I Fired God

by Jocelyn Zichterman

  First Dates

  Despite the rampant sexual abuse in my own home, my father subscribed to the IFB’s strict old-fashioned mores when it came to dating. My sisters and I had our share of crushes on boys in our classes, but we weren’t allowed to date in high school. My brothers, on the other hand, could take girls out on double dates. On rare occasions during my junior and senior year, Bart allowed me to tag along with one of my brothers on a double date, presuming they would act as chaperones.

  My first serious crush was on a man I met at one of our high school football games. He was much older than I was and in the Navy. Greg Patterson was an alumnus of Silver State and a former football star at the school who often came to watch the games when he was home, and apparently I caught his eye while I was cheerleading in front of the stands. I was only sixteen and he was twenty-five, but the age difference didn’t faze my friends, who gushed over him and whispered about what a “hunk” he was.

  At first my father allowed us to talk to each other and write letters, and eventually he allowed me to go on one date with Greg, without either of my brothers present. We simply went to dinner and he never touched me, but he gave me his gold chain to wear while he was away. I wore it with great pride, glowing when the other girls admired it or eyed it jealously. I find it odd now that, though I wasn’t officially allowed to date, my father allowed me to flirt with a man so much older. Even more disturbing is the fact that, though my own parents and all the adults in my school and church seemed to be aware of my budding romance, no one ever explained that a physical relationship between us would have been illegal.

  My father eventually told me I had to cut off all contact with my crush. I was heartbroken. I had envisioned a long-term relationship with this man after I got out of high school. I even dreamed of marrying him. But my father was the decision maker, not me, so there was little I could do.

  Shortly after that “breakup,” Jason introduced me to his new best friend from Northland Baptist Bible College, a boy named Will Galkin, who had come home with Jason on a college break. We went on a few double dates with Jason, but our long-distance “relationship” was far from serious and it ended within a matter of months. I was still sixteen and he was a college freshman, but again no one mentioned our age difference or the fact that, under Colorado law, a physical relationship would have been illegal.

  Camping with God

  The highlight of my teen years was the annual week-long trip my siblings and I took after school ended in June to The Wilds of the Rockies in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. It was an IFB camp run by Bob Jones University graduates, and most of the camp counselors were students at one of the four most prominent IFB colleges in the Jones Camp (BJU, Pensacola Christian College, Maranatha Baptist Bible College, and Northland Baptist Bible College/International University).

  Of course, we got more cult indoctrination there, but we didn’t care. The cheers, competitions, camp food, and new friends from IFB churches all around the country were enough fun to counterbalance the endless hellfire and brimstone sermons.

  “Dr.” Tom Farrell, a BJU graduate, was the fieriest of all our camp preachers, but also the most loved by the teenagers. He would work himself into a frenzy, yelling until he turned beet red and spraying spit on anyone seated in the front row. Fire seemed to blaze from his eyes and his skintight polo shirts strained against his huge bulging biceps. He looked like he could snap you in two if you crossed him. If anyone dared to yawn, slump in his chair, or look bored, Farrell would pounce.

  “Young man in the back row!” he would scream, pointing a damning finger. “Yes, I’m talking to you, big boy! Sit up! You may sit that way in your youth group at your church, and your youth pastor may let you get away with it, but when I’m up here preaching, you will respect my God! Do you understand me?” The culprits snapped to attention like recruits at boot camp every time.

  One of Farrell’s favorite bits of showmanship was to play music samples from popular rock bands and performers like Bon Jovi, Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Def Leppard to highlight their “satanic” lyrics. Sometimes he even played the songs backward so we could hear the hidden satanic messages. By the end of his sermons, I was thoroughly convinced that nearly every artist in the Billboard Top 100 practiced black magic and the beat of their music conjured up demons.

