The familiar agonizing ritual repeated itself until he had given me twenty-six blows, the rod burning and biting so cruelly into my thighs and buttocks that I flipped onto my back instinctively after each blow to protect them even though I was naked from the waist down. Finally, he flung the rod against the wall, and yelled, “Now get up and pull yourself together!” then stomped out.
Wincing, I struggled to my feet, intent on hobbling to the bathroom to view the damage to my backside. I tugged gingerly at the bottom of my skirt, trying to ease it down over my throbbing skin. But the second it came in contact with my wounds, it started to soak up blood. Ankle-length khaki skirts were a precious commodity for girls at Silver State, and bloodstains would be hard to wash out, so I stopped what I was doing and limped to the closet. I found an old T-shirt and used it to wipe off the blood that was dripping down my legs. Even Christy Roland, my closest confidante, never found out. A spanking at that age was too humiliating for words.
The Unpardonable Sin
For some time, I thought the twenty-six-blow spanking session would be the low point of my senior year. But then an incident occurred that eclipsed it completely. In fact, it eclipsed almost everything about my high school life.
To my surprise, my father told me he felt bad about having put an end to my budding romance with Greg Patterson, the military man on whom I’d had a passionate crush at sixteen. Now, apparently, Bart thought it was time I developed a love interest. He zeroed in on the star basketball player in our high school and started encouraging me to like the boy. Following his advice, I took an interest and the boy reciprocated. We were “in like” and talked at school though we were strictly forbidden from having any physical contact.
There was a problem, though. My new crush’s parents didn’t make him follow the school’s rules. They allowed him to listen to whatever music he liked, even Metallica and Def Leppard. They were the most lenient of all the Silver State parents and he knew he could get away with more than the rest of us could. One day, he told me he had books for me at his house. I could see them during study hall, if I would leave school with him. I hesitated but ultimately agreed. It felt exciting to break the rules on purpose for once.
When we got to his house, we started kissing. One thing led to another and the next thing I knew, he was lying on top of me.
“Can we have sex?” he whispered.
My mind went into a sort of hyperdrive, a million confused thoughts crashing into each other all at once. The first one that flashed into my mind was that I was wearing embarrassing underwear. In an attempt to keep us “pure,” my mother bought my sisters and me giant pairs of white granny panties that reached our navels. Next, I remembered that my pantyhose had a big run down the upper thigh. (Hose were mandatory for girls in our school.) None of that seemed very sexy.
“No,” I whispered back, shaking my head.
“Please?” he coaxed.
It was the oldest cliché in the teen sex lexicon. So why did I say yes? Was it something I genuinely wanted to do? Was I flattered by his attention? Was I caught up in the thrill of doing something forbidden? Maybe it was a combination of all those things.
Whatever the reason, I let him keep kissing me. He pulled off my skirt, my hose, and eventually my panties. I had no idea what I was doing and I was a bundle of nerves. He tried to penetrate me, but I was too tight and dry. Instead, he came on top of me. We both stood up and put our clothes back on, feeling awkward. Then he went into the living room and flipped on the TV. I curled up in his lap and we cuddled, but neither one of us spoke more than two words. When we saw each other at school the next day, we pretended like it had never happened.
I told no one, but word still spread through the school like wildfire about what had happened. While I was on my senior trip it reached my brother Jason and he called me long distance.
“Is it true?” he asked, clearly distraught.
“Is what true?” I asked tremulously.
“Did you have sex?”
I burst into sobs and told him everything. He was furious and said the boy was telling all his friends at school. He said we would have to tell my father when I got home. For the rest of the trip I was a mess. I vomited every morning as soon as I woke up and my period was late. I was sure I was pregnant. I knew virtually nothing about my own reproductive system, so I had no idea that I was more likely to have gotten pregnant with my brother’s baby than with one of this boy’s.
Jason picked me up at church when the trip ended and drove me home. When we were a few blocks from our house, he pulled over to the curb and cut the ignition.
He was shaking and nearly as upset as I was. His conscience compelled him to report me to our father, he explained, but he felt torn because he knew the harsh consequence it would mean for me.
“He’s going to kill me,” I sobbed.
We had been agonizing over what to do for about fifteen minutes when a police car pulled up behind us and an officer startled us by knocking on the car window.
Jason rolled it down and the man asked, “Is everything okay?”
“We’re fine,” Jason said, perfectly mannered as always. “My sister has done something terribly wrong and we’re getting ready to go home and tell my parents about it.”
I ventured a glance at the officer through my tears and was surprised to see that he looked genuinely worried about me. “Is there anything I can help you with?” he asked kindly.
I had been trained never to talk to the police about “family business,” or issues, but something about his compassionate expression told me instinctively that I could trust this man. I had to suppress the urge to cry out, “Can you come with us? Please! He’s going to murder me!”
But I fell back on all my years of conditioning and pulled myself together. “I’ll be all right,” I responded mechanically. “Thank you.”
When the officer left, Jason promised me he would call the police if my father got out of hand. He surprised me by saying, “I won’t let him touch you,” and volunteering to go into the house before I did to tell my parents what I had done.
