Ex-Toxic Chronicles
Part (1) My Story
My dear friend Cheryl has asked me to write a little bit about my own spiritual journey.
For the better part of 15 years our family was involved in a fundamentalist Christian lifestyle and attended very cult-like, controlling, demanding churches. Between two and three years ago we decided to walk away and leave that life behind. My husband and I are still Christians but we are no longer Bible literalists and we are no longer fundamentalists.
I began life in a churchgoing household that was not particularly spiritual. It was particularly abusive, however. Physically, emotionally, and verbally abusive. This is part of the reason I ended up where I did, abuse and manipulation were familiar to me, I'd spent my early years learning how to cope in an abusive situation and how to get along with abusive, controlling people. Next door to me lived a little Catholic girl my age, one of my best childhood buddies. I remember swinging on her swingset and talking about God, our churches, what we believed. Back and forth we'd swing, discussing these things in all seriousness. She taught me to cross myself and the way to say the Our Father, the way it was done in her church. It is a wonderful memory and thinking of that time highlights for me the deep sense of spirituality that a child can have. I wanted to know God. I wanted to follow Jesus. Though my parents didn't perceive this in me and I was unable to find a way to tell them of my longing and my faith, they did provide me with weekly Sunday School and fairly regular church attendance. The ministers and Sunday School people were gentle, kind people. The church was sweet and loving and I learned quite a lot about the Bible and about Jesus in my classes.
It was a nice, sane, over 100 year old Congregational UCC Church. Anyway, it helped me immeasurably to have that church of my youth as a frame of reference when I began to see my church of adult choice for the cultic, toxic, spiritually abusive place that it was. Dh had a background in a mainline liturgical church and I think that helped him in the same way. We could look back and see that there were other ways to approach God and Christianity than in the rigid, legalistic, totally literal way that we eventually found ourselves trying to make sense of the faith.
As I moved from my teens to my twenties I moved away from mainstream Christianity into some different byways of religion, some offshoots of Christianity, some not. I plunged into the rock and roll world, moved to the West coast, took up with musicians and sound technicians. I learned to do the work of a "roadie" and some technical stuff. I embraced a new age spirituality and developed some interest in various esoteric and occult subjects. I learned a lot about drugs. And other things. I spent five years in a semi-abusive live-in relationship and traveling around the country working with different rock'n'roll bands. Always in my heart treasuring the Jesus of my childhood, hanging on to Him by a very slender thread.
After I'd been living in California for a few years I spent a very painful and complicated year trying to leave this whole life behind me -- the drugs, the music, the guy. In the process I met up with an old high school friend who had been down some tough roads himself. We fell out of friendship and into love and we married. He was struggling with alcohol and drug addictions himself, but to me, at the time, this seemed like nothing. Nothing compared to what I'd seen and lived through. I was very naive.
After about 10 years together and three children, I was ready to throw in the towel on my marriage. I had walked into a local church two years previously and looked to Heaven and handed my huge mess over to God, over to Jesus, as I knew him from the New Testament, as I remembered Him from my youth. It was a beautiful time with God and I had met some very wonderful and supportive Christian friends but my marriage was going from bad to worse. I had tried to leave before but had come back, grieving because I missed my husband, my friend. My husband was somewhere in a fog of substance abuse but the part of him that was my friend was still a little glimmering light that shone out from time to time. The children loved him. He was as good a father as he could be, for the shape that he was in. After so much prayer and so many tears, with the support of people who cared about me, I left him again. This time I went almost 2,500 miles away -- just to be sure I didn't come running back. I had gathered some money together and was thinking about buying property for the children and myself in a different state.
While I was gone my husband experienced what can only be called (by us anyway) a miracle of healing from drug and alcohol abuse. I don't mean it in a televangelistic way, I mean it genuinely and truly from the heart. Something happened, he was freed, it was incredible, it was awesome, it was a gift from SOMEWHERE. From Someone or Something outside of either of us. And it remains to this day, the guy is a new man even 12 years later. New. Truly. People have told me that their lives were changed just by being in the vicinity of that happening. It was a flood of what the Bible calls Grace.