  We worked hard all week to get our hearts “right with God.” Many campers, myself included, decided they weren’t living for the Lord sufficiently and were “born again” again at camp and opted to be rebaptized when they got back to their home churches. “Dr.” Tom Farrell had a talent for making even the purest, most obedient teenager feel like a deviant. Everyone at camp went for “spiritual counseling,” whether it was to overcome our sinful desire to date or to find the strength to obey our parents more reverently and sweetly. When I was in eighth grade, I wanted so much to shed my excess weight that I would slip off to the basement and do aerobics to “worldly” Christian pop artists like Steve Green and Sandi Patty because their bouncy music made it easier to exercise. But after Farrell’s camp sermons, I repented of my “sin” and headed to a clearing behind the chapel to drop my CDs into the Burn Barrel. (Burn Barrels were common in the IFB, a practice inspired by the Book of Acts, in which converts of the Apostle Paul threw all their occult materials into a huge bonfire in the city of Ephesus.) Into the Wilds’ Burn Barrel went all sorts of worldly entertainments discarded by penitent teens, from romance novels to teen magazines. At the end of the week, we each threw a stick into a bonfire near the lake as a sign of our renewed surrender to God.

  Farrell ran through a menu of sins so exhaustive that, looking back, I’m sure he must have consulted a thesaurus for synonyms. There was bound to be at least one we had committed. If you didn’t think you’d been guilty of pride, he might catch you when he mentioned a “spirit of worldliness” and you’d feel obliged to atone and seek spiritual counseling. “Anger, bitterness, frustration, laziness, sloth, deceit, a lack of forgiveness…” On and on Farrell went until he reached one of the worst, listening to rock and roll music.

  The IFB leaders often gauged a camp speaker’s success on the number of kids who responded to invitations for counseling, and “Dr.” Tom Farrell basically guaranteed that almost all 250 of us junior high and high school kids would file out of his sermons having found something to confess to a camp counselor.

  Every time we confessed a sin to one of our counselors, they filled out a corresponding “confession card” or “decision slip.” I didn’t know it at the time, but IFB camps often kept all our slips on file for future reference. They also shared them with any parents who asked.

  I was foolishly candid with the camp director, “Dr.” Robert Allamon, and his wife, Janie, both BJU graduates, about struggling to forgive my father for his bouts of rage. I had been warned by IFB leaders more times than I could count that the Bible said we must honor our father and mother, and that God might cut my life short if I failed to do so. (My father had told us from a young age that he prayed God would kill us if we ever strayed from the path of righteousness.) But, as I told the Allamons, I also knew that anger for its own sake was strictly forbidden by the IFB, and I felt my father disciplined me with unrighteous anger. One of my friends told me her parents never raised their voices during their discipline sessions. I understood that my father needed to beat me for my sinful actions, but I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t try to control his rage.

  Did my father find out everything I confided in the Allamons? I can’t say for sure, but it would have been par for the course in the IFB. It would also explain why my father’s violence toward me always seemed to escalate after camp, despite the fact that I came home repentant and worked harder than ever to please him.

  I should have learned my lesson, but I was still naive enough to buy into the IFB’s rhetoric. Between my junior and senior year, I attended counselor-in-training sessions at camp. The program was designed to give high school students a glimpse into what being a s
ummer counselor was like and to see if we had the spiritual fortitude to lead a group of teenagers. In every private session I attended, I was treated to a diatribe on the attributes of the various IFB colleges and the importance of Christian higher education. I now realize it was a strategic marketing ploy to boost enrollment in IFB colleges. Our IFB Christian schools were feeders for IFB colleges, and they all took their students on annual tours of whichever IFB colleges their school was affiliated with—BJU, Hyles-Anderson College, “Dr.” Bill Gothard’s Advanced Training Institute, Pensacola Christian College, and so on.

