There was a little girl in my fifth-grade class who didn’t seem much better off than the boy. But rather than ignore her as they did him, the boys targeted her mercilessly. Their favorite game was to pass her “cooties” around. I distinctly remember the teacher, a graduate of Bob Jones University, as virtually all of them were, rolling her eyes and chuckling at their cruelty. “Hey, now. Stop it. Don’t say that about her,” she chided, but her tone was light and her manner implied that it was all in good fun. With no consequence, the boys redoubled their attacks. One day I glanced over and saw tears streaming down the girl’s face, cutting a clear line through the dirt and revealing bright, white skin. I remember being shocked at the amount of grime on her cheeks and feeling sorry for her. Eventually they got bored tormenting her. By the time we reached junior high school, they treated her as if she didn’t exist—just like they did the little boy in the grubby outgrown pants.
You could make the case that bullying is endemic in schools, but our school seemed worse, given the fact that the people running it professed to be teaching us to follow Jesus’s example. Not only did the instructors at Silver State habitually ignore bullying, some of them fostered it. They seemed as immature as the students, giggling along sycophantically at the bullies’ antics.
My Father: The Biggest Bully
My father was a natural when it came to bullying, and it didn’t take him long to figure out that our new IFB church was on the same page as the old one when it came to discipline sessions. Pastor Ed Nelson was a proud proponent of “breaking the will of the child” and he proclaimed it vociferously from the pulpit. He even told stories of the many times he had needed to break his own children’s wills.
Like many other members in our congregation, we soon became patients of Dr. Roland, a general practitioner who was a fellow member of our church. Dr. Roland was so passionately anti–birth control that he refused to prescribe contraceptives for any of the women in the church. He and his wife had nine children and when he found out my mother was working outside the home, he launched into a lecture about how they were doomed to lose all of us to the wicked world outside the IFB.
Christy, the Rolands’ third child, became my best friend. We both loved practical jokes and we spent hours laughing over the silliest things. But the best fringe benefit of befriending the Rolands, from my parents’ point of view, was that the good doctor was always ready and willing to patch us up without blanching if my father went too far during a discipline session.
I remember one beating in particular that my younger sister Melissa got in third grade for not completing her chores, always a sure way to infuriate my father. He beat her so severely that she couldn’t sit down. Fortunately (from Bart’s perspective), Melissa’s teacher was a BJU graduate, and instead of calling the police or Child Protective Services, she simply stacked cardboard boxes up in the back of the classroom to form a makeshift desk. My sister stood behind them and did her school work for three days, until she was able to gingerly rest enough weight on her thighs and buttocks to stay seated at her desk through the day again.
I knew Melissa was in agony and that standing for so long made her shaky and weak, but even I applauded her teacher’s solution at the time. Everyone in the cult would have considered her “crazy” if she had arranged for a state investigation of our household because bringing ungodly people into our lives would cause us to lose our souls to Hell. In my mind, Melissa’s teacher had done exactly as God would want her to do.
I wish that was my worst memory of abuse, but those were some of the darkest days of my life. Dealing with a working wife and a houseful of preteens while trying to build a new business was getting to my father, and his violent temper manifested itself in new and terrifying ways.
He started beating us for things as simple as not emptying the dishwasher, forgetting to put in a load of laundry, or failing to dust his desk. I was responsible for pulling what he called “fuzzies” off his dress socks. He was obsessive about little details like that and if he discovered a stray hair or piece of string had somehow attached itself to one of them, he would fly off the handle and beat me. I was desperate to perfect my work, spending from two to three hours at night meticulously picking tiny lint balls off the socks, but it felt like second-grade workbook scoring all over again: No matter how hard I tried, I could never get it right. I would always end up in the spanking position, facedown with my hands tucked under my pelvic bones, getting battered with a rod.
