a hand in it, but long story short she’d been talking about the Charismatic movement, and loaning people books and pamphlets. And we excommunicated her over it. The pastor’s rationale for it made it even worse– it wasn’t that she was “spreading false doctrine” it was that she’d defied his authority.

One of my best friends is the “Andrew” in this story about “church discipline” at Mars Hill, and his experience was horrific. He left the freaking city because of what Mars Hill put him through.

In my opinion, after being a loyal member of the fundamentalist movement for twelve years, dedicated to this evolving branch of it for another four, and writing and researching about these things for another two years: nothing good can come of “church discipline.” It will be used as a weapon against innocent people for not toeing the line, for not bending their neck to narcissistic abusers. It will. It will be used to ostracize the vulnerable and silence victims. It will be used to publicly humiliate and shame women— even when her “crime” was divorcing her child-rape-watching-and-enjoying husband.

If the church makes it clear that you have to sign a “covenant” or “contract” of any kind and especially if that contract includes a line about the right to exercise “church discipline,” run as fast and as far as you can.

***

I’ve done my best to keep these broad enough to be helpful, but not so broad that they become expansively meaningless. I’d love to hear about your experiences, too– what signs have tipped you off to a possibly toxic church?

Photo by Vetiver Aromatics

May 11, 2016 by SamanthaField

Theology

the not-so-ridiculous reasons people leave church

Every once in a while, someone I know on Facebook will share a joke or a meme that makes me grit my teeth because it makes me feel dismissed. Most recently it was this one:

I’m sure we’ve all seen these sorts of things before, or heard something similar from a pulpit. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a pastor talk about “some bitty that got her feelings hurt because ‘the pastor didn’t shake my hand!’” I’d be rolling in money. These “jokes” have always made me wonder if I was really just that out of touch– am I missing some huge exodus from church because the pews are too hard?

So, I reached out to a few groups, posting this meme and asking if they’d stopped attending church for one of the listed reasons. I also posed a similar question on Twitter:

Poll: if you used to attend church regularly, but don't attend anymore, what made you stop? (For a blog post)

— Samantha Field (@samanthapfield) October 6, 2015

The responses I got back were heartbreaking. They shattered me all over again because they echoed the pain I felt on being forced to realize that church is not a safe place. I used to finish that sentence with “for me,” but sometimes, I drop the modifier. I know it’s possible for people to find a safe haven in church even though they’ve been hurt by it before, but I don’t think it’s overly dramatic to say those people are finding safe places in spite of American church culture.

The reasons I got back from people fell under a few significant headings, which are in no particular order below:

The constant homophobia and mistreatment of queer people.

For some it was because a friend or family member was excommunicated for their orientation; for many others it was because they themselves were queer and were demonized by their church. In my own case, I was constantly correcting the pastoral staff at my last church for misgendering the trans people who attended, but they outright refused to listen.

Political figures, ballot measures, laws, and political ideologies were openly supported from the pulpit.

Frequently associated with this was the not-so-implicit expectation that everyone in the church be a conservative Republican. I’m not a fan of any politics being preached from the pulpit, conservative or liberal, but in America the dominant narrative in our churches is conservative. Tied into all of this is the common belief in American Exceptionalism and nationalism– that American patriotism is a part of being a Christian.

The church protected abusers.

This is the one that really broke me. I was flooded with stories of child sexual abusers being given leadership positions and subsequently using their power to attack more children. There were hair-raising instances of church leadership point-blank lying to members asking about the safety of a convicted sex offender who went on to rape multiple women in the church. I heard about pastors being shuttled around denominations where they would continue to assault new victims. One person recounted a story of how a child was sexually assaulted by one of the Sunday school teachers, and while the child was denounced from the pulpit, the teacher escaped any consequences. This should never happen, but it does, on a level that feels almost routine.

The church refused to accommodate, understand, or show empathy to those with disabilities.

Most often I heard this from people who have autism, or are the parents of children with autism. Children with autism, or a sensory impairment of some kind, especially suffer in church, and the reactions of church members was to shame and ostracize the parents of those “spoiled rotten brats.” I know that, for myself, I couldn’t participate in church service because there was nothing for someone who wasn’t able-bodied to do. One person said that their allergic reaction to perfumes was treated like a joke.

Women are treated as less than men.

This was the biggest reason why we left our last church. They wanted to have their cake and eat it, too, and refused to even consider the idea that silence in the face of oppression is wrong. Many people talked about abusive relationship dynamics being endorsed from the pulpit or in private counseling sessions, of blatant misogyny in the sermons every Sunday, of being refused to use their talents and gifts to serve because of their gender.

The church did not care about the community.

This was one of the more repeated reasons, and I know it was something that annoyed me about the last church I attended. There was plenty of money for bulletins and pens and donuts and coffee and giving away flat-screen TVs and putting on lavish Christmas spectacles, but less than 10% of the budget was dedicated to helping either church members or the community. How many churches have I been in that had a coffee shop in the lobby but it had never occurred to them to have a soup kitchen?

They had experienced spiritual abuse.

