Post by Sierra on Aug 20, 2009 15:38:30 GMT -5
Hi folks!
I have been lurking at NLQ for the last few months and have finally dared to make an introduction. I have been gloriously irreligious for about three years now, although it was a slow and exacting process to completely disentangle myself from 12 years of solid fundamentalism. I wasn't a QF parent, nor did my church go out of its way to describe itself as QF. But I was a child raised in a fundamentalist sect that calls itself "The Message of the Hour" with William Branham (d. 1965) its founder, hailed as "the end-time prophet" and a faith healer. Most families did espouse a QF lifestyle (our pastor has 7 children) and there were those among us promoting extreme patriarchal propaganda.
I was 7 years old (and an only child) when my mother started attending the church. Ironically, we found them through homeschooling rather than the other way around. I was a terrifically shy child and was pulled out of public school after a few months of severe anxiety. My mother had recently suffered a traumatic miscarriage, and some of these folks befriended her and offered their support. There are a lot of perfectly understandable reasons for my mother's decision to attend the church. She was a vivacious person looking for a unique and personal relationship with God, which I don't doubt the church provided for her. She was also looking for an escape from my abusive father.
Unfortunately, the teachings of William Branham are painfully misogynistic, and his followers accord his sermons a barely subservient status to the Bible itself. They often claim he "has THUS SAITH THE LORD" (yes, always in caps) which means he is literally dictating the thoughts of God. He openly preached that women would be the downfall of the United States (which was destined to become a nuclear wasteland immediately after the evacuation of the "bride of Christ") by voting in the president who would lead the nation irreparably into sin (he thought this was Kennedy, others later interpreted it as Bill Clinton and god only knows what they're saying about Obama right now). He described women's suffrage as "an evil thing," and promoted a doctrine called The Serpent's Seed that claims the Fall was the result of Eve having sex with an upright beast who just happened to be called the serpent at the time, whereafter there were two races of human beings - descendants of God and Satan - and women were permanently and unremittingly evil and inferior.
I've mentioned that I have an abusive father. He wasn't in the church. In fact, he thought it was crap. This wasn't particularly helpful, as he was very interested in the doctrines of female submission and would make degrading commands of my mother and me. "Coffee, woman!" he would yell across the house, after tossing himself into his armchair in front of some military history program. As a young child, I remember climbing into his lap to be met with "Go away, little girl. You're bothering me." He smiled as he said it, so I didn't know he wasn't kidding until he shoved me away. But worst was the way my mother shut down during his screaming, abusive fits, because submissive women are supposed to "type" the suffering of Christ in the face of abuse. Our church used to tell a story about a woman whose abusive husband was won over at last through the longsuffering of his godly wife. He had come home after a long night of binge drinking and philandering and demanded that his wife make scrambled eggs. She did as he asked, and he flung them across the room, shattering the plate. As she knelt to clean up the eggs and shards of ceramic, she began to sing a hymn, and "the Lord" struck him with the conviction that he needed to be a good Christian like his wife. The repugnance of that story has stuck with me since I was a little girl.
As a teenager, things got worse. Due to the doctrine of the Serpent's Seed and the fact that I had an unbelieving father, I was perpetually mistrusted, a sort of half-devil girl. I was simultaneously set up with a young man from the church and treated as a whore for half-believing that we should be together since everyone thought so. Despite the fact that we'd never held hands or hugged, his mother took aversion to me and treated me as a whore and infidel. As young people, we weren't allowed to touch each other (I and some other girls around age 19 once played a basketball game with some 12 year old boys who were desperately afraid that we might brush up against them while scuffling for the ball and thus poison their lustful souls). But I was singled out to be watched, hounded, and forbidden to be in the same room or car with this particular boy, even while other girls (who were clearly interested in him) were permitted those privileges. (And it's just now occurred to me that when those 12 year old boys appeared on the basketball court, the girls all abandoned their game and gave them the ball as if they were expected to defer at all times to their own little brothers. What the hell?)
Patriarchy teaches women to internalize all the negativity continually thrust at them. I did so by developing an eating disorder. When I was 14, I decided to "fix everything" by becoming religious like my mother. Everything in my life needed to change, I reasoned. I threw out the oh-so-subversive Billy Joel MP3s I'd listened to with headphones and danced to after my parents were asleep. But I also stopped eating, because I thought weight was a neat, calculable problem - easier to change than my sense of impending doom and lack of salvation. One deluded soul attempted to dissuade me, Above Rubies in hand, with the warning, "But women need some fat on their hips to bear children!" I laughed in her face. I was 14, and patriarchy made motherhood look like hell.