Over time, the endless beatings took a toll on our emotional stability. We were crumbling inside. But you would have never guessed it as an outsider looking at us. We were well mannered and flawlessly groomed. We were also “cultured” enough to play musical instruments. I sang, as well as played piano and violin, and loved doing all three. We were the model perfect family on the outside, which seemed to matter most to the IFB.
Melissa fared even worse than I did back then when it came to punishment on one memorable occasion. She was a born rebel and, one night when she was eleven, she decided to express her independence. She had vacuumed the entire house, but when my father came home, he found two balled-up carpet fibers under his bedroom nightstand. To him, this proved she had been lazy. Too angry to waste time retrieving the rod, he flew down the stairs with his belt in his hands and screamed, “Get upstairs to my room NOW!”
Melissa hesitated, but stood her ground. “No,” she said tentatively, as if she was testing the waters.
No Janz child had ever refused to lie down and take a beating. None of us had ever defied my father this openly and, hearing her refusal, I gasped so hard I felt light-headed.
My father seized Melissa and threw her onto the steps. She landed on her side, but scrambled to her feet, pure terror in her eyes. He lunged after her and shoved her hard. Her head slammed into the wall, but she bounced back to her feet and scrambled up the staircase. Over his yells and her shrieks, I heard thuds and crashes as he shoved her down the long upstairs hallway toward my parents’ bedroom.
She told me the details later. She said he ripped her clothes off, stripping her naked, and threw her onto the bed. “You’re about to get the beating of a lifetime,” he growled. “Put your face in the pillow and your hands under your stomach, girl. Nobody says no to me!”
Frantic to get away, Melissa rolled off the far side of the bed. But Bart vaulted over the edge of it, swinging the belt wildly and striking her anywhere he could land a blow. He hit her legs, her hands, her back, even her face as she crawled on her hands and knees toward the door. Naturally, it was locked, but she gripped the handle and managed to pull herself to her feet and fled for the master bathroom, with him in pursuit, flogging any part of her body he could reach. There was no bathroom door, so she had no hope of protecting herself. At last she surrendered and agreed to lie on the bed to avoid any more blows to her face.
Even after that, he beat her so viciously for so long that as she lay there with her hands pinned under her abdomen, she gouged deep chunks out of her own skin in an effort to cope with the pain. She thought she was going to die. More than a half hour later, he finally decided she’d had enough. He told her to put her clothes back on and marched her out of the bedroom.
He called all of us into the living room to make sure we got a good look at Melissa and assured us that if we ever refused to lie down for a spanking, the same or worse would happen to us. Every part of my sister’s body bore the marks of the beating. There were wide angry red lines across her face. She could easily have been blinded if the belt had caught her a few inches higher or lower.
My father ordered me to go upstairs and get the thickest foundation and face powder I could find on my mother’s dressing table and bring it to him. Without a word, I did as he instructed. We all watched him cake layer after layer of makeup and powder on Melissa’s face to conceal her wounds.
We were supposed to attend a U.F.O. (Unusual Fellowship Opportunity) that included a movie at church that night and we were forty-five minutes late.
When we finally arrived, Melissa couldn’t sit in the pews. She stood in the back of the church next to the ushers, just as she had done in third grade. Eventually my father spotted her and told her if she didn’t take a seat, he would take her home and give her a second beating to rival the first. She hobbled over to her friends and lay on her side next to them in a pew.
“What happened?” they whispered.
“I got a bad beating,” she rasped. Her stomach ached, she was running a fever, and she could barely sit up. When we got home from church that night, she went straight to bed.
Melissa was never the same after that. She became brooding and introverted. Whenever she could, she would escape to her room and vanish into drawing, which resulted in her developing unusual artistic skill. Even now, so many years later, she’s still an amazing artist.
The Price of Playing the Devil’s Tunes
Melissa wasn’t the only one chafing under the harsh rules of my parents and the IFB. My brother Jeremy, however, was more covert. When he was fifteen, my parents caught him masturbating and listening to rock music. To an IFB father, those are sins as grievous as doing drugs or running away would be to the average American parent.
