Nikita of the many words...

[nikita]

I just realized that I didn’t introduce myself properly in the right thread so I thought I’d correct that now.

A little history. I was a little hippie girl in the sixties and in 1970 got caught up in a Jesus movement cult, at age fifteen. We were strict but very anti establishment, lived in communal houses unless married (and sometimes even then), and for the first almost-decade believed that pretty much no one else on the planet was going to heaven, that we were the only ones doing it ‘right’. We were close knit even though there were hundreds of us, we had fun together, and we spent hours every day in prayer, reading the bible, and church services. We also worked and/or went to school (to get the money to keep us all going over the long haul) and were completely insular in spite of that. To this day I have a hard time having any kind of relationship with ‘outsiders’ other than the superficial kind that I was able to way back then. The world versus ‘us’, and ‘us’ must not mix too freely lest we become contaminated and lukewarm or worse, fall away. If anyone left, they were shunned and that was the end of them as far as any relationship with them went.

Some folks had large families but it wasn’t a ‘thing’ at that time. After sixteen years I had gained a husband and a child, lost a lot of friends, and the church ‘blew up’ in a very ugly contentious split that had me questioning the Christianity of a great many of the people involved. Folks I thought were good people showed an ugly side that was devastating and horrifying to me. I fled, as did my husband.

I spent two years not dealing with it at all but had no desire to enter another congregation and had no idea what to do spiritually. I was always quite mystical, however, so I thought I’d start there. I got a very strong call to convert to Catholicism and cannot explain it other than in spiritual terms so I will leave that be here. But I studied it exhaustively and carefully, worked with a wonderful priest who ‘got’ me, and converted four years after I fled my original cult. I still have problems with groups of believers but am pretty happy and feel safe in my adopted church no matter where I go. My experience with the cult and the split and the conflicting views of what was proper and scriptural and ‘right’ was so traumatic that I wanted to go back to something ancient and steady, something not influenced so much by whether the assistant pastor wanted to sleep with the piano player’s wife and needed to find a scriptural basis for switching partners.

(Long story made simple: A belief went through the church that there was only one person God had for you and if you didn’t find that person you could never properly do God’s will. So you could marry ‘the wrong person’. If you were married and saw someone else – even if they were married to someone else as well – and you both fell in love you could convince yourself that the second person was ‘the one God meant for you to marry’ and discard the old spouse and get the new one. And any children of the first ‘wrong marriage’ were just casualties of your error. You can imagine how devastating that would be to the suddenly designated ‘wrong one’ – yet leaders and lay people alike were espousing this, and my own husband was making noises that direction for a split second before I threatened to kill him in his sleep).

Anyway, the whole thing was very traumatic at many different levels for me and Catholicism was my firm and steady anchor.

So I completely split off from all those people and lost touch completely until last year when I ran into one of them on facebook. This was a male friend that was always wonderful and wise and I liked hearing from him. He’s one of a handful of people from those days that I respect and actually still like. But friending him put me in touch with scores of folks from way back then and I was overwhelmed by it all. I still don’t trust them. They have scattered to the far ends of the earth, most in this country, and have joined different religions or none at all. The vast majority are in mainstream denominations or other evangelical or fundamentalist churches now.

So I started looking stuff up as it was mentioned on facebook , to see what their different churches taught and believed and was floored. While I was converting to Catholicism and going about my life, my old friends and fellow believers were still in Protestantism and followed it’s varied channels to where those churches wound up today. I had thought that the evangelical and fundamentalist churches were pretty much as I remembered them but they have really evolved and not in a good way IMHO. That’s how I found old friends in Quiverfull groups and homeschooling, and in heavily legalistic Reformed churches. And in one instance I read two of the men discussing a spiritual issue and another female old friend posted a comment and the two men (currently friends of hers) told her to go away and post a thread about gardening or cats or something. The clear message was that spiritual discussions were not for women to participate in. That was a shocker.

