Dear Frank,
I am a former Christian homeschooling mother of seven who finally walked away from fundamentalism after our radical extremism drove my oldest daughter to attempt suicide ~ and I would like to help you spread your message and sell your books.
In bible college, your father was my absolute hero ~ I read all of his books and was determined to study Christian apologetics until I could defend my faith as skillfully as Francis Schaeffer!
However, as the years went by, fundamentalist “family values” put me in my place as a woman ~ and so I shifted my focus and that’s when your mother, Edith became my role model as I devoted myself to homemaking and motherhood.
I dutifully birthed seven “foot soldiers for Jesus” ~ nearly losing my life on more than one occasion. I was totally sold out ~ and as a homeschooler, I was exposed to the most extreme aspects of Dominionism. I felt that James Dobson, Tony Perkins, even Don Wildmon were lightweights ~ I much preferred the uncompromising Randall Terry ~ and Paul dePairie was better yet.
When Flip Benham came to Nebraska, I baked chicken-pot pies for him and we packed all our friends and associates into our livingroom to hear Flip speak about what it really means to be radically “pro-life.”
I was married to a blind man and in order to create a way for him to support our growing “quiverfull” family, I started a “pro-life, pro-family” newspaper in Northeast Nebraska. I followed all the major right-wing leaders in the “culture wars” and used my newspaper to challenge Christians to join the fight to restore America’s godly heritage. My articles advocating no-birth-control-for-Christians and heralding the Old Testament patriarchal family structure were carried by all the major home school publications ~ I even wrote for AFA’s Agape Press News.
Now, my newspaper, which I published for 16 years, had a circulation of around 5,000 ~ so I was totally a small-bit player compared to what you were doing on the national level, but that is not for lack of talent and ambition ~ it was only because, as a woman, I was too busy fulfilling my high calling of producing and raising up an army for God within my own home.
Cutting to the chase here ~ the extremist lifestyle was a total set-up for burn-out for me ~ and psychosis for my oldest daughter.
I met a long-lost uncle who is an atheist ~ and for some reason we hit it off and began a year-long email correspondence. At the very beginning, I wrote to my Uncle Ron this quote which I picked up from one of Francis Schaeffer’s books: Atheists have both feet firmly planted in mid-air. There’s no way that I would ever give up my certainty ~ my absolute “Blessed Assurance” for Ron’s worldview which he described as a “dissonant world of emergence and transition.”
