Like Huckabee, Palin and Bachmann have talked about being called by God to serve in politics. That’s the quintessence of Christian Dominionism. Born-again Christian Bachmann is an ardent follower of the late Francis Schaeffer, a pioneer of Dominionism, calling him “a tremendous philosopher” and “very inspirational” in her life. She’s also fond of talking about letting God’s will dictate her every political move.
Just to make sure the nation knew the Almighty was backing his presidential campaign too, Santorum told the press, “We believe with all our hearts that this is what God wants.” When his political star was on the rise, I couldn’t erase the image that sprang into my mind of the Duggars at the White House in their matching long khaki skirts, teaching American women how to do home perms and shop at Goodwill for inaugural ball gowns.
Santorum’s impassioned speeches about “the dangers of contraception in this country,” likening homosexuality to “man on dog,” and warning that legalizing same-sex marriage would lead to pro-gay indoctrination of schoolchildren echoes countless passages in the books I read and the speeches I heard by Mary Pride and Nancy Campbell. What’s more, it smacks of Bob Jones–style extremism. Jones III stood up in a public forum in 1980 and stated that “I guarantee it would solve the problem post-haste if homosexuals were stoned, if murderers were immediately killed as the Bible commands.”
In the spring of 2012, when President Barack Obama announced his endorsement of gay marriage, blogger Jeremy Hooper at GoodAsYou.org brought to light a series of sermon responses by IFB pastors that exposed how deeply homophobia has permeated the cult. For example, an IFB pastor named Sean Harris delivered a vicious gay-bashing rant, urging his congregation in North Carolina to beat homosexual tendencies out of their children like they would “squash a cockroach.” Harris said, “Can I make it any clearer? Dads, the second you see that son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give them a good punch. Okay?… And when your daughter starts acting too ‘butch,’ you rein her in.”
Hot on the heels of those disturbing comments, North Carolina IFB pastor Tim Rabon asked his congregation, “What is stopping them from redefining marriage from a person and a beast? We’re not far from that.”
Next, IFB Pastor Ron Baity—founding pastor of Berean Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and head of the anti–marriage equality organization Return America—called homosexuality “a perverted lifestyle” in a Sunday sermon and told his congregation that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people should be prosecuted. “For three hundred years, we had laws that would prosecute that lifestyle,” he said. “We’ve gone down the wrong path. We’ve become so dumb that we have accepted a lie for the truth, and we’ve … discarded the truth on the shoals of shipwreck!”
Yet another IFB pastor—Charles Worley, also a North Carolinian—suggested that America “Build a great, big, large fence, a hundred … fifty or a hundred miles long. Put all the lesbians in there. Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals. And have that fence electrified so they can’t get out.”
Kansas-based IFB pastor Curtis Knapp took homophobic rants to new extremes by proclaiming that “[gays] should be put to death. That’s what happened in Israel. That’s why homosexuality wouldn’t have grown in Israel. Oh, so you’re saying we should go out and start killing them? No, I’m saying the government should. They won’t, but they should.”
Finally, Maryland IFB pastor Dennis Leatherman added to the controversy when he stated in one of his sermons, “First of all, there is a danger of reacting in the flesh, of responding not in a scriptural, spiritual way, but in a fleshly way. Kill them all. Right? I will be very honest with you. My flesh kind of likes that idea … but it grieves the Holy Spirit. It violates Scripture. It is wrong.”
The cult’s defenders argue that these pastors are the exception—not the rule. But IFB leaders don’t get any more prominent than “Dr.” Bob Jones III, and if he is willing to suggest stoning homosexuals publicly, you have to wonder: What are IFB leaders saying and doing to LGBT kids in private? It’s scary to consider.
As a cult survivor, knowing all I do about the dangers of the IFB mind-set, it’s terrifying to hear elected officials echo IFB pastors’ views and to catch them slipping IFB lingo into their speeches. Could any of these extremists actually maneuver their way into the White House? Considering how far Christian Dominionists have gone already, and watching Santorum enjoy a brief surge to the number one position in the Republican race in 2012, I believe anything is possible.
