Tag: culture war

The Beautiful Girlhood Doll ~ Part 2: Purity & Contentment

April 17, 2011
by Libby Anne
To be pure in body, mind, and spirit is more precious than all the promises the world offers. Young ladies who experience a beautiful girlhood guard their hearts against anything that would rob them of purity and are content to wait upon the Lord and trust the leadership of Mom and Dad.

My mother taught us when we were little that prostitutes are women who sell their kisses. We, in contrast, were to be pure and save our kisses for our wedding day.

I am not sure when I learned that my dad would give me a purity ring the day I turned thirteen, but it must have been fairly early on because I remember thinking “I’m only seven and it will be six more years until I get my purity ring! How am I going to wait that long?” And indeed, I couldn’t wait. Finally, on my thirteenth birthday, mom and dad took me out to eat and gave me the most beautiful ring I had ever seen. It was love at first sight, and from that point on, I wore my purity ring constantly.

When I was around twelve, I read I Kissed Dating Goodbye, by Joshua Harris, and loved it. Next I read Jeff McLean’s Courtship. There was a lot of other literature too, most of it from No Greater Joy and Vision Forum. My parents read the literature too, though I am not sure when. What I do know is that I cannot remember a time when courtship was not the expectation. I embraced the idea of courtship as wholeheartedly as my parents, and used to daydream about young men asking my father’s permission to court me.

I never found not dating as a teenager odd, and I think that this was for two reasons. First, I did not meet many boys my age. In fact, I did not have a single male friend. Sure, I saw my brothers’ friends, but they were significantly younger than I and thus not marriage material. Through some strange coincidence, all of the families my family associated with had only girls my age, and their brothers were all younger. So in other words, I never had a guy that I was close to, or even really knew at all, so there was never any desire to date anyone, or even any opportunity to court. But then, I knew that would come eventually. The second reason not dating didn’t seem odd was that none of my friends dated either.

While I knew I believed in courtship, I had very little idea about how it would unfold in practice. I guess I figured that my father would handle it when the time came. Every time I saw an article on courtship in No Greater Joy magazine, I hoped my dad would read it and take notes. At some point, dad gave me a list of requirements that a candidate for my hand would have to pass. While his list was not very long, it did include the basics. My list, in contrast, was much longer.

When I was sixteen, my dad made me a hope chest. I was thrilled. I proceeded to fill it with a variety of items, including linens, kitchenware, and books on homemaking. I was very proud of my hope chest, and I could hardly wait to be a wife. I would open my hope chest and smell the cedar, and just know that my future would bring me much joy. I could hardly wait.

The Beautiful Girlhood Doll ~ Part 1: Faith & Fortitude

April 7, 2011

by Libby Anne

The spirit of beautiful girlhood is alive in the girl who, with courage and fortitude, perseveres through the many challenges of life. She realizes that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” and consequently, strives for the principled course of action.

My parents saw us children as empty slates, and held that we had been given to them as gifts from God. At the same time, they believed that babies were born full of sin and ready to lead destructive, miserable, evil lives if allowed to develop without training. Therefore, my parents believed that it was their duty to shape and mold us into godly men and women, and they took this duty very seriously.

When we were little, my parents, following the teaching of Michael and Debi Pearl, trained us children to obey their simplest commands. My parents said they believed in house proofing the baby, rather than baby proofing the house. This meant that they would intentionally leave enticing objects within reach of a toddler, and then spank his or her hand and say “no” each time he or she reached for it. Similarly, they would call a toddler to come, spank the child if he or she did not come immediately, and then try it again. In this way, we were forced to submit our wills and learn obedience. After all, my parents told us, disobedience was rebellion against God.

