I’d hear of the more extreme groups now and then, like the Duggars.

We weren’t like that, I’d think. We were reasonable, with our set gendered roles and our long hair and skirt requirements and purity culture.

I found Fundie Fridays recently, a YouTube channel that covers fundamentalist individuals and groups. Jen is an atheist, and she’s firm but fair, even to go so far as to be conflicted about what she thinks of people like Joshua Harris, the I Kissed Dating Goodbye guy. Yeah, I read that book.

And then I realized the implication of including people like Joshua Harris, who wasn’t considered as extreme as the Duggars. And she also covered Bethel Church, which I visited once or twice when I went to college at Simpson University in Redding, California. A lot of students from Simpson had attended Bethel.

As I delved in more, I realized that I had been raised similar to most of these people. Girl Defined wouldn’t have been so bizarre to me as a teenager.

By 2019, I started calling the groups I’d been raised in cults. That’s what they were. But they were fundamentalist sects, at the very least, if not outright cults. Maybe there weren’t communes with poisoned juice (although the cult I attended in New York City tried to get members first to move to Oregon, then to Maine, where a fair amount did move and join a cult up there instead, an offshoot). But there were so many rules about clothing and how to worship god properly and how to find someone to marry, and I just followed along, trying to do the right thing.

Fundamentalism: A strict adherence to scripture and governing rules.

It took me a long time to understand the fundamentalist aspect, as nearly every church I attended up until 2017 fit into the same sphere. Maybe they were more lenient about divorce or what clothing was appropriate, but they still wouldn’t let women serve in any meaningful capacity, homosexuality was considered a sin (but they wouldn’t turn anyone away), and marriage and children were the foremost goal.

I clung to all of it for so long because I really did believe that’s what god wanted of me, even as I felt dirty and used up after my divorce. I hadn’t really cared about being a good housekeeper, but I did want to find someone who loved me that I could love, and when I’d followed all of the rules, waiting for marriage to have sex unlike so many in the same churches, and it didn’t work for me, I didn’t understand why. That was what purity culture promised–you follow the rules and you get the blessing, a prosperity gospel for relationships, as someone said in the Joshua Harris documentary, where he talked to people whose lives he messed up with his faulty courtship model.

Yeah, it works for some people, but not as many as they’d like you to believe. And of course, if marriage and children is solely what someone wants, to find another person to support while they build a career, there’s nothing inherently wrong with choosing to be a stay-at-home mom (SAHM). I didn’t want it for me, even as everyone else seemed to think it was expected, because in these sorts of circles, it’s conditioned.

And I had failed, anyway.

The deconstruction had been in the works.

My deconversion was much more recent.

But none of that means I didn’t genuinely believe. I did.

Deconstruction: Deconstruction is breaking down deeply held beliefs. Often, faith can survive this process, but brainwashing or conditioning cannot. 

Deconversion: Deconversion is choosing to leave a faith, or the loss of faith, and this can be preceded by deconstruction.

I knew the normal arguments–anyone who stepped away hadn’t really believed in the first place, or they’re just angry at CHRISTIANS, and they shouldn’t be angry at GOD. Don’t let the people get in the way, I’d hear.

But as I unwound things, I couldn’t keep separating the people from the god.

I couldn’t keep accepting that people were just human that made mistakes. Mistakes are hurting someone’s feelings or losing your temper.

Mistakes don’t mean molesting children. And the church is full of molesters.

They’re protected.

Mistakes don’t mean hurting your wife.

And the church is full of violent men.

They’re protected, too.

I watched my mother suffer for years, staying because she believed it was what god asked her to do. I watched her almost lose her life bearing eight children, going through 11 pregnancies. I watched my father hurt my siblings, and I bore the brunt of his anger, too. To this day, he hasn’t suffered any of the consequences, nor will he.

He’s protected. Even as an atheist, he’s protected. And if he still had his faith and he was serving as an elder, they’d continue to find creative ways to explain away his behavior, as they had for years.

A friend said recently that he believed that morality informed religion, not the other way around. That’s the only way really to explain why the church seems so much more depraved than the rest of the world.

When everything started happening in 2020, I felt like I could see just a bit more clearly. I was upset that it had taken the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and so many more to start understanding. 

I thought I did understand.

Note: I’m writing to process. I’m writing for others like me, from similar situations. I’m writing to do the work. I’m writing to dismantle my own beliefs before I can do the larger work out in my community and with my business. I’m not sure what that looks like yet, but I do understand that there are no points or cookies for denouncing white supremacy.

There were three things that defined my childhood:

One: The physical and emotional abuse I suffered at the hands of my parents, along with the indoctrination of religious beliefs that not only excused that abuse but even required it.

This was the most fucked up fundamentalist aspect of my upbringing. A friend raised in a similar situation told me recently it was almost as if the adults bragged to one another how creative they were with how they hurt their children. Hers used items like tool belts. Mine made a wooden paddle with holes, to catch the wind as it came down and hurt more. My father was incredibly creative about never leaving bruises. He liked to say things like, “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” which I knew was a lie. And he liked to say, “If you don’t stop crying, I’m going to keep hitting you,” as if the sobs of abused children are manipulation tools and not the result of pain and confusion.

Two: The importance of reading and the access to stories, as provided by my mother.

We went to the library quite a bit as kids, which provided access to bigger worlds than my own, and I genuinely believe this alone saved my life. When someone I knew from one of the groups I’d been apart of reached out to me to ask how I survived, this was what I stressed the most. Let your kids read. Let them learn. If you can’t get out, the most powerful thing you can instill in them is to let them explore the stories others can’t touch, and give them hope outside of the stagnant suffocation fundamentalism offers.

