I Fired God

by Jocelyn Zichterman

  The IFB song that seems to me to epitomize this subliminal sexualizing of father-daughter relationships is “I Want to Marry Daddy When I Grow Up.” Little girls in the IFB sing it most often on Father’s Day and it makes my hair stand on end because of its fantasized approval of an imagined, physically incestuous relationship (“I love for him to hold my hand and cuddle up with me”) between father and daughter. (“If I could marry Daddy when I grow up, I’d be as good as any girl could be.”) You can find videos on YouTube of them in their little dresses in Fundamentalist churches like the ones I attended, looking out at their dads adoringly and singing the lyrics.

  The phenomenon of Purity Balls is equally unsettling. Conceptualized more than a decade ago by a Colorado couple named Randy and Lisa Wilson, Purity Balls are formal dances fathers attend with their daughters of all ages, in which the daughter signs a contract agreeing to stay a virgin until marriage and the father makes a pledge to protect the girl’s purity. The Wilsons, founders of their own ministry called Generations of Light, have grown the concept into a huge enterprise. Nearly five thousand dances have been held in forty-eight states and tickets often cost upward of $100. If they had existed when I was a kid, I have no doubt my father would have dragged us to them. Mothers can attend similar balls with their sons, which are sometimes called A Knight to Remember, though they’re far less popular.

  Purity Balls strike me as yet another sugarcoated means of subjugating young girls. Not only does the ritual minimize a mother’s role in her daughter’s life, but it asks girls to relinquish control of their own bodies and put their sexuality into the hands of a man. Here’s the pledge itself for fathers:

  I choose before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity. I will be pure in my own life as a man, husband, and father. I will be a man of integrity and accountability as I lead, guide, and pray over my daughter and my family as the high priest in my home. This covering will be used by God to influence generations to come.

  After a lifetime under the patriarchal thumb of the IFB, words like “authority” and “covering” send up red flags the moment I hear them because they smack of Gothard’s Umbrella of Protection approach. From an IFB husband’s viewpoint, a wife and a daughter are equals on many levels. If the IFB fosters a father-daughter relationship between men and their wives, is it sending confusing ancillary messages about the relationship between fathers and their daughters? It certainly did in my home when I was growing up.

  I find even more cause for concern in the fact that extremists like Doug Wilson are loud proponents of Purity Balls. Wilson, one of my idols in my cult days but no relation to the Purity Ball movement founders, is an IFB homeschooling advocate and founder of a ministry called Vision Forum. He is also unabashedly medieval in his views on sex, claiming that the Bible commands a woman to be no more than a passive recipient, a vessel. With male chauvinists like that as its champions, it’s hard to believe the Purity Ball movement really has young women’s best interests at heart.

  The Church and a Woman’s Reproduction: Quiverfull

  Arguably, the nation’s best-known window into the world of the IFB these days is the Duggar family. Arkansas couple Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their now nineteen children have been featured on five Discovery Health and TLC documentaries and spotlighted by countless TV and radio shows, including the Today show, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, AP Radio, CBS Radio, and Fox Radio, not to mention international outlets. They’ve been the subject of articles everywhere from The New York Times to Parents magazine to Ladies’ Home Journal about their astonishing number of kids (all of whom are homeschooled and all of whose names begin with the letter “J”) and their conservative Christian lifestyle. Most people know them as the stars of TLC’s hit show 19 Kids and Counting.

  Judging from blog comments, American audiences find something appealing in TLC’s portrayal of the clan’s lifestyle as a wholesome Leave It to Beaver–esque throwback to simpler times. For viewers who’ve grown up in modern America and have no experience with oppression or patriarchy, I can see how the network’s depiction of the Duggars might seem like heaven on earth. But, speaking as a survivor of that subculture, the reality is far different.

  For months, I couldn’t bring myself to watch the show. Even reading articles about the family sent me spiraling back into the darkness of my own childhood. Though the Duggars don’t use the term “IFB,” the telltale signs are everywhere from the language they use to the homeschooling curriculum they recommend (the same ones all of us IFB moms used when we were homeschooling our kids).