My parents also worked hard to instill their faith in us children. We were expected to spend personal time reading the Bible and praying each morning before doing our chores. After chores came breakfast, and after breakfast, Bible time. My mother read the Bible aloud to us and then we discussed the passage and had group prayer. God was included in nearly every one of our homeschool subjects, including history and science. We learned that God had guided the founding fathers as they wrote the Constitution and that science properly understood shows that God created the world in six literal days six thousand years ago. Before bed, my parents gathered all of us together and prayed with us. God was a given, a part of our lives, and Jesus was a personal friend.

My mother used God to teach us to behave. If two of my siblings were bickering, they would be told to imagine that Jesus was standing right there with them. A child who was sulking would be asked, “do you think you are making Jesus happy right now?” If one of my siblings did his chores sloppily, my mother would quote from the Bible: “Do your job cheerfully as unto the Lord.” If one of my siblings needed an “attitude readjustment,” they would be sent to their bed with their Bible and told to read it. Another frequent punishment was copying down a verse from the Bible by hand, fifty or even a hundred times. In this way we were told a million times a day to make sure that our behavior conformed with what God would want, and of course, what God wanted—for us to do our chores thoroughly, to have a cheerful, loving attitude, and not bicker—was what mom and dad wanted.

Once we reached high school, my siblings and I took an apologetics class with a professor of theology my parents knew. I loved learning the fine points of doctrine, and I loved thinking about Christian theology. My parents often discussed theology around the supper table, helping us children understand what we believed and why. I frequently checked out books from our church library and read about a variety of subjects. The more I read the more convinced I was that my parents’ beliefs were right. I was devoted to my faith and dedicated to my Savior. Like my parents, I believed wholeheartedly that demons were real, that the rapture was coming, that the world had been created in six days six thousand years ago, and that anyone who had not asked Christ as their savior was destined for hell. This instilled me with a deep sense of mission – I had a purpose and a destiny.

Family Man, Family Leader: Created to be His Help Meet – Help I’ve Created a Monster. Part 1

April 3, 2011

by LivingForEternity

My husband and I met at work. We were both recovering from failed marriages, and were friends for a long time before we started dating. After having a failed marriage we were both determined not to let another one fail.

We had two kids within nineteen months. That was fine as we wanted several children. He worked a lot of hours so I was a very capable manager of our home. I could feed babies and fix water leaks. I did not find it necessary to ask him about every single thing I did. If something needed fixing or doing I took care of it if he wasn’t able to. We were partners. However, as the children began to approach school age I began to question whether I wanted them to go away every day. I had quit work by this time, and really loved my kids.

It was decided that I would home educate them. Both of us are college educated, and we felt confident that this would be possible. I was not into a whole bunch of character stuff. I just liked my kids and wanted to be with them. As I began to get involved in a local home school group I was introduced to some ideas I had never heard of before. I met a lot of women who were very different from me. They seemed to be so calm with their many children. They had never worked and many were not college educated.

As I said before I was very independent. I was in no way co-dependent on my husband. I was a very capable person who could take care of most anything I had to. My new “friends” saw this and sought to “help” me. One of those helps was Created to Be His Help Meet.

The Beautiful Girlhood Doll ~ Introduction

March 29, 2011

by Libby Anne My parents started out as fairly ordinary evangelicals. My mother intended to go back to work after I was born, but once she held me in her arms she decided she could not bear to leave me with anyone else, and so she stayed at home. When I turned five, my mom could not bear the thought of sending me off to kindergarten. I was still so little, after all, and what did kids really learn in kindergarten? She had heard of homeschooling, and, though she was still skeptical, she decided to Full post …

Dispelled ~ One Girl’s Journey in a Home School Cult ~ Part 7: Surviving Abuse

February 15, 2011

Please note: The content contained herein does not necessarily reflect the values and opinions of the NLQ blog and its administrators.

by Chandra

For a brief while, the storms in my life had appeared to reach a kind of calm. While I still, at 17, remained friendless and lonely, at least Candi’s abusive and bullying behavior towards me took a backseat as I prepared for my last year of “high school.”
My education, all twelve years of it, had been a complete fraud. The closer I become to achieving my degree in Special Education, the more I am dumbfounded how one parent could let their child’s academic achievements become so neglected. Not only am I a soon to be educator, I am also a parent of three sons who are all in school. Honestly, it sickens me.

