New Books Explore Fundamentalist, Evangelical Trauma

Publishers are tapping into the deep well of hurt, and ultimately, healing with new books from authors who have escaped fundamentalism

By Ann Byle | Mar 19, 2024

Publishers are tapping into the deep well of hurt, and, ultimately, healing with new books from authors who have escaped cults, fundamentalism and other church abuses. “Thanks in large part to recent books like Jesus and John Wayne (2021) by Kristin Kobes DuMez and social forces like the MAGA movement, many Christians are doing some soul searching, grappling with the role of patriarchy and white supremacy in their theologies and church communities,” said Lisa Ann Cockrel, acquisitions editor at Eerdmans Publishing Co., publisher of Cait West’s forthcoming Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy, which received a starred review from PW.

In the book, due out in April, West offers an honest, heartbreaking story of growing up in the Christian Patriarchy movement, her family ruled by her authoritarian father. She became a stay-at-home-daughter after finishing homeschooling, waiting for her “real” life to begin, when her father chose her husband. Instead, West broke free, marrying a man of her choosing and moving away from her family. “West offers a stirring reminder that these ideologies have very personal consequences in individual lives,” said Cockrel, pointing out that West also has an active online community of survivors. “She has a hard-won wisdom that is a function of doing her own work to heal, but also of walking alongside so many others on the same journey.”

Eerdmans also publishes Angela Herrington’s Deconstructing Your Faith without Losing Yourself (out now), a guide for people in the process of deconstructing their faith, and Tiffany Yecke Brooks’s Holy Ghosted: Spiritual Anxiety, Religious Trauma, and the Language of Abuse (Apr.), a resource for people in the process of reconstructing their faith. Both aim to help readers establish a sense of wholeness after breaking away from toxic religious communities.

Another in the emerging subgenre is Hurt and Healed by the Church: Redemption & Reconstruction After Spiritual Abuse by Ryan George (Punchline Books, April.). George spent his childhood and early adulthood attending Independent Fundamental Baptist churches—his dad was pastor at one—and adhering to teachings like those of fundamentalist teacher Bill Gothard. George left in his 20s, eventually discovering his dad was a serial sexual abuser, and has spent decades reevaluating what he believes and reconstructing his faith in a non-abusive church.

Also find A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy by Tia Levings (St. Martin’s, August), a harrowing tale of Levings’s recruitment into the Quiverfull (which rejects all forms of birth control) and Christian Patriarchy movements, the secret life she maintained as a “keeper of the home,” the years of abuse, and her eventual choice to save herself and her family.

In April, Worthy Books will release Star For Jesus (And Other Jobs I Quit): Rediscovering the Grace that Sets Us Free by Kimberly Stuart, which records Stuart’s journey from doing everything she could to be the perfect Christian—including trying to calm an actual storm and earning “Jesus” gifts for Bible memorization—to seeing God’s grace as her anchor instead of a list of must-dos.

Debie Thomas, columnist for The Christian Century, understands what it means to wrestle her way out of fundamentalism's narrow theology and into the expansiveness and grace of God, a journey she records in A Faith of Many Rooms: Inhabiting a More Spacious Christianity (Broadleaf, Mar. 19). She calls readers to a spacious faith instead of a closed, cramped closet of rules and laws.

And this month, Lake Drive Books will release the third in Marla Taviano’s trilogy of deconstruction poetry titled whole: poems on reclaiming the pieces of ourselves and creating something new, which speaks into looking back to move forward, new thoughts on God and freedom to be your true self. Others in the trilogy are unbelieve: poems on the journey to becoming a heretic (2023) and jaded: a poetic reckoning with white evangelical christian indoctrination (2022).

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/religion/article/94626-new-books-explore-fundamentalist-evangelical-trauma.html

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'Shiny Happy People,' Fundamentalism and the Toxic Quest for Certainty

David French
Opinion Columnist
New York Times
June 13, 2023

In the summer of 1993, I almost joined a cult. For love.

It was the same cult featured in the current most-watched show on Amazon Prime, a documentary series called “Shiny Happy People.” It’s centered on the Duggar family and the teachings of a man named Bill Gothard. The Duggars, as many readers know, were the focus of a popular 2008 reality television show called “19 Kids and Counting” and its 2015 spinoff, “Counting On.” Gothard — the Duggars’ spiritual mentor — is less famous in secular America but far more consequential across evangelical America, where the influence of his movement continues today.

