by Sierra

[Editors' note: At the time of writing, Libby Anne and Sierra were unaware of the controversy surrounding Hugo Schwyzer. The discussion of his critique of emotional incest is not an endorsement of Schwyzer by NLQ.]

My last two posts, and indeed all my thinking on the subject has led me to some conclusions about the ways that Christian Patriarchy and purity culture enable and even celebrate emotional incest. The following are the cliff notes:

Christian patriarchy turns marriage from a relationship to an institution, effectively reversing the historical trend from business partnerships and heir insurance to bonds between two free agents based on love. Evangelical culture says that marriage takes three: you, your spouse, and God. It also promotes self-denial and the sublimation of one’s own desires to those of Christ. Therefore, any two evangelical Christians should be able to marry each other and have a godly, fulfilling marriage, given enough work and prayer. Purity culture says that chemistry and personality don’t matter. What matters is following the Word of God. Husbands and wives should love each other because it’s commanded in God’s Word to do so; loving his wife is a husband’s “first ministry.” Similarly, a wife “ministers” to her husband by submission and love. The core of marriage in Christian patriarchy is the commitment to be loyal to God and to the marriage, not attachment to the person of the spouse. This is why evangelical courtships are more focused on purity than the prospective partners getting to know each other personally; what matters is getting to the altar without regrets. The love in marriage flows from commitment rather than the other way around, mirroring the logic of arranged marriage.(Note: Most evangelical Christians do acknowledge the importance of an emotional bond between the bride and groom that develops before the wedding day. Most evangelical Christians do want their children to marry people whom they find attractive, companionable and fun. If you are one of these Christians, you’re not the one I’m critiquing. (Congratulations! You’re normal!) What I do find problematic is the branch of evangelical-fundamentalist Christianity led by people like Bill Gothard, Matthew Chapman (who famously didn’t ask his wife to marry him), Doug Wilson, Jonathan Lindvall, et al. who expect young people to marry with hardly any knowledge of each other, rigid parental oversight and laundry lists of abstract virtues rather than personality traits in mind.)

The institutionalization of marriage in Christian patriarchy leads to relationships based on order, hierarchy and duty rather than affection. Husbands are commanded to be leaders of their wives. Wives are commanded to submit. Husbands are commanded to love. Wives are commanded to reverence. Marriage is reduced to performance of a gender role. Although individuals frequently subvert this, the ideal is that husband and wife will relate to one another as master and subordinate, with two distinct spheres of duty.

Women who must obey their husbands turn to their sons for more equal partnerships. Most evangelical-fundamentalists do not place the son’s authority higher than the mother’s, though some do. A mother can share interests with her son, disagree with him, choose their mutual activities and challenge her son in ways that she cannot challenge her husband. This promotes emotionally incestuous mother-son relationships in which the son becomes his mother’s main source of emotional support.

Husbands whose wives are constrained with childbearing and homemaking turn to their daughters for emotional affirmation. Wives are required to respect, obey, and love their husbands. Daughters are, too, but their devotion and admiration are more often the natural results of kind parenting than coercion or dogmatic instruction. (I fully acknowledge that many daughters don’t love their fathers, because their fathers are distant, abusive, etc. I am one of those daughters. However, a daughter whose father raises her kindly will usually love him without hesitation.) A daughter’s love is more spontaneous, and hence may feel more genuine than a wife’s love. A daughter is also less inhibited by years of conflicts, submission and moral instruction. She is simply younger and (usually) more enthusiastic. As a child, she is also more inclined to want to please her father – especially as that trait is cultivated in girls. As Libby Anne also points out, a daughter is more susceptible to her father’s influence, and has the potential to be molded into the ideal partner.

Christian patriarchy cultivates father-daughter emotional incest through purity pledges and purity balls, father-daughter dating, stay-at-home daughterhood, “practice” homemaking and the courtship process that gives fathers veto power over a girl’s relationships. Daughters are explicitly taught that they should submit to their fathers as their “heads” until they marry, that the father-daughter relationship is practice for marriage, that fathers should treat their daughters the way they want their future husbands to treat them (as opposed to being an example by treating their wives the way they want their daughters treated). With your father “guarding your heart,” you can hardly form relationships that don’t include, or indeed center on, him.

Purity culture limits young people’s access to one another through courtship and sex-segregated activities.This means that contact between the sexes is extremely formal, and many children of large families form their deepest bonds with their parents and siblings. This can stunt their ability to make friends or find partners on their own, further cementing parental control over spousal choices. It also limits children’s access to other families that could show them alternatives to the kinds of relationships that exist within their own families, leading them to think that their own family dynamic is “normal” even if it isn’t.

Quiverfull families normally rely on the eldest children (usually daughters) to parent younger siblings. This can artificially elevate the eldest children to the status of co-parents or partners for their parents. Normally, emotional incest occurs between a parent and his or her eldest child (though there are undoubtedly exceptions).

This is not to say that only patriarchal Christians are vulnerable to emotional incest. It is, however, to point out that some central tenets of Christian patriarchy and quiverfull enable those relationships to flourish unchecked. The results, when they are terminated, can be devastating for both parents and children. These relationships can have ripple effects that prevent children from forming healthy bonds with their own partners in adulthood. In the case of stay-at-home daughterhood, however, this flaw is considered a benefit. If daughters remain at home, serving their fathers, well into their own adulthood, they are treated as success stories. They shouldn’t be.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

Sierra is a PhD student living in the Midwest. She was raised in a “Message of the Hour” congregation that followed the ministry of William Branham. She left the Message in 2006 and is the author of the blog  the phoenix and the olive branch

We would love to feature your personal story on No Longer Quivering. Please submit what you have to say via our submissions form.

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by Libby Anne

[Editors' note: At the time of writing, Libby Anne and Sierra were unaware of the controversy surrounding Hugo Schwyzer. The discussion of his critique of emotional incest is not an endorsement of Schwyzer by NLQ.]

In Part 1 I looked at the definition of emotional incest and in Part 2 I looked at how integral emotional incest is to Christian Patriarchy, but in this segment I want to look at how easy it can be for even ordinary families to be sucked into (admittedly, less intense) patterns of emotional incest.

I recently came upon an article called “Princesses, Princes, Daughters, and Dads: Against Emotional Incest.” The author explains his own experiences as the father of a young daughter and the measures he plans to take to ensure that he does not fall into the trap of emotional incest. It was such a good article that I’m going to quote from it at length and then finish with some discussion.

Becoming a parent for the first time in one’s forties has myriad advantages, not least that one has had the opportunity to watch a great many of one’s peers “do it all first.” And I’ve seen, a time or nine, an unhealthy triangulation occur with dads, moms, and their daughters. While the dangers of physical incest and abuse are real, there’s a kind of emotionally incestuous dynamic I’ve witnessed between fathers and daughters, one in which dads seek from their daughters the validation and affirmation that they feel they are entitled to, but are not receiving from their wives.

Little children adore their parents. Really, it’s a lovely thing to come home each day and be welcomed, as I invariably am, with gales of excited laughter and delight. My daughter’s love is an impressive thing to feel, especially as she’s gotten better recently at wrapping herself around my neck and squeezing me tight. No matter what has transpired during the day, no matter what I’ve said or done (or failed to say or do), Heloise seems to adore me….

Of course, spouses aren’t the same as children. My wife loves me, a fact of which I blessedly have no doubt. But she most certainly doesn’t have me a on pedestal, doesn’t think I’m flawless, and doesn’t greet me with shrieks of joy everytime I walk into the house. Eira engages with me as a partner, and she challenges me and pushes me and asks me for things; I do the same for her….

Here’s the thing: I’ve seen men play their daughters against their wives, mistakenly believing that the way in which their daughters see them (as heroic and perfect) is the way that their spouses ought to as well. If a man hasn’t done his “work”, he may find himself looking at his daughter, gazing up at him with adoration, and he may start (resentfully) to contrast his girl’s fierce and uncomplicated devotion with the somewhat less enthusiastic reception he may be getting from his overworked and exhausted wife. In most cases, this doesn’t mean the papa will turn to his daughter sexually, … [b]ut he may find himself relying more and more on the affirmation he gets from his adoring baby girl.

…a great many dads (and it wasn’t until I became a father to a baby girl myself that I realized how common this was) start to rely more and more on the simple intensity of their daughter’s love rather than doing the much more difficult work to remain connected with their wives. I’m certainly not saying every father of a daughter does this, but it is common — and if you ask the mothers of daughters, as I have, you’ll hear plenty of anecdotes about this.

Plenty of daughters grow up with a sense that they are somehow responsible for taking care of their fathers emotionally, for being the good and understanding woman in his life (as opposed to the mother/wife figure, who is invariably cast as judgmental and cold.) To do this to a daughter is child abuse, and I am determined not only not to do it myself, but to be bolder at calling out other fathers of daughters when I see the signs of what can only be called emotional incest.

Heloise may or may not choose to be a princess as she gets a bit older. But in her little games, I will not play the part of the prince. I’m a father, and that is something utterly and wonderfully different. And if I need validation, I need to go and get it from my equal, my peer, and my partner — the one who will make me earn that validation, as she should.