My best friend and I have since concurred, that even though the state of Missouri had laws on what we had to achieve in order to graduate school, we both knew that neither of our mothers had done a thing to help keep us up to date and within the bounds of one of the nation’s laxest homeschooling laws. We both understood that in order to graduate, we had to meet certain requirements within our high school transcripts. Though both of us pleaded for help, our mothers ignored our pleas. We took matters into our own hands (just to have freedom!) and forged our own transcripts. Not my proudest moment, and I am sure that I did myself no favors. However, to borrow a cliché’: Desperate times call for desperate measures. If every state had strict oversight of homeschooling families, and a social worker assigned to each family in order to catch neglect and abuse, then this would not be an issue.

I can say with a great amount of confidence that based on my preliminary research, nearly 80% of homeschooling graduates that I have spoken with never completed 100% of the requirements that were needed in their state in order to graduate (if that state had no oversight or accountability written into their laws). The only ones who have met these standards, within these lax states, were the ones whose parents either a) enrolled them in an on-line learning school or b) their parents’ had a higher degree (e.g. a Masters) and a great amount of emphasis was placed on academic achievement (not character achievement). Someone needs to intervene on behalf of these children, and something needs to be done to rework the current laws on homeschooling. Yet again another reason I write.

I was pretty lonely in my senior year, and really regretted the fact that when I spoke to my Grandmas they would frequently ask me if I ever wanted to attend a senior prom. Wanting to please my parents, and escape the brainwashing of my mom, I gave them the answer that my parents needed to hear. I was happy being homeschooled, and “saving” myself for that one special person. Dating in high school, I told them, was wrong. Deep down, I wished that my mom had been out of the range of hearing so that I could have a private conversation with one of them and tell them just how unhappy I was. Not only was I not allowed to tell them what was really going on in my life, I was never trusted to talk to them apart from my mom. I was deeply saddened that I was missing out on such a big part of high school. I would look at my cousins’ prom pictures and my heart would cry. I longed to have a formal gown, longed to dance, longed to just have fun. And more than anything, I longed to have a friend.

Steadfast Daughters in a Quivering World ~ Part 6: Soul-Binding

December 17, 2010

[Note: this series is dedicated to Quivering Daughtersby the former-Quiverfull moms at No Longer Quivering.]
by Daisy

My name is Daisy.

I am a good person…but I was a bad parent.

Tragically, by choosing QF/patriarchal fundamentalist methodology as the pattern for my home, believing that it would provide the very best insurance against messing up with parenthood, I messed up. I messed up badly. I hurt my kids and, worse, I silenced them when they tried to tell me about it. Criticizing your parents is, of course, disrespectful and therefore opening a dangerous door that may lead a child ultimately to rebelling against God – and as I believed that put my child in danger of hellfire, of course, I conscientiously nipped dissent in the bud at every opportunity.

As it happens, my eyes were just opening to the dreadful truth that QF had sold me a bill of goods when my oldest child found her voice. I was on the way out of QF teaching, patriarchal Christianity and my marriage when that beautiful daughter tried to describe her pain to me by starving herself almost to death. Shortly after she began her lengthy treatment for anorexia, another of my children found a way to tell me that her soul was in agony. A razor blade and a veritable hill of pills were her loud-hailer.