Many couldn’t experience a church service without experiencing flashbacks and panic attacks. I’ve had to leave many a service because of a trigger. For those of us who have experienced Religious Trauma Syndrome, we’re more aware of the ways that pastors can abuse their authority. The first red flag I got at my last church was that the pastor was completely unaccountable to anyone. Supposedly the staff was in place to help keep him in check, but they were far more interested in defending his terrible behavior than they were in addressing it. For a long time I thought I was only reacting to ghosts from my past, but over time I realized that wasn’t it. I was reacting to my past being repeated. For many who shared their stories with me, this was often the case. They recognized the red flags and couldn’t stay.

~~~

In doing the research for this post I googled “stupid reasons why people leave the church,” and, sadly, I wasn’t disappointed by what turned up. Among the 24 million results there was “7 Really Dumb Reasons to Leave a Church,” “5 Stupid Reasons People Leave the Church,” and “3 Stupid Reasons Millennials are Leaving Churches.” I read through maybe twenty different articles on the subject, and I realized that many of these pieces are actually including the list I’ve given above. Except, to these people, it’s described as “being offended,” or “disagreeing with the pastor,” or “they want so-called freedom” or “their feelings got hurt.”

It’s not that the people who make these memes or write these posts are unaware of the reasons I gave here, it’s that they don’t think these reasons are legitimate. The unending putrid tide of misogyny and homophobia? Just us “being offended.” Thinking that nationalism should not be a part of Christianity? We’re just “disagreeing with the pastor,” (which, in the meme above was given as “reading a book makes me more of an expert than the experts”). Try to explain to a staff member that what the pastor just said was narcissistic or abusive and we just “got our feelings hurt.”

They look at people like me, like the hundreds of people who shared their experiences with me, and they see “7 Stupid Reasons to Quit Church” instead of listening to the pain and horror in our voices.

Photo by Phil Roeder

October 9, 2015 by SamanthaField

Theology

trickle-down cults

~~~~~~~~~

I grew up in a cult.

~~~~~~~~~~

That’s what I say when I have to start explaining my life to someone. As a phrase it carries a lot of baggage, but even so, it’s the easiest and most straightforward way I have to start my story. Generally I have to walk the person back from visions of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, but as loaded as the word “cult” is, it still applies to my life. According to the research of people like Michael Langone, the Independent Fundamental Baptist church I attended for a dozen years fit 13 out of 15 qualifiers. So while I didn’t live in a bunker or on a compound, there’s really no other way to explain what seems like insanity to people with “normal” lives.

For a long time, even after I started blogging, I went out of my way to make clear that it was just my church that was fucked up. Not all IFB churches are unhealthy or cultist, not every fundamentalist church is abusive.

I have since changed my mind.

That change started when I was able to connect the dots between the teachings I absorbed in the tiny little church I was brought up in and the larger movement. The cult leader isolated us from the rest of the fundamentalism, making us all extremely wary of theologians and their “false doctrines,” so I grew up with him being my only example of a fundamentalist pastor. Other churches in our area, no matter how conservative, were suspect; even when we attended revivals or camp meetings everything was filtered through a lens of what my pastor wanted me to absorb.

So I grew up reading C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, was surrounded by ICR and AiG materials, but I had never heard of people like Bill Gothard. I never went to a homeschooling convention, a NCFCA debate, or an ATI/IBLP conference. I had no idea that the words coming out of my pastor’s mouth were stolen from Rushdoony or Doug Philips or Geoffrey Botkin. I didn’t know that the “umbrella of protection”–referring to how the father is supposedly a daughter’s only protection from the evils of The World– came right out of one of Bill Gothard’s Basic Seminar textbooks.

Christian fundamentalism is absolutely and inherently abusive. It is and has always been. As a theological and ideological system it is irredeemable. As Micah Murray put it so eloquently yesterday, “it’s time to burn this motherfucker down.”

In order to argue this, I’m going to rely on the checklist compiled by Drs. Janja Lilich and Michael Langone.

The movement has an unquestioning, uncritical commitment to the ideological system. It is upheld as “Truth,” and is treated as absolute.

This is a core element of Christian fundamentalism. Become familiar with any of the materials, the curriculum, the sermons, and one thing that instantly jumps out at you is how utterly convinced they are that they have a unique access to The Truth. This belief is supported by the argument that only true Christians are capable of actually understanding the Bible. Someone who isn’t a true Christian will be incapable of interpreting the Bible correctly and will merely see it as “foolish.” The proof text verse for this is I Corinthians 2:14.

Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.

Please see this post, which covers that point extensively. The proof text verse for this is John 20:29.

The movement dictates in excruciating minutiae exactly how Christians are to live their lives.

There are prescriptions for how your marriage is to function (see the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood). Some fundamentalists adhere to a strange form of kosher, and almost all fundamentalists tell you what you can’t drink. Depending on the environment, people are told exactly how to groom themselves. For people who follow Bill Gothard, the women are to have long curly hair through whatever means necessary. At most fundamentalist colleges or seminaries, men have to be clean-shaven. Strictures on “modesty” vary, but each church has their specific rules that are usually laced with a heavy dose of racism and fatphobia. How you are to raise your children is dictated– whether you follow James Dobson, the Ezzos, the Pearls, or whoever. Proof text verse for this is I Peter 2:9.

The movement has an “it’s us against the world” mentality.

See: the culture wars. The “War on Christmas.” Cries of “persecution” for ridiculous things. Fundamentalist leaders teach a concept called Dominionism, which should absolutely horrify every red-blooded American. Michael Farris called fundamentalist Millennials “Generation Joshua” because we are supposed to go to war with the Canaan of modern, “secular humanist” America. Proof text verse is Ephesians 6:12.

The leaders of the movement have no accountability.

This is the one that makes me, personally, the most uncomfortable. Unlike ministers in the mainline Protestant denominations who are at leas theoretically held in check by a system meant to encourage, edify, instruct, and reprimand, fundamentalist pastors have nothing like that. There’s a reason why Independent Fundamental Baptists call themselves that: they are unbelievably proud of how they can’t be “controlled” by anyone or anything– my church lifted our noses at the Southern Baptist Convention, as loose an organization as that is. The leaders of fundamentalism are forces unto themselves, and they answer to no one. II Corinthians 6:14 is the proof text for this.

The movement relies on shame to control.

A good introduction to the “lethality of shame” is Brene Brown’s TedTalk “Listening to Shame.” Fundamentalists rely almost exclusively on shame as their motivation for ethics and morality. In Christian fundamentalist theology, humans are incapable of truly responding to positive motivators like trust or love. According to them, each of us is a lowly worm that must be brutalized into compliance. This springs from the belief that we’re basically all a hair’s breadth away from being a child molester. Proof text verse: Psalm 22:6.

Joining fundamentalism means that you must sever ties with “ungodly” family and close friends.

A huge part of what it means to be a fundamentalist is a commitment to radical “holiness.” The promise of fundamentalism is that you will be happy, that you will be fulfilled, that your family will be protected from The World and The Devil; in exchange, all you have to do is obey everything they say and believe everything they tell you to believe without question. In order to accomplish this, however, you must remove any ungodly influence from your life that could “corrupt your good manners.” Being “separated” means you have to fill your life with the fundamentalist community and nothing else. The proof text verse is Luke 14:26.

Once you are a part of the movement, leaving becomes extraordinarily difficult.

There are multiple reasons for this– if you were brought up in it like me, fundamentalism is the only thing you’ve ever known and anything “outside” it seems terrifying. They are the only people you’ve ever associated with; not only that, but you’ve been taught that everyone who isn’t a fundamentalist is hell-bent on destroying you. It can be extremely overwhelming, trying to process all the lies and half-truths. Wrestling these things out is the reason why this blog exists, and why I spent an entire year writing out my story of coming to terms with all the ways fundamentalism had warped me (first post starts is here).