I quote from this article both to point out how common emotional incest is and to emphasize that emotional incest is not simply a result of Christian Patriarchy. Rather, emotional incest can occur in any family. And I think this article moved me especially because it sounded so very, very familiar.

What Christian Patriarchy does do, though, is institutionalize this dynamic. It takes the problematic father/daughter relationship this author describes and glorifies it. While the author here sees it for the problem it is, Christian Patriarchy holds it up as the ideal – and then takes it even a step further.

And this article also points out the problem I pointed out in the previous segment: father/daughter emotional incest creates a triangle between the father, the mother, and the daughter, and can result in the father essentially shutting the “troublesome,” “demanding,” or “cold” wife for the warm love and affection of his adoring daughter.

And I’m sitting here with emotion flowing through my body because I know the pain this dynamic causes. I’ve experienced it. I am going to write one more segment in this series, and that one will be the hardest. Writing this series – and doing the internet research needed to do so – has opened wounds and rendered me raw. It hurts. But it’s also how we heal. I can’t move forward without admitting the past, without confronting the past, acknowledging that it happened, and staring it down.

I’m writing this series even though it’s hard because, well, someone needs to write it. Someone needs to talk about it. Someone needs to put this out into the open. Until the problem is seen for what it is, the pattern will just keep repeating.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

Libby Anne grew up in a large evangelical homeschool family highly involved in the religious right. College turned her world upside down, and she is today an atheist, a feminist, and a progressive. She blogs about leaving fundamentalist and evangelical religion, her experience with the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements, the problems with the “purity culture,” the intricacies of conservative and religious right politics, and the importance of feminism. Her blog is Love, Joy, Feminism

We would love to feature your personal story on No Longer Quivering. Please submit what you have to say via our submissions form.

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by Incongruous Circumspection

Seven years old was a big year for me. It was at this point that Mama and Dad’s relationship boiled over and broke apart. Dad left and went to live by himself, leaving my siblings and I alone with Mama. At this point in my life, the alone time with Mama wasn’t too bad. She hadn’t learned yet, to take her immature “lashing out,” and reconcile it with her interpretation of the Bible. She was just solidly abusive and then excitingly adventurous.

At one point, Dad did try to come back and give the marriage another chance. I remember being asked to dry the dishes one evening. Dad had pulled our old black and white television from its corner, to the middle of the living room, and was watching a night game between the Vikings and who cares who else. I was drying a dish and became quite interested in the noise coming from the tube, being that I wanted to love what my father loved, so I peeked around the corner into the living room. Dad caught my gaze and motioned for me to climb up on his lap. I obliged and, for the next sixty seconds, I learned everything about football down to the color of the Vikings away laces.

Sixty seconds with my Dad was an eternity. He had come back to try and reconcile with Mama and the whole eleven days that he stayed was a living hell for him. Any time he tried to enjoy his family by playing with his kids, Mama would come into the room and yell, demanding that we go and do some chore that sorely needed to be done. This time was no different. Around the corner she came, swooping in and grabbing me, forcing me into the kitchen to finish my duties. It would be about a year before I watched another game of football with my father.

Another time, I was playing Old Maid with very large cards with my father and two younger sisters. I laid down a card, heard Dad exclaim how good a move I had made, heard one of my sisters giggle, and then, was whisked away to do something else. Mama never missed an opportunity to make Dad feel like the most unloved human being on the face of the earth. Interestingly, whenever she tells the story, it is always Dad’s fault for only sticking it out for eleven days. In her mind, she plays the part of a saint, while my dad was evil for leaving her high and dry. I know better.

The worst memory is when all seven of us were wrestling with my dad in the living room. Imagine the noise of seven children, between the ages of two and ten, screaming and giggling, trying to get their old man to fall on his face from his position on his knees. I know how loud it can get with my six. Wrestling together is one of our favorite activities now, just like it was for me and my siblings then. My mother heard the noise and came flying around the corner and rattled off seven individual chores for us in ten seconds. How did she DO that!?

Needless to say, my father left, never to return. I don’t blame him. Not long afterward, the divorce was finalized and my mother won sole custody of all seven of us. The judge gave my father every other weekend visitation rights with four whole weeks in the summer. My father begged him to reconsider and laid out all the abuse we had suffered up to that point, not to mention, his abuse at the hands of Mama. The judge would not be moved. It was very normal for the state to not even consider a father to be fit for custody in those days.

Dad and Mama getting divorced would be the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I can’t even begin to describe the wonting feeling I would get whenever it was my turn to go to my dad’s for the weekend. To Mama, my leaving meant she had to scrub all the floors, wash and wipe all the dishes, and have nobody around the house that made a point to try to find the laughter in any moment. I didn’t see it that way. Going to Dad’s house was pure, unadulterated freedom – or so I thought.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

Incongruous Circumspection

I am a 30 something husband of one and father of 6 dynamic and loud children. My wife and I are still madly in love – at least in my view. My world is exciting, tense, and full of life. I love to write and hope to one day, do it full time. – Incongruous Circumspection

Read all posts by Incongruous Circumspection!

We would love to feature your personal story on No Longer Quivering. Please submit what you have to say via our submissions form.

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Reading through the many different stories at NLQ of how we were enmeshed in the unhealthy lifestyle that is patriarchy, fundamentalism, quiverful, dominionism, evangelism, name your ism, has led me to wonder why we all so readily embraced that which was so clearly illogical and dangerous. There must be something in us that went off in that direction that’s significantly different than the average person that likes regular movies and beer plus other forbidden things in our old religious lives.

This isn’t about those that were raised in the life. Growing up to emulate your parents is perfectly understandable, be your parent Charlie Manson or Billy Graham. I’m talking about those of us that willingly signed on as adults, who should have known better in the first place.

I did notice during my own frustrating years toiling in fundigelical land that the truest bluest believers seem to have some quirk or oddness. It usually didn’t show at first but once you delved deeper you could discern some brokenness inside. Significant brokenness. Like they were using their extreme flavor of God to plug some holes filled with deep neediness. Like a drug.

And I can relate to that because for me I think I felt empty in some ways. Serious ways. My years at PCC were an attempt to correct that empty painful place. I’d been raised by a beautiful alcoholic that spent much of my childhood drinking alone in her bedroom, one very glamorous shut in. When I entered adolescence she divorced my father and took a job, going from ignoring me for liquor to ignoring me for a job and her lover she’d left my father for. My father moved out, leaving me, stripping me of the only adult in my life who loved for me unconditionally, took care of me day to day. My father is the reason that to this day I can do things like use a skill saw, swing a hammer or paint and wall paper a house.

Our circumstances were reduced. A woman leaving her bank vp husband for lover in the early 1970s wasn’t going to get away with the house, servants and belongings. We moved from a large gracious home to a small apartment on the edge of town. I lost my beloved parent surrogates, my dog and my piano. I changed schools, I lost all my friends. This all changed me, not for the better. I was stripped of most everyone and every thing I loved and thrust into another existence.

Losing my piano was one of the biggest emotional hits I received. It took me until I was in my forties to recover the sense of trust after the piano incident.

During my growing up years my mother enrolled me in all the classes a well bred young lady was supposed to take in able to take her place in society. I took ballet, I took tap, I took baton, I took jazz dance lessons. I took fencing and riding lessons. I took art lessons. But my favorite was piano, I took piano lessons on the family piano, a huge mahogany monstrosity that stood six feet tall. The front was carved in elaborate whorls and patterns. Even the knobs you turned to tune the strings were decorative and gilded. I loved that damn piano. I loved to play.

Just before my parents split they took me to Disneyworld and one day out in park as we were exiting the Teacups ride one of my parents let it slip that they were splitting up. The first thought I had was if I was going to be allowed to keep my precious piano. Yes, yes, they both assured me. It was the only thing that made the changes bearable. I played more often and poured my rage into my music, doubling my lessons as they fought over who got what dishes and silver.

When we started packing for the move to the apartment I was frantic to know about my piano. Yes, yes, my mother assured me again, the moving men were going to move the piano too.

Then Saturday came and my father showed up, with his parents and assorted relatives and took my piano. I keep screaming and asking why in that same melodramatic way that thirteen year old girls favor. The only answer my father could give me was that my mother had called up several weeks before and demanded he take the piano because she wanted nothing from his family in the home, plus it was going to cost a fortune to move. (I can attest to that, it’s in my living room right now. It took five men and taking the french doors out of the wall in the back to get it into my house) Dad told me that they were scrambling to find a family member that wanted it so the piano would be going to my cousin Debbie and her husband. They left. I stayed in the living room weeping after losing my piano, waiting for my mother.

My mother had left me alone that Saturday at the house while she went ‘shopping’ – (code word for meeting the lover in a hotel I found out years later). I waited for her for hours. She finally came home around ten thirty that night after having left more than twelve hours before. I think she thought I’d surely be in bed but I wasn’t, I was tearfully awaiting her to ask why she’d given away something that meant that much to me. I angrily confronted her and she sighed, told me that my father had called and demanded it back since it had been in their family since the late 1800s.