Three: The understanding of being half-Jewish, and the history that came along with it.

Being ethnically, but not religiously or culturally Jewish, held a lot of weight for me as a child. There was this idea of a continuation, of being chosen as god’s people first as a Jew, and then as a Christian. I learned a lot about the Holocaust. I read about Corrie ten Boom. I learned about Anne Frank. I read the gruesome stories about infants being murdered in front of their parents by Nazis and what happened in concentration camps. I knew a lot, even as a kid. From there, learning about slavery wasn’t too much of a jump. There were a lot of parallels, but it would take years for me to understand the extent — that Hitler learned from the enslavers, that he took quite a few tips from Jim Crow laws.  

I went to a Baptist high school for a part of my education, while being homeschooled for part. When I was in 10th or 11th grade, I was pulled from computer class after hearing whispers. One of the older kids had been drawing swastikas on his computer, and a teacher made him apologize to me in the hall. The teacher spoke to me after, explaining he’d always thought it was kind of cool that someone could be a Jewish Christian. I think he was proud of how he handled it. I was deeply embarrassed. I hadn’t felt the effects of Nazi Germany. It had happened so long before I was born. I understand he was trying to put a face to those persecuted, trying to show that these were real people who had suffered, but I doubt that kid learned anything that day.

Because as much as that teacher tried to do his best, the whole school was set up to teach white supremacy. In fourth grade, I learned about the Civil War, and I was taught that the southern cause was about state’s rights, not slavery. We were given a chance to pick the Confederate side or the Union side when we wrote journals as a solder or a nurse. I wanted to be a Union solder so badly, and years later I would learn about the women who went undercover as men to be spies. We learned about the Underground Railroad as a footnote, with an emphasis on on the white people who didn’t participate, or the enslavers who treated the enslaved “well”.

Then there were the dress codes. The emphasis on the girls being responsible for the boys’ thoughts. Boys just can’t help themselves. The emphasis on purity culture, on abstinence.

There was a very cute boy in the grade above mine that I really wanted the attention of, and I never got it. Years later, I’d learn he was a predator, having sex with girls barely out of high school, if not still in it, while he advanced well into his late 20s and beyond.

I’d been conditioned to crave male attention, and as a teenager, not getting the attention I wanted felt like it meant that I was ugly and unwanted, feeding into a narrative that I still battle.

Now, I know that it’s all connected.

Fundamental Christianity is equal to patriarchy to white supremacy to capitalism.

The bible had been weaponized, faith had been weaponized, and requiring children to think and act a certain way in order to “please god” was simply to maintain the status quo, the systems that were established.

After I lost my faith, I started to see all the ways that I had been in a cult, all the things I never questioned because I thought I was doing what god wanted.

I’d been taught not to have boundaries or preferences because it was selfish, and god couldn’t use prideful people. I’d been taught to want a husband at all costs because I couldn’t have value as a woman without a husband and kids. I’d been taught to push all of me aside because it was better to think of others first always. But all it taught me was to have no boundaries and to let people in who could take whatever they wanted.

When I met my ex-husband, I was 25, feeling ancient. We were married by the time I was 27, which felt so late. He changed on our wedding night, as he let himself unravel and become who he’d always had been but I just didn’t see. I became a victim to sexual and emotional abuse and physical intimidation. I was working a full-time job while doing all of the cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, and laundry. He got mad when I didn’t thank him the one time he washed the dishes. “So many women would be so thankful that their husbands did the dishes,” he told me.

I struggled to accept that divorce might be acceptable. I soon realized I didn’t have much choice if I wanted to live. I divorced him in 2016, and it took years to rebuild. As part of that process, I started to learn how to recognize behaviors over labels. The church had taught me that if they’re Christian, they’re safe. Those other people aren’t safe. Those other people are from bad neighborhoods. Those other people aren’t working hard enough. Those other people just wanted handouts.

Also in 2016, there were women in the belief circles I was in who had a vested interested in seeing 45 elected. It was time for a change, they said. Maybe we needed a business man instead of a politician. Maybe, maybe. They took me to a Kirk Cameron movie rally. They were boycotting Target because Target was allowing gender neutral bathrooms. Everything was an attack on Christmas, on Christianity. It was deeply ingrained. Now, I can see the false narrative of it. There’s no attack. Christianity isn’t at risk. It never was, because just as the enslavers went to church on Sundays, so did the politicians who were creating the Jim Crow laws and keeping office for decades.

I recognize that not all Christians are like this. And I try to be careful to keep the conversation to conservative Christianity, fundamentalism. Faith has helped a lot of people, and has provided community and safety now and then for people who need it. Faith even kept me from being homeless on several occasions. Not all faith is bad, and we need faith. We need hope. But the rigid aspect of conservative Christianity looks like a cult and it is performative and it holds so many secrets and it is the source of so much trauma.

By the time I came to the South, I’d lost my faith, and I encountered a different type of racism. It was the type that said “You need to be harder on ‘those kids’,” because if you weren’t, they wouldn’t do their job. (That business got forced out, as they were violating child labor laws, anyway, so maybe it wasn’t the teenagers’ faults.) It was the type that was friendly to a Black photographer on the phone because she sounded white, but that forced her out when she showed up in person. And I’m not saying that racism in the North is any better. It’s simply different.

But I still couldn’t see all of it fully for what it was, at first. Then, as everything happened in 2020, I began to understand. I started to dismantle the racist beliefs I’d accepted. The abelism I’d accepted. The homophobia I’d accepted. The transphobia I’d accepted. The fatphobia I’d accepted.

I can’t accept it anymore.