I Fired God
Page 22
My father took our plunge to rock bottom as a sure sign that he was winning the battle for control over us and redoubled his harassment campaign. He started leaving enraged phone messages, demanding visits with our children. My nightmares got worse. I started having panic attacks, envisioning Bart getting my children alone and then beating them black-and-blue with his horrible wooden rod. I was desperate to protect them from him.
We had to find a way to get out of the IFB.
12
THE ROCKY ROAD TO FREEDOM (2006)
Today [pastors are] looked upon like some mealy-mouthed, little pansy-wansy, little guys that … just hold everybody’s hands and say, “God bless you. God be with you. Oh, I’ll pray for you.” Shut up! Man, take the lace off your underwear, will you? Be a man!… I believe I’m a man’s man!
—Bart Janz, sermon, “Reading Between the Lines,” 2005
I was beside myself as the end of Joseph’s tenure at the college drew nearer, breaking down and weeping sporadically throughout the day. My past had been bleak and hopeless enough. Now the future looked even darker. And that’s when an utterly unexpected life-changing moment occurred, like a ray of morning light in a night sky.
Earlier in 2005 Joseph had finally decided to allow a television into our home, provided I watch only educational news programs. For me, it was a lifeline to the world outside the cult. One night when he was working late and all the kids were tucked in bed, I decided to take a few minutes away from my endless housework. I sat down on the king-sized bed in the master bedroom and turned on the TV. A newscaster was interviewing a woman named Carolyn Jessop about her flight from a polygamist compound in Utah with her eight young children in tow.
As I listened, I got goose bumps. Her story was remarkably similar to mine. She had married young in an intensely patriarchal subculture and had been told practically from infancy that she had to produce as many babies as possible to please God. She had been raised to fear everyone and everything in the “wicked” world outside her own isolated religious community. She believed hers was the only true church on earth. Her church leaders exercised totalitarian control over their members, and women were utterly disenfranchised. When pictures of Carolyn from her cult days flashed on screen, I did a double take. She looked like she had just come from Sunday services at an IFB church, in ankle-length floral dresses and denim jumpers just like the ones I wore.
As Carolyn told the interviewer about her harrowing escape and her struggle to acclimate herself to the real world, I sat there in shock. I felt as if I had just rammed my head into a cement wall. Was I in a cult? It was the first time that word had entered my mind. My head started throbbing intensely, a sure sign of an impending migraine. At the bottom of the screen, a crawl read, “If you are in need of help, please contact the HOPE organization.” Then a hotline number appeared. I jumped up off my bed, grabbed a pen, and, with trembling hands, wrote it down.
I didn’t have the courage to call that night, but the next day, after Joseph left for work, I mustered up the nerve to pick up the phone. Polygamy was just starting to gain national media exposure, and the HOPE organization was small, so the operator passed me on to Carolyn Jessop herself. The moment she said hello, I started crying and shaking.
Lately it seemed that every word I said behind closed doors mysteriously circulated among college personnel, only with a negative spin, so I was extremely paranoid. “I think my church leaders might be recording my phone calls, so I’m really scared,” I began. “But I had to call because I think I might be in a cult.”
“Do you practice polygamy?” she asked.
“No, no, no,” I stammered. “We don’t practice polygamy. I’m from a Baptist group that call themselves fundamentalists, but I was watching your program last night and it sounds just like what I’m in aside from the plural marriage part.”
Kind, empathetic, and wise, Carolyn Jessop spent the next hour patiently asking me all kinds of questions about the practices and doctrines of the IFB. By the end of the call, she said firmly, “Jocelyn, you are in a cult. You need to leave as quickly and quietly as you can. They will try to take everything from you.”
When I got off the phone, I sank down on the floor of my walk-in closet and sobbed. I knew the truth now. But I was no closer to finding a way out for myself and my family. Joseph would think I was crazy if I suggested that the IFB was a cult. I didn’t breathe a word about the phone call, but I couldn’t get Carolyn Jessop’s words out of my mind.