Most of the attention paid to “Shiny Happy People” will focus on the accusations of sexual abuse — some of them proven in court — surrounding the Duggars and Gothard. (The Institute in Basic Life Principles, which Gothard founded, has issued a statement in response to the documentary, calling it “misleading and untruthful” and claiming that it “mocks that which is good and moral in the most sensationalized way possible.”)

I’m going to address the issue of abuse below, but I also want to focus on a different question: Why are otherwise good, solid people attracted to movements like Gothard’s? How can they not see its controlling darkness?

My own story isn’t uncommon. If you lived in evangelical America in the 1980s and 1990s, you’d often encounter men and women who were deeply influenced by Gothard. When I was 24 years old, I was engaged to a woman I’d been dating for two years. She and her family followed Gothard’s teachings and attended events sponsored by the Institute in Basic Life Principles. She told me that she couldn’t marry a man who hadn’t attended its introductory course, the Basic Seminar. Just as important, as it happened, her father said he would not allow his daughter to marry anyone who refused to attend the seminar.

So I said yes. I’d give the seminar a try. For a week, I got up early and drove an hour from my small hometown to a packed megachurch in Louisville, Ky. It turned into one of the most important weeks of my life.

I grew up in a quite conservative church (as one friend joked, we definitely did not put the “fun” in “fundamentalist”), and I was accustomed to encountering strict families and strict teachings. But the teachings at the seminar were unlike anything I’d ever heard. In my church, we had learned to value modesty in attire. My Christian college, for example, regulated the length of skirts and didn’t permit any shorts on campus until my senior year.

The Gothard movement, by contrast, went so far as to teach that even otherwise modest outfits could contain “eye traps” for men that rendered the clothing morally insidious. This teaching placed an enormous burden on women to maintain the purity of men and created an environment where women would often blame themselves in the face of male predation. The actual material has to be seen to be believed.

My church taught that men and women should not have sex before marriage. The Gothard movement placed such a premium on virginity that his followers viewed any sexual activity before marriage — sometimes including even kissing — as a form of defilement, a permanent stain on your life.

Life was strictly regulated. All music with a rock beat, including Christian rock, was deemed spiritually dangerous. Men and women should not date, or at least not in the way most Americans do. Instead, young people could only “court,” which was a father-directed, father-supervised process that could be strikingly similar to arranged marriage, especially if both families followed Gothard’s teachings.

The beating heart of Gothardism was a combination of authority and superstition. One of Gothard’s keys to Christian life was something called the “umbrella of protection.” So long as the wife placed herself under the husband’s authority and the husband placed himself under Christ’s authority, then the family would flourish. Defying Gothard’s teachings, by contrast, placed you outside of this zone of God’s protection and rendered you (and your family) vulnerable to disaster, destruction and even death.

I sat through each session. I tried to be open, but I just couldn’t agree. The ideas in the books didn’t match what I read in Scripture. My parents taught me to value mercy and grace, and I couldn’t see mercy here, just power and control. I couldn’t join Gothard, and that ultimately meant I couldn’t continue my engagement. The entire trajectory of my life changed.

Even as I share this story, however, I’m uncomfortable. The details of Gothard’s teachings are so strange to so many people — especially to those who grew up outside of the evangelical church — that it’s easy to distance oneself, to watch with a sense of morbid curiosity about “those people,” those crazy folks who live lives we can’t understand.

When I went to the Gothard seminar, I didn’t see strange people. I saw people seeking community and certainty in the most important relationships of their lives. In fact, the families at the seminar were so mainstream and so numerous that I worry that the word “cult” communicates something more fringe than it truly was.

They loved God, and they wanted to learn how to serve him better. They loved their spouses and children and wanted to make sure that their marriages were healthy and their children thrived. Many of them came to the seminar facing serious challenges. Their marriages were in trouble, or there was conflict with their kids.

They found community in the people who flocked to the churches like the one I visited in Louisville. Certainty, however, was elusive. The formulas they received from Gothard seemed to work for some, didn’t work for others, and deeply damaged many, many people — especially women and children. The Duggars are a prime example. As the Amazon series recounts, even as the Duggar parents, Jim Bob and Michelle, were enormous celebrities in Gothard-world, extolling the virtues of his vision, they were concealing terrible secrets about their family.

Their oldest son, Josh, had molested four of his sisters. Later, he admitted to cheating on his wife. And now he’s in prison for possessing child pornography. The Duggars weren’t the model family they were presented as. They were in crisis. The Duggars’ guru, Gothard, was also disgraced. He has faced dozens of accusations of sexual misconduct — he denies them — and in 2014 he resigned from the presidency of his ministry.