I didn’t know who to believe and I decided I couldn’t believe or trust people. People would hurt you, disappoint you every single time. This one incident had ugly repercussions for many years later. It affected my ability to be emotionally intimate, to trust or to believe I had any value or worth. In the ensuring years I turned that incident over and over and over again in my mind trying to figure out who was lying. Neither would back down from their story. It was at that point in my life that I started to self medicate with drugs. I drank but didn’t much like it. Hangovers sucked but pot smoothed off the edges, coke made me feel like a million bucks.

I was set adrift in a dangerous world alone. My mother left for weeks at a time. I didn’t see her, I was alone in apartment, left to my own teenage devices. Because I’d done very well in elementary school I’d skipped a few grades so I was a few years ahead of the kids my own age, among kids older than myself. I had older friends and you know where that leads. Especially when you add in drugs and rock and roll.

For me it led straight to a relationship with a man older than myself, someone above age of consent. I think I fell for him because he was so forbidden, a local musician in his twenties always surrounded by women. I just instinctively knew he would piss off my parents, from his long hair to his occupation. I fell for him hard, that painful hard first love. We were intimate, and from the first he asked me to do things I was very uncomfortable with but gradually I started to do as he wished, after all, he really loved me. He, Dan, could be with all those other gorgeous sexy older than me women yet he’d chosen me. Me!

Looking back now I can see he was grooming me, grooming me as carefully as any cult leader or pedophile grooms their followers. Naive, inexperienced me fell for every romantic, seductive, honeyed word dripping from Dan’s mouth and sought to be that sixteen year old Lolita he wanted. And then I got pregnant. At sixteen.

My parents were something less than thrilled. In fact I was threatened with being put in the insane asylum and forcibly aborted. Dan’s family took an instant dislike to me as well, both families eyeing each other in mutual distrust and hatred. But I stood firm, promptly married Dan and we bought a trailer to start our little family in.

The marriage didn’t work from the beginning even I was trying to be the sexiest pregnant woman in the world. It was obvious early on that what Dan wanted was a loving innocent sex pot waiting at home with child to cook for him and make mad passionate love to him. But also to sleep with each and every attractive vagina possessor around the band when they were out on the road. It took me quite a while to discover this was his ideal set up. Again, I was crushed that I’d allowed someone close and they’d hurt me badly. A year into the marriage I left Dan and I filed for divorce as soon as I could afford it.

The good thing about my time with Dan is that I knew I had to get it together, get my shit together we used to say back in the 70s. My leaving him left me with a baby, a high school diploma, no car, no job skills but I moved forward anyway. I went on to college, worked, raised my child and tried to toe the straight and narrow. Hard years but good years. Part of getting it together was going into therapy.

Ten years and 14 days to the day that I’d married Dan I married again, to Jim, my husband of the last twenty five years. Even committing to marry him was a difficult thing, we dated for over three years. I’d had to let my desire to be Jim’s wife be stronger than my fear of trust before I could say yes.

We married, and you know the rest. Good jobs, nice house, kids, good life. But I still felt like something was missing. When we first attended church in our town I was turned off to Christianity because I felt it was a social club filled with people sitting around in their good clothes mouthing boring prayers and platitudes. I didn’t know what I wanted exactly but I knew I wanted something else.

How did we arrive at fundigelical patriarchal quivering Possum Creek Church? By way of a local acquaintance who’d been bugging us to visit the church. I used to tell Jim when he called, “Ned Flanders is on the phone for you.” because this guy struck me very much as a in the flesh Ned Flanders from the tv show “The Simpsons” Little did I know how big a role in our joining and leaving PCC he would play.

At first all my buttons were pushed visiting. People were over friendly, too space invading, too questioning and every visit seemed an assault on my senses. But it was the worship music that pulled me in. I would go and worship and be pulled in.

From the great distance of now from that early day I have to conclude that the trauma I experienced as my parents divorced plus being used by Dan made me susceptible to being pulled in. The hole in my heart, the piano shaped one, was at least temporarily assuaged by whatever it was I was getting in those early days.

From my experience and many I’ve observed I have to conclude that being a hurting broken person with inner wounds seems to make it easier to get intrinsically involved. After all, those at the church seem happy, they seem to know it all, have the answers, be without inner pain. You see that. You want that. Unfortunately it can take a long time to realize you’re being put in a situation of abuse again.

I’ve love to know everyone elses reasons for getting involved with Quiverful or the Patriarchal movement. Was there some defining moment that make you likely to be open to that? Or did you just aspire to be like the others? Why? Please leave me a comment or come on over to the Forum and reply in the thread.

Eventually I did get my piano back. When I turned thirty five, shortly after joining PCC I was telling a close friend the piano story and he challenged me to call up each of my parents and ask why they’d taken my piano away. Ask again. I did. My mother changed her story to how it would have been too big for the apartment plus the apartment management didn’t allow big musical instruments. My father sighed and told me the same thing he said originally. A week later he showed up at my house in Virginia unexpectedly, told me happy birthday and revealed he’d gotten my piano back for me from the family member who’d ended up with it. That piano bounced all around the family before coming to rest in my living room around fifteen years ago. I still play it and I have a good idea who the liar was. My mother is the one that lied to me but I’ve moved past that. I know that not everyone is untrustworthy now.

Discuss this post on the NLQ Forum. Comments are also open below.

Calulu lives near Washington DC , was raised Catholic in South Louisiana before falling in with a bunch of fallen Catholics whom had formed their own part Fundamentalist, part Evangelical church. After fifteen uncomfortable years drinking that Koolaid she left nearly 6 years ago.  Her blog is Calulu – Roadkill on the Internet Superhighway

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Nate got another partner almost immediately. He found her on a Christian dating site. Patty had money from her millionaire father and a big house paid for by the government salary of her estranged husband. Nate had told me that remarriage for me was unbiblical, but he found a loophole in Scripture and told the children that he and Patty were already married in God’s eyes. God having spoken, Nate moved into Patty’s house and put our marital home up for rent.

Nate wrote me a letter warning that if I did not “come to terms” (give him full custody of the children), he would hold a big yard sale and sell off everything in the house that belonged to me and the kids. He had the right to do this, having been awarded the entire contents of the house by the courts. The letter specifically mentioned a silver tray that my grandparents had given us as a wedding present. The toys, costly and old-fashioned and ordered from catalogs, had been my parents’ birthday and Christmas gifts to the children. The kids had left behind probably two thousand dollars’ worth of toys–$300 in large hand-carved wooden blocks alone. Nate sold them all, except for a few that he informed us he would keep at Patty’s house for “when the children come home.” Nate sold or gave to Goodwill the 150 books in my personal library and the children’s library.

Nate informed the children during visitation that he was sleeping with his fiancée, but that he was sleeping on top of the covers while Patty slept underneath.

Sam, who has always been precociously bright, was eleven at the time and had developed advanced bullshit radar. “On top of the covers” has been a pet euphemism for Sam and I ever since. Whenever Sam was trying to get away with something and making preposterous excuses, I’d say, “you’re on top of the covers on that one, bud.”
In the divorce, the court-appointed psychologist reported that Nate had a high probability for child abuse and that I had every indicator of a battered spouse. She also found that the children’s accounts of child abuse were entirely credible. Nate tested high for narcissistic personality disorder and had indicators of antisocial disorder, white I had post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.

So, readers: what do judges do when they appoint psychologists to evaluate a broken family and file a report, and that report states that the non-custodial parent has:

      *  chronic, untreatable personality disorders,

      *  an estranged partner who perfectly fits a battered partner’s profile, and

      *  credible reports (though no present physical evidence or prior police reports) that the noncustodial parent has abused the children as well.

Anybody?

The judges either order a joint custody arrangement, or order the custodial parent to give the children to the noncustodial parent for “visitation,” because (and this is the case in all fifty states, as far as I can tell from my research) only parents who have been proven to cause recent, physical injury to their biological children are not allowed unsupervised contact with their children.

Women escaping abusive cults or cult-like situations with children have no chance to even draw a breath of relief, figure out how to survive, or even hardly unpack, before they are in a courtroom being ordered to hand over their kids to the crazy man who hurt both them and the kids. Once the abuser has the kids alone, even infrequently, he’s able to make sure that the kids do not ever become normal, and to turn the kids against his former partner in an effort to force her back, to force her to accept legal terms that are not in her best interest, or simply to torture her using her children.

You escaped abuse. Congratulations! says the juvenile legal system. You’re probably just lying about the abuse to get an advantage in court, and we won’t tolerate any interference with your ex’s visitation with his children. Now come to court as much as your ex wants, even if that’s once a week. He has a “right to access the system” but you too have a “right to be heard,” for which you should be grateful and respectful. Cooperate with your children’s father and get along. And get over that PTSD and depression, get a job, and become a demonstrably successful mother, or we’ll give your children to your ex.