The entire facebook reunion experience made my jaw drop and wonder what on earth was going on in the fundamentalist and evangelical church nowadays. People would accuse our old cult of being strict and legalistic but the things they ran off to, especially the Reformed ones, was a hundred times worse than anything we ever dreamed up way back then. It was such a disconnect.

And when one couple – old friends of mine – wound up with thirteen kids in the middle of the wilderness and homeschooling and obviously living Quiverfull, patriarchy, and Reformed theology I decided to research it further and found NLQ.

This is the first (and so far only) place on the internet that I feel I can completely relate to and feel safe in interacting with folks, regardless of my own Catholic beliefs or my cultic past. I actually feel free here.

So I’m glad to be here, and hope to stick around. And will attempt to use less words in further postings. Sorry for the length of this.

[krwordgazer]

That's a fascinating story, Nikita. Thanks for sharing it.

I was in Maranatha Campus Ministries in the early 1980s. Some of what you're talking about sounds very familiar.

[hrd]

Your background is very similar to mine--except that it was my parents who were part of the "Jesus movement," and in their case it had a Jewish flare.

I can totally see how the grounding of the Catholic church could be a comfort.

Welcome, Nikita

[kiery]

If anyone left, they were shunned and that was the end of them as far as any relationship with them went.

I can relate to this, although it was more of a disagreement with my family that brought that on as opposed to cult leadership. I'm so glad that you're out - it must have been hard (and scary).

So happy you feel at home here!

[nikita]

Thanks guys. I'm glad I'm out too, although I miss the good parts. The incredible relationships we had with each other can't be duplicated anywhere else except in such an extreme and cultic environment. All these years later so many of us are meeting up through facebook friends and the sense of connectedness is still very strong, like an unbreakable bond. I imagine people who go through extreme circumstances (fellow political prisoners, or those guys whose plane crashed in the Andes and had to cannibalize the dead, for example) feel similarly. There is a life long bond that simply does not fade with time. And that bond exists even with people I didn't like and still don't, like a sibling you can't stand but would rally for if called upon to do so. Once the group ceased to exist those who left and were shunned no longer maintained that status in the collective consciousness of those who stayed. We are all on even ground now. Which is comforting on some level.

All of this is pretty much impossible to explain to someone who hasn't been there and done that. Which is why this group is so great, because so many of you have been there and done that and can understand. 99.99% of the world has no idea what the hell I'm talking about right now.

[Sierra]

Welcome! I've really enjoyed your posts, so it's nice to hear more of where you're coming from.

I observed similar close-knit bonds in my Branhamist 'Message of the Hour' church without successfully entering any of them. As a result, I developed something of an 'outsider complex' and have never managed to make more than one friend at a time. (Here in grad school I have six different friends, most of whom have met each other only once when I deliberately threw a party.) But I understand the power of the bond. I sometimes think 'failure to bond' explains my ability to walk away from the Message while others can't.

[dangermom]

Hi Nikita, your story is fascinating, thanks for sharing.

[Ex-Adriel]

Sierra, you hit the nail on the head right there -

I never felt like I was accepted by all the groups we floated through (thank heavens for my mother's wandering spirit) so I never was interested in bonding with any of them. They viewed us as outsiders, and I was perfectly happy to stay that way.

On the downside, we were the bottom rung of the totem pole in all of the fellowships. On the upside, I didn't feel like I was losing any friendships or soul buddies when we were eventually shunned or moved on.


and Nikita - you have very well-thought-out posts. I've enjoyed everything you've written so far, and I think you explain yourself and your background in a very interesting way. It's also good to hear from someone else who isn't intimately familiar with the whole Branham/Pearl/QF brand of fundieism. (I'm not, and I can't tell you the trips I've made through wikipedia and amazon.com based on comments in this group!)

Regardess of background, it sure is nice to know that other people here will understand where you're coming from, isn't it!

(edited because I can't spell sometimes)

[usotsuki]

I've practically never been accepted by anyone. Though I fit in among people who should have been my polar opposite. o.o