I Fired God

by Jocelyn Zichterman

  Almost every IFB church I ever set foot in had an American flag on one side and a Christian flag on the other, with its trademark red cross in a blue square on a white background. Between them stands the pulpit because, we learned, God’s Word is most important.

  Patriotism was woven into many aspects of our schooling too. Our uniforms were red, white, and blue. The boys wore navy pants, white-collared dress shirts, and American flag clip ties. As girls, we wore royal blue skirts that fell several inches below our knees, white blouses, and red ribbons tied in a bow around the buttonhole at our necks. Our uniforms were expected to stay neat and clean at all times. I lost my red ribbon one day and got a memorable spanking for having been so careless.

  We began every school day by pledging allegiance to the USA, the Bible, and the Christian flag. Most people know the standard Pledge of Allegiance, but at our school it led into these two variations.

  “I pledge allegiance to the Bible, God’s Holy Word. I will make it a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path and will hide its words in my heart that I might not sin against God.”

  “I pledge allegiance to the Christian Flag and to the Savior for whose Kingdom it stands. One Savior, crucified, risen, and coming again with life and liberty to all who believe.”

  Mixed-messaging is part and parcel of the IFB, however, and despite all the proud-to-be-an-American propaganda, our pastors often warned us that the country was headed for destruction. The proof? The government was banning the Bible and prayer from public schools and godless feminists were taking over, they said. Women were leaving their homes to go to work and using birth control because they wanted to dominate men, when we all knew it was God’s plan that men dominate women.

  Listening to them, I could never quite figure out if I was really supposed to love America or despise it. On one hand, ours was the best country, and we were the best people. On the other, God was going to destroy the U.S. for its wickedness—and that destruction could happen any day now. Our pastors continually contradicted themselves, which made it impossible to figure out what was truly “right” and “wrong.”

  Like so much of the teaching I received as a child, it was a recipe for emotional imbalance. Our cult leaders knew exactly what they were doing; they knew that confused, unstable people were more likely to cling blindly to them for support.

  The Church and Outreach to the Community

  When I was a child, the IFB ran programs called Bus Ministries to draw disadvantaged children to the church, a concept pioneered by the IFB icon, “Dr.” Jack Hyles. Pastor Keck’s mentor and the guiding force for our little IFB church in Wisconsin, Hyles was a controversial and hugely influential figure in the cult until his death in 2001. He founded his own Bible college (Hyles-Anderson in Indiana) in 1972, eschewing accreditation. And like others, he found himself embroiled in financial and sexual scandals.

  But Hyles is best remembered for building First Baptist Church in Hammond, Indiana, to a staggering fifty thousand members in its heyday, largely through his innovative Bus Ministries program. Time magazine featured him in 1975, dubbing Hammond’s First Baptist a “superchurch” and noting that attendance at Sunday services had been known to exceed thirty thousand even at that early date. At one point, Hyles had more than a thousand workers on 230 buses, bringing as many as fifteen thousand believers to Hammond to hear him preach. Every Saturday church members went door-to-door throughout the neighborhoods “soul-winning,” in an attempt to keep the church growing. “Dr.” Jack Hyles’s son-in-law, “Dr.” Jack Schaap, took over when Hyles died, but as I mentioned, lost his pastoring job in the wake of a recent scandal.

  My father eventually became a deacon at First Bible Baptist Church in Wisconsin and was appointed bus captain and pastor to the “bus kids.” He held a painting party to deck the outside of the buses out in red, white, and blue and then spent Sunday mornings coaxing kids he found hanging out on the streets to climb aboard and take a ride to our church. He coordinated bus routes through the projects of Green Bay to recruit youngsters. He and the other drivers sang songs, played games, gave out tons of candy, and told the kids how much fun they’d have at church, if they would only give it a try.