~~~~~~~~~

To me, all of that is conclusive. Christian fundamentalism is intended to be a high-control totalitarian religious environment. If that doesn’t make it a cult, I don’t know what would.

Photo by Ivy Dawned

May 27, 2015 by SamanthaField

Uncategorized

book review: "Searching for Sunday" by Rachel Held Evans

I sat down to start reading Searching for Sunday a little over a month and a half ago, and I couldn’t get past page xvi before I was sobbing. I’ve been reading this paragraph out loud to everyone I know, and it’s one of the things that rang inside of my soul like a sonorous bell:

This book is entitled Searching for Sunday, but it’s less about searching for a Sunday church and more about searching for Sunday resurrection. It’s about all the strange ways God brings dead things back to life again. It’s about giving up and starting over again. It’s about why, even on days when I suspect all this talk of Jesus and resurrection and life everlasting is a bunch of bunk designed to coddle us through an essentially meaningless existence, I should still like to be buried with my feet facing the rising sun.

Just in case.

And I’m sobbing again. That sentence– I should still like to be buried with my feet facing the rising sun— is exactly where I am right now. Exactly. It put every agonized, spirit-wrenching emotion I’ve had over the last few months into a dozen words. I sat my Nook down and cried like a baby until Handsome asked me what was wrong and we had a four-hour-long conversation about why we’re still bothering with this whole “being a Christian” thing.

This book was for me, and I think this book might be for a lot of you, too. If there’s a part of you– a big part, a small part– that is whispering the question why am I still a Christian? then I think you might need to read this. Not because she has some earth-shattering answer that will miraculously solve all our problems. I didn’t finish this book, set it down, and think to myself “ah, this was just the thing I needed to get me to go to church again.” I still have reservations, and questions, and doubts, and the thought of walking into a church still terrifies me. But it did help make hope a little more possible.

Since we left our last church, I came to the conclusion that my emotional well-being will not let me attend a church where a) women are barred from any form of leadership whatsoever, and complementarian messages are preached from the pulpit in subtle or overt ways, and/or b) anyone in church leadership embraces the “love the sinner, hate the sin” approach to the LGBTQ community. Those may not be hard lines for you (nor do they have to be), but they are for me now. Finding a church that doesn’t conflict with either of those has been … difficult. The longer I’m away from church, the easier it is to wake up like I did yesterday, make cinnamon buns and read The Great Hunt out loud to my partner while I pet my cat.

But the longer I’m away from church, the more a sliver in the back corners of my heart hungers for the bread the wine. Reading Searching for Sunday was a gentle, gracious, gorgeous reminder that I do believe in the sacraments. I do believe in the Body. Reading her chapters on Communion was one of the most sacred experiences I’ve ever had, and it gave me the nudge I needed to start reaching out again. I don’t know where this road will take me– maybe further away from church, from faith, I don’t know. But I want to hope. I want to believe. I want to try again, even if I get terribly burned.

Going through this book was comforting, and encouraging. It was like sitting down with a friend and drinking tea and being honest in a way that terrifies both of you, but once you start talking you can’t seem to stem the flow of words. Each slicing knife wound is recounted, each euphoric moment comes out tinged over with a little bit of sadness. You’re sad because you wish your faith were still that simple, that fresh and naive– and sad because you know that those moments of happiness came in the middle of suffering, and the pain made those brief moments of joy seem like ambrosia.

But we can’t get rid of who we are. There are many days, many weeks when I wish I could pave over my life and pretend like there isn’t a graveyard underneath what I’m building, but our lives aren’t like that. At one point in the book, Rachel uses the metaphor of a palimpsest, and that image made me catch my breath. My theology might look and feel completely and utterly removed from anything I thought or believed as a child, but there are remnants peeking through, things I won’t ever be able to shake.

