Tag: Non-Prophet Message

The Dead Village: Living With Disapproval

November 2, 2010

by Sierra

Leaving quiverfull/patriarchal Christianity means losing approval. It means your parents, children, or spouse may reject you – or worse, implicitly disapprove while claiming to maintain a loving bond. That means that every time you talk, there’s another dagger through your heart – the feeling that you’ll never again have their respect (if you ever did in the first place) or be a whole person in their eyes (if you ever were).

It almost certainly means your community evaporates like a holographic illusion. You walk away, and it’s like you left behind a burning village with only ghosts pacing the streets. Sometimes they haunt you – follow you into your new life, reminding you at every false step that you’re on the wrong path, that they know what you really need, that you need to stop this foolish stubborn sinful willfulness and surrender to God. He loves you – the ghosts remind you when your heart is crushed – and there you went and walked away from him. Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame. But if you’re penitent enough, he’ll take you back, they say. Except there is no going back. There are no living things left in the village.

You are accused. Suddenly you’re worse than your abusers – sometimes the abused person you tried to defend tells you it’s all your fault. Sometimes your children curse your face. When you finally drop leaden umbrella of protection under which you were staggering, others accuse you of exposing them to the elements. Their pain is your fault, they say. Shame, shame, shame.

Daughter of the Patriarchy: A Jewel or a Trash Can

January 19, 2010

by Sierra William Branham with a woman in his prayer line. (He would lay on hands, pray, and they would walk away healed, allegedly.) If you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always had an answer. If you asked again in ten minutes, it would be a different one. I wanted to be a figure skater, detective, veterinarian, zoologist, writer, astronaut and archaeologist – and not just one at a time. When I went outdoors to play, I climbed rocks and saw them as mountains. When I jumped over Full post …

Daughter of the Patriarchy: Scooby Doo and the Angel

January 12, 2010

by Sierra By my eighth birthday, Anna’s church had become our own. My father attended sporadically, but my mother and I adopted a weekly ritual of driving forty minutes through the woods, to the highway, passing numerous small churches on our way to the secret annex of the YMCA. No one would have guessed there was a church there, unless they happened by as we all bustled in with our flowing skirts and dresses and exited under the mid-afternoon sun. My mother was enthralled, talking excitedly to Anna and her new friend Sheila every day. Full post …

Daughter of the Patriarchy: Old-Girl in Young-Girl Disguise

November 25, 2009

by Sierra “What did you think?” My mother asked, as our blue Chevrolet rolled smoothly out of the parking lot, mingling with more expensive cars on a fresh-paved freeway. “I liked it,” responded seven-year-old I. “I actually listened.” We were talking about our first visit to Anna and Sven’s church, an informal affair that gathered weekly in the upper annex of a suburban YMCA. The church had begun in the pastor’s living room, hosting only two or three families. Over the next few years it had grown to six or seven. The pastor and his Full post …

Daughter of the Patriarchy: A Terrible Secret

October 21, 2009

by Sierra When we went to visit the house in Pennsylvania, it seemed remote, dark and expansive. At the inquisitive yet reticent age of seven, I hovered behind my mother’s leg as we looked around the basement of the long ranch house. It wasn’t quite a finished basement, but there was a bar installed with Heineken cans lining the ceiling. A child about my age was sitting on the floor playing with some ugly 1990s toys. We shared a mutual glance of childhood understanding: we were not agents in this business of buying, selling and Full post …