Courtrooms have become a trauma trigger for me. I react to being in a courtroom with Nate no differently than I would if I found myself back in my old house with Nate. I’m like a Vietnam vet parachuted into a rice paddy. It doesn’t even have to be a courtroom where Nate is present: I have nervous jitters when I’m in any courthouse for any reason. I get sweaty palms and fight off a panic attack when I take a child to court to get a driver’s license.

For Nate, court was a dating service. He couldn’t get me to go on real dates, but I could be subpoenaed for dozens of court dates, and jailed if I did not appear. He would put me on the stand and grill me for three or four hours at a stretch until I nearly fainted. I was forced to go into jury rooms with him for “depositions,” where I was so terrified I could not breathe, much less think. Then Nate would go into court and cross-examine me about what I said in the jury room and how it differed from what I was saying now, and “was it not true that I was lying now? Or had I been lying then?” The courts and their police power would force me to show up and submit to his abuse on a regular schedule.

Nate has a special voice he uses in court. It is the same voice he used during our marriage to signal that he was about to inflict physical pain on me if I didn’t yield to his demands. It is slow, with every syllable carefully enunciated, slightly mocking, and ice cold. In the early years it was all could do to remain seated in a courtroom, and not run away, as soon as Nate began speaking in that voice. Many times, I have asked for a recess and gone to the ladies’ room to vomit.

In my very first juvenile court hearing in my hometown, the judge said two things to me:

      1. I was probably lying about the child abuse.

     2. If I wasn’t lying about the child abuse then I condoned it.

Since that day, I’ve probably replayed those two statements in my head a thousand times, trying to figure out how they jive, and what they have to do with custody or visitation.
The guardian ad litem chimed in and said I had poor parenting skills and was the lesser of two evils.
Nate’s fiancée Patty took the stand and said Nate was the most wonderful Christian man in the world, was positively fantastic to her two children, and that I was making it all up to get revenge.
Nate took the stand and bawled like a baby about how much he missed the kids, said that I had abandoned him for no reason and “kidnapped” all of his children, and added that I had always been abusive and controlling.

The judge gave Nate unsupervised visits every other Saturday for eight hours, plus one phone call a week.

Now I realize I got off easy, with Nate getting no overnight visitation, and with his visitation occurring only twice a month. I talked to one man whose children had to spend every weekend in a meth lab with their mother and her string of lovers, where there was no food. The common practice in juvenile courts is to determine the maximum amount of destructive visitation that the kids can tolerate with abusive noncustodial parents without being hurt too badly (and being neglected and mentally and emotionally wrecked doesn’t really count). This is true even in states like Virginia, where the legal standard is “the best interests of the child.” The pattern with Nate, as I’ve gone before 15 different judges in 12 years, has been that Nate gets increasing visitation over time. He hires rent-a-shrinks who testify that he has no personality disorders and is no danger to his children.

Nate’s second wife helps; Patty has testified dozens of times that there’s nothing wrong with Nate. Nate married Patty in 2003 but kept pressuring me to come back to him. I could live in the bedroom over the garage, he said. Patty was totally on board with this, as she freely testified in court.

I began to wonder about my children’s stepmother. On the other hand, my own experience taught me that you can find freaks on any dating site, but the Christian dating sites are in a freak class all by themselves.

Speaking of freaky groups of people, here is a shoutout to everybody in the legal system who thinks “the right to be heard”—to defend yourself before the law–is a sacred and beautiful right which insures the courts will be fair, simply because both sides “get their day in court.”

I have been heard through 158 court appearances. My lawyers were heard until I went bankrupt, and then I was heard representing myself. I have been heard through five Legal Aid attorneys, even though they could only manage a tiny fraction of the litigation Nate filed while still representing the other poor women in the area. I was heard until I was suicidal and on Prozac and Zoloft. I was heard right through five therapists. Nate issued a subpoena to one of these therapists, who responded by mailing Nate the notes he had taken during my therapy sessions.

My children have been heard too, in chambers and on the witness stand, after they had been prepped by their father for hours during court-ordered visitation. Everybody we were connected with was heard: medical care providers, counselors, relatives, friends, employers, prospective employers—until we felt like some kind of legal plague. Prosecutors and defense lawyers were heard on the sixty warrants that Nate swore out before magistrates, or made Jack swear out before magistrates. I was falsely arrested three times—but I had a right to be heard. We were heard through a decade of terrible poverty and despair.

Things are better now, but we are still all exercising our right to be heard as often as Nate decides to file papers in court. Whether it’s pure hell, as it mostly was ten years ago, or a major inconvenience, as it mostly is now, it’s no picnic. Some might even call it an outrage.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum!

Read all posts by Tess Willoughby!

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By Sierra

Growing up fundamentalist, I heard endless tirades about the importance of having a set of heterosexual parents. My mother was to be my example of submission, selflessness and homemaking. My father was to be my protector, modeling the role of my future husband. I’ll say more about some of the problems with this model in a future post.

I was taught that children needed both a feminine and a masculine parental figure, that the traits of each would “balance” us somehow (even though I was expected to grow up 100% feminine). The worst possible sin against one’s children was to entertain the thought of divorcing one’s spouse.

When I was 13, my parents divorced. It was awesome.

I’m not kidding. You know why? Here’s what preceded the divorce: My father being absentee for the first few years of my life. He actually slept in the car to avoid my cries as a baby at night. Then, when I hit puberty, he decided to get involved. This meant a series of endless lectures about how boys were faithless lechers and would abandon me, pregnant, in the middle of a parking lot, if I so much as held their hands. He also began to point out anything I was wearing that made me look “busty” or “developed,” which made me want to crawl under a rock and saw off my breasts with a kitchen knife.

His demeanor was rigid and authoritarian, then excessively affectionate. This meant that I never knew whether confiding him would result in a cold rebuke or a hug. He once shoved me off his lap and said, “Go away, little girl, you’re bothering me.” I thought he was joking, so I climbed back up. He shoved me away, hard. I was eight years old. My father also modeled the selfishness and lechery he told me were inherent in all men. He ridiculed my mother for her small breasts and once mistakenly picked up one of my bras from the laundry pile and made fun of it, thinking it was hers. He leered at every woman in high heels who crossed our path in public. His office was plastered with pornography. He verbally abused my mother for refusing to cut her hair or wear makeup, telling her that it was her duty as a wife to be sexy for him when he wanted it. It turns out that he really wanted to be able to show her off to other men. He told my mother and me that he was humiliated to take us to the beach in our church garb (I was humiliated to wear the church garb, but shaming us only reinforced our convictions that we should). He grew jealous of my mother’s commitment to her church, and insisted that she have dinner on the table for him at 6:00 every night, which meant no going to evening church services. To save my mother the indignity of being commanded, “Coffee, woman,” I began filling the coffeepot and plugging it in before the meal started. My strategy only got “Coffee, daughter,” addressed to me. He would stand over me, micromanaging the dishes I washed, though he never himself scrubbed a dish at all, or even pushed in his chair.

Before the divorce, my father began gaslighting my mother, telling her that she was stupid and incompetent and that he was doing her a favor by staying with her. Broken down under the weight of her marriage, my mother began to frantically confess all of her sins – including an ancient sin she believed she’d committed against him in the early years of their marriage. She asked his forgiveness. He slapped her across the face. He blamed her for ruining her life. I heard this, and wanted to beg God to kill him already and spare us. But I knew that was wrong, so I didn’t. Instead, I wrote him one of fifteen angry letters disowning him as a parent, and then burned it in the bathroom sink.

Then, to spite her, he took a mistress. This mistress was literally a prostitute, with a daughter my age. He would stay up all night, using the computer in my bedroom to chat with her online. In frustration, I (then 12) emailed her the message “LEAVE MY DAD ALONE.” I was promptly punished and harangued for not “thinking about others’ feelings.” He moved in with her before the divorce went through, and promptly spent all his money buying things for her and her daughter that we had never had. I was glad to be rid of him, but he still showed up once a week to demand one-on-one time with me.

Then there were the little isolated incidents. Once, he told me that he had the right to inspect my naked body anytime to “observe my development.” I told him he had no such right without my permission, and he responded that, as his daughter, I belonged to him and he could do what he liked with me. Nothing further came of it, but I felt constantly insecure afterwards and began locking my door when I went to sleep.

And there was the temper. He could be reduced to screaming rage, object-breaking and vicious belittling without any provocation. I once had to literally beg him, sobbing on my knees, not to hit me after I disobeyed him. He only hit me once, but I knew his potential. He collected guns and knives, and I had a vivid imagination.

The divorce came from him. My mother didn’t accept it, since nothing could undo wedding vows once spoken. She did not, however, contest it legally. There was no property dispute, because by this time we had already had to sell everything to stay alive. His income was being poured into the pockets of his mistress. In short order, we lost our house and all the things in it. We had to give away our dog and move into the basement of my mother’s parents. My mother was devastated and shamed. I was weathered but grateful that at least we didn’t have to live with him anymore.

Both of us fell into a deep depression, having washed up where my mother began her life, isolated from our friends by a two-hour drive and bereft of an income (because my mother had stayed at home to homeschool me). I socialized exactly once a week, and worked the rest of it.