  Once they arrived at the services, the adults kept the “church kids” and the “bus kids” separated. Remember, we weren’t allowed to associate with worldly children who might lead us astray with their devilish ways. I had little contact with these underprivileged youths, but I remember seeing them trudge into church with dirty pants and matted hair and thinking about how much they needed Jesus. I was convinced that if He came into their lives, they would don pretty dresses like the ones I owned, wear their hair in beautiful braids, and be filled with joy. Not that I was particularly joyful myself. But I mention this to show how little I understood about poverty. Kids in the IFB had a Victorian mind-set; we thought poverty was a direct result of laziness or bad morals. We assumed the bus kids were a tarnished group because their parents had chosen the wages of sin.

  I suspect one incentive for the adults in our church to expose us to impoverished inner-city kids was to reinforce our appreciation for our own parents. Weren’t they wonderful? They taught us about God and the appropriate way to live. Every time I saw another bus kid, I felt flooded with pride and gratitude that my parents had chosen the path of purity and righteousness.

  The Church and Holidays

  When I was a child, the IFB condemned most mainstream Christmas holiday traditions. In my church, Santa was strictly forbidden (I grew up believing the name was an anagram for “Satan”). Halloween was the worst of all. It was the devil’s own holiday, so we called it “Harvestfest,” instead. Most IFB kids weren’t allowed to dress up or go trick-or-treating. Instead, we filled Ziploc bags with candy and slipped an IFB comic book called a Chick Tract into each one to give out to worldly kids who knocked on our door. Chick Tracts told sinister stories about kids who made the wrong decisions and got cast into the lake of fire, but we loved them. We even had a “Tract rack” filled with them in our church. We figured the kids who knocked on our door would love them too and accept Jesus into their hearts after seeing pictures of people burning in Hell.

  The books probably gave those unfortunate trick-or-treaters quite a scare, but my memories of Halloween are even more macabre. My father had a talent for taking even the most twisted IFB tradition to new extremes. On one unforgettable October 31, my father staged a Haunted Woods Walk for all the kids in our church. Though he had no training and was not ordained, he was the children’s pastor by that point, and he was given free rein to design the activities. Knowing him all too well, I was terrified as our group gathered at the edge of the woods at 9 P.M. We shuffled along a path, pressed close together for safety, as adults from the church jumped out from behind the trees to spook us. My father had also rounded up a huge number of live pigeons and set them loose so they scuttled around our feet and took flight suddenly, flapping past our ears in a cluster when we got too close. It heightened the drama delightfully and I remember squealing from both fear and excitement.

  But as we pressed deeper into the woods, the scenery became more grisly. My father had hung dead mutilated deer, rabbits, squirrels, and raccoons from nooses in the trees, and the kills were fresh enough that blood dripped from their torsos as we passed. Sickened, I averted my eyes. Then I heard a noise that snatched my voice away and chilled my blood. Somewhere ahead in the darkness, my father was laughing. But it wasn’t a normal laugh. It sounded warped, sadistic. I was keenly attuned to his moods and every instinct told me to bolt the other away. But I was swept along in a tide of kids blithely unaware of the danger.

  “Quick! Grab him,” I heard my father hiss. “Good job! Do it just like this.”

  We came to a clearing in the trees and there stood my father, demonstrating to a group of enthralled, horrified boys how to snap the neck of a pigeon. As the bird’s body went limp, he let out a demented howl of laughter and contorted his face into a hideous expression mimick
ing the bugged-out eyes of the animal he had just murdered. Several of the men from church were leaning against tree trunks nearby watching the show, and they chortled approvingly, spurring him on. “Now do this,” my father said, showing the boys how to tear the legs off the pigeon’s body. Even in the dim light of the moon, I could see blood spattered everywhere.

  The boys giggled and raced off in all directions, chasing pigeons. Several of them rolled on the ground laughing hysterically, whether from nervous shock or genuine enjoyment I had no idea. One came barreling toward me, waving a mangled bird in my face. I bolted past them and pounded down the path as fast as my legs would carry me, gasping for breath, not caring that I was alone in the woods at night. I wanted nothing more than to get as far away from that walk as possible, to get as far away as I could from my father.