How in the world could she go from that incredibly joyous time of experiencing one of life's miracles and a rediscovery of God to talking about church abuse and cultic behavior, you might be thinking? In a way I'm still trying to figure it out.
The church that our family became involved in was a small country church, conservative and pentecostal. The pastor was a dear man, who became like a papa to dh and I, his wife like a grandmother to our kids. He was seeking God, like the rest of us. Sadly in a couple of short years he was chewed up and spit out by the leading men of the church. We should have run not walked to the nearest exit then but we didn't. We, being kids out of a liberal and a liturgical church, respectively, didn't really catch what was coming at us. The church world at the other end of the theological spectrum was run a little differently. This church was packed full of people from the "shepherding movement", also known as neo-discipleship. Several influential members were from extreme versions of the pentecostal "deliverance" ministries. They were convinced that their ways were "true New Testament Christianity" and some of them were very persuasive and charismatic people. These folks managed to snag a little of the credit, in a way, for the incredible change in my husband. They had drawn us in, convinced us that we could truly serve God by doing it from out of their midst. They were sincere and earnest. They studied hard. They sure knew their Bibles, from cover to cover. They also used fear and guilt to manipulate. The congregation found a new pastor who came from a much less pentecostal but still rigid, formulaic background. The church divided. The people scattered. All of the musicians except my husband left. A year and a half later, a new church in town, formed by people who had left the church we were still sitting in still baffled by all of this, "called" my husband into the music ministry there. He accepted.
It felt strange from the first, but we ignored our visceral reactions. These people knew their Bibles, they were strong and sincere. They loved us, they told us God had a purpose for us in their midst. Everyone urged my husband to continue using his musical gifts to serve God. They said they wanted us to grow, all of us together, to better love and serve God and our fellow men. We wanted that too. They began pulling us in -- and our children. Over time they became more demanding, more condemning, more verbally abusive, more guilt-provoking, and guilt-manipulating. No one could measure up, no one could give enough (time, effort, or money), no one could be righteous enough, no one could evangelize enough. It's this aspect of church abuse that parallels child abuse. When a child grows up expecting this kind of mixed-message, crazy-making, slap-and-then-hug relating as normal, as an adult she may not realize at first that the situation she's in is completely bad news. I didn't. Not at first. I never even saw the shift from the initial appearance of "unconditional love" to the very legalistic, performance-based acceptance that we received once we were safely within the confines of the church. We were busy raising a large family, homeschooling, my husband working at his job and involved in the church's ministries. We barely had time to take a breath and realize that we were up to our eyeballs in some worsening stuff, that what began as a heartfelt urge to be used by God was becoming a forced burden.
In addition the deliverance aspect of the church was getting more and more extreme. There was an unhealthy focus on demonic elements and dark forces.
Within a couple of years not only was my husband ensconced in the music ministry, but he was told by the pastor that God had given him a vision about dh as an "elder." Our gut instinct was "no, we're not ready," but the pastor was an extraordinary salesman and pulled us in even more deeply. Describing the vision in detail enhanced its credibility to us. Pulling out the Bible and showing us its scriptural nature didn't hurt his cause, either. Now we were part of the so-called leadership.
My husband was always the guy that was out of step with the other church leadership; I was an oddity because I wanted to be home with my kids, homeschooling and just enjoying them. There were calls from the pastor, pressuring me to leave my children more often and to be a presence among the church women. I would tell him that the church women knew I was hospitable and had an open home and could come calling. People knew that most of the time when they'd call I'd put the coffee on. People knew that they could usually stop by for a visit. Conversations about this with the pastor invariably left me in tears and shaken for days. He didn't want me exercising my hospitality out of my home, he wanted me there in the church, working and praying as he and the other leaders saw fit. I was told that I was not serving God adequately. That I was not faithful to His call. My husband constantly went to bat for me and had to take flak because of it. My homebirthing, homeschooling, other things I did at home (writing, artistic endeavors) were discussed as a kind of new age residue from my old days. My large family was seen as very weird. During this phase of my life it grew from 3 children to 7, not a *huge* family but large enough that there were plenty of comments about it -- some of them making the older children uncomfortable. However, my home was greatly appreciated for the weekly Bible studies we were asked to conduct. We walked the line between being doled out alternate spiritual slapping and stroking, to keep us in line. At the time we didn't see it for that, however.