  When I finally steeled myself to sit through a few episodes, I wasn’t surprised to see scenes shot in an IFB church (the family’s oldest son was married in one during an episode) or to see footage of a music conference at one of the largest IFB churches, Bethel Baptist, in Schaumburg, Illinois. My husband had actually spoken at a Fundamental Baptist Fellowship conference at Bethel Baptist and I hosted a ladies seminar for homemakers there—so it was a flashback to my past. Hearing ads for “Dr.” Bill Gothard’s unaccredited Advanced Training Institute (ATI) was another telltale sign that they were loyalists of his teachings. Gothard is a big proponent of living debt-free, as are Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar. It might be an admirable principle—and the Duggars seem to manage their finances successfully—but avoiding debt entirely is unrealistic for many Americans, and it can have dangerous consequences for less business-savvy families. You get a glimpse of this when the TLC show focuses on son Josh Duggar’s in-laws, who raised their six daughters in a trailer. Untold difficulties arise when you’re not only living but homeschooling children in such cramped quarters.

  Based on my years of experience, the Duggars’ success is the exception, not the rule. No story illustrates the dire potential consequences of following this model more than that of Andrea Yates, a homeschooling mother of five who lived in a few hundred square feet, though her husband worked for NASA, because the family wanted to embrace the “simple lifestyle.” Ultimately, Andrea lost her mind and drowned all five of her young children in the bathtub. I spent a year with four kids and a fifth on the way living in a doublewide trailer and I, too, thought I was going to lose my mind with so little space.

  A wave of anger flashed over me when I heard Michelle Duggar mention a “jurisdiction.” To an average viewer, it would just sound like odd phraseology, but it left no doubt in my mind that she was a Gothard disciple. “Jurisdiction” is a term he coined to replace the more familiar “chores.” The theory is that using it gives children a sense of ownership for certain responsibilities. But in reality it’s just more cult lingo, and you’ll hear a lot of IFB lingo if you watch the Duggars. The men who run the IFB are masters at using language to reinforce their followers’ sense of separation from everyone else. As children, my siblings and schoolmates and I were forever being reminded that the IFB was better than the rest of society; others weren’t enlightened enough to understand terms like “jurisdiction” when it came to parenting.

  People on the TLC show sometimes ask Michelle Duggar if she wants more children. Invariably, she replies with an enthusiastic, “Yes! We want all that God will give us.” No one explains to viewers that as a Gothard follower, she’ll undoubtedly believe it’s a sin to use birth control and that to balk at the idea of pregnancy would displease God. In IFB circles, this is known as a “Quiverfull ideology.” It comes from Psalm 127: “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them [children].”

  My own father became so enamored with the Quiverfull concept when we were in Wisconsin that he decided to form us into a family nursing home ministry. He made us practice songs like “Amazing Grace,” “Just as I Am,” and “I Surrender All.” Then he dressed us up in our matching Sunday best clothes and dragged us to every assisted-living facility for the elderly he could find, billing us as the group “Quiverfull.” Whenever we sang, we held a small American flag in one hand and a Chri
stian flag in the other. Afterward, we would talk with the residents, presumably spreading Christian warmth and cheer to lonely old folks. My love for the elderly was seriously shaken one day when a lady named Kora suddenly slapped me across the face as I was chatting politely with her. I had been so trained to control negative emotions that I simply stood there in stunned silence. My father walked over, checked my cheek to see that no serious damage had been done, and soon he turned it into another funny anecdote he could recount to friends in the years to come.

  Not all IFBers take a no birth control stance, but the Quiverfull lifestyle has thoroughly permeated the movement. My dear friend Vyckie Garrison escaped it after giving birth to seven children and has started a blog called No Longer Qivering (minus the letter “u” because “there is no ‘you’ in quivering”), dedicated to exposing the domineering, patriarchal practices within the IFB. On her blog, she explains how dangerous the Gothard viewpoint is for women and how stressful it can be to feel that God expects you to give birth to another baby every year. Of course I can relate to that anxiety well, having had eight babies in nine years. It took an incredible toll on my young body, which would have been obvious to anyone. The psychological effects are much harder to see, but so many pregnancies combined with having to care for so many small children on what’s often a tight budget can set IFB women up for incredible depression and anxiety. That’s exactly what it did to me.