John McCain seems to be all too aware of the extremism creeping into mainstream politics, judging from the fact that he’s distanced himself from Sarah Palin just as he distanced himself from BJU years earlier. If the GOP is to have any long-term chance of survival, responsible Republican politicians will need to purge their party of the right-wing extremist fringe that has infiltrated it—the sooner the better.
10
THE “VIRTUOUS WOMAN”
You can’t have a career and be what God intended you to be as a wife for your husband. He didn’t mean for marriage to be a woman with her goals pursuing them—a man with his goals pursuing his and doing … the kid-house thing together.
—Diane Olson, President’s Wife’s Address, Northland Baptist Bible College International University, 2004
My Darker Days
The truth was that things in my own home weren’t as wonderful as I tried to make them appear to the outside world. I put on a happy face, but I was having agonizing doubts about the IFB. I kept wondering what it would be like to live my own life instead of being trapped in one my parents, my pastors, and God had chosen for me. Was this all there was?
All the faces around me seemed grim. The faculty, staff members, and at-home moms were dealing with their own stressors, from seasonal affective disorder to tremendous financial strain, compounded by the knowledge that at Northland they would most likely never be able to provide more for their families.
My bouts of depression intensified. In my darker moments, I considered suicide again. I confessed my conflict to God and asked Him to give me a heart of gratitude, but no matter what I did, I felt a constant underlying boredom. My life ground along tediously, devoid of intellectual stimulation—and I knew it would always be that way.
Mental stimuli are hard to come by in a culture that predominantly says a woman’s only place is in the home, and even at home there’s no room for a meeting of the minds. IFB women were expected to submit unconditionally to their husbands. They are slave labor—perpetual worker bees. Those who kept their mouths shut won praise. We were allowed to do the grunt work of paying bills, but crucial decisions about finances and other important matters were our husbands’ domain. We were bound to them, as dependent as children. It didn’t dawn on me until after I left the cult how the men in the IFB relegate their wives to toddler status. If a wife disagrees with a husband’s choice, she is told, “you just need to submit to my decision,” just as I would tell my three-year-old to “sit on the couch until we’re ready to leave” while I prepped the other kids to go to the park.
My mother was an anomaly in IFB circles, working for United Airlines all those years. My father still ruled with an iron fist, but he “permitted” her to work because he couldn’t resist the extra income and the steady supply of cheap airline tickets. The more common scenario for IFB wives I knew was that we never got a chance to use our educations. If a husband died, deserted, or found himself unable to work, cult wives often ended up in dire straits, unable to support themselves and their quivers full of children.
Racked with guilt over our own ingratitude (we were supposed to be elated with our lots in life) and entrenched in a culture of backstabbing, we seldom turned to each other for true solace. I remember a speech by Diane Olson, wife of Northland’s president and a mentor to us younger wives, in which she confessed to having been depressed as a young mom and giving in “to ungodly
temptation” by watching soap operas. She said she repented and determined never to turn on the TV again during the day. To avoid the risk, Joseph and I didn’t own a TV. I heard about 9/11 over the radio and rushed to a friend’s home with all my kids in tow to see the news footage.
Ambitious women were often made to feel “sinful” for wanting a career. That was not God’s intention for us, we learned. Olson said she had always longed to be a doctor, like her father. But he told her she couldn’t be a godly wife and mother if she went into medicine, so she never tried. I kept a recording of one of the talks she gave to women at Northland in which she said: “You can’t have a career and be what God intended you to be as a wife for your husband.… What are you involved in that you really don’t need to be involved in?… Is it detracting [sic] for me from meeting his needs?… We are his helper. His task is what’s important to us. We are oriented to Him. And I really believe only then are we going to find the fulfillment and really accomplish the purpose for which God created us.”
