I Fired God

by Jocelyn Zichterman

  Bart knew we were headed for disaster. He needed to take drastic action. He and my mother had honeymooned in Colorado and they must have had pleasant memories of it because they decided the road to financial freedom led to the Rockies. My father always said he was a cowboy at heart, and he had had enough of Wisconsin’s long bitter winters to last a lifetime. So one night after we finished our evening prayers (we called them family devotions), Bible study, and one of “Dr.” Bill Gothard’s read-aloud Character Sketchbook lessons, he pulled out a U.S. map and pointed to Colorado.

  “Would you like to move away from Wisconsin?” he asked. In a rare pretense of democracy, he took a vote. All five of us raised our hands. I remember hesitating, unsure which answer he wanted and worrying that I would provoke him by getting it wrong. We were wide-eyed, tingling with fear and excitement at the thought of going on an adventure, starting a new life in the mountains.

  Over the next few days, we told everyone at church we were leaving. My four best friends and I all cried and hugged each other, realizing our days of playing house with our dolls together in the church nursery at recess were ending. We loved each other dearly and I knew I’d miss them. First Bible only had about thirty students, and in a school as small as that, you get very close. Our IFB friends were not only our confidants but also our only social contacts.

  The congregation threw us a going-away party, but Pastor Keck was livid when he found out we were leaving. My father had been a pillar of Keck’s church—children’s pastor, deacon, and de facto PR man for First Bible through his Sunday bus routes. Vicious as he often was to us, Bart could be extraordinarily charismatic when he wanted to win someone over. Almost everybody loved him when they first met him. Not surprisingly, he had increased Keck’s flock considerably through his weekly Bus Ministry. He and Keck also had attended “Dr.” Jack Hyles’s annual Pastors’ School in Hammond, Indiana, and Keck had come to regard my father as a close friend during those retreats.

  “You’re stepping out of the will of God,” he warned my father. He told the church members God wanted the Janz family to stay in Wisconsin, and we were ignoring His wishes for us. But Bart was not a man to be intimidated, even by his own pastor. He reminded Keck that the church had done nothing to help our family monetarily. “There’s no way I can stay here and keep a roof over our heads,” he said.

  Our fellow church members empathized with our decision and didn’t hold it against us. They cried, hugged us, and passed pictures around the food tables, reminding us of all the fun times we had shared. There were photos of our family wearing cowboy hats and riding horses during the week we spent at family camp at Bill Rice Ranch (an IFB summer camp in Tennessee named for the evangelist who founded it in 1953), and snapshots from Northland Camp and Conference Center in Dunbar, Wisconsin, where our entire church went every summer and where my future husband, Joseph, would eventually work. More pictures passed hands, followed by tearful goodbyes. But, as sad as I was to leave my friends, I was brimming with excitement about our new adventure.

  From Small Town to Big Time

  Several days later we were packed like sardines into our old station wagon with my mother at the wheel, ready to make the long trip to Colorado. My father led the way, driving ahead of us in a U-Haul truck. We had no money for fast food restaurants, so my mother had packed homemade snacks to eat along the way. When we finally arrived in Denver, we drove straight to the house of a couple my parents knew. Though they were strangers to my siblings and me, they had generously agreed to let us stay with them for a few months while my father jump-started his carpet business.

  We did our best to be unobtrusive, but living in another family’s home is always a little uncomfortable. Still, I remember feeling less afraid in the weeks we spent under their roof than I had in my life. I knew that as long as my father was around other people, he’d never act out the way he did in private with our family.

  My parents practically gushed with enthusiasm as they told us about the new church we would be attending. The pastor was “Dr.” Ed Nelson, a graduate and board member of Bob Jones University. “Wait until you see the church,” they said, their eyes shining. “It’s huge!”

  To me, bigger was always better, and from the moment I set foot in South Sheridan Baptist Church’s two-thousand-seat auditorium, I loved it. It was all perfect—the beautiful music the choir sang, the gorgeous foyer, the women’s sophisticated long floral dresses with their crisp white collars and hose to match, the men’s sleek suits and ties, the pastors’ elevated platform, reminding everyone that they were in charge. At first I felt intimidated by the church’s sheer size. But as I grew accustomed to it, it shrank, as things tend to do in a child’s eyes, until it had almost the same dimensions as our old Wisconsin church and everyone inside it seemed like extended family.

  From an IFB family’s viewpoint, the transition from Wisconsin to Colorado was momentous not just geographically but philosophically. We were switching from a small church loyal to “Dr.” Jack Hyles, to a big church, whose loyalty was with Bob Jones III. Both men were formidable forces in the IFB, and intense rivals. Each demanded absolute loyalty of all his followers and they could make or break a man’s ministry career. Every IFB insider knew that the way to climb the church ladder was to be asked to speak at the cult’s prestigious annual leadership conferences, and a word from Hyles or Jones could get you an invitation—or ensure that you never got one. IFB pastors lived under the sword of Damocles: They could be blackballed at any moment by their respective IFB godfathers for doing or saying anything that wasn’t approved by the top brass. In moving to South Sheridan, my father had essentially switched “mob” families (Hyles to Jones—to put it colloquially).