But that’s not the extent of the darkness. Gothard’s teaching didn’t reach just the millions of Christians he claims have attended his seminars. Because he spoke to the most motivated and dedicated cohort of evangelicals in America, his teachings spread deep into American churches. Gothard’s concepts became part of the fabric of evangelical life even for people who’d never heard of the Basic Seminar.

In 2021, my wife, Nancy, and I published a report detailing years of horrific sexual abuse at one of the largest Christian camps in America, Kanakuk Kamps. The camp’s chief executive, Joe White, wrote that the “greatest journey of my life” began at a Bill Gothard conference in 1974, and many of the teachings at the camp mirrored the marriage and purity teachings in the Gothard seminars. A predator named Pete Newman exploited such teachings to gain access to countless young boys. White supported and promoted him even after receiving repeated reports of Newman playing games in the nude with kids.

With authority so central to Gothardism (and so many other fundamentalist movements), the quest for certainty turned into a quest for control. The explicitly patriarchal structure fed the will to power in troubled men. Failures in the family would lead to tighter controls, more rules, and an enormous amount of guilt and shame. After all, the principles Gothard taught were supposed to work. At the seminar I attended Gothard even taught that following his principles would make a young woman more beautiful. Obedience would improve her “countenance.” If a family struggled, the principles weren’t wrong — they were.

A healthy church can provide community. But it must also teach its members that certainty is elusive, humility is essential to the Christian faith and the will to power is antithetical to the example of Jesus. Otherwise, America’s conservative Christian communities will continue to face different versions of the same rigid fundamentalism. They’ll be tempted to follow more gurus like Bill Gothard.

The quest for certainty and control can tempt people of every faith and no faith. In religious circles it can manifest itself in ways that look strange to secular eyes, but I’ve seen people from all walks of American life and all ideological perspectives fall for gurus and fads. Life is hard, and we want answers — even, perhaps especially, where answers are impossible to find. We crave control, even when attempts to establish control sow destruction in our loved ones’ lives.

The Apostle Paul stated a universal human truth when he declared that “we see through a glass, darkly.” We can know things only “in part.” The Gothard movement and movements like it reject that sense of doubt. They purport to reveal all the deepest truths and answer all our most difficult questions. Yet no person possesses such wisdom. And if there is one lesson we should take from “Shiny Happy People,” it’s this: When people claim to personally light the path and clear away the darkness, you know they are leading you astray.

David French is a New York Times Opinion columnist. He is a lawyer, writer and veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is a former constitutional litigator, and his most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” @DavidAFrench



https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/opinion/shiny-happy-people.html

ArtPrize entry takes aim at extreme 'Christianity' spanking

Amy Biolchini 

GRAND RAPIDS NEWS
September 30, 2017

GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- On a windy corner of Ionia Avenue and Newberry Street, Daniel Vander Ley has set up his Extremist Supply Company store.

On Friday, Sept. 29, he had a stack of leather belts on display. Their belt buckles bear the same name as the giant sign hung on the building behind him -- "fundamentalism."

On other days during ArtPrize, the ESC conceptual store offers "street" Bibles marked with religious passages that discuss child abuse and homosexuals, or pamphlets for conversion camps for gays as an exaggerated performance art and political statement.

Vander Ley, 34, was homeschooled by his Baptist family in Hudsonville. He now lives in Detroit where he designs airbags as an automotive safety engineer -- but his experience being spanked as a child hasn't left him. His parents sent him to "change camps," though he knew he was gay.

"This is my childhood," Vander Ley said as he gestured to the table full of belts. "Growing up with adults that thought it was OK to use corporal punishment to instill religious values."

Vander Ley is using the exhibit to lobby the U.S. Department of Education -- and now Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in her hometown -- to prevent funding from going to public schools where they use corporal punishment on children.

"This struck me as a perfect time to drive a conversation with a local leader," Vander Ley said of why he entered ArtPrize.

Vander Ley has sent DeVos one of his "fundamentalism" belts, along with an invitation to visit his ArtPrize entry.

Vander Ley is also using the exhibit to draw attention to how Christian fundamentalism can be used to hurt or oppress.

"When you take the word of God seriously, it can be used to hurt people," Vander Ley said.

He points to Proverbs 23:13-14 which says, "Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you punish them with the rod, they will not die. Punish them with the rod and save them from death."

According to an NPR investigation, 28 states -- including Michigan -- and the District of Columbia expressly prohibit corporal punishment in schools. Fifteen states expressly permit corporal punishment in schools -- mostly southern states -- and seven states do not prohibit the practice, according to Department of Education information compiled by NPR.