  Giving birth year after year obviously can be dangerous. You run the risk of everything from gestational diabetes to preeclampsia. If you’re prone to morning sickness, you’re consigned to years on end spent bolting to the nearest ladies’ room to vomit. Repeated weight gain and loss puts great stress on your joints. Childbirth comes with even more risks. IFB women who have endured a problematic labor but feel forced to have another baby every year constantly face the possibility that they might not make it this time. But, as Vyckie has explained in interviews, we were always told that a woman shouldn’t shrink from dangers. We should honor God with our bodies. After all, Jesus died for us. We should be willing to die for him, argued Quiverfull proponents like writers Mary Pride, Nancy Campbell, and Debi Pearl.

  Many IFB homeschoolers were firm opponents of pain relief during labor too. God intended women to suffer during childbirth to remind us of our original fall from grace in the Garden of Eden, they said. But having a beautiful baby placed on our chest afterward was supposed to compensate for all this because it reminded us of God’s redemptive plan for us.

  Gothard would have you believe mental illness is just a manifestation of sin, so if you are a woman suffering from postpartum depression, you are sorely out of luck in the cult. Those in power will tell you all you need to do is succumb to the will of God and read the KJV and you’ll be fine.

  Vyckie has done an admirable job raising awareness about the dangers of the Quiverfull lifestyle. A number of survivors have also come forward to share stories of the abuse they suffered at the hands of overstressed fathers and mothers in Quiverfull homes, some in the throes of untreated mental disorders. To date, Vyckie has shared hundreds of their accounts and has had 1.9 million visitors to her blog, demonstrating the prevalence of these oppressive beliefs still in our society today.

  I find it astonishing that anyone could present the patriarchal lifestyle as if it’s as sweet and wholesome as apple pie. Yet the Duggars come across as modern-day Waltons. The truth is, if you’re a Gothardite, Campbellite, Pearlite, or Prideite, as IFB survivors call people who follow those icons’ teachings, you not only buy into the notion of complete subjugation of women but you also subscribe to the idea that every child’s will must be broken.

  It’s a demand—not a suggestion—that “you beat him to save his soul from Hell,” as Proverbs 23:14 instructs. Nobody talks about it on TLC, but those of us raised in homes like the Duggars’ know full well that you can’t be deemed “a godly family” if you spare the rod. One can only wonder how Bob and Michelle get nineteen kids—most of them under age twelve—to stand still, fold their hands, and smile into the camera?

  After spending most of my life immersed in the darker, more sinister underside of the IFB ideology—the side that led to Lydia Schatz’s and Hana Grace-Rose Williams’s death—I feel it’s important for Americans to see more than the sanitized utopian version reality TV presents. That’s my motivation, painful as it is to relive my past, for sharing my story.

  5

  EARLY YEARS IN COLORADO (1985–1988)

  I spanked my daughter when she was seventeen … and she’ll tell you, she needed it.

  —Matt Olson, Lecture to Pastors, President of Northland Baptist Bible College/International University, 2006

  Growing Anxiety and Restlessness

  I could feel my body switching into fight-or-flight mode. Adrenaline surged through me, making every muscle tense and reducing my breath to quick shallow gasps. But I had no way to escape. I was seven years old. I wasn’t allowed outside without permission and I was too little to think of running away. So I crawled under my bed and curled into a ball, covering my ears to muffle the awful sounds coming from the next room.

  My brother Jason, who was now eight, had gotten into the habit of lying and my father swore that every time he caught him doing it he would double the number of blows he gave him with the wooden dowel. I knew it was going to be a bad night when Jason blundered into another obvious fib a few minutes after we all sat down to dinner in our converted schoolhouse home. My father exploded. He’d already given Jason thirty blows with the wooden dowel. This time it would be sixty.

  As I huddled in the darkness under the box springs, I sang softly to my doll, trying to drown out the barbarity that was only too audible through the wall.