“If he goes nuts, I’ll run out and drive away with you,” he assured me as we pulled up in front of our house. Then he got out of the car, ran up the steps to our front door, and disappeared.
Thirty long minutes later, he came back. “I think he’s stable,” he said, “but don’t say any more than you have to.”
I walked into the house like a convict to his execution. My mother was sitting on the couch with her head in her hands. My father had his back to me. Jason ushered me over to the love seat. I curled up in a ball and put my head between my knees, avoiding eye contact with anyone.
“Tell me what happened. Every detail,” my father said, without turning to look at me.
I sobbed out the story. As I talked, he dropped his head down onto the fireplace mantel and started weeping so hard his shoulders were heaving.
When I finally talked myself out and fell silent, he came over to me and dropped to his knees. “How could you do this?” he sobbed. “How? You have tainted yourself for the rest of your life! You are ruined! Your virginity is all you have and you have given that away!”
I remember being shocked that he wasn’t yelling at Jason to get the rod. The only thing I had worried about was being beaten to death. I didn’t like hearing that I was pathetic and ruined, but it meant I was safe for now. If my father started losing control this time, I knew he wouldn’t stop.
Suddenly, he sprang up and started pacing the living room manically, his grief hardening into anger. “I’m going to kill that boy!” he shouted.
At last, he and my mother told me to go to bed so they could call Pastor Les Heinze, another graduate and board member of BJU, who had replaced “Dr.” Nelson, now senior pastor at another IFB church.
Later that night, my father lifted me out of bed and carried me downstairs as if I were six years old again. He sat me next to my mother on the couch and the two of them started grilling me
.
“Did he rape you?” they demanded.
I tried to explain that I had said no initially because I was afraid to do wrong, but then I had said yes.
“But did he ask to have sex with you first?”
I was exhausted, having returned the night before from my senior trip, so it was hard to think straight, but I told them all the details. The next morning my mother drove me to a rape crisis center. My mother told me to tell the counselor all about my sexual experience. I had no idea they were hoping to build a case against the boy until the lady who counseled me met with my mother and told her, “Your daughter wasn’t raped and I’m not even sure if she was penetrated.”
Despite what the counselor said, I’m convinced that my parents energetically circulated the rumor that the boy had raped me. Somehow my father found out the Heinzes kept a shotgun and he called the pastor’s fifteen-year-old son to demand that he bring the gun over. He swore he was going to kill the kid who had ruined his daughter. That rumor circulated back to the boy’s parents and they panicked and called the police.
Terrified that members of the wicked outside world would insert themselves into our sordid little drama, Pastor Heinze jumped in and managed to calm Bart down. He spent hours on the phone with my father, convincing him that murder was not the right way to handle the situation. He also broke the news that, according to the school handbook, the loss of my virginity meant that I wouldn’t be able to graduate with my senior class. He offered to come over the next day to discuss the details with my parents and me.
Instead, when he arrived, he started grilling me about my classmates’ transgressions. He had a long list of the “dirty deeds” my fellow seniors had committed, from drinking alcohol to having sex. I had no idea where the list came from and no knowledge about whether the stories were true. I told him so, but he didn’t care. He wanted me to verify each event—and to swear that I had witnessed them all.
I didn’t want to get anyone else in trouble. All I wanted was to flee to a foreign country and escape the nightmare. I learned later that my father called Pastor Heinze and told him I had confirmed every one of his lurid accusations about my classmates. He couldn’t have cared less about the truth; he was bent on proving to the IFB community that other teenagers were as bad as his own disgraced daughter. It seemed clear to me that the only thing my parents cared about was salvaging their reputation.
Those months of my life are still a blur. Things seemed to move at lightning speed and in slow motion all at once. I remember so little of it that other people have had to put some of the pieces together for me and fill me in on the details. I knew a lot of other kids were getting in trouble and refusing to speak to me, but I had no idea they thought I had ratted on them. I figured they were avoiding me because I was impure.
The worst point of the whole debacle came when my father insisted that I acknowledge my sin and ask for restoration from the church membership in public. I was made to write a letter of apology to the entire church. I wrote the letter, then he rewrote it in his own words. I had to stand next to him at the pulpit Sunday morning. He told me I needed to wear my one good white dress and hold his hand while standing in front of the entire congregation.—a sign to him of my renewed purity.
“We have here before us today both Bart and Jocelyn Janz,” Pastor Heinze told the packed church. “Bart is standing as Jocelyn’s representative before the Lord. She has sinned and would now like to read a letter of apology to the church.”
My father’s plan was to read the letter aloud himself. After all, it was his letter. We had even rehearsed it that way. But once we got up on the platform, the utter humiliation was too much for me. I pulled my hand out of his. He shot a withering look at me, but I turned my head toward Pastor Heinze. Then I surprised everyone, even myself, by crossing in front of my father and walking to the pulpit.
My knees were weak as I read the words, but I fumbled through them. When I had finished, Pastor Heinze said there would be a reception line at the front of the church where members were welcome to come forward and offer me forgiveness.