We didn't see what was being done to manipulate us until we pulled back and left the church eventually. We didn't see that these manipulative behaviors were being enacted towards our children until we had put some space between our family and the church. Until we'd had the time and space to hear more of the kids' stories and process it all. Until we'd allowed ourselves time to breathe.
As our kids grew and we began to have teens in the home, we found ourselves ever more out of step with the rest of the church leadership, out of step with the youth leadership, out of step with everyone in our sphere. Things reached unbearable proportions when our teens were brought into the picture and publicly chastised for their shortcomings. The rigidity and the condemnation, the narrow little parameters that were acceptable for the teens became totally unacceptable to us. We were in trouble with the church staff, our kids were in trouble, it became overwhelming. The church staff wanted to call the shots for our family and that was unacceptable. Another teen and his family were going through the same treatment and when we stood up for them, things became worse for us. More verbal abuse, more guilt-manipulation, more cold treatment if we didn't toe the line, more very public prayers directed toward our sons and their unrighteousnesses (which centered mainly in their choices of music, hair and clothing styles, the fact that they were allowed to drive places by themselves, secular band stickers placed on their guitars, that they were able to date, and the fact that one of them questioned church ideas and teachings). The teens needed answers to their questions that they weren't getting, they needed acceptance and warmth which was being withheld because their performance wasn't within the required bounds of the church leaders. We were taught about God's love and grace from the pulpit and we encountered legalism, condemnation, and harshness in our daily interactions. The teens were encouraged to follow the leader and discouraged from questioning anything that the leaders didn't want questioned.
My oldest went through an emotional hell on earth in the name of God. His faith, at 17, was all but shipwrecked :""(. The last day that I attended church was the day that I truly realized what was happening to my son. He had been hanging in there trying with these people and suffering. The last straw for me was a church elder publicly rebuking my son in the form of a prayer at a Sunday service. Former friends turned on him -- leaving him hanging out there. Lies were told and gossip abounded.
Youth staff and our son's own former friends were confronted by us over lies that had been told about him and more venom was poured out against our family. So very sad. It's ironic that we'd chosen to homeschool, unschool in fact, wanting to give our kids the freedom to learn in their own best ways, yet we'd plunged them headlong into this church regimentation and weirdness. I've had to deal with a lot of anger, especially anger at myself over this.
Our son left first -- with our blessing. I stopped attending church right after that. These two things truly enraged the church leadership. At the same time we were discussing all of these things in our family and beginning to disentangle ourselves, my husband pitched in the towel on his own leadership position. The other leaders in the church began to shun our entire family. After my husband spent some time talking with people he'd been making music with, trying to explain, salvage some friendships, he left.
With the exception of two families who had left years before and knew what we were going through -- we lost every friendship that we'd made in 8-10 years. The two families who had walked away before us, were my lifeline to sanity as I began my own walk away. Even after three years the shunning continues. These are relationships that were based on something other than (what I call) friendship and they seem to be beyond repair. When I walked back into church life as an adult almost two decades ago, I would never have believed that shunning existed today in American Christianity. It was something from centuries past, I would have thought. I had no idea. I'm older, sadder, and wiser about the state of American Christianity today.
The good news is that we are all getting better. We spent the better part of a decade in an extremely legalistic world. As a family, we've been out completely for about three years. We are attending an ELCA church, sometimes I go to a Catholic Mass. Like any recovery it takes time and we are doing well, all of us, including our oldest son. When I look back upon where we were a year ago, two years ago, I'm heartened. Our family is testimony to the fact that there is a way out, that the way is a way of freedom, that a family can pick up the pieces of a life shattered by the harshness of religious extremism and can find a way to walk in the life that is the light of all men (and women and children :-))
Copyright 1999 Kathy Ward