Finally, I resolved to broach the subject of leaving the IFB with Joseph. If we were ever going to get out, now was the time. I began to encourage Joseph to consider the possibility of exploring the world outside our own tight-knit subculture. I suggested we take a trip to Chicago together to look at evangelical ministries as potential options. “You don’t need to make a commitment,” I assured him. “But maybe we should consider the idea of you going back to school to get an accredited Ph.D. Then you could look into evangelical churches in the area.” Joseph was hesitant about even considering a degree from a non-IFB school. A few years earlier, Sam Horn had enrolled in a doctoral program at Master’s Seminary in California, where ultraconservative evangelical leader John MacArthur was president. After the news broke, Horn stated publicly that he would counsel no one to follow his example unless they had served in the ministry for at least twenty years because the danger of being corrupted at a place like the Master’s Seminary was too great.
It was a huge step for me to suggest leaving and an even bigger one for Joseph to consider it. I knew that in his mind, I could be Eve in the Garden, tempting him to make the biggest mistake of his life. After all, women were temptresses. In our natural “flesh bent,” we were manipulators, beguilers who led men into a life of sin.
Time to Explore
Fortunately, Joseph agreed to explore non-IFB alternatives. He confessed that he had always wanted to know what it was like “on the other side.” Eventually I even persuaded him to send his résumé to Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, though the IFB had always condemned it as “liberal” and “compromising.”
Even though we had lost everything, Joseph and I were working together as a team for the first time in our marriage. We didn’t tell anyone where we were going, but one weekend we left the children with a sitter and took a day trip to Moody to meet with the vice president and dean of the faculty, Larry Davidhizar. I’ll never forget the drive to his office.
Traveling down the highway on our way to Chicago, we were both exhausted and overwrought, holding hands to reassure each other. Joseph prayed aloud, “Dear God, be merciful toward us and if we are making the wrong decision in this, please stop us now. You know that all we want to do is follow your will.”
We walked into Larry’s office like deer in the headlights of an oncoming semi. We spent a lot of time crying in those days, and we both welled up as soon as we sat down. Within fifteen minutes, Larry called his wife, Donna, explained that there was a couple that needed help, and asked if she would meet us for dinner. That evening marked the beginning of a deep friendship. Larry and Donna listened with endless patience and compassion as we cried and talked. During the twelve months after our final departure, they came to our home for countless visits and continued to listen, letting us pour out all our fear and doubt and guilt and anguish. They came along like angels and showered us with love, acceptance, encouragement, and understanding.
The Davidhizars set something in motion that first night over dinner that would forever change our lives. We started taking trips to Chicago nearly every weekend. We visited Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS) and Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois and we got to know sincere, strong Christians who shocked us with their warmth and their nonjudgmental attitude toward us. We also met with Dr. John Woodbridge at Trinity, whose father had been a faculty member at Bob Jones University in the 1960s and had written one of the most influential IFB books on the Doctrine of Separation. John had left the Doctrine behind as a young ma
n and eventually became a well-known evangelical author and professor, but the IFB spread the word that he had gone into demonism. When we told him about the current theological positions and isolation within the group, John said it had become worse than he could have imagined. After we finalized our decision to leave the IFB, he pulled me aside. “Are you sure you’re ready for what is to come?” he asked. “You know that they are going to demonize you. You’re the one they are focusing on.”
I had wanted to leave the IFB my entire adult life, so I answered confidently, “Of course, I’m ready!”
I had never been so wrong in all my life.
Demons of the Past
Sleep was harder than ever to come by in the midst of all this chaos, and after one fitful night, I woke up lying on my back. It was an unusual position to find myself in because I always slept on my side or my stomach. I closed my eyes and a strange, unsettling, yet somehow familiar image flashed through my mind. My body seized up instinctively and a feeling of panic rumbled through my mind. What was that? I froze as a horrible memory re-formed itself against my will like a monster rising out of the mist.