On one occasion, my father found a tape by the rock band Bon Jovi hidden in Jeremy’s bedroom. He flew into a blind rage. “GET THE ROD!” he shouted at me. “Bring it here!”
Petrified, I ran downstairs for the dowel, wondering if I was about to get a beating too. I knew when he became this livid, he could turn on any one of us. Sometimes three or four Janz kids would be lined up for discipline sessions.
Bart dragged Jeremy into his bedroom and locked the door. We heard him yell, “Get those clothes off!” Jeremy was blubbering the way you would expect a five-year-old child to cry. As usual, I stumbled numbly into my own bedroom and sat like a statue, trying not to listen to the hideous clap of the wooden dowel as it hit Jeremy. Between blows, my father paused long enough to upbraid my brother for his disgraceful behavior and to bellow the familiar, “ROLL BACK OVER!”
When the beating had dragged on for more than thirty minutes, longer than Melissa’s terrible session with the belt, my whole body started to sweat. I couldn’t take any more. I dropped to my knees beside my bed and begged God to save Jeremy.
“Please don’t let him die!” I prayed. “Please, God. I love my brother. Let him live through this.”
I started telling God about all of Jeremy’s wonderful qualities. I told him how empty our lives would be if my father killed him. “I know he sinned, but I’m sure he learned his lesson. He’ll choose to walk uprightly now. Please, God, make my father stop,” I implored.
At last the door opened and my father shouted, “All of you, get in here NOW!”
I can still see it in my mind’s eye, as if it were a movie playing. Terrified I was about to find Jeremy’s bloody, lifeless body sprawled across the bed, I stepped tremulously into the room. My sisters followed, cowering behind me. My father lined us up shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the bed. Jason stopped in the doorway, so petrified his eyes seemed to be bulging out of his head.
“Take a good look at Jeremy,” my father ordered.
There was a long pause as we all looked down. Jeremy lay naked, facedown in the spanking position with his hands hidden under his stomach and his head buried in the pillow weeping. The pose was familiar, but he was shaking so violently from head to toe that it was obvious he had no control. Blood covered the entire backside of his body. It was splattered all over the sheets and pillows.
We stood transfixed until my father broke the silence, his voice shooting through us like a jolt of electricity. “If you EVER listen to rock music, this will happen to you too!” He shook the bloody rod in each of our faces, then he threw it at Jason. “Take that to the kitchen and wash the blood off of it! Now get out of here!” he told us, reaching for the salve to treat Jeremy’s wounds.
Bad Attitudes and Homeschooling
Not long after this, Jeremy got caught stealing equipment from the science lab at Silver State Baptist High School, where he and Jason were students. My father met with the principal at the school, which was adjacent to our church, and told him to expel his son. He would homeschool him instead. That would be Jeremy’s wake-up call, Bart predicted.
A short time later, Jason got caught stealing candy from the gas station across the street from school. My father was so angry he not only beat them, but he pulled all five of us out of school and forced us to do a year of homeschooling together. My brothers were football players in the school sports program and they were devastated to be off the team. (The IFB places tremendous importance on boys’ sports—not surprising, given its male-dominant culture.) Jeremy was on the small side, and he was painfully self-conscious about it. A year without football practice would set him back so much he might never get to play a starting position. But that didn’t matter to my father, despite the fact that he had spent our whole childhood brooding over the fact that his own dad never let him play high school sports.
He vowed to correct our bad attitudes and teach us to be grateful. Naturally, no one at school ever brought up the subject of abuse with my father. Nobody dared suggest that Bart’s children might be acting out because there were problems in the Janz home. There are no licensed school counselors on staff at IFB schools, so there was no one to intervene on our behalf, though we would have been ripe for a state intervention. Private IFB schools like ours are, to this day, utterly autocratic. They operate with complete disregard for traditional educational norms. And in all my years attending them, no one outside ever intervened.