This was the period when I also cut myself off from the wonderful online friends I'd made who supported me through adolescence. I cut myself off because I was afraid to witness and could not handle the thought that they were all going to die in nuclear fallout after the Rapture(TM) had whisked away all the true believers. I wrote an agonizing and hypocritical letter to a boy who liked me declaring in a panic that he needed Jesus, not me. I didn't believe it even when I wrote it. As I dug myself deeper into the elusive pit of "trying to be born again," I started to have serious "rapture scares," panic attacks that occurred whenever I couldn't find my mother. I needed her as reassurance that the world hadn't ended yet, that I wasn't trapped in that eerie period just before the Great Tribulation when the bride of Christ had left Earth and there was no more mercy. The pastor always preached that Christ, the "bloody lamb," was "getting off the mercy seat" of the great altar and soon no more applications for eternal salvation would be processed. Sorry folks, you had until April 15th! I went outside screaming and crying one day when my mother had run to the gas station without telling me, fearing that she had been taken and I had been left.
I got myself out through college. My mother, fortunately, always supported my education and work goals. This meant worlds to me, given that the same year that I started college, several other "Message" girls I knew were planning to go to Bob Jones University, but their fathers decided to forbid them. It would have been "too far from their fathers' headship" for these girls to travel to a Bible college in North Carolina from Connecticut. When I started at my own community college, I encountered some of the first genuinely supportive people I've ever known. They loved my work and believed in my future. This was novel - I had a future? But what about the world ending?! Eventually I moved on to a full time school and moved into a dorm, which made the biggest difference. My first roommate was unabashedly irreligious, and also quirky, ambitious, smart and fun. I started to notice that the best people I knew were not the ones from the church. I decided I could not believe in a god who arbitrarily decided that the ones he was going to save were the ones who tortured and oppressed their young girls, and somehow all of the kind, rational, hardworking individuals who supported me were going to hell. Heaven, or rather the "New World," was where the "bride of Christ" ruled over the rest of the Christians who hadn't accepted Branham, and they all unceasingly worshiped the god who had, like an abusive, sadistic man, demanded they kill their very selfhood to suit his most fleeting tastes. I decided that I'd rather go to hell than live in that kind of heaven. I bought my very first pair of jeans a month before I turned 20. I mark June 2006 as my date of emancipation.
If you made it through all that, thank you - I know I can relate so much to your stories. My mother has since left the abusive man. I hope she continues to grow and learn the self-preservation skills she lost over the last 30 years. My goal is to do one day what you are doing - produce a book, or some other compilation of stories, that provides some insight and help to people struggling to free themselves from Biblical patriarchy. While I've shed the belief that everything happens for a reason, I haven't shed the determination to put what happens to work to improve the future.
Live long and prosper!
I have been lurking at NLQ for the last few months and have finally dared to make an introduction. I have been gloriously irreligious for about three years now, although it was a slow and exacting process to completely disentangle myself from 12 years of solid fundamentalism. I wasn't a QF parent, nor did my church go out of its way to describe itself as QF. But I was a child raised in a fundamentalist sect that calls itself "The Message of the Hour" with William Branham (d. 1965) its founder, hailed as "the end-time prophet" and a faith healer. Most families did espouse a QF lifestyle (our pastor has 7 children) and there were those among us promoting extreme patriarchal propaganda.
I was 7 years old (and an only child) when my mother started attending the church. Ironically, we found them through homeschooling rather than the other way around. I was a terrifically shy child and was pulled out of public school after a few months of severe anxiety. My mother had recently suffered a traumatic miscarriage, and some of these folks befriended her and offered their support. There are a lot of perfectly understandable reasons for my mother's decision to attend the church. She was a vivacious person looking for a unique and personal relationship with God, which I don't doubt the church provided for her. She was also looking for an escape from my abusive father.
Unfortunately, the teachings of William Branham are painfully misogynistic, and his followers accord his sermons a barely subservient status to the Bible itself. They often claim he "has THUS SAITH THE LORD" (yes, always in caps) which means he is literally dictating the thoughts of God. He openly preached that women would be the downfall of the United States (which was destined to become a nuclear wasteland immediately after the evacuation of the "bride of Christ") by voting in the president who would lead the nation irreparably into sin (he thought this was Kennedy, others later interpreted it as Bill Clinton and god only knows what they're saying about Obama right now). He described women's suffrage as "an evil thing," and promoted a doctrine called The Serpent's Seed that claims the Fall was the result of Eve having sex with an upright beast who just happened to be called the serpent at the time, whereafter there were two races of human beings - descendants of God and Satan - and women were permanently and unremittingly evil and inferior.
