The dean’s office kept a record of every infraction so BJU could monitor offenses and know if they were dealing with a “troubled student.” Anyone who got one hundred demerits would be permanently “campused,” which meant that you could never go outside the university gates until the end of the semester. And anyone who hit 150 demerits before the end of the semester got “shipped” (expelled).
The Preacher Boys
BJU has long cultivated a special breed of male college students known on campus as “the preacher boys.” When they graduate, these ministerial students start IFB churches across the country and around the world. These ambassadors ensure a steady source of revenue for the Joneses from new students. It’s a brilliant business scheme, especially since, as naive young undergrads, the preacher boys confide some of their deepest, darkest secrets to college personnel in an effort to keep their consciences clean. The University has actually encouraged these confessions from future IFB leaders for decades. Whether they have porn addictions, secret same-sex attractions, or a weakness for shoplifting, preacher boys know that if they want to “live uprightly,” they must confess and ask for mentoring. BJU mandates tattletaling, so no matter who they spill their secrets to, the recipient will almost certainly tell the administration. The sin can then be documented and tucked safely away in BJU’s files, ensuring that the future pastor stays loyal for life. In such cases, if anyone hears rumblings about a possible defector, it’s easy enough to dredge up old files and subtly remind the pastor in question how unfortunate it would be if word got out about his homosexual or kleptomaniacal proclivities. IFB leaders generally have access to virtually everyone who ever knew the potential defector (high school friends and teachers, college roommates, youth pastors, and so on), so the threat feels very real. Couple that with access to church and camp decision cards, and the cult can build an airtight case to destroy an antagonist’s credibility. If there is nothing incriminating, it’s easy to manufacture a plausible scandal and, with absolute control over the IFB rumor mill, character assassination is almost a sure thing.
At least that is the common understanding among those whose lives are most intertwined with the IFB. So much like the FBI during the reign of J. Edgar Hoover even the imagined threat of a potentially devastating revelation exerts its power to control whether or not an incriminating file actually exists.
Sex and BJU
There is no better example of the IFB’s culture of domination through repression than BJU’s attitude toward human sexuality. Things that every rational person outside the cult would be apt to deem as perfectly natural were “dirty” and “that about which we do not speak.” Mild expletives like “wuss” and “that sucks” were strictly forbidden when Joseph and I were students because they had vague sexual connotations. Virtually every fall, Tony Miller, dean of men, would stand up in front of BJU’s entire male college population to rattle off a list of outlawed words and expressions.
Worse, as my father demonstrated so brutally in Jeremy’s case, masturbation is seen as a sin in the IFB. My husband vividly remembers sitting with five hundred other teenage boys at The Wilds camp, quaking in fear as leaders assured them all that they would never have God’s blessing on their lives if they didn’t conquer this vile temptation. Once, during a long car ride, one of the camp’s most respected staff members told Joseph that God had spoken to him in his twenties and told him, “I am never going to bring a godly woman into your life until you get the victory over masturbation.” He said he then redoubled his efforts, refraining from masturbating for a long time, and sure enough, God brought him a godly wife.
When Joseph got to BJU, the staff doled out the same dire warnings again at hall meetings. This heaped tremendous guilt on nearly every male student. Many of them assumed that because they had yielded to the temptation to masturbate, they must be sexual deviants, a conclusion that had horrible consequences for their self-esteem and their futures. If they were unable to control themselves, didn’t that make them pathetic and weak? With everybody too ashamed and wary to confide in their peers, boys couldn’t even take comfort in knowing they weren’t alone in their struggle. Almost no one in the IFB concedes that masturbating is normal behavior for teenage boys. With their general antagonism toward sex education, it is all too common for teens to lack understanding about the biological shifts in their bodies as they head into puberty and their sex drives peak. Why? Guilt is crippling, and nobody knows how to exploit it better than the IFB and Bob Jones University.