A few months after the dust settled, my pastor made the Second Stupidest Comment to Ever Be Made to Me. It was this:

“Sierra is depressed because she needs her father. She is vulnerable without the head of the household to ward off evil spirits. She has no one to protect her from ungodly boys. She won’t admit it, but deep down she misses him. You must pray that he will return to you.”

This comment was made within earshot, and I could not let it stand. I marched up to my pastor and my mother and declared, “No, actually I don’t miss him at all. I hated him. His leaving was the best thing that ever happened to me.” They stared at me, aghast, then laughed and called me a delusional child. I gave up and walked away. I was 15.

The mindset that divorce is the worst thing that can happen to a child is idiotic. Divorce was the best thing my father ever did for me (although he later recanted and moved back in with us, to my dismay). Living without him for a few years was a haven of tranquility that I never knew in his presence. In the worst of our circumstances, with family blaming us for our “weird religion” and how it drove away my father, I was just glad to know that I could go about my business without avoiding, serving or placating him.

The absence of a father was my most treasured possession in those empty years. Not being subject to his control and his temper, not listening to him belittle my mother and criticize her every feature, not fearing a physical assault, not feeling obliged to pay some sort of Biblical respect and obedience to a man I despised – that was my prize. I loved his absence more than I could possibly have loved the man himself. His absence allowed me to gain confidence I had never had.

In some ways, I’m grateful for my father’s failures. They allowed me to instinctively recognize the culture of purity balls and pledges for what it is: lace-trimmed patriarchal incest. The thought of my father literally controlling my sexuality, of his being the one to decide what men were worthy of me, made my skin crawl. I wanted a good man to help me get away from him – which would have been impossible if he were “guiding” my “courtship.”

My father’s blatant claim that I was his property, and most importantly my church’s failure to veto that claim, told me all I needed to know about my status in fundamentalist Christianity. I insisted that my body was mine. They taught me that it was my father’s until I was married, and then it was my husband’s. Literally, ownership. I learned that a wife could never refuse sex with her husband, or deny him the number of children he wanted. “Your father has no right to make you sin,” they said, trying to reassure me. As if that was any comfort! I didn’t want to sin. I wanted to be free. My body was mine; I lived in it, not he. But that didn’t matter to anyone at my church.

I’ll undoubtedly get some comments saying that divorce is certainly acceptable in mysituation, because obviously my father’s behavior was abusive. The thing is, my church made no allowance for divorce because of abuse. The only acceptable divorce was a man divorcing a woman for infidelity. A woman could not divorce her husband, ever, for any reason. Do, please, explain to me the sense in pairing this lunacy with the courtship model and expecting to get good results. Marrying a woman to a man she hardly knows, vetted by her father no matter what his character, and divesting her of the option to leave if the worst happens, is a despicable, misogynistic prison built by merciless men with “Jesus” on their lips.

Divorce is not what breaks a family. It is only the seal placed on a family that has broken itself. Sometimes, the children need divorce to protect them. They are being broken by one of their parents, or both of the parents together. “God hates divorce,” the fundamentalists parrot to each other.

Really. I ask you, how do you in good conscience worship a God who prefers the upholding of an external ideal (“marriage”) over the health and mental soundness of the children that union produced? You who counsel women to stay in abusive marriages because her children “need a father,” you might as well drop all pretenses and slit the child’s throat on an altar to the idol you call Marriage. You who uphold marriage as an inflexible Law – what would you have done with Jesus?

Divorce did not make me angry, helpless, depressed and scared. My father did those things. Divorce did not make me leave the church. The church did that. Divorce has never, ever hurt me. Indeed, it was welcome. A blessing.

Divorce, for a little while, was my salvation.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

Sierra is a PhD student living in the Midwest. She was raised in a “Message of the Hour” congregation that followed the ministry of William Branham. She left the Message in 2006 and is the author of the blog The Unspoken Words: A Non-Prophet Message.

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by Libby Anne

From my experience, I would argue that hell is the worst Christian doctrine of all. I’m not even going to get into how there is no justice in punishing finite transgressions with eternal torture, or into all the other problems with the theological ins and outs of hell. Instead, I’m referring to the practical implications of the doctrine.

I am a mother. I look at my beautiful young daughter, so full of life and joy and excitement and curiosity, and I feel my love for her bubbling up in my heart. If I believed that there were any possibility that this sweet little thing could end up tortured in a lake of fire for eternity, I would leave no stone unturned in desperately working to keep her from this fate.

In my quest to keep my daughter from unimaginable pain, I would probably be highly susceptible to religious leaders offering various methods for raising good Christian children, and easily taken in by their promises to keep my daughter’s soul from destruction. I would do anything I had to do, buy any book, try any method, risk any hurt. What parent wouldn’t?

Fundamentalist preacher and author Michael Pearl promises parents that if they discipline their children just so, including an emphasis on absolute obedience and the use of hitting to back it up, they will not stray from God’s path, and if he warns that if children are allowed to grow up without such discipline, they will be set on the path to hell. Is it any wonder that so many parents follow Pearl’s highly problematic parenting methods?

Leading Christian patriarchy organization Vision Forum promises that if you raise your children according to their teachings, homeschooling in order to “shelter” from “evil influences” and “teach God’s truth” and emphasizing the hierarchical teachings of Christian patriarchy, your child will not stray from Christ’s side like all those willful pagan children in the public schools. Is it any surprise Vision Forum has such a draw?

Bill Gothard’s Institute for Basic Life Principles also promises a perfect godly family, with highly problematic consequences. Mercy Ministries and Hephzibah House promise to restore your rebellious teenage daughter’s faith, though both have been linked to abuse.Exodus International promises to “cure” your gay son or daughter, though actual science is nowhere on their side. And on and on and on it goes.

If I believed there was any chance my small daughter could go to hell, I would turn to any method I could to keep her from this unimaginably horrible fate.

Attend church three times a week? Check. Homeschool using only religious textbooks? Check. Control her every interaction with others to keep her away from “bad influences”? Check. Follow strict child training methods that involve enforced obedience and hitting her if she so much as has a bad attitude? Check. Employ emotional manipulation or even threaten to cut her off if she grows up to make wrong choices, hoping that tough love will bring her back? Check.

Simply put, I would do anything I had to to keep my daughter from eternal torture. I suspect any parent would, really.

And then, if my daughter ceased to follow Jesus and I believed that she was on her way to hell, my heart would break. How could I have joy in life thinking of my daughter suffering eternal torture? How could I be happy knowing that pain without end lay in her path?

And how could I not lay some of the blame for her fate on myself? I would ask myself where I went wrong. Should I have sent her to the Worldview Academy, which promises to make your child immune to the wiles of liberal professors? Should I have sent her toSummit, the McCarthyist worldview conference that promises to give young people a conservative Christian worldview, for several summers instead of only one? Or maybe I should have sent her to an even more conservative college, or taken her to the Creation Museum?

Guilt and blame would ensue. How could I not keep my own daughter from eternal torture?

I understand why my parents raised me as they did and then reacted as they did when I questioned their beliefs. And I think now you understand why I really, really, really hate the doctrine of hell.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum!  Comments are also open below.

Libby Anne lives with her husband and toddler somewhere in the U.S. She has left patriarchy for feminism and has found freedom. She is a graduate student with big plans for her life. You can read her blog at Love, Joy, Feminism.

Read all posts by Libby Anne!

This post was originally published at Love, Joy, Feminism– crossposted by permission.

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by Libby Anne

I can’t say how often I’ve heard ordinary Americans defend Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their popular TLC television show, 19 Kids and Counting. “I wouldn’t choose to have nineteen kids,” they say, “but if they can manage it, who am I to question their choice?” “The kids look happy and healthy,” they say, “look how polite and well mannered they are.” I hear these comments and I just have to sigh.

First of all, I want to point out that I would have concerns about the Duggars even if they were your ordinary family plus seventeen extra children. For one thing, there is no way any two parents can give nineteen children the individual attention and time they need. It’s just not feasibly possible. The Duggars like to say that “love multiplies,” but the thing is, time doesn’t. And then, of course, there is the population issue.

But it’s not these things I’m going to discuss here. The fact is, the Duggars aren’t just your ordinary family plus seventeen extra children. There is a great deal of editing that goes into making TV, and one thing that gets edited out are the Duggars’ religious beliefs and their beliefs about child rearing. There is much, much more going on here than you see on TV.

I know this because I grew up in a family very much like the Duggars. We had a third fewer kids and we didn’t have a TV show, but otherwise it was about the same. Our beliefs were nearly identical to theirs, as was our way of living. When I look at the older Duggar girls, I see myself. I was them. With that in mind, I’m going to take a moment to outline nine specific concerns I have about the Duggars.

1. Isolation and Indoctrination

The Duggar childern are homeschooled in part in order to shelter them from bad influences, i.e. from other kids and teachers who hold different beliefs or live different sorts of lives. The Duggar kids don’t have friends who aren’t pre-approved by their parents. In fact, the Duggar kids aren’t even involved in church activities – their family participates in a “home church” where they and several other like-minded families get together on Sunday mornings and worship together.