Homeschooling guru Debi Pearl, wife of Michael Pearl, echoed the sentiment in her book Created to Be His Help Meet, which was sold at BJU and other IFB college bookstores and which we frequently used as a manual. “You were created to make him [your husband] complete, not to seek fulfillment parallel to him,” Pearl wrote. “You are not on the board of directors with an equal vote. You have no authority to set the agenda.”
Pearl expounds on the culture of submission so familiar to my peers and me, writing, “When you obey your husband, you obey God. The degree to which you reverence your husband is the degree to which you reverence your Creator.”
For good measure, she throws in a threat that if you don’t knuckle under, you might find yourself alone. “If you want to keep your man and the father of your children, you are going to have to forget your rights as a wife.… A man is attracted to vulnerability in a woman—the blush, the need, the dependence.… A perfect help meet does not require a list of chores, as would a child. Her readiness to please motivates her to look around and see the things she knows her husband would like to see done.”
Another one of my favorite speakers was Beneth Jones, wife of “Dr.” Bob Jones III. She preached that a good wife treated her husband as if Jesus himself had walked through the door. She admonished us about keeping up our appearances. No man wanted to come home to a frazzled hausfrau who looked worn out from a day spent minding scads of children.
She and Mary Pride told us even our bodies belonged to our husbands, not to us. That meant we should gladly meet any sexual desire he had whenever he asked. Jones used to talk about being a “Proverbs 7 woman in the bedroom,” which meant acting like a street harlot, and a “Proverbs 31 woman in the kitchen,” which meant acting like the ideal housewife. She even told a story in her all-female class at BJU about walking across the campus wearing nothing but a trench coat and going to her husband’s office, unbuttoning the coat and sending him into a state of shock. Even though sexual conversations were discouraged for the unmarried college students at BJU, the rules never applied to the upper echelons of the IFB—and Jones’s point was not to titillate but to stress that we were 100 percent responsible for our husbands’ sexual pleasure. Cult survivors joke about how men love IFB wives because, “In the morning they feed you eggs and at night they spread their legs.” It was hardly a recipe for female self-fulfillment.
The Need for an Intellectual Pursuit
Joseph knew how unhappy I was, and he agonized over my depression. He talked with me every night at length about how I could find happiness in the IFB. Eventually he came up with a creative idea to help me break out of my slump. Each day he would go to the college library and check out a new teaching tape for me. When the kids were in quiet play, I would pop in a tape and listen to yet another IFB leader’s wife discuss baking, sewing, being a handmaiden of the Lord, or a similar topic. He also challenged me to read as many books on the home and family as I could. Over the next five years I became a voracious reader. Every night, after putting the kids to bed, Joseph and I would discuss what he had taught in his classroom that day and what I had listened to or read.
For quite a while, it kept my mind occupied and gave me a renewed sense of purpose. I convinced myself the only work God wanted any woman to do was in the house. Surely, a woman who chose joyful submission to her husband and excellence in her home would hear “Well done, thy good and faithful servant” when she stood before the Lord on the Day of Judgment. I embarked on a quest to be a more godly wife, asking older, wiser IFB wives for their advice. One named Louise Champlain assured me, “A woman’s role is to do all the manual labor in the home, to free her husband to do the work of the ministry. Wake up every morning and ask your husband what you can do for him,” she urged. “Never question his authority.” I determined to be as much like her as I possibly could be. To encourage me in my desire to please God, Joseph put gold plaques engraved with phrases like “Embrace the Work” above the stove and sink in the kitchen.
In fact, he had Bible verses engraved on plaques for every doorway in our home. When JoJo walked into his room, his verse read, “Blessed are the humble, for they will inherit the earth.” The plaque above our bedroom door read, “You will seek me and find me when you search for me with all your heart.”