I won’t ever be able to forget the look on my pastor’s wife when I tried to tell her I’d been sexually assaulted and she called me a liar who was only jealous of his musical talents.

But I won’t ever be able to forget it when I came to her, unsure that I’d been “sorry enough” when I’d said the sinner’s prayer, and she hugged me and took her face into my hands and said that wasn’t up to me, that the only thing that mattered was that Jesus loved me.

I won’t ever be able to forget the time a family friend lectured and berated me for not respecting my mother enough to clean our house like Martha Stewart would when I was 10, contributing to a complex that still has me panicking before anyone sees my home.

But I’ll never forget the look on her face when she came to my senior piano recital and she was so proud of me she could have burst, or that when she hugged me afterward she cried when she told me she loved me.

For better or for worse, all of those things are part of who I am today, all so mixed up and confusing it would be easier if I could set it all aside. However, Rachel reminded me that the God I believe in is one who makes all things new. She cares for the broken things, even the dead things, and restores them.

~~~~~~~~~

Searching for Sunday officially releases tomorrow, although if you’re near a brick-and-mortar Barnes & Noble some already have it stocked. If you buy it sometime this week and show a proof of purchase, you gain access to the “launch celebration” goodies. And yes, I got a free copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.

April 13, 2015 by SamanthaField

Theology

Mark Driscoll’s resignation letter

You might have heard the news that broke just a little while ago– Mark Driscoll has officially resigned from being a pastor and elder of Mars Hill. This is exceedingly good news, and while I was not exactly joyful to hear it, I am hopeful that those who have been abused by Mark and the Mars Hill leadership can gain some hope and comfort from this. Mark Driscoll wasn’t the only problem at Mars Hill– no one becomes a spiritual abuser of thousands all by themselves– but he was the most visible example of misogynistic, abusive Christianity and I’m glad he’s gone.

For the moment.

Because he’ll be back.

However, that’s not what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about a few things happening in Mark’s resignation letter that hopefully won’t be ignored in the flood of “see, everyone, now we need to forgive him and NEVER SPEAK OF THIS EVER AGAIN” posts that are probably coming. You can read the entire letter here, if you’d like, but there’s a few things about this letter that I think it’s important to highlight.

This appears in the third paragraph:

You have also shared with me that many of those making charges against me declined to meet with you or participate in the review process at all. Consequently, those conducting the review of charges against me began to interview people who had not even been a party to the charges.

The “You” there is “Board of Advisers and Accountability.” When I got to this section, at first I was a little puzzled why this was coming up in the middle of what was supposed to be a resignation letter, and then I remembered that this is not so much a resignation letter as much as it is a PR move on Mark’s part. It’s his attempt to continue controlling the narrative and what gets talked about as he leaves, and “these people who have forced me into this are cowards whose stories aren’t credible” is supposed to be one of the things he wants us all to bicker about.

Except most of the people who have “made charges against him” have done so publicly, with their names attached, and they have put an overwhelming amount of proof out there for anyone to review, including memos and e-mails. That whoever Mark is talking about didn’t feel particularly inclined to talk to a “Board of Advisers” isn’t at all surprising, especially when people like Paul Tripp resigned from it because it was incapable of actually addressing the issues at hand. Why would anyone abused by not just Mark Driscoll but an entire system set up to keep him in power ever want to talk to these people?

This is not a failure on the part of those who “declined to meet.” They’ve done more than their fair share of suffering in order to expose Driscoll and Mars Hill leadership, and “declining to meet” was probably the only option they had to protect their mental and spiritual well-being.

Prior to and during this process there have been no charges of criminal activity, immorality or heresy, any of which could clearly be grounds for disqualification from pastoral ministry.

This line made me laugh– a bitter and cynical and rueful laugh, because oh it’s just so … sad. What this line actually means is: well, nothing I did was actually ILLEGAL. If the best thing you have to say about your behavior is “well, I wouldn’t go to prison for it,” you have a problem.

But let’s talk about how he says he didn’t commit “heresy.” The fact that he doesn’t think his abusive behavior– and his plagiarism– is immoral is a problem all on its own, but that the Board decided he’d never taught anything heretical is revealing. Granted, I’m not one to bandy around the word “heresy”– but Mark’s tribe is. I mean, they pull out the “heretic!” when someone uses a feminine pronoun to describe God in a poem.

But Mark gets to call women “penis homes” and preach entire sermon series on how women should basically be nothing more than sex slaves to their husbands and … crickets.

And, to be blunt, that Mark’s and the Board’s standard is “don’t be convicted of anything illegal and don’t do anything heretical or immoral” is more than just a touch horrifying. It’s also troubling, because the “standard” that these people claim to adhere to doesn’t have “don’t do something illegal” as its baseline. The Acts 29 Network even has a whole article dedicated to the “Biblical Qualifications of a Pastor” (posted March 2010, when Mark was still in charge) and these items jumped out at me:

4. A Pastor must be humble – not arrogant (Titus 1:7)
5. A Pastor must be gentle – not quick-tempered (Titus 1:7; 1 Tim 3:3)
7. A Pastor must be peaceful – not violent (Titus 1:7; 1 Tim 3:3)
16. A Pastor must be respectable (1 Tim 3:7)
17. A Pastor must be an example to the flock (1 Peter 5:3)

The Board of Advisers and Mark himself admitted to all the different ways Mark has not been any of these things– and some of these he even admitted to in the letter. He says that ” I have confessed to past pride, anger and a domineering spirit.” The Board of Advisers said this:

We concluded that Pastor Mark has, at times, been guilty of arrogance, responding to conflict with a quick temper and harsh speech, and leading the staff and elders in a domineering manner.

Mark is quite clearly saying my own articulation of the rules do not apply to me.

One of the last things he says in this letter, though, made me angry:

Recent months have proven unhealthy for our family—even physically unsafe at times—and we believe the time has now come for the elders to choose new pastoral leadership for Mars Hill.

I am not in Seattle, and I do not personally know the Driscolls. It is entirely possible that his family has received threats, even threats of physical violence. That would not surprise me at all, considering the things that Mark has done in an incredibly public way. Threats against his family are completely inexcusable and I will not justify them if they happened.

However, there is absolutely nothing in this letter that says “I am resigning as pastor because I have sinned against the people I was supposed to shepherd.” He never says that. He says a bunch of stuff about how the Board didn’t say he was disqualified to lead, and how the people accusing him are a bunch of untrusthworthy cowards, and how he’s leaving because it’s just not the best thing for him. This letter is dedicated to creating this image of a man who was persecuted out of being a pastor, and it makes me sick because that’s not what happened.

Mark is a misogynistic abuser who has spent well over a decade creating a church and staff that would enable his behavior, and this letter is nothing more than a continuation of that. It is insurance so that one day he can start another ministry and do it all over again.