Furthermore, even the older Duggar children are not allowed to go anywhere without having an “accountability partner,” i.e. another sibling, to keep tabs on them. When one of the older boys volunteered at the local fire department, one of his sisters always went with him to keep an eye on him and make sure he didn’t get in trouble.

Another reason the Duggar children are homeschooled is in order to teach them “God’s truth.” This means that they use religious textbooks, creationist science curriculum, etc. I understand that we have this thing called “freedom of religion” in our country, but I also believe that children have a right to an education, and teaching children one side of everything becomes indoctrination rather than education.

Not surprisingly, the Duggars’ computers have internet access limited to about seventy “approved” websites. To get unlimited internet access, the children – even the older ones – have to get a password from their mother and then have another sibling sitting by them watching the screen as they surf the web to make sure they stay out of trouble. The main reason for this is likely to keep the children from viewing internet pornography, but it also helps ensure that they don’t get subversive information or other viewpoints.

2. Children raising children

If you think Michelle is the one raising all of those kids, think again. Those older daughters, some of them already adults, are the ones who are actually doing the majority of the cooking, cleaning, and childcare. They are, in effect, raising their younger siblings.

Now I’m not saying Michelle sits back and watches soap operas while the kids work, but rather that with that many children there is simply too much for her to do on her own. She doesn’t have the time or energy to raise her children without her older daughters’ help. And fortunately, because the Duggars homeschool, those older daughters are available to help 24/7.

The Duggars have this thing called the “buddy system.” When each new child is born, that child is assigned to one of the older children. In this way, the older children are responsible for dressing, feeding, and even educating the younger children. Michelle hadthis to say about the buddy system:

This house would not work if we didn’t have the buddy system. The older children mentor the younger ones. They help them with their little phonics lessons and games during the day, help them practice their music lessons. They will play with them or help them pick out the color of their outfit that they want to wear that day, and just all of those types of things.

I’m all for siblings helping each other and playing together, but this goes way further than this. This is siblings raising each other. And as we’ll see, this means a lot of sacrifice for the older siblings doing the raising.

3. Authoritarian discipline

Though they have not directly admitted it, there is a lot to indicate that the Duggars follow Michael and Debi Pearl’s discipline methods. This means they require absolute obedience from their children and see even bad attitudes as signs of disobedience. It also means they use corporal punishment. The Pearls suggest that you begin to spank your children at around six months, and they urge parents to spank a disobedient child until that child submits completely. Complete submission to the parent’s will is the hallmark of the Pearls’ teachings. Here is a quote:

If you are just beginning to institute training on an already rebellious child, who runs from discipline and is too incoherent to listen, then use whatever force is necessary to bring him to bay. If you have to sit on him to spank him then do not hesitate. And hold him there until he is surrendered. Prove that you are bigger, tougher, more patiently enduring and are unmoved by his wailing. Defeat him totally. Accept no conditions for surrender. No compromise. You are to rule over him as a benevolent sovereign. Your word is final. (To Train Up A Child, page 49)

The Duggars have stated that they use blanket training. What they do is place a baby on a blanket and tell the baby not to get off. If the baby crawls off, he or she is spanked on the leg, told “no,” and placed back on the blanket. If you do this for long enough, the baby will learn to stay on the blanket, and then you can safely leave the baby there while you cook lunch or school the older ones. This all seems counter to the nature of a naturally curious baby.

Authoritarian discipline shuts off questions and leaves little room for children to explore. The emphasis on obedience overrides anything else, and as I’ve written before, this can behighly problematic.

4. Bill Gothard and IBLP

The Duggars are big fans of Bill Gothard and are enrolled in his Institutes for Basic Life Principles. Outside of the circle of his followers, Bill Gothard is frequently regarded as a cult leader. He teaches, for instance, that troll dolls delay labor, that cabbage patch dolls are possessed by demons, and that Christians today must follow Old Testament sexual purity codes, including abstaining from sex the evening before weekly worship. Oh, and he teaches that tampons take girls’ virginity.

Until 2002 Gothard ran a group home for delinquent children in Indianapolis, Indiana. Children were sent there by the juvenile justice system for years until the place was closed down under allegations of abuse, including Gothard’s notorious “prayer closets.” There has been a growing movement among young people raised on Gothard’s teachings to expose the abuse, physical, emotional, and spiritual, they suffered at the hand of Gothard and his multiple ministries, including orphanages in places like Russia.

What bothers me most about the Duggars’ involvement with Gothard and IBLP is their use of his “re-education” camps (my term). When Josh Duggar was showing some signs of being “rebellious” years ago, they sent him to Gothard’s military boot camp for young men, the ALERT Academy. He returned much subdued. They’ve done the same with some of the girls, sending them to Gothard’s Journey to the Heart programs, where they are reminded of how wicked and sinful they are and told again and again that following God means obeying their earthly parents.

5. Emotional control

The Duggar children are also taught to carefully control their emotions, and emotions like anger or ingratitude are not acceptable. I’ve often heard people argue in favor of the Duggars by stating that “they look so happy!” Here is an excerpt from blogger Dulce, who was raised on the same teachings as the Duggars, dealing specifically with this issue:

One of the creepiest things about Gothard and the Pearls is that they teach that happy is the only acceptable emotion.  If you do not have a joyful countenance, you are publicly shaming your authorities.  In other words, if the kid looks unhappy, it is a personal offense against the parents.  Pearl also has nauseating quotes and anecdotes about how any time his kids expressed unhappiness or anger they were hit even harder and longer until they were cheerful.  How twisted is that?  Children are taught from babyhood to always be cheerful, or else they deserve a spanking.  As they grow older, it is not just the fear of a spanking that causes them to keep smiling.  It is the sincere belief that they are sinning with ingratitude, rebellion and more if they don’t present a happy face.

As I said earlier that a bad attitude is seen as rebellion, and immediately dealt with. I have no idea whether the Duggar children are happy or not, but I know that if they are unhappy they aren’t allowed to express it, especially for the TV cameras (being a Christian “witness” to the world and all that jazz).

6. A quiver full of expectations

As I said in my introduction to the Quiverfull movement, Quiverfull is more than just seeing children as a gift from God. It’s also about seeing children as potential culture warriors. Children are “arrows” who are to be sent out into the world spreading the gospel and Christian values and replicating their parents beliefs and lifestyles. This mindset leaves little room for children who may differ from their parents or what a different sort of life.

In a family influenced by Quiverfull beliefs, children who embrace different beliefs or ways of life from their parents are seen as failures. The idea is to raise ideological clones. The amount of expectations this places on children is immense. I really don’t know what those older Duggar kids want out of life, but I do know that if they want something different from what their parents want for them they are in for a lot of trouble, a lot of emotional manipulation, and a lot of guilt.

7. A patriarchal family order

The main emphasis in the Christian Patriarchy movement, as I pointed out in myintroduction to it, is on a hierarchical family order where each member plays his or her role and everyone stays in their place.  As an example, click here and here to see what the teachings the Duggars follow regarding the proper role of the husband and of the wife. The gist is, of course, that the husband is to lead and the wife is to submit.

The main way this plays out for the children is threefold. First, the children are required to obey their parents without exception. Second, the children are being raised for their future roles – the boys are to be providers and protectors and the girls are to be homemakers. They’re taught this from day one. Third, daughters are taught that they must obey their father even after they become adults.

Those older Duggar girls have been taught that they are under their father’s authority, and that they must follow his will for them. His commands are absolute, just as their obedience is to be absolute. By obeying their father, they are preparing for the time when they will similarly obey their future husbands. Furthermore, by staying at home rather than leaving the home to attend college or get a job, they are preparing to spend their lives as homemakers, as mandated by their gender.

8. Courtship, modesty, and purity

Like many Americans, the Duggars teach their children to remain sexually abstinent until marriage. But they go further, teaching that even kissing should wait until the wedding day. Furthermore, virginity is not just physical, it is also emotional. “Giving away pieces of your heart” through crushes or childhood romances is viewed as permanently damaging, and sexual thoughts are strictly forbidden.

The Duggar girls are also taught that they must dress extremely modestly so as not to “tempt” their “brethren in Christ” (why is this always the female’s responsibility?). That is, of course, what is behind their long jean skirts. This sort of emphasis on “modesty” can be damaging to both girls and boys.

In addition, the Duggars believe that their children should find spouses through parent-guided “courtships” rather than through dating. Dating is portrayed as “practice for divorce” rather than more realistically as “practice for carrying out relationships.” I’ll give an overview of what such a courtship looks like below, but for a young woman’s excellent courtship story, which finishes with damning analysis, click here.

First a young man goes to a young woman’s father and asks to court her, and the father says either yes or no (or sometimes maybe later). The young woman is given the chance to veto the courtship if she is not interested in the young man. If a young woman has her eye on a guy, she can share that with her father and he can possibly talk to the young man or the young man’s father, but she can’t initiate anything herself.