  “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so…”

  “Roll over!”

  My father’s harsh shout was followed immediately by the ominous whistle of the rod and a sharp smack as it made contact with my brother’s skin. Jason let out an anguished cry. I could tell by the muffled tone of it that his face was buried in his pillow.

  “Do you think you can lie to ME and get away with it?” my father boomed. “Who do you think you are? You little punk! Now, roll back over!”

  My stomach muscles clenched at the fury I heard in his tone and at the low, pitiful sobs of my brother. I tried again to tune it all out.

  “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine…”

  I ran my fingers through my doll’s hair and whispered gently into her ear, “Everything’s going to be okay.” Being her mommy, I knew it was my job to make her feel safe. I repeated the words like a mantra, as much to quell my real fears as her imaginary ones.

  Sometimes the blows came in furious succession. Sometimes my father paused to rant or preach at Jason, and anywhere from two to eight minutes elapsed before I heard another smack. At last the whistle of the rod stopped. “Stay put,” my father ordered tersely. I heard him stomp out of the bedroom and head for the bathroom. I knew Jason was covered in bloody welts and my father had gone to retrieve the first-aid supplies he always used to treat the wounds he inflicted on us.

  It was over. Still, I remained pressed against the wall in my hiding place, cringing as I thought about the pain Jason must be feeling. I knew that pain all too well myself.

  Jason’s brief stint as a compulsive liar would soon become one of my father’s favorite jokes. Through some irresistible urge to tempt fate, Jason lied to him one more time after getting sixty lashes. He was now facing 120 blows with the rod. Maybe my father didn’t want to bother with a marathon spanking session. Maybe he was afraid he’d do real damage. Or maybe he was seized with a rare fit of compassion. Whatever the reason, he reduced Jason’s sentence to a single blow. When he announced his decision, Jason was dumbfounded.

  “You mean, you’re only going to give me one?” he asked. “Not two? Not three? Not four? Just o
ne?”

  This struck my father as comical and he doubled over laughing. We never heard the end of it. He told the story countless times, even to our teenage friends when they came over to our house years later.

  Looking back now, I can’t find any humor in the incident. It strikes me as yet more evidence of the psychological manipulation that was so typical in the IFB. The fact that Jason received unexpected mercy from my father when he had deliberately defied him threw us off balance just as much as my getting a beating on my tenth birthday when I’d done nothing wrong. Somehow, trivializing Jason’s misbehavior after having beaten him so savagely a few days earlier made my father even more menacing. He doled out punishment all the time, but he was utterly unpredictable about it. He might fly into a rage. He might burst into laughter. We never knew what to expect. But we were groomed to accept whatever he did to us from the time we were toddlers.

  It’s a classic move in power politics, and Bart knew how to use it instinctively. “Be deliberately unpredictable,” advises Robert Greene in his bestselling book The 48 Laws of Power, analyzing the most effective tactics of ruthless leaders from Machiavelli to Mao. “Behavior that seems to have no consistency or purpose will keep them off-balance, and they will wear themselves out trying to explain your moves. Taken to an extreme, this strategy can intimidate and terrorize.” Many victims leave a cult only to join another. Reading the “laws of power” highlighted in Greene’s book is highly beneficial for former cult members, to help them understand what they have been through and protect themselves from being exploited, once again, by the tactics cult leaders use instinctively to control people.

  The Way West

  By the time Jason had his legendary run-in with my father, our family was in desperate financial straits. The tension in our home was reaching a crescendo. Carpet-laying jobs were scarce in our part of Wisconsin and my parents were in debt up to their ears. There was barely enough money to buy food, so we were living from one can of peas to the next. When my father discovered that my brothers’ winter boots were full of holes, he made them secure plastic bags over the toes with rubber bands to keep the snow out. We heated our home with a wood stove, so Jeremy and Jason had to tromp out in those ruined boots even in blizzard conditions to cut wood for the fire. When she could scrape together the ingredients, my mother would bake because it was cheaper than buying bread, and one of my few happy memory of those dark times is the sweet smell of freshly made dinner rolls filling the air of the shabby little schoolhouse.