  The Church and Private School

  It’s quite common for IFB churches to run their own private Christian schools, usually housed in the same building as the church and headed by the local pastor. Classes generally range from one to twenty-five students, and total enrollment can be anywhere from thirty to four hundred students in a K–12. You don’t need any formal training to teach in most IFB schools; you just have to belong to the church running it and buy into its views. The vast majority of these schools have no state accreditation or curriculum checks and no oversight. In fact, they have no outside involvement whatsoever.

  When we weren’t hearing about the imminent dangers of watching Saturday morning cartoons like The Smurfs during Sunday sermons, we were treated to a description of the litany of horrors in the public school system. It was run by the dreaded “secular humanists,” whose primary agenda was to ensure that the American people would accept the gay and lesbian community. Homosexuals, we were assured, were the worst of all sinners. They wanted to take over our country and destroy every shred of morality left in it. By the time I was seven years old I could rattle off a complicated definition of a secular humanist. I don’t mean to imply that I was well educated. I had no idea who Martin Luther King Jr. was. But I was steeped in IFB ideology. I was sure that “they” were the bad guys and we were the good ones.

  In nearly every service we heard another tirade against public school. My father vowed that he would never subject his children to such a godless system. “When you have kids of your own someday, you’d better put them in Christian schools,” he warned. “If you don’t, they’ll lose their souls to the devil!”

  In my mind, public school was a place where you got drugged, raped, and murdered. It sounded as terrifying as the impending Apocalypse.

  It’s no surprise that the IFB leaders fear public schools. Concepts like progressive education and experiential learning encourage kids to question accepted ideas, think independently, and draw their own conclusions. Those are dangerous concepts when you’re trying to keep the sheep in the pen.

  Worse, public school teachers taught scientific subjects like the theory of human evolution. True to the spirit of “Dr.” Bob Jones Sr., our IFB schoolteachers assured us that evolution was nonsense. They made fun of it. An IFB evangelist even wrote a catchy little song called “I’m No Kin to the Monkey,” that became a favorite in our Sunday services. I liked it so much I sang it while I played with my toys at home. This song decries and makes fun of the teaching of evolution, and concludes:

  Oooo, I’m no kin to the monkey,

  The monkey’s no kin to me,

  I don’t know much about his ancestors,

  But mine didn’t swing from a tree.…

  Our Christian school in Wisconsin was a tiny operation, owned and run by our church, with classes in First Bible’s basement. Our elementary curriculum was a self-directed program called Accelerated Christian Education, ACE for short. We had to complete workbooks every day. Whenever we finished one, we were supposed to go to the “score table” to correct our work. To indicate that we were ready, instead of raising a hand, we put a small American flag in a hole at the top of our desks that were painted red, white, and blue. When the teacher saw the flag, she’d say, “You may go to the score table.”

  All our parents signed waivers stating that school personnel could spank us whenever necessary. Based on my experience, school “spankings” ran the gamut of abuses from physical to sexual, just as “spankings” did in many IFB homes.

  When I was in second grade, I had a hard time scoring my work thoroughly. I compared what I had written to the answer key, but I was always missing little errors like misspelled words. Whenever I failed to correct one of my mistakes, my teacher deemed it cheating. She thought I was trying to make it look like I’d done a better job on the work than I really had. And every time I “cheated,” she led me to the bathroom upstairs for a spanking. The school’s policy was to emulate your parents’ discipline sessions, and I remember her putting a paper towel under my nose as I lay on the cold tile floor with my hands under my stomach while she whipped me with the familiar wooden dowel. The pain in my wrist bones as they were compressed against the hard floor was excruciating.