My father was rolling my nightgown up to my armpits. He tucked the excess material under my back. He then lay down on top of me, naked, and started pushing his hips hard against my stomach. Unable to breathe under the weight of his body, I turned my head to the left. I tried to stop myself from hyperventilating as I gasped for air through a space under his armpit, nearly gagged by the smell of his sweat. I was going to suffocate to death. Pinned down and too terrified to try to wrestle free, I turned all my attention to my drawing a thin stream of oxygen into my lungs. The second I lost concentration I started hyperventilating. “I can’t breathe! I’m dying,” I thought, in silent panic. Talking to myself, I tried again to focus my mind. “Slow and steady … breathe in and out … slowly…” At last, I felt his body unclench. Without looking at me, he stood up, grabbed a cloth, and rubbed my stomach roughly. Then he pulled my nightgown back down over my knees. I rolled onto my side, facing away from him. My stomach hurt and I felt like I needed to throw up. I pressed my hand against my belly to quell the nausea, and my nightgown stuck against it. I reached underneath the fabric to free it and my hand touched something wet all over my stomach. I thought it was Vicks VapoRub, the gel my mother put on our chests when we had colds.
As the memory came rushing back with the force of a freight train, I felt the sticky flannel against my body again. I saw the ruffle across the bottom of the gown. My mind cast around frantically for answers. How old was I? Realizing I couldn’t have been more than six given my memories of my bed, the room, and the nightgown, I started heaving and the room tilted at a crazy angle. With my pajamas still on, I staggered to the shower, turned on the cold water, and rolled into a fetal position under the spray. “I hate you! I hate you!” I screamed, years of striving for godly forgiveness washing down the drain and uncovering a raw, visceral emotion I had never experienced before. Suddenly flashes of my mother’s face over the years came back to me, her eyes boring through me with a look of pure loathing that left me both devastated and puzzled. “No wonder! No wonder you hated me!” I cried. It all made sense now.
Finally, I called Joseph and begged him to come home from work right away. I poured out everything about the long repressed memory that had suddenly and inexplicably returned, leaving him ashen.
“What do we do now?” I sobbed.
He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said.
We decided to call a crisis center in Michigan and set up a meeting with a counselor. The next day I spent several hours talking through my childhood with her. She explained that what I had experienced was a repressed memory. Introduced by Sigmund Freud in the late 1800s and still the source of debate among psychologists, repressed memories are a phenomenon that can occur when an event is so traumatizing that the mind buries it in some remote corner of the unconscious as a coping mechanism. Sometimes, decades later and for no apparent reason, it resurfaces in the conscious mind.
I told the counselor that I had always been able to remember my father rubbing his erect penis against my back while watching TV and in the swimming pool. He would even grope me in front of the family so obviously that they would shout out in disgust, “Gross, Dad! Stop that!” Then I told her about the way I’d been beaten until I turned eighteen, and how my father removed my clothing before each session.
“Even without the memory that returned this week, the things you’re describing are sexual abuse,” she assured me. “None of that was appropriate behavior for a father.”
I had always understood that my brothers had molested me, but it had never occurred to me that my father’s actions might be sexual abuse and I had never mentioned any of these incidents to Joseph. I also hadn’t remembered any naked touching until now. Besides, my siblings were well aware of what went on in our home. They were all beaten, just like I was. I thought it was normal because so many of my friends had experienced the same thing.
I confided in my sister Melissa, who, to my astonishment, had similar memories. She still hadn’t come to terms with the label “sexual abuse,” but she knew what she had experienced was wrong—and she could clearly articulate the fear she had lived in as a result. Foolishly, I told Jason too, and he wasted no time in telling Bart.
Jason Intervenes
In cases of interpersonal conflict, IFB protocol was for both parties to meet to “clear offenses,” as Will Galkin had done after my brain tumor diagnosis. Apparently, Jason was taking it upon himself to orchestrate an offense-clearing session because he called back a short time later to say that Bart would meet with me.