  Once you were in training, you were required to meet with “Dr.” Tom Farrell in one-on-one sessions to discuss the areas of your life in which you wrestled with sin and needed spiritual guidance. In all my innocence, I repeated what I had told the Allamons about struggling to forgive my father for beating me in a rage until I bled. Farrell gave the pat response you almost always hear from IFB authority figures. “You need to forgive and not get bitter,” he said. “In fact, you should apologize to your father for any signs of bitterness you may have manifested.” IFB leaders always preached that, “You need to apologize for your ten percent wrong behavior even if the other person is ninety percent wrong.” But, the men in power never apologized for anything to their subordinates—ever. I knew I could expect nothing different from my father, but I wouldn’t have dreamed of questioning Farrell’s counsel. I thought the man “walked with God.” (It’s worth noting that Farrell went on to receive numerous invitations to speak at my father’s church, where he later received love offerings worth thousands of dollars, and that the two of them started vacationing together.)

  Despite all I knew of my father from personal experience, I followed “Dr.” Tom Farrell’s advice and apologized to him as soon as I got home from The Wilds.

  “You’re bitter?” he exploded. “I’m bitter at you! No one knows what I’ve had to put up with raising you! If you’re bitter, that’s your fault, girl!”

  Bart Janz had found the perfect home in the IFB—a community where the child is always wrong and the adult is always right, especially if he’s a man, and where he could inflict untold damage in the name of God. No wonder children have been beaten to death in the IFB in recent years. No wonder pedophiles and sadists seek out the cult and blend into its ranks. The Independent Fundamental Baptist Church offers ample opportunities to insinuate yourself into the lives of vulnerable children as a pastor, counselor, teacher, or just an abusive parent. It’s easy to disguise any number of atrocities as religious dogma. Often, the only ones tending the sheep are wolves just like them and if a victim doesn’t stay quiet, one of the leaders is sure to give you a heads-up in time to silence the troublemaker.

  Demeaning Through Sexual Innuendos

  A perfect example of the IFB’s penchant for cloaking inappropriate behavior under the guise of religion—and then turning a blind eye to those it victimized—happened at the beginning of my senior year. That was when our principal imposed mandatory daily “devotions”—a time for personal prayer and Bible study—before the school day started. Our senior class of eighteen was divided into two small groups, and I was the only girl in a room filled with testosterone-fueled teenage boys overseen by the basketball coach, Matt DeVries, a graduate of Bob Jones University. It didn’t take long before the sexual harassment started, and Coach DeVries was often an enthusiastic participant in the laughter. For a solid year, instead of studying the Bible, I sat in silence nearly every morning enduring a barrage of lascivious comments and getting called names like “whore” and “slut.” I tried to act good-natured, but I frequently ended up in tears. I was curvy and well developed, and they scrutinized every part of my body, commenting aloud like bidders at a livestock auction sizing up a heifer. My parents hadn’t decided to pay for braces yet, and I was terribly self-conscious about my prominent canine teeth. The boys in my class had called me “Jaws” and “Fangs” ever since elementary school, but now they started speculating on whether my teeth would make fellatio painful. DeVries never once tried to censor them. On the contrary, he seemed to find their comments funny.

  I had spent my life in a culture where boys and girls weren’t allowed to touch, yet every boy in that room knew what a blow job was and sexual innuendo was not only tolerated by school personnel, it was rampant. Years later, when a Silver State school principal and BJU graduate was standing trial for sexual assault allegations, it surfaced that the male students and school staff had played a game called “sack-tapping,” where they flicked each other’s testacles unexpectedly, so everyone was always on the alert. Some even wore athletic cups for protection. I was out of the cult by the time the case hit the news, but the information didn’t surprise me. Why did so many of our teachers seem as immature as the kids they were supposed to be educating? The vast majority were BJU grads, and I blame the environment the university cultivates. Nobody grows up there; they go from being treated like children with bedtimes and hair checks to teaching in IFB schools. Naturally, they still act like kids.

  Never Too Old for a Spanking

  Teenage girls in the cult were infantilized even more severely. In our world, their only way to transition into adulthood was to marry. Until then, a girl was under her father’s rule.