If you, like me, raised your children in QF until at least their early teens, you may have already had to endure the sorrow of watching your children rise up and call you Monster, or at least, Failure. If you haven’t yet, it is my opinion that, you probably will. And, believe it or not, this is a good, good thing. I do hope your child does not need to resort to the dramatic acts my oldest two did in order to gain your attention, in fact, I would plead with you to listen to them well before that becomes necessary. But I want to encourage you with this:

As parents we should not be afraid of the volume or power or ugliness of the moment – or indeed the many moments – when our child finds her young adult voice. What we really should be afraid of is her silence. That compliant 25-year-old looks and sounds like an adult, but she has a 12-year-old soul. Like the tiny feet of Chinese girls crushed and tightly bound in rags by well-intentioned parents to prevent their healthy growth, that child may be the victim of a sort of a ‘soul-binding’. This disastrous mistake may have doomed her to endure both a crippling emotional agony and an ongoing rage that her mother could dare to insist that such a violent and abusive act was perpetrated because of love.

Steadfast Daughters in a Quivering World ~ Part 5: Confessions of a Quiverfull Hero

December 14, 2010

[Note: this series is dedicated to Quivering Daughters by the former-Quiverfull moms at No Longer Quivering.]
by Daisy

I was only 19 when I arrived at Christianity’s door, bruised and highly impressionable and, because of my family situation, determined to do a better job of sorting out my life than my parents had done. Victims of abuse in their own homes, my parents had learned very early to dissociate from their emotions. Our home was an emotionally sterile one and, although I know now that this is not true, as as child I believed my parents did not love me. I decided that when *I* had kids, if they grew up knowing nothing else, they would know for sure that I loved them more than breathing.

I became the kind of Christian mother other Christian mothers looked up to in awe. My numerous children were admired wherever they went: smart, lively, godly and absolutely obedient. Women used to call on me and ask advice, yearning to be able to produce the kind of wonderful ‘fruit’ I was enjoying in abundance in my children. I would explain the difference between violent abuse and the loving application of ‘the rod’ which turned children’s little hearts away from sin and toward God. I would explain that I spanked sparingly and always in the context of a warm, loving expansive relationship, as part of a ritual that included healthy confession, repentance, and loving forgiveness. Anyone who knew my kids could see that following these biblical parenting principles was paying off big time.

As committed as I was to following the principles I’d come to believe would help me to raise wonderful and godly children, and as invested as I was in the outcome, I was blind to the true state of my children’s hearts. Forbidding certain, and indeed numerous, beliefs and practices which I now see were absolutely benign didn’t make my children lose their taste for them as I thought it would – it just drove them underground. In order to indulge perfectly normal, harmless preferences and cling to some semblance of separate identity, my children were forced to construct a secret inner life to which I had no access and which, of course, added considerably to their guilt burden.

Despite many, many lessons about the love and forgiveness of a generous heavenly Father, I realize now that my children were not able to reconcile the horrors of personal guilt and the fear of punishment against abstract concepts such as Christian integrity and the grace of God. In an effort to explain the kindness and extent of a grace so great it could save even sinners like us, I inadvertently buried my older children in the shallow grave of shame, self-loathing, and later, deep, deep rage. They came to be appalled at the lurking sin monster that evidently resided in their hearts, and endured an abiding self-disgust that their natural bents seemed often to be precisely what God deemed evil.

My older girls were damaged in particularly sad ways. QF standards of modesty caused them to wonder just what was so disgusting or dangerous about their bodies that they needed to keep them so carefully under wraps. Witnessing my unreasonably energetic efforts to submit to their father, my girls learned that even when a man is stupid, petty and a bully, God wants Christian women and their children to bear it with a smile and a prayer. I taught them that heroic hypocrisy was more important than honest misery. Their determination not to repeat my marital nightmare ultimately caused them to question their sexual orientation. Frustrated in the belief that the whole world was conspiring to strip them of their sense of self and squeeze them into a mold for which they were not fitted, my daughters generated lakefuls of underground anger which eventually exploded into terrifying geysers of self-destructive energy.

But I was oblivious to this at the time. I adored my children, poured my life out for them, and simply could not imagine that my best and most sincere efforts at applying what was, after all, God’s methodology might be harming them in anyway.