“How did he react to what you told him?” I asked. “Did he show any emotion?”
“No,” said Jason. I wondered if Bart had half expected a call like this to come one day. My psychologist explained later that abusers prepare for this moment their entire lives. Now Bart was poised and ready to spring into action to discredit me.
Joseph’s contract was set to end shortly after graduation on May 13, so we were braced for a full-fledged attack. I knew my father and the cult leaders would maneuver against us and attempt to push us into checkmate before my husband’s official ties to Northland were severed. A few months earlier, after one of Bart’s particularly vicious phone calls, we contacted the police and they told us to record any future calls he made for our protection. So when Bart called on April 30, Joseph had his voice recorder next to the phone and put the call on speaker so I could listen silently in the background. For the first twenty minutes, Joseph tried to talk Bart out of coming to his workplace to force a public confrontation. My father ignored his pleas and insisted that he was going to “disclose our family secrets” to the “entire faculty and staff” whether we liked it or not. Finally, Joseph told Bart he was going to call the police and start the process of issuing a restraining order. My father exploded. During the next thirty minutes my husband barely got a word in edgewise.
“You are being so deplorable, it gnaws at my craw.… You are a dog, Joe! A dog! This is war! This is going to trail you, buddy, for the rest of your life!… If Northland doesn’t deal with you, I’m coming to the next place you go!… You picked the wrong guy to dis!… I can tell you something young man, God is watching you, Joe!… I’m in total control and that’s what you don’t like.… Go ahead and call the police on me, Joe. And I’ll tell you what, Joe, you’ll wish you never did!”
As soon as Bart slammed the phone down, we called the police.
Northland Administration Backs My Father
The next morning, my father faxed a letter to one of Northland’s vice presidents, “Dr.” Marty Von, telling him about the restraining order. Then they all pounced at once.
When Joseph arrived at work, “Dr.” Les Ollila confronted him. “It was a faithless and fear-filled decision for you to threaten to take out a restraining order against a man of God,” he admonished, refusing to hear Joseph’s side of the story.
Next, the following long, rambling e-mail dropped into Joseph’s inbox from “Dr.” Marty Von:
I received an unusual fax from Bart Janz outlining a phone conversation with you about his desire for clearing offenses from the past. I believe I know what you would teach in your classes on this: that offense clearing is so critical to leave your gift at the altar and clear up the offenses if they have not been resolved. This is a clear, Biblical command from Matthew 5. Then, the fax included a court restraining order. Wow! Something is being severely hidden here. I realize there are two sides to every story, but you are in a place of higher accountability, as is he, as pastors, and you as a faculty/staff member. Where is the Christ-like model? This tells me there are things under the table that are being hidden. The most likely agenda from my almost 40 years of counseling tells me: there may be deceit that is being covered, protecting the family which usually means severe problems in the home, a manipulation to carry out a game plan that nobody knows, using people to accomplish desired ends, outside control that you have bought into, fear of exposure that could hurt reputation and acceptance. When a person goes out on a limb, they have to come up with other legitimate reasons to keep from doing right. Any believer would welcome an offense-clearing opportunity, particularly if you could have another believer as a witness. I know I have had many good conversations with Jocelyn, and some regarding her past relationship with her father; so any way I can help her or you now I’m open to consider. But, please, for the sake of Jesus Christ, and your personal walk with God which trumps all other issues—otherwise Satan will blind the mind, and you both could become something you would never want to be. I know there is a time to pray, but God told Joshua to obey. What is the first step in God-ward obedience that needs to be taken now? My suggestion is that since Bart is on campus now (today); it is time to make things right. I can’t imagine you teaching your classes or your children that Godly obedience is delayed obedience versus obeying right away. We are either broken and Davidic or Saulish and covering and excusing. Obedience is not geared to our convenience or schedule. Joe, you may have to make a choice between God and all others. As a Campus Pastor, I would ask you to move on this today.