  People unfamiliar with the IFB’s patriarchal culture are often shocked that we were beaten until adulthood, though it was common in our peer group. I have one friend whose father threatened to spank her on her wedding day for having the proverbial “bad attitude.” Another told me that when she got into an argument with her brother during a car ride as a sophomore in college, her father pulled the family van to the side of the road, turned her over his knee, and spanked her. He didn’t say a word to her brother.

  The most legendary “spanking session” inflicted on a teenage girl I knew happened when my best friend Christy Roland’s big sister Shannon made the mistake of falling for a black student in her class during her senior year. The formidable Dr. Roland didn’t care that the boy was a fellow IFB member. He considered interracial dating and marriage a sin. Such racism is widespread in the IFB and my father even believed all black people bear the “mark of Cain,” a curse handed down from the biblical Cain, who murdered his brother, Abel. Roland forbade her from talking to the boy, let alone going out with him. But Shannon disobeyed. She even snuck over to his house after school one day. Her father caught her and gave her a beating so horrific that Christy’s eyes were like saucers the next morning at school when she told me about it. She said Shannon was black-and-blue and so sick she had diarrhea. She lay in bed for three days on her stomach, barely able to move. The story got around, but it didn’t dissuade any of our parents from viewing Roland as a man of great wisdom when it came to raising children in a “godly” fashion.

  My own final discipline session happened right before my eighteenth birthday. I was doing some of my father’s laundry when the phone rang. I tucked the basket with five pairs of his socks and three of his dress shirts in my closet to hide it from view before heading downstairs to take the call, which turned out to be from a friend who wanted me to join her family at a nearby park for a spur-of-the-moment cookout. It sounded fun, but I would have to do some quick thinking to come up with a pleasing appeal for my father.

  “Is the laundry done?” he asked.

  “I have to starch a few more shirts, but then I’ll be done for the day,” I assured him.

  To my delight he said okay, and I raced upstairs to retrieve the basket from my closet. I ironed and starched his shirts, then quickly plucked the lint off his socks and tucked them in his sock drawer. I had no time to change. Still wearing my school clothes—an ankle-length khaki skirt and navy blue polo shirt, the signature “cool” look for IFB girls—I tore out of the house, in a rush to meet my friend’s parents when they arrived to pick me up.

  When I walked back in the door later that evening, my father was sitting at his desk in the den with his back to me. He didn’t turn around to look at me.
“Did you have a good time?” he asked. I sensed something amiss in his voice. Hoping I was wrong, I responded, “Sure! It was a lot of fun.”

  Suddenly, he swung his chair around to face me, his face flushed with rage. “Well, that’s going to end right now!” he yelled. “Go to your room!”

  I had no idea why he was so upset, and I racked my brain trying to think of what sin I had committed as I sat waiting on my bed. After an interminable ten minutes or so, he opened my door and said, “Come to my room!”

  Panic-stricken, I followed. He led me to his dresser, pulled out the top drawer, and told me to unfold his socks. When I did, he snatched them out of my hand and put them on his bed. “What do you see?”

  My heart sank. A few loose strings from the bottom of the laundry basket were clinging to them. In my rush to get out the door, I hadn’t taken the usual time to pick meticulously at each pair of socks, and I had failed to meet his standards.

  He told me to go back to my room and wait again. A minute later, he stormed in scowling and locked the door behind him.

  “Pull up your skirt!” he ordered, reaching for the wooden dowel he had evidently propped against the wall before I got home. How had I failed to see it?

  My skirt was getting a little too tight and I had a hard time tugging it up over my hips and rear end. As I struggled, he watched my every move. At last, exasperated, he stormed over and yanked it up so far that it was bunched under my breasts.

  “Take your panties off,” he said.

  I did as he instructed, thinking all the while, I’m getting spanked as a senior in high school!

  He shook the rod in my face. “You are so lazy! Always have been! And your ungrateful attitude is really getting to me! You think you’re too old to do work in the right way in this house? Well, let me tell you something, you are never too old for my expectations! Roll back over!”