I've mentioned that I have an abusive father. He wasn't in the church. In fact, he thought it was crap. This wasn't particularly helpful, as he was very interested in the doctrines of female submission and would make degrading commands of my mother and me. "Coffee, woman!" he would yell across the house, after tossing himself into his armchair in front of some military history program. As a young child, I remember climbing into his lap to be met with "Go away, little girl. You're bothering me." He smiled as he said it, so I didn't know he wasn't kidding until he shoved me away. But worst was the way my mother shut down during his screaming, abusive fits, because submissive women are supposed to "type" the suffering of Christ in the face of abuse. Our church used to tell a story about a woman whose abusive husband was won over at last through the longsuffering of his godly wife. He had come home after a long night of binge drinking and philandering and demanded that his wife make scrambled eggs. She did as he asked, and he flung them across the room, shattering the plate. As she knelt to clean up the eggs and shards of ceramic, she began to sing a hymn, and "the Lord" struck him with the conviction that he needed to be a good Christian like his wife. The repugnance of that story has stuck with me since I was a little girl.
As a teenager, things got worse. Due to the doctrine of the Serpent's Seed and the fact that I had an unbelieving father, I was perpetually mistrusted, a sort of half-devil girl. I was simultaneously set up with a young man from the church and treated as a whore for half-believing that we should be together since everyone thought so. Despite the fact that we'd never held hands or hugged, his mother took aversion to me and treated me as a whore and infidel. As young people, we weren't allowed to touch each other (I and some other girls around age 19 once played a basketball game with some 12 year old boys who were desperately afraid that we might brush up against them while scuffling for the ball and thus poison their lustful souls). But I was singled out to be watched, hounded, and forbidden to be in the same room or car with this particular boy, even while other girls (who were clearly interested in him) were permitted those privileges. (And it's just now occurred to me that when those 12 year old boys appeared on the basketball court, the girls all abandoned their game and gave them the ball as if they were expected to defer at all times to their own little brothers. What the hell?)
Patriarchy teaches women to internalize all the negativity continually thrust at them. I did so by developing an eating disorder. When I was 14, I decided to "fix everything" by becoming religious like my mother. Everything in my life needed to change, I reasoned. I threw out the oh-so-subversive Billy Joel MP3s I'd listened to with headphones and danced to after my parents were asleep. But I also stopped eating, because I thought weight was a neat, calculable problem - easier to change than my sense of impending doom and lack of salvation. One deluded soul attempted to dissuade me, Above Rubies in hand, with the warning, "But women need some fat on their hips to bear children!" I laughed in her face. I was 14, and patriarchy made motherhood look like hell.
This was the period when I also cut myself off from the wonderful online friends I'd made who supported me through adolescence. I cut myself off because I was afraid to witness and could not handle the thought that they were all going to die in nuclear fallout after the Rapture(TM) had whisked away all the true believers. I wrote an agonizing and hypocritical letter to a boy who liked me declaring in a panic that he needed Jesus, not me. I didn't believe it even when I wrote it. As I dug myself deeper into the elusive pit of "trying to be born again," I started to have serious "rapture scares," panic attacks that occurred whenever I couldn't find my mother. I needed her as reassurance that the world hadn't ended yet, that I wasn't trapped in that eerie period just before the Great Tribulation when the bride of Christ had left Earth and there was no more mercy. The pastor always preached that Christ, the "bloody lamb," was "getting off the mercy seat" of the great altar and soon no more applications for eternal salvation would be processed. Sorry folks, you had until April 15th! I went outside screaming and crying one day when my mother had run to the gas station without telling me, fearing that she had been taken and I had been left.
I got myself out through college. My mother, fortunately, always supported my education and work goals. This meant worlds to me, given that the same year that I started college, several other "Message" girls I knew were planning to go to Bob Jones University, but their fathers decided to forbid them. It would have been "too far from their fathers' headship" for these girls to travel to a Bible college in North Carolina from Connecticut. When I started at my own community college, I encountered some of the first genuinely supportive people I've ever known. They loved my work and believed in my future. This was novel - I had a future? But what about the world ending?! Eventually I moved on to a full time school and moved into a dorm, which made the biggest difference. My first roommate was unabashedly irreligious, and also quirky, ambitious, smart and fun. I started to notice that the best people I knew were not the ones from the church. I decided I could not believe in a god who arbitrarily decided that the ones he was going to save were the ones who tortured and oppressed their young girls, and somehow all of the kind, rational, hardworking individuals who supported me were going to hell. Heaven, or rather the "New World," was where the "bride of Christ" ruled over the rest of the Christians who hadn't accepted Branham, and they all unceasingly worshiped the god who had, like an abusive, sadistic man, demanded they kill their very selfhood to suit his most fleeting tastes. I decided that I'd rather go to hell than live in that kind of heaven. I bought my very first pair of jeans a month before I turned 20. I mark June 2006 as my date of emancipation.
If you made it through all that, thank you - I know I can relate so much to your stories. My mother has since left the abusive man. I hope she continues to grow and learn the self-preservation skills she lost over the last 30 years. My goal is to do one day what you are doing - produce a book, or some other compilation of stories, that provides some insight and help to people struggling to free themselves from Biblical patriarchy. While I've shed the belief that everything happens for a reason, I haven't shed the determination to put what happens to work to improve the future.
Live long and prosper!