A courting couple is ever under the watchful eye of parents and other chaperons, and sometimes is not given a chance of privacy at all. The father can call or suspend the courtship off at any time for any reason. Eventually, if the courtship goes well, the young man asks the young woman’s father for permission to marry her, and if he obtains that permission he asks the young woman, and if she says yes a wedding follows almost immediately.

9. No teenagers allowed

Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about the Duggars is that their older children aren’t allowed to be teenagers or make their own choices. You can see this strung throughout this entire post.

The older children spend their teen years raising their younger siblings and are only allowed friends from a small pool of approved families. Their access to the internet is strongly curtailed, and they aren’t allowed to go anywhere without an “accountability partner.” Disobedience or ingratitude is seen as rebellion and dealt with swiftly and immediately, sometimes through one of Gothard’s many “re-education” camps. Extreme modesty is enforced and dating is forbidden. Contact with the opposite sex is watched closely. Adult daughters are expected to obey their father’s will for them, are taught that being a homemaker is their God-mandated role in life, and are only allowed to marry through a courtship controlled by their fathers. Furthermore, teen and adult children are expected to adopt their parents exact beliefs and way of life, and any other option is seen as failure.

All this is seen as a good thing. Just like my parents, you see, the Duggars don’t believe in teenagers. Let me quote myself on this issue:

It’s true that the word teenager is less than a hundred years old, and it’s true that our current modern conception of the teenager is new. But the reality is, in our society today, being a teenager is not simply about gossip and boys and a lack of responsibility, it’s about figuring out who you are as an entity separate from your family and their beliefs. Because I was never allowed to be a teenager, I never differentiated myself from my parents at all. I never learned who I was. I was never allowed to.

While I do wish I had been allowed to be a teenager in external trappings – clothes, dating, hanging out at the mall – what I really regret about not being allowed to be a teenager is not the material trappings but rather not ever separating myself and my identity from those of my parents. I wish I had been allowed to be different from them, and encouraged to find my own interests and beliefs. I wish I hadn’t been so enmeshed in my parents’ lives and identities as to lose myself completely.

The Duggar children are given no real chance to differentiate from their parents and to explore what they themselves believe and want from life. Instead, they are set off along a prescribed path and are quickly nudged back onto it if they so much as angle to toward the edge. Rather than forging their own paths, the Duggar children are expected to simply follow the path forged by their parents. No questions, no buts, no backtalk.

Have you noticed that all the Duggar girls share one room and all the Duggar boys share another? Michelle said that’s because that’s how the children wanted it – they didn’t want to be separated. That may well be true, but it’s worth noting that when you share your room with your eight sisters, some still toddlers or babies, it’s really hard to find a moment of privacy or a place for sharing secrets.

Conclusion

Most of this stuff doesn’t come across on the TV show, does it? On the TV show the Duggars try to portray themselves as just one big happy family following God’s commands – a witness to others. What you don’t see is that the Duggar children live lives in a fishbowl, carefully scripted lives from which no dissent or differentiation is allowed. Their lives are laid out for them, and growing up is not about exploration but rather fulfilling the expectations of their parents. Conformity is key and stepping out of line is not acceptable.

Bowing to negative publicity, the Duggars recently enrolled some of their children, including the older girls, in an online college program highly promoted by premier Christian Patriarchy group Vision Forum. This program promises bachelors degrees in as little as two years and has the advantage of keeping the Duggar children safely under their parents’ watchful eyes. Not surprisingly, the girls are interested in studying things like nursing and midwifery. I have no idea whether they’ll actually finish, but it would be great for those older girls if they were able to get college degrees of some sort, because it might open more horizons for them in the future.

As for what’s in the future for the Duggar kids, if all follows their parents’ plans the boys will be set up with careers of some sort and will court girls from like-minded families and then start their own families with a baby at least every other year. We’ve already seen Josh Duggar follow this prescribed path.

The Duggar girls, in contrast, will remain at home until some suitable suitor approaches Jim Bob to ask to court them, and they will then move to their own homes to continue their duty as homemakers and begin having numerous children of their own.

If things work out differently, though, and one or more of the Duggar kids strike out on their own, I can only guess how hard things will be for them. And I have to say, the TV cameras and publicity won’t help. I can only wish them the best.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum!  Comments are also open below.

Libby Anne lives with her husband and toddler somewhere in the U.S. She has left patriarchy for feminism and has found freedom. She is a graduate student with big plans for her life. You can read her blog at Love, Joy, Feminism.

Read all posts by Libby Anne!

This post was originally published at Love, Joy, Feminism– crossposted by permission.

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by Sierra

I’ve written a few times about how the modesty doctrine hurts women. Now it’s time to switch lenses. The modesty doctrine also wreaks havoc on the minds of young men in the Christian patriarchy movement. Here’s how:

1. It teaches men to be afraid of women because their sexual power is too great to be resisted.
2. It teaches men to despise women and hampers their relationships.
3. It teaches men to be afraid of their own bodies.
4. It teaches men to control and criticize women in order to protect themselves.
5. It teaches men to be paranoid about their sexual orientation.
6. It teaches gay men that they don’t exist.

Before we go any further, a definition. The “modesty doctrine” is the belief that women need to cover their bodies to prevent men from being attracted to them, because sexual attraction leads to sin and death for both.  The modesty doctrine is not the same as wearing conservative clothing. You can do the latter without believing the former. It is the belief, themindset of the modesty doctrine that is so harmful. Not the clothes.

1. The modesty doctrine teaches men that they are constantly under assault. Advertising images of sexy women in skimpy clothing feel like clouds of fiery missiles  hurtling into their brains. They have to avert their eyes everywhere they go just to avoid the images, and on top of that there are actual women wearing skimpy outfits. They feel like they can’t get away from sexual stimuli. When you’re taught that merely seeing something can defile you, guarding your eyes from “evil” becomes your eternal chore.

For boys going through puberty, this is especially painful. They can’t participate in mainstream culture (if they’re allowed to in the first place) because the music, television and movie industries bombard them with sexual images.  The solution, according to fundamentalist preachers, is to “change the culture” by telling women to cover up. But this is disingenuous. Once you’ve planted the idea that feeling attracted to a woman is sinful lust, you can’t walk away that easily. Women who already do dress “modestly” are the next targets. Are they drawing attention to themselves with fashionable jewelry or luxurious hair? They should cover up and wear plainer clothing. Young men at Message youth camps would complain if a girl had on sandals or nail polish because her feet and hands were too attractive. Were they just trying to be mean? Some might have been, but not others. Many of them were just hypersensitive to the opposite sex (you know, like almost all teenagers) and very, very afraid of falling prey to lust.

Men who are raised with the modesty doctrine learn that everything women wear is directed at them. When an “immodest” woman walks by, it feels like both a test and an assault. My best friend from church got a job at Wal-Mart when he was 17, and he complained to me endlessly about how women at his workplace would tease and flirt with him. I was treated to a detailed account of how one of the women (also a teenager) stood behind him and ran her fingers across his lower back. He went stiff as a board and tried to brush her off as politely as he could. Perplexed, she asked whether he might be gay. He related this story in helpless frustration. He couldn’t figure out how to avoid female attention without acting like a jerk, and his co-workers couldn’t understand how a heterosexual man could want to avoid female attention. He felt like he was hemmed in by demons and armed with a toothpick.

2. Young men can react to this pressure by learning to despise women. Even as they are being taught not to look at women’s bodies, they are being taught to look at women as bodies.They are encouraged to speak hatefully about the scantily-clad models on magazine covers and billboards. Pastors scream about filthy harlots from the pulpit. The specter of Jezebel is raised and crucified once again. In Message circles, young men grow up hearing Branham’s crackling voice crying that “immoral women” are lower than dogs and livestock. This translates easily to hating girls who just happen to wander into their sight “immodestly” dressed. My male friends used to vent their frustrations by mocking “fat” girls who wore shorts, because “no one wants to see that.” It didn’t occur to them that it would be hurtful to me, a thin girl, to see them dehumanize other girls. Now, as I look back, it strikes me that they really believed that women only wore skimpy clothing to attract them. Everything women wore was directed at them, personally, because they were men.

Walking down the street for them must have been like fending off endless trays of hors d’oeuvres at a party. Only the hors d’oeuvres were poisoned, so it was urgent that they turn down each offer, graciously if they could, but most of all firmly. Every woman who walked by was offering, inviting, enticing them to sin. If their bodies responded, they were in peril for their lives. The “fat” girls were easy targets for these boys. Although they were still “offering” (by not dressing “modestly”), they were like sardines on a platter: lacking allure, they were easy to turn down and laugh about afterwards. Finally, the idea of being friends with such a girl or listening to what she had to say became ludicrous.  She had already said everything she could possibly want to say to a guy when she put on a pair of shorts.

(I won’t go into detail about the horrible ramifications of teaching young men that women are constantly offering themselves for sex just by being visible. But I’m sure you can imagine what I might say about that.)