  Shortly after we arrived in Colorado, Bart met with “Dr.” Nelson to find out whether South Sheridan would be right for our family. He was floored when, on hearing about our financial hardship, Nelson wrote him a check from the church for $200 for groceries. He said the man won his heart on the spot. Pastor Keck had known how desperate we were for years, yet he had never offered us a penny.

  Practically speaking, most IFB pastors have complete control over how their church’s money is used. If that control isn’t codified by the church’s own bylaws, then it’s often secured through the pastor’s selection of yes-men deacons who rubber-stamp their decisions. In addition to using money to create lifelong loyalty in down-and-outers like my father, many IFB pastors regularly invite fellow ministers from other states to their churches as special guest speakers. Afterward, they send them home with a “love offering” of thousands of dollars, expecting the men to return the favor in the future. “Dr.” Bob Jones III most likely received record love offerings since he was on the road for a large portion of every year ministering to his international IFB flock, flying from place to place in his private jet, then back home to his mansion on the BJU campus.

  Nelson’s generosity to Bart set the trajectory of my life. From that moment on, the man could do no wrong in my parents’ eyes. Not only was he a BJU alumnus, he was also a long-standing university board member, pastoring one of the country’s largest BJU megachurches. He and “Dr.” Bob Jones Jr. seemed to be bosom buddies. Later “Dr.” Bob Jones III would visit annually. “He’s the godliest man alive,” they told us in hushed and reverent tones. We were forbidden to speak a word against either “Dr.” Nelson or “Dr.” Bob Jones III, though the rebellious kids called him “triple sticks” under their breath. On the rare occasions when one of these two icons walked into our Sunday School classes or a classroom in our IFB school, our teachers ordered us to leap to our feet to show respect. It was like having the president of the United States pay you a visit.

  Actually, it was better. We thought much more of “Dr.” Ed Nelson and “Dr.” Bob Jones III than we did of the president, no matter who was in the White House. Growing up, whenever a Democrat was elected we heard that America was “in big trouble.” When a Republican took office, we were “in a time-sensitive situation�
�� and needed to act quickly to run the liberals out before they could ready us for the guillotines.

  Our overriding concern was always our religious freedom. We were terrified some godless liberal would restrict our ability to worship and bring God’s wrath down on us. Given our belief in the impending Apocalypse, we thought one misguided decision in the White House could put our immortal souls in danger.

  A Curriculum Change

  My parents soon found a house for us to rent and enrolled us in Silver State Baptist School, the local private IFB K–12. I was ten and starting fifth grade that fall. Our first year in Denver was particularly traumatic. My father was still struggling to get his business up and running, so my mother took a job at United Airlines out of desperation. They were both still staunch believers that mothers should stay home, but there was no other way they could pay for tuition and necessities for five growing kids.

  One reason our IFB education cost more in Colorado was that Silver State used different teaching materials. “Dr.” Jack Hyles churches most often used “Dr.” Bill Gothard’s Advanced Training Institute (ATI) and the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) curriculum favored by TLC’s Duggars, which were relatively inexpensive. Bob Jones University churches, on the other hand, used Bob Jones Press materials and A Beka Books from Pensacola Christian College, the two largest IFB curriculum distributors in the country. Both programs were considered top notch in the IFB, and they were, not surprisingly, considerably more expensive. IFB homeschoolers often use a mix of all of these programs.

  It didn’t matter which “curriculum” they favored, Christian schools and textbooks typically taught nothing but memorization and obedience. We were drilled in reading, writing, and math, but we learned almost no legitimate science or history. Our critical thinking skills were virtually nonexistent. We were told exactly how to think on just about everything.

  The ACE textbooks we used were always red, white, and blue to underscore the IFB-patriotism link and they featured Christian character-building lessons at the bottom of every page, even in math. BJU’s books contained blatant inaccuracies. For example, according to one Bob Jones Press fourth-grade science textbook:

  Electricity is a mystery. No one has ever observed it or heard it or felt it. We can see and hear and feel only what electricity does. We know that it makes light bulbs shine and irons heat up and telephones ring. But we cannot say what electricity itself is like. We cannot even say where electricity comes from. Some scientists think that the sun may be the source of most electricity. Others think that the movement of the earth produces some of it. All anyone knows is that electricity seems to be everywhere and that there are many ways to bring it forth.

  Another passage from a seventh-grade Bob Jones Press textbook instructs students that, “Since the Bible is always accurate, we can use it to judge scientific observations and any conclusions based on observations. Any observation or conclusion will fit one of three categories. It will 1. contradict the Bible and be wrong, 2. agree with the Bible and be accurate, or 3. not be discussed in the Bible and may or may not be accurate.”

  And one passage from an ACE textbook notes, “Biblical and scientific evidence seems to indicate that men and dinosaurs lived at the same time.… Fossilized human footprints and three-toed dinosaur tracks occur in the same rock stratum.… That dinosaurs existed with humans is an important discovery disproving the evolutionists’ theory that dinosaurs lived 70 million years before man. God created dinosaurs on the sixth day. He created man later the same day.”