Vander Ley claims 19 states allow corporal punishment in schools, citing a 2014 Economist article. Though he's spoken out on other issues in the past, this is his first go at performance art.

Vander Ley's ArtPrize entry was initially slated for an unopened restaurant. Instead, his Extremist Supply Company is located outside of a building.

It means he has to set up and tear down the entry every day during ArtPrize.

Most of the traffic to the entry is drive-by, and most visitors don't get out of their vehicles, Vander Ley said. He's received some middle fingers, which he sees as people reacting to his assertion that "extreme Christianity is harmful."

"It pains me to have to show everyone who goes by what happened to me as a kid," Vander Ley said.

But some stop, roll down their windows and share their own experience about how they too have been hurt.

Vander Ley was involved in a lawsuit filed by Jenison Bible Chuch in which the chuch claimed a sign Vander Ley held at a June 2015 protest falsely protrayed the church as being in support of same-sex marriage. The lawsuit, filed in Ottawa County Circuit Court, was later dismissed.

An Ottawa County judge said that the church did not have the same privacy rights of people.

Vander Ley has taken his ArtPrize entry across the country for the three weeks leading up to the event, taking a three-month sabbatical and investing in the project.

On Sept. 18, he was in Topeka, Kansas, where he "renamed" a street near the Westboro Baptist Church to "Fundamentalism Way." Two days later, he was in Nashville protesting Tennessee's corporal punishment laws with a large painting of Jesus spanking a little girl.

http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2017/09/artprize_entry_takes_aim_at_fu.html

IT HAPPENED TO ME: I Was Raised in a Fundamentalist Baptist Cult

Yahoo News

Samantha Clarke

xoJane November 2, 2016

 

Being raised in an oppressive religion made my childhood a living hell.

Our church building was a tattered, whitewashed old building from the late 19th century, with a great old-fashioned bell that barely worked and creaky haunted staircases that wound into odd back rooms and baptismal chambers. It was set in beautiful rural Oregon, only 45 minutes from Portland, but it felt like we could have been hundreds of miles away. We were surrounded by a handful of sleepy small towns and acre after acre of lush farmland.

It was a beautiful setting for a dark story.

My church could most accurately be classified as “fundamentalist Baptist,” although even that description seems too broad. To this day, I’ve never met another person, besides the 100 or so people I grew up with, who had the same interpretation of the Bible. This is part of why it’s always been so hard to explain, even to other people who were raised in extreme religious environments. But I know there are others out there who had experiences like mine, and that is why I share my story. 

Church was three days a week. On Sundays, there was a one-and-a-half-hour Sunday school service where we split up by age group, then a one-and-a-half to two-hour regular service, then lunch, then another hour and a half in the afternoon. Tuesday was "evening school," which was essentially a watered-down version of the church's seminary classes and meant for those who couldn't attend the seminary, like the women. Wednesday was youth group, which was much more social but still involved a sermon. Considering that by high school I was taking AP classes and maintaining a GPA above 4.0, my entire life felt like it was dedicated to study.

They believed that to be “saved,” one had to believe a very specific set of events happened: that Jesus Christ, the son of god, died on the cross for our sins, was buried, and rose again the third day. This is more or less what most Protestant groups believe is necessary for salvation, but my church took it one step further. It was almost like an incantation; one had to be able to literally recite the sentence above. My best friend in middle school, a Presbyterian, told me that she believed Jesus died on the cross for her sins and rose again the third day, and because she left out the “was buried” part, I was truly terrified that she was going to hell. This is just one example of how unbelievably literal they were with their doctrine.

They also believed in dispensations. In other words, they believed different parts of the Bible were written for people in different time periods — some past, some present, and some future — which, taken to that extreme, is a pretty unusual interpretation. They also believed that every temptation could be broken down to one of three sources: the devil, the world system (i.e., society), or your own human weakness. There were different step-by-step mental defenses against each one. 

I had untreated obsessive-compulsive disorder (they thought the Bible could heal mental illness and didn't take it seriously), and I would go through the steps over and over again, sometimes for days at a time, barely sleeping, thinking I was doing it wrong. In high school, I became severely depressed and found myself wishing I could just die and go to heaven so I wouldn't have to "fight the enemies" anymore. In retrospect, it was really scary, and I wish my family had known more about depression and mental illness and realized I needed help.

The way they interpreted the Bible was not the only display of their inner ugliness. They were also racist, sexist, and homophobic, to name just a few of their most blatantly hateful beliefs.