IFB leaders often cite the fact that public schools taught sex education as proof of their wickedness. The way they told it, those evil secular humanists were dropping condoms from planes to encourage schoolyard orgies. It never occurred to us that a public school teacher might actually be doing something constructive by explaining natural biological changes to students, handling subjects many parents have difficulty discussing with their own children.
Despite being molested, losing my virginity, and enduring years of my father’s lustful boasting about his prowess, I had no idea what a clitoris was or where it was located even as a college student. When I was sixteen, a male bus kid in my father’s ministry asked me where babies came out during delivery and I told him they were cut out of our stomachs.
As homeschooling guru Mary Pride put it in her book The Way Home, “All forms of sex that shy away from marital fruitfulness are perverted. Masturbation, homosexuality, lesbianism, bestiality, prostitution, adultery, and even deliberate marital barrenness—all are perverted.” Pride, incidentally, goes on to warn good Christian women never to dress up in lingerie to excite their husbands because “when women exchange their natural function of childbearing and motherliness for that which is ‘against nature’ [that is, trying to behave sexually like a man], the men tend to abandon the natural sexual use of the women and turn to homosexuality. When men stop seeing women as mothers, sex loses its sacredness. Sex becomes ‘recreational,’ and therefore the drive begins to find new kicks.” In other words, that lacy black negligee just might make your husband gay.
Unfortunately, banning discussion of a subject has a way of fueling curiosity and even fixation on it. Take the “First BJ” buttons given to freshmen, for instance. We got them as soon as we arrived on campus. When you wore your “First BJ” pin, you were given “grace” if you were late to class or broke a rule during your first semester, which meant you didn’t receive demerits. Unbeknownst to me as a naive sophomore transfer, a frequent joke among the upperclassmen, faculty, staff, and administration was that the pins indicated virgins ready for their first blow job. Furtive smirks and suppressed chuckles would ripple through the classroom whenever a fresh-faced girl walked in with her “First BJ” button proudly pinned to her chest. It wasn’t until I walked into the library with the button attached to my backpack that two of my classmates, Sam Gage and Brad Baughm, explained what “BJ” meant to those in the know. I turned crimson with humiliation. No wonder Coach DeVries tolerated so much snickering and lascivious speculation about me during those excruciating Bible devotions back in high school. As a male BJU grad, he was literally schooled in it.
8
MARRIAGE AND MOTHERHOOD, IFB STYLE (1995)
If we say that a person over eighteen years of age has the legal right to make his own marriage decisions, regardless of whether those decisions please his parents or not, we are making the Law of God of no effect by our traditions.
—“Dr.” Bill Gothard
At the end of my first semester at BJU, I was still conflicted about Joseph, so I sought counsel from older, wiser women in the IFB. My choir director’s wife, my former piano teacher, and my best friend’s mom were all graduates of the school and they all said the same thing.
“Love will come. The most important part of any marriage is a man’s integrity. And Joseph is a man of integrity.”
What about compatibility? What about chemistry? Those were frequently scorned as worldly ideas. People often ask me if marriages are arranged i
n the IFB. I tell them it’s difficult to explain. They’re not quite arranged, but a woman has no real free will in the cult. She might be desperately in love with a man who proposes to her, but unless her father and the other men in her family consent to the union, she normally can’t accept him. On the other hand, she might detest a suitor, but if her father blesses the match, there can be no way out. For girls raised by abusive fathers like mine it can spell disaster because the men who control their marital fate care so little for their daughters’ happiness that they’re apt to pick a husband who will make them miserable. And if they’ve been primed early enough, the daughters will submit to just about anything.
Joseph was the furthest thing from abusive and I certainly didn’t detest him. On paper, he was everything I’d ever thought I wanted in a husband and most any other girl in my shoes would have fallen in love with him. My father gave his final word on my internal struggle when he told me, “It is God’s will for you to marry him and this is simply a matter of surrendering yourself to the will of God, something you’ve never done very well.” I felt incredible pressure. Finally, I decided that God must indeed want me to marry this man, and I told Joseph so in early summer 1995 after my sophomore year. Elated, he called my father right away to ask for my hand.