“Dr.” Nelson and his wife were at the church service that day. He had known me for almost a decade, but he was ice cold in the reception line. He said in a mechanical tone that he forgave me and hoped I would do better in my future.
My father later chastised me for “taking control” but, to my surprise, he didn’t beat me. Instead, he used the incident against me for the next decade. It was a glaring public example of my willful disobedience, he said, and irrefutable proof that I needed to be broken and “brought to a place of submission.”
Nobody made the boy responsible for my “downfall” read a letter of apology, but he decided to read one anyway. In it, he made a point of stating that a lot of false rumors had been going around and he wanted to set the record straight. I realized later that he was trying to tell the congregation he wasn’t a rapist.
The irony of this situation isn’t lost on me now. I was made to stand in front of a church of nearly one thousand members, apologizing for what—according to every scrap of recent data available—is part of a pretty normal high school relationship in America today. The boy who took part in it with me felt the need to stand up in public, humiliated just like I was, and defend himself against a lie that he had raped me—a lie my parents started rather than accepting the truth. And all the while, my three molesters looked on from the pew and platform, weeping over the disgrace and grief I had heaped on our family through my evil deeds. Like Hester Prynne with her scarlet letter A, my shame would follow me across the country and into the next stage of my life. It was a magnificent example of the IFB’s hypocritical and deceptive culture in action—where the victim is ultimately put on display to the masses as the villain.
7
MY COLLEGE YEARS (1993–1995)
[Rock music] is not fit material for a Christian to feed his soul upon. The very beat of it is sensual.
—Bob Jones III
No Griping, No Sex, No Walking on the Grass
Excluded from graduation ceremonies and parties, I got my diploma in June of 1993 with no fanfare and I was grateful when summer finally arrived. I kept my head down in a show of remorse for my sin and at the end of August headed off to Dunbar, Wisconsin, for my freshman year at Northland Baptist Bible College. Unfortunately, everything about a girl’s personal life often reaches other IFB authorities, so my reputation preceded me.
The moment I set foot on campus, I had to meet with Wynne Kimbrough, the dean of students. He let me know I had a serious black mark on my character and told me I would be on “spiritual probation” for a year. The administration would be keeping an eagle eye on me. As my parents put it, I would be “loved into righteousness.” In other words, I would be given no opportunity to sin again.
They had nothing to worry about. Not only was I getting heavily indoctrinated in the IFB’s code of chastity, I was in the middle of the north woods where bears were a common sight. I couldn’t get into trouble on Northland’s campus, and I wasn’t foolhardy enough to sneak off it. What’s more, my brothers were both upperclassmen. They had promised to keep tabs on me and report to my father if I showed any sign of a rebellious spirit. They needn’t have bothered. I was so broken, so defeated that I kept my mouth shut and stayed out of the action. Jeremy and Jason, on the other hand, were the class clowns, college leaders in almost every activity. Northland, like all small IFB colleges, was a glorified high school with only a few hundred students and your status was determined by who you knew. The Janz brothers knew everyone, so their antics gave me a modicum of popularity by extension.
Even though monitors prowled nearly every room to ensure that we didn’t say or do anything ungodly, and I knew they were hypervigilant in my case, I still felt freer than I ever had. Sure, the rules were harsh. We couldn’t listen to music with a rock beat, show up late for class, wear pants, hold a boy’s hand, or be out of bed after 11 P.M. But I had escaped from my father’s clutches for f
our whole months. I wouldn’t have to see him until Christmas break. I felt like I had died and landed in Heaven. He was thousands of miles away. He couldn’t touch me. I was no longer in danger of the belt or the wooden dowel. I could choose my own activities from within the guidelines of the college handbook, befriend whichever students I chose, and even sit on a couch next to a guy and “date.”
Compared to life at home, nothing here bothered me. Not the palpable sense of cold and dark that seemed omnipresent in the Great Lakes winter. Not even the fierce glacial wind, sleet, and snow that lashed my legs and bit at my frozen toes through my flimsy shoes and stockings. Every muscle in my body stiffened as I plodded across the frozen field separating the classroom building from the girls’ dormitory. The subzero weather made the tundra seem a mile wide. Banned from wearing slacks or jeans and too self-conscious to pair warm winter boots with our ubiquitous long khaki skirts, all of us Northland girls trudged through foot-deep snow in paper-thin dress flats. We were slaves to IFB fashion, having been warned ad infinitum by our parents and fellow coeds that we had only four short years to land a husband. If we failed to snag a man at Northland, we could end up back home living under our dads’ Umbrella of Protection, destined for the singles groups at church. We called the guys there “the leftovers,” the last, untouched dish in the dating potluck of IFB life. It was deemed a fate worse than death by any self-respecting woman under the age of twenty-two. Enduring minus-20-degree wind chills and risking a few frostbitten toes seemed a small price to pay for looking cute enough to catch a guy’s eye.
Back at my dorm after every class, I would lift my skirt and treat my chapped and bleeding calves with hydrogen peroxide and Vaseline. I was so used to pain that I felt no emotional connection to it. Besides, these wounds were self-inflicted and mild compared to a spanking session. Internally, I felt nothing but relief.
I Fired God Page 12