As far as people of color at the church, there was one black family with three boys, one Korean kid who'd been adopted by his Dwight Schrute–like German family, and then me — half Armenian, raised by my white mother and white stepfather. We five brown kids were immediately drawn to each other. But while the church community seemed fine with the black family in attendance, there was always this weird feeling like no one wanted us to mingle too much, and by the time I was 9 or 10, they vanished. It was only me and the Korean kid left. And we got to sit through some seriously racist sermons. 

I remember when we were about 11 hearing our old crotchety pastor say he was convinced the "troops from the East" in the Book of Revelation was referring to East Asians, and that they were the bad guys, and we should be afraid of them. And I also remember, around the same time, hearing that God's people, the Hebrews, were descended from Isaac, and the Arabs were descended from his half-brother Ishmael, painted as the “bad” son (both children of Abraham, Ishmael his illegitimate son — and being “illegitimate” myself, this also hit home). They of course took this to mean that the people of the Middle East are still the bad guys today, and Islam is their “heathen” religion. I can even remember the pastor saying "camel jockey" in front of a huge crowd, with me, this black-eyed little girl, staring straight up at him.

And that was just race. The sexism ran even more rampant. Not only were women not allowed to be pastors, they weren't even allowed to teach if men were in the room — only women and children. We were taught that women were "more easily deceived" (read: dumber) than men, as evidenced by how Eve was tricked by the serpent. Wives were supposed to submit to their husbands. Divorce was acceptable only in cases of proven adultery; not even abuse was good enough reason, and they kicked my mother out of the church for getting a divorce with "only" 20 years of abuse, and no adultery, as an excuse. Women were encouraged to wear skirts and dresses, to go into professions like teaching or nursing if they must work, to have lots of children, to be demure and submissive and innocent. I could go on and on.

Just as ugly, if perhaps less surprising, was my church's stance on homosexuality. It's a good thing no one found out I was bisexual — my first sexual experience was even with another girl, around age 12 — until years after I'd left, or I'd have been forced to do one-on-one counseling with the pastor and his wife at a minimum, or more likely been kicked out altogether. They had a habit of cutting people out without even trying to reach out to them.

Being raised in an oppressive religion, fighting imaginary enemies in my own mind with strange prescription-like steps, being constantly told my value as a woman was less than that of a man, having my race, my sexuality, my gender, and a lot of my personality ripped to pieces on a regular basis — it all made my childhood hell. It also made it really hard to do the whole figure-out-who-you-are thing most people do in college, because even though I left the church in my first semester, I had to start almost from scratch in putting the who-am-I pieces together. 

But here I am now. I no longer have nightmares about going to hell. I am a feminist with half-decent self-esteem. I am proud of my Middle Eastern heritage. I have accepted my sexual interest in both men and women. I no longer believe in a god, and I've even made it past the angry atheist phase and can understand why other people do believe in a god. I can even see a small handful of values I kept from the religion I was raised with, such as doing unto your neighbor as yourself, and trying not to judge people for their wrongs when you are not blameless yourself (glass houses and all that jazz).

I don’t believe religion itself was the problem. I believe people were the problem. I believe that, like any ideology, religion can be dangerous in the wrong hands. And I’m a stronger, more discerning person now for making it through that.

https://www.yahoo.com/style/happened-raised-fundamentalist-baptist-cult-190000321.html

 

Raised in a Lake Worth cult: Award-winning film screens Saturday

All it takes is one hair-raising listen of the trailer for Destiny Thomas‘ short film and you understand.

You understand why she fled her own fundamentalist evangelical upbringing (which she calls “abusive” and a “cult”) in Lake Worth for Los Angeles. And you understand why she made a punishing 11-minute short film based on her life and why it won Best Short Film at the L-Dub Film Festival last January.

That film, “My Center Will Not Hold,” got her into the “Harvard of film schools,” the AFI Conservatory in Hollywood, Calif., but only tuition will keep her there. In less than two months, she has gotten scholarships, grants and loans to cover all but $30,000 of the $106,000 cost of the two-year school.

The Stonzek Theater at the Lakeworth Playhouse is screening her film Aug. 8 at 8 p.m., and all the proceeds from the $15 tickets go toward paying her tuition at the AFI Conservatory.

“I wanted to be an actor. I wanted to be a director. I wanted to to tell stories,” Thomas said. “And the film had to premiere (in Lake Worth). It just had to.”http://featured.blog.palmbeachpost.com/2015/08/06/raised-in-a-lake-worth-cult-award-winnng-film-screens-saturday/