Photo by Barret Anspach

October 15, 2014 by SamanthaField

Theology

thinking about leaving a church?

note: I use a lot of curse words today.
Also, content note for discussions of spiritual abuse.

I mentioned in a comment a little bit ago that Handsome and I decided to leave the church we’d been attending for the past few years. It was an extremely difficult decision that took us a very long time to make, and someday I’ll talk about the reasons why. It was a little heart-breaking for me– I had been so hopeful that I’d finally found a church I could make a home in, and when I couldn’t … well, it was hard and still leaves me feeling despondent on Sunday mornings.

And then, yesterday, I read “If You’re Thinking about Leaving a Church” (DoNotLink), an excerpt from Mark Dever’s book What is a Healthy Church? At first I was just frustrated– his list of questions for church members to ask themselves before leaving was … just so profoundly unhelpful. I walked away agitated and triggered, my initial reaction focused on how this list could affect someone in a spiritually abusive environment. After chewing over the list for a while, though, I think his list of questions is spiritually abusive in and of themselves. You’re free to disagree with me, but let me explain why.

“Let your current pastor know about your thinking before you move to another church or make your decision to relocate to another city. Ask for his counsel.”

This ‘suggestion,’ I believe, assumes that your pastor has the authority to advise you on the church you attend or the city you live in, and that assumption is undergirded by an attitude of spiritual totalitarianism. Heads up: your pastor does not deserve to know about any of this. If you have the patience and time and desire to talk to him or her about your reasons for leaving you can, but you are not obligated to do this. The idea that your pastor has any business telling you where you could or should live is fucking ridiculous. If you want to ask him about this, again, you can, but the mindset behind this list isn’t one of “if you want to,” it’s you should or you’re a bad Christian.

In the case that your pastor has been spiritually abusive, this is not just unwise advice, it’s dangerous. If your pastor has been abusive to you, your family, or another church member, you have every right to get the hell out of Dodge without notifying anybody.

“Weigh your motives. Is your desire to leave because of sinful, personal conflict or disappointment? If it’s because of doctrinal reasons, are these doctrinal issues significant?”

First: the second half of this one is meaningless. If you’re thinking about leaving a church because you disagree on doctrinal issues, of course those issues are significant. I wish I had the entire context of What is a Healthy Church? in front of me so I could know what he thinks a “significant doctrinal issue” is, but I don’t think it would really matter. In our case, we left over doctrinal issues, and while those disagreements weren’t over anything having to do with salvation, they were pretty damn important to me. Would anyone else think they were “significant”? Well, it would depend on who you asked– you all, my twitter followers, etc. would agree that they were significant. Most of the evangelical church, though? Absolutely not.

The line about “sinful, personal conflict or disappointment,” though, pisses me off. The phrasing implies that “sinful, personal conflict or disappointment” are not good enough reasons to leave a church, and oh are they ever good enough. Y’know what’s a good enough reason to leave a church? Because you want to. Seriously. You do not need any other justification whatsoever to go. In this case, it’s a bit like dating relationships– “I don’t want to date you” is the only reason you need not to date someone.

The problem with this line is that “personal conflict and disappointment” are ways of minimizing abuse. Your pastor is an abusive son of a gun that targets you from the pulpit in their sermons? The entire deacon board is disgustingly homophobic? Personal conflict. Disappointment. Not a good enough reason to leave.

“Be sure to consider all the ‘evidences of grace’ you’ve seen in the church’s life– places where God’s work is evident. If you cannot see any evidences of God’s grace, you might want to examine your own heart once more.”

This is the spot where I got triggered. Because my abusive cult had “evidences of grace.” We led people to the lord all of the time. We stayed “faithful” to the Scriptures in a million ways that no other church in our city did. Walk into church on a Wednesday night and you’d see a crowd full of people seeking God at the altar. We’d have jam-packed revival services. Evidences of grace were everywhere.

It was still an abusive cult.

His last bit about “if you can’t see them, you need to look at your own heart again” and tacking on Matthew 7:3-5 (beam and moat verses) is … ARG GABLARG. That is abusive. That is gaslighting, pure and simple. Just because a church might do something good sometimes has nothing to do with whether or not you belong there. In fact, your church doesn’t even have to be an abusive, unhealthy place for you not to want to be there– our recently-left church certainly wasn’t. That church has “evidences of grace” up to the ceiling rafters. Doesn’t mean I should sit through a church service, wanting to throw something at the stage because the pastor had done something infuriating again.

“If you go … Take the utmost care not to sow discontent even among your closest friends. Remember, you don’t want anything to hinder their growth in grace in this church.”

That’s where my triggered-feelings blew up into a full-blown panic attack and I could hear touch not the Lord’s anointed echoing in my head. I started crying– heavens, I’m crying now– because that line all by itself is the biggest fucking reason why my family stayed in that Goddamn cult.

We were at that church for almost eleven years. We were loyal. We were there “every time the church doors were open.” We supported the pastor and his family in ways no one else in the church did or even could. In a lot of ways, we kept that church afloat. My father spent years trying to gently encourage and edify the cult-leader into being a less abusive narcissistic control freak (not that we thought of it that way at the time) because he honestly believed that it was the spiritually mature and right thing to do.

Over those years, dozens upon dozens of families left the church. We sat down and counted one day and the number of people who had come and gone numbered in the hundreds– at a church that was usually at most 70 people.

No one ever said a word about why they were leaving– they didn’t want to be “divisive” or to “sow discord.” They thought they were doing the spiritually mature and right thing to just quietly disappear. After we eventually left and were summarily “churched” (fundamentalist parlance for excommunication), we joined a church where many of those families attended after leaving. In the following months, we finally found out why they’d left– and if we had known, if we had heard any of that before? We would have left faster than greased lightening. We would have been gone in a heartbeat because those stories were fucking crazy. That man was evil, and if any of these families had been vocal about what he’d done to them? I think that church wouldn’t still exist today.

But Mark Dever thinks those families were right for staying silent.

I’m not talking about why Handsome and I left right now– we’re still in the process of telling the pastoral staff what our reasons are, and I think it’s fair to give that to them privately before talking about it on the internet (not that I’ll ever name the church or even publicly reveal where I live), but I will be talking about it because those reasons are important. And I have talked about these reasons with my small group– some of them a long time before we’d ever decided to leave, because pastors are not untouchable. Pastors and their staff are our spiritual leaders, and they must be criticized. They must be held accountable– by us, the lay folk. If they do something wrong, we should tell them and each other about it.

