I Fired God

by Jocelyn Zichterman

  Playtime outside or with toys in playroom

  1:30–2:00 P.M.:

  Listen to Suzuki (violin) tapes while resting—prepping for naps/Mom pray

  2:00–4:00 P.M.:

  Nap time/Mom spends time in prayer

  4:00–5:00 P.M.:

  Older kids help Mom set table/make dinner/little kids play in playroom

  5:00–5:30 P.M.:

  Get devotional items in place/music prepared/do additional cleanup

  5:30–7:00 P.M.:

  Dad home. Family dinner. Family devotions. Family sing.

  7:00–8:00 P.M.:

  Dad play with kids/Mom clean up dinner

  8:00 P.M.:

  Kids in bed

  8:00–9:00 P.M.:

  Husband-wife time

  9:00–11:00 P.M.:

  Personal Bible study/prayer

  Into that tightly packed schedule I also squeezed breastfeeding the baby, changing diapers for four kids, cleaning up unexpected messes, and doing countless loads of laundry. I was determined to spend hours in prayer every day too. I would be a shining example of what the IFB called “the hidden woman,” one who served quietly and passionately in private, making my relationship with God and my family my number one priority.

  Corporal Punishment for Beginners

  Whenever I could, I attended homeschooling conferences held by Christian curriculum providers like ACE, BJU Press, fundamentalists like “Dr.” Bill Gothard, and homeschooling gurus like Michael Pearl, the spanking advocate who has come under fire recently, accused of being a catalyst for parents who have beaten their children to death.

  When I took my “Christian Family” class as a freshman at Northland Baptist Bible College, Wynne Kimbrough told his students that he preferred to use a twelve-inch glue stick on his younger children because it was flexible, like a switch. He also emphasized that it was “easy to hide and carry” and didn’t leave “marks.” I purchased glue sticks as he instructed, but ended up using them for arts-and-crafts projects. I also bought the PVC pipe Michael Pearl recommended and had a friend cut it down because it was too long and awkward, but, despite what Pearl’s book said, it wasn’t soft or flexible. I knew instinctively that it could cause damage. The pieces soon became “swords” used by the children during playtime.

  Pearl, incidentally, didn’t pioneer the idea of using the rod on children in fundamentalist circles. “Dr.” Bill Gothard and Richard Fugate were among the first IFB leaders to espouse “breaking the will” of the child in the 1970s. Fugate is exalted as a child training “expert” in the IFB and his book, What the Bible Says About Child Training, is still recommended reading in child psychology classes at BJU. It’s also sold in the Bob Jones University bookstore and featured on its Web site. In his book, Fugate advocates using a wooden dowel just like my father did, even going so far as to specify to parents what size dowel they should use at each age:

  Fugate recommends a:

  … balloon stick, willow or peach tree branch, blackboard pointer, or 1/8" dowel rod) with a toddler from the time he starts crawling to about 15 months old …

  and notes that:

  Most parents would admit that it is a waste of effort to chastise through either a diaper or heavy pants, like jeans.… You can spank them bare-bottomed as long as you are still washing them in the tub or are otherwise seeing them nude anyway.… After then the child should be spanked wearing underwear at the least. When a child moves into puberty, a swim suit or similar clothing would be more suitable, if chastisement is still necessary.

  He also writes:

  the child who has not yet learned to trust his parent’s commitment to his obedience, or who is exceptionally willful, will require more frequent and more intense whippings. Such a child is likely to require enough strokes to receive stripes or even welts. Some children have very sensitive skin that will welt or even bruise quite easily. Parents should not be overly concerned if such minor injuries do result from their chastisement as it is perfectly normal.

  Pearl furthered Fugate’s approach in his book To Train Up a Child, one of the IFB’s favorite discipline manuals when I was a member. In it, Pearl compares training children to training dogs and horses. He encourages parents to place a tempting object where a child can grab it, then to say no and hit them with a spanking instrument when they reach for it. On the Web site for his ministry, No Greater Joy, he writes that, “God commands parents to use the rod in training their children.… The rod purges the soul of guilt.… The rod assures the child of his parent’s love.” Pearl says his book has sold more than 670,000 copies and has been translated into a dozen languages. According to published reports, his Tennessee-based ministry, No Greater Joy, brings in annual earnings of more than $1.5 million according to published reports.

  Be Fruitful and Multiply

  I was also a big fan of Nancy Campbell, an ultraconservative homeschooling advocate and Quiverfull movement leader. Campbell publishes a magazine called Above Rubies, which her Web site claims reaches readers in more than a hundred countries and has a pass-along readership of half a million. She’s fond of referring to children as “arrows for God’s army.” In her book Be Fruitful and Multiply, she writes, “We are in a war. Our children must be trained for battle. They must be trained to stand and fight against the enemy of their souls. They must be trained to be warriors for God.”

  The book’s publisher was Doug Phillips, founder of a Christian educational organization called Vision Forum that claims to have more than 200,000 customers. Phillips was yet another role model of mine. In the Foreword to Campbell’s book, he seconded her opinion: “We must actively seek to bring forth legions of children for the glory of God.”