3. The modesty doctrine teaches men that the worst possible danger lies between their own legs. They are taught to fear their bodies and natural urges. There is no such thing as an innocent sexual thought for an unmarried Christian man. There is most definitely no masturbation. When a guy actually courts a girl, he must walk the impossible line of learning to love her without wanting to kiss or touch her at all. Courtships and engagements can be blindingly short for this reason, but what happens afterwards? A man who has been taught to avoid feeling attracted to all women, including his fiancée, now suddenly has to be passionately attracted to his wife and able to perform. This sounds like a recipe for a lot of false starts, fears and failures of communication.

4. The modesty doctrine does not give men any tools to deal with unwanted sexual attraction. It only tells them not to feel something they can’t help, and then tells them that they could go to hell for it. They do not learn to take a beat and let it pass, to move on and forget about it, to live their lives with the security of knowing that they are in charge of what they do. They literally believe that they can be moved to animalistic rape by the curve of a woman’s knee.

Evangelical Christian culture teaches men that being faithful to their wives is an incredible challenge. Evil women are lurking everywhere, waiting to pounce and drag them into their dens of sin. Women’s sexual power is so overwhelming that, at any moment, they could topple into the devil’s pit. Worse yet, there’s nothing they can do to prevent it other than pray and avert their eyes. No wonder they feel helpless. No wonder they’re afraid.

It is this perpetual peril that drives evangelical men to ridiculous lengths to rid their world of sexual stimuli. The only way to prevent the inevitable (adultery or fornication) is to keep women under wraps (literally). Men become micromanagers of their wives’ and daughters’ clothing. My pastor once chastised his 11 year old daughter for wearing her sweatshirt off her shoulders (with a t-shirt underneath). “Either take that off or put it on,” he ordered sternly, warning her that boys might see the sweatshirt and think about her taking all her clothes off. I was mystified that this had even entered his mind. Because the Christian patriarchy movement invests men with such significant power, their fears take precedence as the laws of the home. Because it’s impossible for a man to fully protect himself, the job falls to all the women around him to make sure he doesn’t turn into a sex-crazed werewolf.

5. The modesty doctrine gives men contradictory messages about masculinity. The doctrine teaches them that they need to protect themselves from sin by avoiding feeling attracted to women. American culture, on the other hand, tells them that the only way to prove that theyare masculine is to be interested in sex with women (along with violence, beer and mechanical things). Christian boys feel like sitting ducks for abuse from their peers, who assume that they are gay because they avoid participating in the rituals of adolescent sexuality (like flipping through smutty magazines and checking out the cheerleaders). Since conservative evangelical groups consider being gay an even worse sin than having the hots for a girl, these boys are trapped between a rock and a hard place. They are terrified that gay boys will be attracted to them, and terrified to be attracted to girls.

My teenage best friend was constantly trying to assert his heterosexuality. Not only could he not date (taking away the “I have a girlfriend” excuse), he couldn’t spend time alone with female friends, return the playful glances of his coworkers or have a crush on a movie star. He therefore plunged headlong into identifying as a “nerd” whose intellect left no time for girls. The truth was that his family had forbidden him to court until he finished college. While in college, perceiving visual assaults on all sides, he locked himself in his room for almost the entirety of a six-week study abroad program in France. The reason? There were girls there,drinking.

6. Finally, the modesty doctrine erases gay and lesbian people entirely. The idea of being gay is just a terrifying specter for straight boys in this culture; actually being gay is frightening to admit, even to themselves.  There is literally no code of behavior for them other than to “repent” of their “sin.” I’m not sure which one is worse: being told that you’re an abomination or being told that you don’t exist. In either case, gay boys are receiving signals that they aren’t men, because “real” men need to wrestle with their attraction to women and suppress it constantly. “Every Man’s Battle” is the revealing name of an evangelical anti-pornography initiative. For gay men, there is an entirely different war going on. Theirs is a lonelier battle.

What do I make of all this?

It’s a lot of needless suffering for both men and women. Sexual attraction is a biological norm. It happens, whether you’re young or old, gay or straight, in a relationship or not. It lasts for a second and you get on with your life. But by pairing those fleeting moments of appreciation for a face on a billboard or a stranger’s lean legs with sinful lust, evangelical Christians have created an impossible bind for men and a culture of hostility for women. Living outside of this culture now, I can tell the difference between attraction (when a man smiles at me across the street or pays me a compliment) and lust (when a man follows me with his eyes fixed somewhere below my shoulders, or says something vulgar). What youdo with sexual attraction is what makes you moral or immoral. If you accept the lie that you can’t control yourself and use your sexual attraction to control or intimidate others, then you are indeed enslaved to your own lust and a danger to people. If you recognize, however, that you are always in control of your own actions and that you can choose not to act on sexual attraction, you can protect yourself and others. Self-control and respect for others are the lessons we should teach boys (and girls). We should not teach them to fear their bodies, feel attacked by the mere sight of attractive strangers, or despise the people they find attractive.

These are the things I’ve discovered through growing up with mostly male friends (an odd circumstance that got me punished in various ways in my fundamentalist church). I have also learned a lot from men who weren’t raised this way, who are used to living their lives without worrying about feeling attracted to strangers, or sexy pictures, or movie stars. I can’t pretend to know all the details of either experience, but I do remember the agony in the voices of my friends who were tired of fighting the modesty battle all the time. I remember their frustration and anger when girls flirted with them, and they were powerless. I remember how much they resented being called gay, and how they assumed stances of superiority to fend off the hurt of being falsely identified with a group they were taught to fear and hate. I can hardly imagine the frustration of actually being gay in this environment and being told weekly that you are an abomination in the eyes of God. All this heartache could have been avoided by adopting a normal approach to sexuality.

If I could do anything to soften the blows of the modesty doctrine, I would tell young boys, “There is nothing wrong with you. It’s normal to feel attracted to people. You can want to eat nothing but chocolate cake all the time, but you know that wouldn’t be good for you. You also have the power not to have sex until you know it will be good for you. Your body belongs to you, and you decide what it does. This is your freedom and your responsibility, not anyone else’s.”

The modesty doctrine is a game that no one ever wins. It perpetuates fear and contempt in men. It oppresses women. It needs to stop.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

Sierra is a PhD student living in the Midwest. She was raised in a “Message of the Hour” congregation that followed the ministry of William Branham. She left the Message in 2006 and is the author of the blog The Unspoken Words: A Non-Prophet Message.

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I was born in Minneapolis as a boy.  Mama took one look at me and exclaimed, “I thought he was going to be Rebecca!”  Needless to say, I was scarred for life.  In those days, getting an ultrasound to determine the sex of a baby wasn’t a bygone decision and people essentially relied on the doctors and midwives to make educated guesses based on measurements, heart rates, and old wives tales.

Yes, I was born in a hospital.  My mother birthed all seven of us children before she entered the world of Bill Gothard (Billy Boy G.), i.e. no home births.   Thus, there were no complications when she had to have an emergency C-section with my younger sister (though she constantly attributed that sister’s rebellion to not being squeezed through the birth canal).

I was the middle child of seven.  I had an older sister, two older twin brothers, two younger sisters, and my baby bro.  We were all within 7.5 years in age, allowing us to be very close as we tried to navigate the hell that was to be our childhood and young adult years.

My father tells the story that he knew something was wrong with Mama when my older sister (I’ll call her Marie) was beaten at the ripe old age of six months – for crying.  This practice helped Mama fit in to her new-found faith once she found Billy Boy G in 1987, 10 years later.  Marie was beaten until she escaped at 25 years old, a fact you might remember from my previous installments.

The only memory I have of being beaten during my “little years” was when we were being babysat by an aunt.  The aunt was a good woman and allowed kids to be kids.  I climbed up on the dresser in the boys’ bedroom and knocked a bunch of clothes off of it.  As a young whippersnapper, I never cleaned up my messes – unless I was beaten.  Children tend to learn things like that quickly.  Mama came home and found the mess and lit into me.  I have no recollection of the beating –just the narrative.  And she never let me forget. Years later, she still used that incident as proof that I was a disobedient, evil, louse.

I saw very little of my dad and have almost no memories of him from when I was younger.  He was going to night school to finish his law and accounting degrees while working full time as an accountant to feed his burgeoning family.  As far as I can remember, not one good word ever came out of Mama’s mouth about him.

“Your father is lazy.”  “Papa can’t hold a job down.”  “You are not allowed to play with Papa when he comes home because he allows you to do disobedient things.”  So much for such little minds to take in.  And guess what…we believed every word of it.  After all, Mama was with us twenty-four hours a day.  She fed, clothed, and beat us.  Why wouldn’t we believe every word?  Our livelihood depended on it.

I learned to hate my father.  This would prove to be a feeling that would take years to reverse.  Even today, I love him dearly and yet still find it difficult to form a close bond.  I missed so much during those years as a brainwashed little boy.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

I am a 30 something husband of one and father of 6 dynamic and loud children. My wife and I are still madly in love – at least in my view. My world is exciting, tense, and full of life. I love to write and hope to one day, do it full time. – Incongruous Circumspection

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