But it was.

Steadfast Daughters in a Quivering World ~ Part 4: Acknowledgement & Apologies

December 12, 2010

[Note: this series is dedicated to Quivering Daughters by the former-Quiverfull moms at No Longer Quivering.]
In this part of our series, the ex-QF moms of NLQ are speaking directly to our own Quivering Daughters ~ though we’ve already said our apologies in person, we want to acknowledge the abuse we inflicted on our children publicly for their sake, though we’re doing it anonymously out of respect for their privacy.

Trigger warning: As painful it has been for us to write these confessions down ~ it may be even tougher for the Quivering Daughters who were on the receiving end of our neglect and abuse to read.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

My children were everything to me. I remember the feelings I had when I gave birth to my first child, emotions that surprised me with their ferocity. I’d spent my entire life focusing on me, more than anyone else, and yet now, after a few hours of the most horrible pain I’d ever experienced in my entire life (so much for the pain-free birthing books I’d read and committed to memory), this bloody squalling thing suddenly became the Most Important Thing On Earth.

I looked in shock at my husband, holding that baby that, up until then, I’d never even seen with my physical eyes, and, my gaze wide with amazement at the power of the raw protective urge coursing through my body, said, “I’d do anything for her. I don’t care if it is a Mack Truck on the highway—I’d willingly let it run over me if it would save her life.”

I was absolutely, totally and emphatically in love.

So when a woman from church gave me an innocent looking white book with an Amish-style family on the front cover, telling me it was the best book on raising children she’d ever read, I was interested. Two pages into it, I was hooked. Here was a man telling me that there was a sure-fire way that I could raise my child and guarantee that she would grow up to love and serve the Lord. As a devout evangelical conservative Christian, there was nothing more important to me than that. As bad as a Mack Truck accident might be, there was no “accident” or situation worse than the thought of my child not growing up to follow Christ—because that would mean an entire eternity of Hell. A Mack Truck can’t begin to compare.

So with my mother-love highly aroused and my fears fully engaged, I read, page by page, all about the way to ensure that your children are properly trained so that they will grow up to love and serve God.

If I could sum up the message that this book spoke to a young mother who deeply loved her baby, it was this:

“Momma, your baby is a sinner. He/she will try to manipulate you. Things like a child not liking a diaper change and squirming to be free are an example of a sinful will attempting to dominate you. You may think this is a little thing, but it’s huge. Why? Because if you let the child dominate you, the child will win. If the child wins, the child will learn that rebellion pays. The child will then grow up to probably reject God and go to Hell, because a rebellious heart will not want to follow God. So, Momma, never ever let your child win. Your child’s exertion of will [which includes anything you deem unacceptable---grumpiness, for example] is an act of war, and parenting is about the parent winning any and all battles of wills.”

I loved my baby. How grateful, absolutely grateful I felt, that someone was there to show me the way. Now, at last, there was hope! My baby would get the joy of growing up in a home where things were done right. She wouldn’t have to go through the things I went through! No, she was going to have a godly home where she would be trained properly, and she would grow up happy and obedient and full of love towards God. It was so exciting.

So exciting that I bought ten of those books and passed them out to my friends so that they could all join in the delight of knowing we could raise our children in a way that would ensure both their happiness now and their eternal future in Heaven.

I didn’t know. If I could go back now and re-do the way I parented that little baby, I would. Out of all the things in my life that I deeply regret, that is the most painful, the most difficult, the most horrific set of memories to revisit. Because the thing is, I love my children no less now than I did then. It’s still a ferocious mother-bear kind of love. It’s still so powerful it is palpable.

But seeing your children as enemies in a war creates a fundamental crack in the parent-child relationship. Even if there is the most powerful love in the universe on the other side of the crack, the divide is still there…including the distortion of communication it causes. I entered into a performance-based parenting model out of love for my child. But that model does not feed love, or nurture love, or engage love.