That is not “sowing discontent.” That is being, in Scriptural terms, a Berean. It is your obligation to let other church members know if there’s a problem. Granted “I don’t like the music service” — while a perfectly acceptable reason, like any other, for leaving– might not warrant talking about with other members, “the pastor misapplied X scripture” or “that sermon was homophobic” or “they never talk about abuse” or “they believe that mental illness is just sin” is.

TL;DR: you don’t have to have a “good enough” reason to leave a church, and you can talk about your reasons for going with anyone you want to.

Photo by Mike Tewkesbury

October 1, 2014 by SamanthaField

Theology

hoping to help bring change at church, part two

An . . . interesting . . . thing happened on Sunday. If you follow me on twitter you probably already saw it, but in case twitter isn’t your thing, I gathered it all up here. You should probably go read it real quick in order for the rest of the post to make sense.

A lot of the responses I got to what happened were along the lines of “WTF” and “wow, you should really get the hell out of there.” To an extent, I don’t really disagree. What happened on Sunday was, in a word, wrong, and it should not have happened. I’m still deeply troubled by it, and me and Handsome are figuring out what we could do– and if we should do it, especially since we’re already approaching the elder board and senior pastor about two other things, which I’ll talk about in other posts.

I’ve reached out to this pastor before about an inappropriate joke he’d made and his response to my e-mail bothered me. I did my best to be gracious– he is incredibly busy, he was responding to my e-mail among a hundred others, and he probably wouldn’t have said what he did if he’d had more time. However, his “I’m sorry that’s what you heard– here, we have a counseling ministry” was off-putting because it implied that you only think what I said was wrong because you have issues. Because of that, I’m hesitant to send him another e-mail that’s nothing more than a critique of his sermon. I don’t want to be the congregant that has nothing encouraging to say, and since I’ve never interacted with him outside of shaking his hand occasionally, I’m not sure how to proceed.

So, the question I have right now– and a question I’ve heard echoed from many of you– is why do I stay here? Why bother? Why keep going? It’s a question I’ve seen all over the place– and usually not directed at me and my situation. It pops up in comment sections all of the time– if your church is doing something like this, why do you stay? Why not just walk away? Sometimes they advocate to drop church entirely, but most of the time they recommend a different denomination.

This is not intended to be disparaging toward anyone– leaving church altogether is, depending on your situation, could be the absolutely best thing for you. Trying another denomination can be spectacular and life-changing. I read a lot of blogs that are actually dedicated to this transition– women who grew up Baptist that are now Catholic, men who grew up evangelical that are now Anglican . . . and it can be a beautiful, refreshing thing. Those blogs have had me running to the ELCA, UMC, PCUSA, and UU websites looking for another option. In those moments, all I can think is surely a denomination that ordains women would be better. Going to a denomination that ordains LGBTQ people? Wow, sign me up.

But there are things holding me back from making that transition right now, and I wanted to explain why. Simply switching denominations sounds so simple, so straightforward; after all, if you don’t like where you are, there’s nothing really keeping you there. But, for me at least (and I think many others), it’s not really that simple.

The biggest reason, up front: Handsome has been attending this church for three years now. I’ve been attending for a year. We’re involved in this church, and we are both well-known to the leadership. Handsome has been serving in two separate ministries practically from the moment that he started attending, and now we’re both involved in two others. We facilitate one of the theology classes (it’s a video course, so we just manage discussion and occasionally prepare notes), and we’re both consulted on church organization and structural development (it’s a young church). The leadership that we know trusts us, and I cannot overstate how valuable I find that. The fact that we are as young as we are– I’m 26, Handsome is 25– and we’re respected and our insight and advice is sought? I don’t know how rare that is, but it’s certainly nothing I’ve ever experienced.

And, what if we do go to another church? We’d have to start from scratch. We’d be strangers- nobodys. No one would have any reason to trust us, or listen to us, and what if there was something that was just as problematic in this new church? At least, at this church, I know that the elders and most of the leadership is willing to listen to me.

Second, and there is no possible way I could overstate how incredibly important this is to me: this church is racially diverse. There are black men and women in highly visible leadership positions. Black men serve on the elder board. I look around the auditorium on Sunday morning, and I see black, hispanic, Indian, and Asian people– and not just a light sprinkling. There have been a few mornings where I have been almost completely surrounded by people who aren’t white.

The most interesting thing about this is that I live in an area that is deeply, deeply segregated. The first week I lived here I went shopping for the house (Handsome didn’t have a broom!). The first place I went was Big Lots and Ollie’s and a few other discount stores, looking for floor mats and potholders. The entire morning I was the only white person anywhere. That afternoon I went to Wal-Mart and Ross (which are in a different part of town), and I didn’t see a single non-white person for three hours. In this county, white people and brown people don’t eat in the same restaurants, shop in the same stores, go to the same bars, or attend the same churches. When I look at the websites for the ELCA, UMC, and PCUSA churches that are “nearby” (read: 45 min+ drive), every single last picture is of a white person. All of them. Even the group pictures that seem to be most or all of the congregation. Even the ELCA church, which is in an almost-nearly-black neighborhood, every single last church member is white.

It is amazing to me that this church managed to overcome that monumental barrier in this community. They were deliberate about being diverse– on one occasion when the church was first starting and one of the staff, a black man, was considering leaving, the senior pastor and the elder board begged him to stay, because they knew that if he left, the church was doomed to being just another white church. He stayed, and now I see an Indian family in the lobby every Sunday and a black woman sings and shouts behind me every service I’m there.

by Rachel Hestilow

Third, I live in an extremely conservative county. It is Southern, and it is redneck, and it is Tea Party Republican, and the overwhelming majority of the churches are outright fundamentalist– or at the very least “fundiegelical.” Even in the churches that belong to progressive denominations, the people who attend the church are going to be overwhelmingly conservative, and that is going to affect the entire church culture.

In the church I attend, though, even though I’m a heretic by most Protestant standards (between the universalism-ish and the Pelagianism . . .), and even though I’m a pro-choice Democrat, I can talk about that with the people I go to church with, in my small group and in my theology program, and not face any condemnation or judgment for that. And it’s because, right along with racial diversity, the motto “in essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity” is taken pretty doggone seriously. There are Quiverful families in this church, and there are single working mothers, and there are politics of all stripes, and we all go to church together– and we’re led by people who have no patience for self-righteousness and judgment. I’m sure I could probably find another church that has this, but I know I have that here, and I’m not willing to risk it yet.