  It appalls me that after enduring years of such mis-education myself, which contradicts modern science, and finally getting our own children away from it, my husband’s and my tax dollars—and yours—are being used to underwrite the same misinformation for a new generation. School voucher programs were designed to help low-income and special-needs students obtain a better education. But the reality is that vouchers allow states to use public funds to pay for private education in religious schools, many of which teach some of the same nonsensical IFB rhetoric my classmates and I learned. According to recent data from the U.S. Department of Education, 80 percent of students who participate in Washington, D.C.’s, voucher program attend a faith-based school. The number is even higher in Florida, which has the country’s highest number of tax-subsidized school vouchers.

  A 2012 report presented to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce by the National Coalition for Public Education noted that, “Private schools are not subject to the same transparency as public schools—there are no elected school boards, rights to review records, or other accountability measures.… Students attending private schools with vouchers are stripped of their First Amendment, due process, and other constitutional and statutory rights offered to them and guaranteed in public schools.”

  In Colorado the Bullies Rule

  Academic issues aside, our move to Silver State Baptist school caused great upheaval in our family. My mother was no longer around to keep an eye on us at a time when my brothers were adolescents, going through all the biological shifts that age entails, and we were all struggling mightily to make friends in a school where it wasn’t easy.

  Cliques were well established at Silver State and there was a distinct division between the “cool” church kids and the “losers.” The “losers” were children whose parents had unimpressive minimum-wage jobs and held no leadership positions in the church. The “cool” kids’ parents were professionals who earned good salaries and played influential roles in the church. It was easy to spot their offspring. They all hung out together. They played sports. And even though the standard IFB regulations applied to clothing, hair, music, and television, these kids knew how to look more fashionable than everyone else.

  Most IFB girls weren’t allowed to wear pants, except on very specific occasions. For instance, if we were at home with the family or doing something athletic like horseback riding, my parents deemed pants acceptable. But the sartorial goal for IFB girls’ clothing was “lots, loose, and long.” (Needless to say, we weren’t allowed to color our hair. Boys had strict guidelines as well and weren’t allowed to wear theirs longer than their ears or spike it with gel.) Most IFB moms made their children’s clothes and many were accomplished seamstresses. My mom had spent hours at the sewing machine when we lived in Wisconsin making us culottes, which were essentially big skirts split down the middle—cotton ones for youth group activities and snow-pants-style ones that could be worn in the winter for sledding, hiking, skating, and skiing. Mixed swimming was generally banned in the IFB, but on rare occasions when we were permitted in the water with boys present, we had to wear dark T-shirts and culottes, which ballooned out awkwardly and tangled around our legs, creating a drowning hazard. Girls were always worried the water would “take them away.” It was no surprise to me when the Bates family, the newest Quiverfull family with a reality show on TLC, made their teenage daughters wear full-length skirts while whitewater rafting during one episode and their teenage sons swim in jeans at their hotel swimming pool.

  During our first years in Colorado, my mother broke the IFB pattern and stopped sewing altogether and most of our clothes came from Goodwill. I was petite and rail-thin, so I managed to scrounge a few decent size 0s and 2s, but my sisters were stockier. It was almost impossible to find anything flattering that fit IFB standards and so their self-esteem plummeted.

  While the “cool” girls all wore long khaki skirts with polo shirts, a number of the “uncool” kids at school wore tattered, disheveled clothing. Some of the girls hung their heads and their eyes had a vacant look. I remember being struck by how hopeless they seemed. The homeschooled kids who showed up for our Sunday School classes exuded the same morose, downtrodden aura. My heart went out to them. We weren’t segregated from them like we had been from the bus kids in Wisconsin, so I tried to be friendly, but they barely talked and we never became close. Looking back, I’m struck by how similar their demeanor and body language were to that of many vict
ims of abuse I’ve met since leaving the IFB. Now I would recognize the telltale signs, and I would have a better understanding of how to reach out to them. Back then I had no clue.

  There is one boy who stands out in my memory. His hair was greasy, his clothes were too small and filthy, and he smelled. Every time I saw him at school or church, he was wearing the same pair of pants. He was sullen and distant, with a pained sort of expression. It never dawned on me that he could be being abused to extremes even we couldn’t have imagined—extremes like those in the Esther Combs case. As a kid, I just thought he was slovenly and apathetic. After all, one of our favorite Sunday School songs, sung by our favorite Christian music artist, Patch the Pirate (Ron “Patch” Hamilton), included these lines:

  Pigs don’t live in houses and pigs don’t make their beds.

  Pigs don’t wash their faces. They love the dirt instead.

  So, if you’re not a piglet, make the difference clearly seen,

  Pick up that messy bedroom and show you’re Christian clean.

  On and on that song went, listing different childhood scenarios and making the point that a messy family was not a God-honoring family. Dirty boys and girls were lazy. They needed discipline. Is it any wonder I concluded that the boy was a little piglet who lacked the godly character to keep himself clean? My heart breaks when I think back on that now. But the IFB didn’t advocate state intervention even when they suspected severe child abuse. Nobody seemed worried about the boy’s welfare. The pristine, well-dressed kids in the IFB just wrinkled their noses whenever he passed.