True to form, Bart told him, “I’ll gladly let you take her off my hands. She’s your problem now! If you ever need help getting her back in line, give me a call.” It struck Joseph as a cruel thing to say, but since Bart laughed as he said it, he decided it must have been intended as a joke. Joseph’s parents had been loving and supportive his whole life, so at the time he was completely naive to the tactics abusive men use. He had no idea what my father was really like—yet.
Engagement
Joseph had gotten a job as the music director at Northland Camp and Conference Center in Wisconsin, and I was waitressing there for the summer. My parents flew to Wisconsin to help Joseph pick out a ring for me, then they all invited me to dinner followed by a walk along Bay Beach in Green Bay. My parents headed strategically off into the distance while Joseph and I strolled along the pier. When we had settled into a spot between two large rocks, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a diamond ring. In preparation for popping the question, Joseph had gotten permission from camp director “Dr.” Jeff Kahl to hug me, and when I accepted we embraced for the first time. However, like most dedicated young IFB couples, we resolved to save our first kiss for the wedding altar.
We set our wedding date for just two months away, and headed to Maryland to meet Joseph’s mother, Elizabeth, who had been battling cancer for seven years and was now dying of the disease. Being an only child, Joseph was everything to her and she had planned to travel to Colorado for our wedding on August 19, 1995, despite her frail health. It was a heartbreaking situation, and perhaps because I knew that Joseph needed comfort, we held each other one night for a long time and ended up kissing—the end of our quest to remain kiss-free until we reached the altar.
Since we were still on staff at Northland Camp, where policy dictated that any man and woman who touched had to confess to the camp director and risked being dismissed, Joseph questioned whether we should turn ourselves in. I persuaded him that, since we were so close to marriage, God would understand and we kept the secret to ourselves.
A week before our wedding, Elizabeth checked herself into the hospital because her pain was unbearable, under the condition that she be released in time for the wedding. Tragically, she took a dramatic turn for the worse almost as soon as she was admitted. Elizabeth died the night before our wedding and Joseph was devastated by her loss. He knew she loved him dearly and that she had been a good person, doing her best to raise him alone after her divorce when Joseph was four. But she wasn’t a member of the IFB, the “one true church,” so what tormented him most about his mother’s death was the fate of her soul.
The Wedding Day
My best friend Christy Roland was my maid of honor. The big day arrived and I was consumed with looking modest as I walked down the aisle. I chose a large, flowing wedding gown that made me look like a princess, but internally I still had nagging doubts. To put myself at ease, I kept repeating under my breath, “I am not marrying this man because I love him, but because God wants me to.” I still bought into the IFB mind-set wholeheartedly, and I thought being in the will of God trumped love. As long as I was in His will and under a man’s protection, absolute joy and peace would surely follow. Joseph knew about some of my struggles, but I had told him I loved him because I thought God wanted me to and he thought at that point that I was dealing with normal pre-wedding jitters.
Three preachers participated in our wedding, all graduates of Bob Jones University and prominent IFB leaders. “Dr.” Jim Van Gelderen preached the sermon. “Dr.” Steve Pettit performed the unity prayer. And Les Heinze, who had played such a memorable role in my senior year scandal, conducted our vow ceremony. Being a songwriter, Joseph wrote all the music, though, per IFB tradition, there was no dancing and no alcohol. IFB weddings are serious events, with outreach to the “lost” to embrace salvation frequently mentioned in the sermon.
After the wedding came a reception in the church with cake, nuts, mints, and punch. Some brides and grooms include a meal, but my wedding budget was less than $5,000, so we couldn’t afford one. My father rented a horse and buggy to take us to our hotel at the end of it all. As I sank back into the seat facing my new husband for our ride through the streets of Denver, my first thought was, “I will never be hit again.” A sense of complete and blissful relief swept over me.
First-Night Jitters
The night before my wedding ceremony, my mother sat down on the edge of my bed, put her hand on my leg, and said, “I just want to say that sometimes things don’t happen the way we think they will.” That was the extent of her parental advice on sex.