~~~~~~~~~~

I know this has been a longer post than normal, so thank you for your patience. This post, although it’s about my experience, isn’t really about me, either. Everyone has reasons for being where they are– even in church situations that are questionable and troubling. I very much appreciate the insight, the concern, and the life experience here in this community, and I always take your advice seriously. And, this post was really directed at myself, as well. Why do I stay here? Well, I may eventually get to the point where I just can’t do this church anymore– and that day may be coming faster than I’d like.

January 14, 2014 by SamanthaField

Theology

Plymouth Brethren Dropouts

One of the friends I’ve made in the blogging world and on twitter is Dani Kelley. She’s an amazing woman, and just getting to know her online has been a joy and a comfort– and watching her journey this year has been incredible. She is strong, intelligent, and brave, and so far one of the best people I’ve met on the internet since I started blogging.

She has recently started a new blog, called Plymouth Brethren Dropouts, which is the fundamentalist denomination she grew up in. There are many resources for ex-fundamentalists and spiritual abuse survivors, but as she was looking for people coming out of the Plymouth Brethren denomination, she wasn’t finding very many resources for people like her. So, being amazing, she started her own.

The website already has plenty of resources, so I wanted to recommend it here. I don’t know how many of my readers have experience with the Plymouth Brethren denomination, or if you know anyone who has, but I wanted to point you in this direction just in case. I have some people in my life who grew up in this movement, so I’m really happy Dani’s created this.

~~~~~~~~~~

And, it’s Thanksgiving! I’m on holiday, so I’ll see you all again on Monday! Happy holidays!

November 27, 2013 by SamanthaField

Social Issues

learning the words: abuse

Tamara Rice is an editor and write and a frequently loud-mouthed advocate for victims of abuse within the church who blogs at Hopefully Known. “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.

trigger warning for child abuse, sexual abuse, and spiritual abuse

Where I come from abuse was a term reserved for vicious violence. I’m not really sure why or how this protection around the word came to be, but I know that great care was taken to distinguish between parents who were abusive and parents who were merely … very bad parents. Between sexual boundaries being crossed in a way that was sexually abusive and in a way that was more … molestation. Between spiritual authority being misused in an evil way that was spiritually abusive and in a way that was simply … unfortunate. Abuse, in short, was reserved for what I now might put in the category of sadistic torment—the stuff they make horror films about.

Under these narrow definitions, abuse was rarely encountered in my growing up years (or so we thought), and maybe that was the whole point. Defined as such, abuse was kept at arm’s length, out of our circles. Abuse happened to people on the news and in salacious Stephen King novels, it didn’t happen to us, it didn’t happen in our fundamentalist Baptist church, it didn’t happen in the missionary community we were part of overseas.