  With every spanking, I grew more riddled with anxiety—and more prone to errors. To add insult to injury, the school told our parents whenever they had disciplined us, and my father’s rule was that if you were spanked at school, you would get a repeat performance at home that night—with double the number of “swats” received at school—to reinforce the point.

  I tried diligently to correct every booklet perfectly, but inevitably I’d miss something and get dragged upstairs for another beating. Then I would stumble home filled with dread, knowing an equally vicious session lay ahead.

  Looking back, I realize how ludicrous it was to expect a seven-year-old to be so precise in her schoolwork. The correction process became so distracting and traumatic for me that I couldn’t focus on reading or writing and it was a struggle to learn anything. No wonder. Research shows that high levels of the stress hormone cortisol can actually decrease the size of a child’s hippocampus, the part of the brain you need for processing information properly.

  The Church and Home: The Gospel According to Bill Gothard

  While I was spending my mornings facedown on the bathroom floor at First Bible, my father was growing more and more enamored with an IFB icon named “Dr.” Bill Gothard. He started attending parenting and family seminars led by Gothard, a minister and founder of an organization called the Institute in Basic Life Principles. While I was growing up, I can’t remember an IFB home that didn’t contain at least one of the distinctive red notebooks handed out at Gothard’s Basic Life Seminars.

  Though he has never been married, Gothard instructs men and women all over the country on the biblical model for the husband-wife relationship. He tells them women should not use any form of birth control and that a wife must submit completely to her husband’s every wish (provided he doesn’t command her to disobey a clear biblical teaching like stealing, murdering, or becoming a prostitute) in order to stay under the “Umbrella of Protection,” a term he popularized. If a wife stepped out from underneath her Umbrella, he warned, God would punish her Himself or use the devil to chastise her. Either way, it was a grave sin.

  Gothard was also a big proponent of keeping unmarried women under their fathers’ Umbrella of Protection for life. After my sister Melissa graduated from college with her nursing degree and was working to support herself, my father tried to insist that she move home and live in the basement until “God brought the right man along.” She told him no in no uncertain terms. She was truly the independent one. That’s the reason she left the IFB four years before my husband and I did.

  Gothard runs seminars on childrearing too, and his instructions for children are essentially identical to his orders for women: They are to obey unconditionally. Those who fail lose the blessing of God on their lives, he warned in the seminars my father attended.

  He also advocated another bizarre behavior for children called “making an appeal.” My father loved it and implemented it in our home immed
iately. We were never to ask for anything directly. Instead, we had to make an appeal to him. So rather than say, “I’d like a piece of candy,” we would say, “Dad, would it be possible for me to have a piece of candy? I don’t need one and if you don’t think it’s best, that’s okay. But I would really enjoy one. Please?” This was so drilled into our psyches that I would lie in bed, silently crafting statements to my father for hours. I knew that if I phrased one sentence wrong I might well get a beating for making an inappropriate appeal. With my father, it was always better to say too much to qualify an appeal than to say too little and leave room for doubt in his mind. To this day, I use too many words to express my feelings because I was so conditioned to “make an appeal.”

  It had had horrible ramifications in certain situations. For instance, in 2007 Matthew Murray, a former student enrolled in Bill Gothard’s program, shot and killed four people at two Christian Centers in Colorado before turning the gun on himself. Murray, had stated in blog posts, “[we] were raised on home school and we both went through some insane stuff growing up in The Nightmare that outsiders just do not understand.” He went on to say, “Me, I remember the beatings and the fighting and the yelling and the insane rules and all the Bill Gothard [expletive] and the trancing out [expletive]. I’m still tranced out.”

  Another issue to consider is the IFB’s culture of abject submission of daughters to their fathers, and the disturbing sexual undercurrent that ran through it. Thousands of IFB survivors are speaking out publicly now about abuse and have confirmed the rampant sexual abuse within IFB homes, which is perhaps not surprising considering how many fathers in the cult were ordering their daughters as old as seventeen to lift up their dresses and bend over the bed so they could be spanked.