It should come as no surprise that I knew very little about the subject despite my scandalous reputation. The vast majority of my sexual experience at age twenty had come from members of my own family. Joseph was a twenty-five-year-old virgin with even less carnal knowledge than I had.
“Dr.” Jim Van Gelderen had done pre-marriage counseling for Joseph and advised him to read The Act of Marriage by Tim and Beverly LaHaye a week before our wedding night. The book, which was often recommended to IFB grooms, gave a biblical view of sexuality and marriage, and the husband-to-be was expected to learn everything he needed to know from it—with no hands-on experience, so to speak. Men who strove for absolute purity timed their exposure to the book carefully, lest they be overcome with lust and fail to “control their bodily urges” until they could yield to them in a godly way, within the bounds of marriage.
Though women didn’t typically talk about sex at all, several of my friends pulled me aside shortly before my wedding to share their horror stories. One said she had burst into tears on her wedding night and asked for an ibuprofen. Then she sat and watched movies with her new husband, too afraid to have sex. Another friend discovered on her honeymoon that she had a rare condition in which her vaginal opening was too small to allow her to have sex. She and her husband were unable to have relations for an entire year after their wedding. None of the women I knew offered any reassurance or encouragement.
When we walked into our suite at the Hilton, we were surprised to find that my father had left a fruit basket and engraved wineglasses for us, for nonalcoholic champagne. It was late in the evening, we were exhausted, and we had to get up early the next morning, but we consummated our marriage. It happened so fast that I have almost no recollection of it. My sharpest memory is of being jolted awake at 3 A.M. by an alarm blaring in my ear. We leapt out of bed and started looking everywhere to find the source of the noise. At last we located about five different alarm clocks strategically placed under the bed and hidden around the room. It was my father’s idea of a practical joke. But to me, it was an unsettling reminder that his presence still hung over us like a shadow, even in our new li
fe together. We climbed shakily back into bed but were up again a few hours later, heading to the airport to meet my parents.
When we arrived, I was light-headed and shaking. Joseph went off with my mother to get the standby tickets she had arranged while my father waited with me. “Man, you’re pale as a ghost,” he joked. “He’s capable of doing that much damage? I’m impressed.” Suddenly I felt an overwhelming urge to vomit. I put my head between my knees and ignored him, avoiding further conversation.
When I stumbled onto the plane I was still queasy, but arriving in Hawaii rejuvenated me. We stayed in a hotel within walking distance of Waikiki’s beaches. The setting was gorgeous and it was wonderful to be able to relax after the stress of wedding planning. But five days into our honeymoon, I was still unable to reach orgasm. Joseph reread and analyzed the Act of Marriage book, trying his best to figure out where everything was located, but I was frustrated and in pain. How many times would we try and fail? Finally, out of pure desperation, Joseph pulled the big black Bible he had packed out of his suitcase and started reading passages from the Song of Solomon. Then he held my hand and prayed that God would give guidance during our next attempt.
I don’t remember the earth moving, but we made it to the finish line. You would think bringing the Bible into the bedroom would be a sure libido killer, on a par with Mother Teresa lingerie or vibrators with Scripture inscribed on the battery compartment. But it worked. Bible study was the IFB’s solution to every problem. And if prayer could move mountains, surely it could help a man bring a woman to climax.
Biblical Sex
It might seem strange to go into such detail about my sex life, but it’s impossible to fully grasp the impact of the IFB ideology on women without it. I was still struggling to understand it myself when I broached the topic on one of our IFB cult survivor forums not long ago. To my surprise, dozens of women came forward to talk about their nights as newlyweds. Many remembered the intercourse as rough, aggressive, and painful. Their husbands made no attempt at seduction and showed little sensitivity to the fact that they were virgins. It opened my eyes to the incredible danger the IFB’s philosophy poses for brides. Many have no idea they’re vowing their lives to abusers. I was thankful that Joseph genuinely wanted to make me happy and to ensure that I enjoyed our sex life.
I Fired God Page 15