  Mary Pride was my other role model and Campbell’s counterpart in the Quiverfull movement. Pride runs a magazine called Practical Homeschooling, which she says has more than 100,000 readers, and maintains a Web site of the same name that she claims is the world’s most visited homeschool site. Her book The Way Home was a lifestyle Bible for IFB homeschooling moms like me. It’s filled with sentences like, “My body is not my own, to do with as I please; it belongs to God.… Why should you and I not ‘honor God with your body’ by having babies?”

  No Government Interference

  Like my fellow IFB moms at Northland, I was inundated with heavy-handed messaging from our homeschooling gurus about the pros of corporal punishment, submission in the bedroom, and popping out more children to fight off the evil secular humanists. I believed everything they said. We were all adamant about keeping the government from interfering with our noble efforts to raise godly super-children. The truth was, we had nothing to worry about. In all my years of homeschooling my kids, there was not one iota of interference.

  Sadly, the government’s hands-off approach to homeschooling has enabled psychopaths and led to tragedies like the cases of Lydia Schatz, Hana Grace Williams, Esther Combs, and little four-year-old Sean Paddock, who was murdered by the hands of his own mother who testified at her trial that she was following Pearl’s teachings. More recently, a fifteen-year-old girl in rural Georgia was reportedly forced to wear a shock collar and locked in a chicken coop repeatedly for failing to complete her homeschooling assignments. Fortunately, in her case, someone tipped off the sheriff’s office in 2012 and Child Protective Services finally intervened.

  Looking back now, I realize many of my fellow IFB moms and I were so antigovernment that we turned a blind eye to abuse in our own backyards. A large homeschooling family lived down the street from me in Wisconsin, scraping by on welfare and spilling out of two rattletrap trailers. Their yard was a shambles of broken toys and their ragged children were perpetually filthy. Worse, the children were illiterate, thanks to their mother’s apparently nonexistent homeschooling. Like everyone else I knew, I overlooked the obvious neglect because this family was following Quiverfull ideology, bearing as many children as God dictated, and protecting their offspring from the evils of public school. Northland faculty made
a few feeble attempts to support their homeschooling efforts by bringing them books and tutoring the children, but soon lost interest, because the mother was so unresponsive to their efforts.

  I should have called CPS. But I thought they were the bad guys and homeschoolers were the good ones, no matter how they treated their kids. I was also steeped in IFB propaganda about the importance of preserving our cult’s godly image. If word got out about a negligent homeschooling family at Northland, it would shatter the facade of perfection we thought we were presenting to the outside world. For the sake of the cause, I looked the other way.

  The Home School Legal Defense Association

  Right now, homeschooling is enjoying an astronomical rise in popularity in the U.S. That means the stage is set for more egregious and widespread abuse. About 1.5 million children were being educated at home as of 2009, according to the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). That’s a 36 percent jump from 1994 and a whopping 75 percent jump from 1999. The most popular reason parents cite for opting out of public schools? To provide religious and moral instruction. An overwhelming majority (83 percent) of homeschoolers mention faith as a driving force in their decision to opt out of more traditional educational settings. In a similar survey five years earlier, only 73 percent listed religion as a key factor in their choice to homeschool.

  The National Home Education Research Institute pegs the number of kids being homeschooled even higher, at over two million. That means there are a lot of parents out there like my peers and I were in Wisconsin. Many homeschooling families I knew embraced extremist groups like the Patriot Movement, which advocates building a militia poised to battle the U.S. government—no surprise, considering all the messaging we were getting about giving birth to an army of foot soldiers for the Lord.

  The homeschooling movement also has a league of powerful lobbyists like Michael Farris, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), who speak at homeschooling conferences across the country and oppose laws that make the homeschooling community accountable. The HSLDA appears never to have taken abused women and children into consideration with its fervent commitment to keeping the government out of our religious beliefs at any price. Abuse victims pay a hefty price for that separation.

  The HSLDA is diametrically opposed to the idea of oversight and the group seems to bend over backward to accommodate abusers. When I went to their conferences, HSLDA senior counsel Chris Klicka coached us on how to avoid accusations of abuse. Nobody distributed handouts telling victims how to dial 911, but we got plenty of tip sheets telling us what to have on hand if we were accused of abuse, including “A statement from your doctor, after he has examined your children, if the allegations involve some type of physical abuse. References from individuals who can vouch for your being good parents. Evidence of the legality of your homeschool program.”

  It’s a veritable how-to for covering your crimes, if you consider the fact that many homeschooled kids go to physicians like Silver State’s infamous Dr. Roland. Homeschooling parents who believe in “biblical chastisement” surround themselves with adults who support the same brutal approach to discipline. It’s easy enough for an IFB family to find doctors and neighbors who will vouch for their parenting style and combat a CPS investigation.

  Klicka also compiled a tips list for the HSLDA Web site, advising parents how to handle a potential inquiry from social services personnel:

  Never let the social worker in your house without a warrant or court order.

  Never let the social worker talk to your children alone without a court order.