Children like us were, and still are, left alone in isolated religious settings, without even one responsible, caring adult to turn to when they are in danger. We were at the mercy of my father in every way, and school personnel backed him unconditionally. They gave full support to his idea of removing us from school at the end of the year. They asked no questions about how our homeschooling would be handled, who would be in charge of teaching us, or what academic materials my parents planned to use.
Nobody warned my parents that homeschooling without supervision was illegal in Colorado, though every member of the administration and faculty knew that both of my parents worked full-time. They never suggested that we come in periodically so they could evaluate our academic progress. My father was the head of our home. He made the decisions. They believed that no one inside the IFB or out should question his authority.
Curtains Drawn, No One Watching
The year that followed my brothers’ expulsion was a travesty. Both of my parents left for work around 8 A.M. Neither one got home before 5 or 6 P.M. Before they left, they drew all the curtains in the house and warned us to keep them closed to make sure no passersby glanced in and saw five unsupervised teens at home. They told us to be perfectly quiet and never to answer the door or the phone. We were to sit at our desks in the front room for the entire day and do our ACE and Alpha Omega booklets, then score the work ourselves. Of course, while my parents were gone we just filled in all the answers from the score keys in our booklets. We received no education whatsoever that year.
Instead, my brothers and sisters would sneak off to watch MTV, while I went to my parents’ room and settled down in front of their small black-and-white television set. My favorite shows were I Love Lucy, Leave It to Beaver, and The Brady Bunch. The Brady Bunch was strictly forbidden because my parents thought the characters had bad attitudes and wore feminist clothes, but I loved it.
My job was to listen for the garage door. When I heard it go up, I would run down the hallway and call, “They’re here!” The kids downstairs would switch off the TV and race back to their desks, while I flipped off the set upstairs and pounded down to mine. By the time my parents walked in, we were seated like perfect angels, diligently bent over our schoolwork. My brothers affectionately called our homeschool, “Party Hearty Christian School.”
Unfortunately, it wasn’t much of a party for me. I had just tur
ned thirteen and I was going through significant hormonal changes. I felt exhausted all the time. I had put on thirty pounds, and the extra weight was taxing my small frame. Maybe it was inevitable that my changing body would draw the attention of two hormone-fueled teenage boys who were keeping close quarters with me and had no healthy outlets for their pent-up sexual urges.
During those long terrible months with no one around to watch us, my brother Jeremy molested me more times than I can count. He had been groping me about once a week ever since I’d turned eleven. Now, finding himself in an unsupervised environment, his attentions grew more frequent and more intense. He was extremely violent. I became hyper-vigilant whenever I walked past bathrooms and closets, because he would hide behind doors then leap out and grab my arm with incredible force, yanking me in and slamming the door behind us. I had deep bruises in the shape of fingerprints all over my upper arms. As soon as he got me alone, he would start to kiss me aggressively and grab my breasts until they throbbed. The harder I pushed against him to get away, the more threatening he grew. He never looked me in the eye, but kept his eyes fixed on my breasts and lower body as he took off my clothes piece by piece until we were both naked. He would then jam his penis between my legs and rub against me until he ejaculated against my vagina.
This happened several times every week. And even though Jason had also kissed me and ejaculated against me while groping my breasts, I remember he and my sisters banging on the bathroom door and yelling, “Stop! Disgusting! Get out of there!”
Jeremy would bang back on the door from the other side and scream, “Leave me alone!”
I was appalled and deeply ashamed, but I had no idea how to get out of the situation. I was frightened of Jeremy’s violent temper, but I was equally afraid my father would chop him into pieces and bury him in the backyard if he ever found out, assuring IFB church members and friends that Jeremy had run away. Then he would chain me in my room for the rest of my life, blaming me for having somehow enticed my own brother.
I Fired God Page 9