~~~~~~~~~~

By the time I reached my 30s I had very little to do with the faith community of my childhood. I had married a man in ministry and had gone on to be part of churches and religious organizations where legalism was rare and the kind of fundamentalism I’d grown up with was rarer still. I got it out of my system and left it behind. And then in 2011, I got sucked back in.

I began to fight alongside several old friends to bring justice for the victims of a missionary from our childhood and to call into account the Baptist mission board who had been mishandling the pedophile’s exposure for over twenty years.

Even now, it’s hard to put this story into a few brief words. The pain is still thick at the back of my throat and the journey isn’t over. But from the moment I stepped back into that fundamentalist world, the term abuse grew to encompass so much more than violence. I grew to understand it in its fullness, as it was meant to be understood–as I wish I had understood it from a very young age.

The justice endeavor began as an effort to bring healing to a friend and her family who had been deeply wounded by the pedophile and mission board, but over time it became very clear that I suffered sexual abuse myself—something I had long pushed back and denied and reasoned away, despite it explaining decades of emotional instability. New information made it undeniable, and I had to face the things my mind had hidden. Then, as I fought for justice, I became the victim of spiritual and emotional abuse as well.

First came the e-mails and blog comments from total strangers calling me a tool of Satan and an enemy of the gospel. Verses were thrown at me—at us—and we, the victims,were admonished not to touch “God’s anointed.” The vile things that self-proclaimed Christians will say in anonymity is appalling. If self-righteous curses of “shame on you, you whore of Satan” could kill, I’d be dead from the anonymous e-mails of vitriol and hate I have read.

The harder we pushed for justice, the closer the abusers came. Now it wasn’t just strangers dishing out spiritual and emotional abuse on the internet, it was people we had called “aunts” and “uncles” in our youth. Verses, again, were thrown at us. We were reminded to forgive, reminded of the supposedly innocent family members who were embarrassed and hurt by the pedophile’s public exposure, but who—let’s face it—probably knew a certain amount but lived in denial all along. “What about them?” the emails would say. “You’re being evil and cruel. They don’t deserve this.” And they, the family, didn’t deserve it. That’s true. But neither did we, and neither did any other child.

False familial titles (the cult-like “aunt”/“uncle” monikers) and childhood nicknames were doled out in long e-mails, phone calls and voicemail messages from those whose were rightly being questioned. I stopped taking the calls, stopped listening to the messages, but not before a few left their mark. “This is your ‘Aunt’ ______. We’re hurting so much over all these accusations. We looove you, Tammy,” she said, her voice thick with emotion I couldn’t understand given we’d hardly known each other, hadn’t seen each other since I was fifteen, and she was using a name no one outside my family had called me in over two decades.

It was a poorly disguised attempt to guilt me into silence over a leadership “mistake” her husband had made. Her husband should have be shouting from the rooftops that he’d been wrong, done something criminal under the mandated reporting laws, done something morally shameful. But instead the wife was sent to sway me, to spare her and their grown children this sadness.

Her voicemail haunted me for weeks, not because she got to me, because she didn’t. It was because she had tried. Because she had invoked love and false familiarity and spiritual obligation in her desperation to silence me. I was shocked—utterly shocked—at the subtle insidiousness of it.

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The misplaced resentment against us, against me, personally, grew to epic proportions when a friend exposed a second pedophile a few years later—and by misplaced resentment I mean more spiritual and emotional abuse. I mean using scripture wrongly and improperly, using relationships and pasts and church authority wrongly and improperly, I mean hurting and injuring by maltreatment, I mean the continuation of corrupt practices and customs, I mean language that condemns and vilifies unjustly and intemperately. I mean all of those things above that Webster’s and Farlex tell us are the definition of abuse. I suffered these things publicly and privately from the mission board, from people I barely knew, and from people I knew well.

At one point, a man who grew up on the same mission field as I did launched a Facebook page vilifying me. His page banner labeled me a fascist, but the reality was he didn’t even know me well enough to use my married name of almost twenty years. One by one, I watched as adults and former friends of my formative years overseas “liked” his page, all because they didn’t like men they admired being exposed for the havoc they had wreaked in the lives of young women who were now middle-aged and grown and no longer being silent.

It wouldn’t have been so bad, really, except that then this Facebook group started in on my faith, mocking me, using my words against me, twisting who I was. Knowing I shouldn’t read their bitter words that came from a narrow view of faith I didn’t even subscribe to, I read anyway, sickened that I had become the target of hate and abuse when there were pedophiles sleeping as free men.

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The spiritual and emotional abuse of these years, and the time I spent coming to terms with my sexual abuse—it’s all left me battered.

I retreated for quite a while after the Facebook incident, and I’ve never made a full comeback to that particular justice effort. I wish so much that I could tell you that justice and truth won out. That doing the right thing and exposing sin (no, make that crimes) paid off. But it didn’t and it hasn’t. It has been the most painful exercise in futility of my life.

My consolation, however, is this: I know what abuse is now. Sexual. Spiritual. Emotional. And because I’ve learned the word I can call it what it is. I can give it a name. I can see it when it happens to me or in front of me. And I can cry and grieve and hurt, but then I can get up and walk away and find healing in a safer place. Because the word has lost its power now that my vocabulary has grown.

October 4, 2013 by SamanthaField

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