  Inform your church, and put the investigation on your prayer chain. Over and over again, HSLDA has seen God deliver home schoolers from this scary scenario.

  Like the IFB pastors, many of the homeschooling leaders I considered mentors urged us to spank our kids in private. They said “the world” wouldn’t understand our godly approach to discipline. So mothers I knew carried short rulers and glue sticks in their purses, ready to whip their spanking instruments out and discreetly nip bad behavior in the bud if their kids acted out. They also told us to pinch disobedient children under the arm or on the inner thigh because we could pass off bruises and hematomas in those spots as normal play. We felt tremendous peace of mind knowing that if any of us homeschoolers were accused of abuse for practicing “godly discipline,” we could rest assured that HSLDA lawyers would be on hand to defend us.

  In 2012 the group helped to defeat a California bill that would have required all adults to report reasonable suspicions of child sex abuse. They likened the bill to the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, calling it “Very Dangerous to the Lives and Freedoms of Everyone” and hailing its defeat as “a tremendous victory for all adults and parents!”

  Like it or not, the HSLDA is a formidable driving force in America’s homeschooling movement. So is the IFB, with its plethora of Christian curricula for moms teaching their kids at home. And virtually anyone who attends homeschooling conferences or reads homeschooling literature gets a generous dose of far-right religious rhetoric, biblical spanking, and the culture of secrecy endemic to the IFB. Even publicly funded charter schools like North Valley Academy in Gooding, Idaho, are making headlines for wearing red, white, and blue uniforms and touting themselves as a “patriotic” choice for parents, where kids shout out “God bless the USA” in the cafeteria. Say what you want, but the uniforms are almost identical to the ones my siblings and I wore at our IFB school in Wisconsin, and so is the God-fearing, patriotic messaging.

  Christian Dominionism, Free Will, and the Current Political Landscape

  The homeschooling movement’s heavy emphasis on religion and the quest by leaders like Phillips, Campbell, and Pride to build an army for God in America dovetail seamlessly with the philosophy of Christian Dominionism that is becoming increasingly prevalent in conservative politics. The phrase comes from a passage in Genesis (1:26) that says man should “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” From that biblical passage, Dominionists have extrapolated the notion that it’s time for Christians to take America back by getting fundamentalists into positions of political power so they can enact laws that support their viewpoints.

  Dominionist ideology had a significant surge in the political landscape with the rise of the Moral Majority in the 1970s and 1980s under Jerry Falwell, who told the evangelical right that America was doomed after it took the Bible and prayer out of public schools. He cultivated an us-versus-them attitude toward the government. Since then, religious fanatics have taken the idea to new extremes. Ironically, many Christian Dominionists call themselves Constitutionalists, though they’re far from it.

  Every homeschooling guru I met encouraged moms like me to believe that America should be a theocracy and, judging from their speeches, Christian Dominionist politicians agree with them. Not surprising, of course, since Christian Dominionism and patriarchy go hand in hand. These fundamentalist ideologies do not promote freedom of religion for people of all faiths, but freedom of religion only for people of one faith—their particular brand of Christianity. It’s a scary proposition that would undercut our Constitutional rights as American citizens. The field for the Republican presidential primary race of 2011–2012 illustrates just how far the tentacles of Christian Dominionism have wound into politics. U.S. representative and homeschooling mother Michele Bachmann, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Texas governor Rick Perry, and former Pennsylvania senator and homeschooling father Rick Santorum (for whom TLC’s Duggars campaigned) all have ties to the movement. So do former Alaska governor Sarah Palin and political commentator and homeschooling father Glenn Beck.

  Huckabee wrote in his book Character Makes a Difference, “People say, ‘We ought to separate politics from religion,’ I say to separate the two is absolutely impossible.” In 1998, Huckabee and his wife
, Janet, took out a full-page ad in USA Today thanking the Southern Baptists for supporting the idea that “a wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the leadership of Christ.” It could have been lifted wholesale from every IFB sermon I ever heard. No one should be surprised at Huckabee’s action, considering the fact that he has attended “Dr.” Bill Gothard’s seminars and praised them as “some of the best programs available for instilling character into the lives of people.” Even scarier, Huckabee has advocated merging Gothard’s institute’s teachings with government programs and posed for fundraising photos with the IFB icon and homeschooling leader.

  Huckabee reiterated his misogynistic views in 2012 when he defended U.S. representative Todd Akin for making the incendiary public statement that abortion shouldn’t be legal, even in rape cases. As Akin explained his views, “It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that [conception after rape is] really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something: I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

  Even after Mitt Romney called for Akin to resign in the wake of public outrage over his statement, distancing himself from this extremism, Huckabee continued to defend him. “This could be a Mount Carmel moment,” said the former Arkansas governor, referring to the holy battle between Elijah and the prophets of Baal in the Book of Kings. “You know, you bring your gods. We’ll bring ours. We’ll see whose God answers the prayers and brings fire from Heaven. That’s kind of where I’m praying: that there will be fire from Heaven, and we’ll see it clearly, and everyone else will too.’”