I felt so inspired by my new “knowledge” that Joseph and I decided to start a quarterly magazine for IFB women called Keeping Hearts and Home and a mock college called Women at Home University (WAHU). We would challenge women to earn a “Ph.D. in homemaking” by educating themselves on how to run an excellent household. Joseph was the publisher and founder and wrote articles on our Web site. I laugh now when I read some of the things we wrote. I sounded like the classic Stepford Wife. To read those issues, you’d think I couldn’t flip a light switch without seeking my husband’s counsel.
We fronted all the costs and invited fourteen prominent IFB leaders’ wives to be submissions editors, reviewing each issue of the magazine before it went to press and nixing any content that failed to meet their standards of purity. My old nemesis Sam Horn, now a vice president at Northland, insisted we get each copy approved by the college too. Horn threw a fit when we quoted a book by a controversial evangelical figure named James Dobson, founder of a group called Focus on the Family. Horn complained to Joseph’s boss, Curt Lamansky, head of the Bible department, and Lamansky told Joseph to get me “in line.” We were told later that Horn had badmouthed our magazine all across the country, referring to it as a “newsletter,” probably because sabotaging sales would prevent us from making money that could have led to financial freedom.
Despite Horn’s efforts, the religious publishing house Zondervan heard about our magazine and contacted us to see if we had an interest in writing books. My heart leapt. Here was a chance to reach beyond the borders of the IFB, to spread the information I’d painstakingly accumulated to a larger audience. But after several calls with a Zondervan editor, we realized the IFB’s Doctrine of Separation would be a major stumbling block. The restrictions it would impose on marketing would be fatal to potential sales. The opportunity fizzled and I sank into an even deeper depression.
11
THE TURNING POINT
Has your husband reviled you and threatened you? You are exhorted to respond as Jesus did.… Your husband will answer to God, and you must answer to God for how you respond to your husband, even when he causes you to suffer.
—Michael Pearl, Created to Be His Help Meet, Appendix
Melissa Elopes
Melissa graduated from BJU in 1999 with a degree in nursing. She was a model student who committed so few infractions that she earned the high honor of being named dating parlor monitor and, later, received the Soul Winning Award. We laugh about this now because my sister swears she didn’t lead one person to Jesus in all the time she spent at BJU.
Though she planned to become a missionary eventually, she took a job at a hospital in Greenville, South Carolina, to tide her over. In the co
urse of her work, she met several evangelicals who shared their perspective on Christianity with her. She also started dating Vance, a doctor at the hospital. For the first time in her life, Melissa found herself surrounded by people whose viewpoints differed from the IFB’s. She began to question all she had been taught. She stopped attending IFB churches in 2001 and, little by little, started backing away from the cult.
Naturally, my father recognized the signs and went ballistic. Bart Janz wasn’t going to lose control of one of his kids. So he did what came naturally: He started stalking her. He made threatening phone calls. He flew to Greenville and tried to strong-arm her into obeying. He met with IFB pastors, friends, and authority figures from Melissa’s years at BJU and asked them to confront her. At his urging, they showed up on her doorstep and at the hospital during her shifts, pleading with her to “return to the truth.”
Evangelist “Dr.” Tom Farrell and Pastor Danny Brooks (another graduate of BJU), called to warn her, “You’re out of the will of God.” They knew about her boyfriend, so they added, “You must not marry a lost man.”
Jason left gruff messages on her answering machine. “Melissa, call me!” he said, then slammed the phone down.
My sister Meagan called too, pleading for assurances that Melissa was still “born again.” Like Jason, Meagan stayed loyal to the IFB and is now married to the pastor of a church in South Carolina.
The harassment campaign dragged on for more than three years, and in February of 2004 Bart finally snapped when Melissa turned twenty-seven and got engaged to Vance. I was at home with my kids as usual when she called in such a panic that she was almost unintelligible.
“Dad just called and said he’s had it with me! He’s flown in from Colorado. He’s in town, Jocelyn!” she cried. “His exact words were, ‘Pull up your pants, sweetheart, because I’m coming for you, whether you want me to or not!’”
I Fired God Page 19