I Fired God

by Jocelyn Zichterman

  Since it was fall, school was about to start and we were still planning on homeschooling the children because we were so heavily indoctrinated to believe the public school was full of secular humanists who would destroy the souls of our kids. I didn’t know what I believed, but Joseph was holding tight to his faith. Fortunately, a new friend from Willow Creek recognized how depressed I was. She worried that our home life was becoming chaotic for the children—and she knew I was in no shape to teach them—so she staged an intervention. She encouraged us to enroll our kids in the local public school, assuring us that lots of children from the church attended the school and were thriving. Our new friends arranged for us to meet with the principal, who gave us a thorough explanation of the curriculum and assured us that a number of teachers in the school were fellow members of Willow Creek Community Church. Joseph and I were astonished at how rational he was and how nonthreatening the place seemed. I couldn’t shake the images the IFB pastors had painted in my mind about public school—of orgies on elementary playgrounds and condoms being handed out by teachers around every corner. But the principal assured us that no such thing was taking place. Four weeks into our arrival, the children started their first day of school and soon they were happily ensconced in their new classrooms, able for the first time to interact with peers in an educational setting.

  I stayed in bed for long stretches the next year, grieving. Joseph couldn’t sleep well either. Night after night, he woke up overcome with anxiety and reliving the traumatic events of the past. We rushed him to the emergency room several times, convinced he was having a heart attack, but the doctors explained that he was suffering panic attacks from severe stress.

  True Friends

  One remarkable couple, Matt and Melanie Harper, stayed loyal to us when we fled the cult. Though they were still members of the IFB themselves and received subtle threats from the cult’s leaders, who suspected they were staying in contact, they spent countless hours on the phone with us during our long and agonizing transition to the world outside the IFB. At one point I told them it felt like everyone I ever knew had perished in some terrible bus accident. “But in their eyes,” the Harpers reminded me, “you’re the ones who are dead now.”

  Joseph tried diligently to find a job as a Christian counselor to bring in some income for our family, but no place—not even evangelical organizations—considered his master’s degree in counseling from Bob Jones University a legitimate credential. BJU’s staff had duped us into thinking that accreditation was a meaningless term, but we were learning the hard way that it mattered a great deal. In fact, accreditation serves a vetting process—validation that the education a college or university provides is reputable and high-quality based on standards set by a peer review board. It would be impossible for my husband to get licensed as a counselor in any U.S. state with his counseling degree from BJU, a fact the folks back in Greenville conveniently forget to tell their students.

  My sister Melissa and friend Melanie were my lifelines, and when I called to tell them the bad news, they weren’t surprised. “In our nursing classes, they always said that mental health issues were a sin,” Melissa explained. Her psychology “professors” had lectured that bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, ADD, and ADHD were spiritual problems, not worthy of medication or therapy. Greg Mazak, the head of BJU’s psychology department, told Melissa and her fellow nursing students that the teachers and parents in our country were lazy and that they wanted to keep kids on drugs to create zombies so they could keep order in public school classrooms. That statement naturally segued into a rant on the necessity of Christian school education.

  Mazak, incidentally, holds a master’s degree in counseling and guidance from BJU and a Ph.D. from BJU in New Testament interpretation. With those degrees, as of 2012, he was teaching nine master’s-level courses in counseling and two bachelor’s-level psychology courses, including abnormal psychology and clinical psychology. Steven Cruice, his colleague in the psychology department, held no degrees in counseling or psychology listed in the university catalogue as of 2012, yet he taught eight master’s-level courses in counseling at BJU that year.

  “But the school gets federal grants,” I told Melissa. “How can the government give money to them if their professors’ degrees are bogus and the professors aren’t even teaching legitimate psychology?”

  BJU having national accreditation is an anomaly in our country, since it’s a liberal arts university. It has been suggested TRACS was allowed in as a campaign favor and exception for religious schools, under Ronald Reagan. However, national accreditation is usually reserved for tech schools with specialized degrees, such as ITT tech, or aviation, etc. This means, BJU is not required to follow standard procedure—and the students are the ones who lose out.

  I finally called the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools (TRACS), which is BJU’s and Northland’s Christian national accreditation agency. I told the president that a number of men with bogus degrees had tried to “counsel” me about the sexual abuse I had suffered and that they were now covering for my abuser. I also explained that Joseph couldn’t get a job anywhere with his degrees and that BJU had lied to us in saying that regional accreditation didn’t matter.

  “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do to help you,” he said.

  “That’s not good enough,” I insisted. “There is no accountability. BJU needs to get regionally accredited.”

  “Well, don’t hold your breath,” he responded. “I can tell you that will never happen.”

  He chuckled, but I was fuming. We had escaped one nightmare situation only to plunge into another. I felt betrayed, not just by the cult leaders, but by the government. Why couldn’t it regulate these organizations? It was a question I would ask countless times in the years to come.

  The next night I went to Willow Creek Church and shared my frustration over the accreditation issue with our friends. “People at BJU always used Harvard as an example,” I said. “They pointed out that since Harvard isn’t accredited, no school needs that type of oversight.”

  “What do you mean Harvard isn’t accredited?” one of my friends said. “Of course Harvard’s accredited.”

  I was flabbergasted. How many other lies had we believed? Why hadn’t any of us ever bothered to vet the so-called “facts” we were fed by the IFB?

  Trying to Find Jobs: Harder than It Seems

  Joseph applied for every part-time opening he could find, but with no luck. He even got turned down for a job as a bus driver. Finally, he found part-time work pastoring a small church near our new home. I took a job as a waitress at TGI Friday’s to help out, but it brought in very little income. We were forced to use a private loan to make ends meet, watching helplessly as Joseph’s school loans racked up. By the time he graduated, we would be several hundred thousand dollars in debt.

  Just when things seemed to be settling down, Jason called me. The IFB, it seemed, had tracked us down. To my horror, my brother informed me that my father had flown to Northland and that he and all the college administrators were planning to show up at Willow Creek to confront me. “They heard you’ve been talking and violating the statement of silence you signed,” he said accusingly.

  I knew he was baiting me. Aside from the fact that the famous statement of silence was not legally binding, we had agreed that I could seek counseling for the abuse I had suffered. The only person I had confided in about the gory details of my past was my counselor. There was no way these men could know who I was talking to or what I was saying. They were trumping up charges, looking for any excuse to attack me.

  Our home address was unlisted and we had left only a PO box for forwarding mail, so I didn’t think they had found out where we lived. Although we gave Jason and Melissa our cell phone numbers in case of emergency, we specifically asked for numbers outside our area code. Still I was terrified. I envisioned them frog-marching me out the front doors of Willow Creek and spiriting me away to be imprisoned und
er my father’s tyrannical Umbrella of Protection forever, unable to reach my precious children or my husband for the rest of our lives.

  There is no privacy in the cult. None. Right after we left, Jason called my cell phone and insisted that we tell him our whereabouts so he could get in touch with us in an emergency. We told him about Trinity and Willow Creek, though we refused to reveal where we were living. I’m afraid we still didn’t understand the consequences of talking to him at all. He acted as if he were trying to help us, but word about us spread like wildfire all over the cult. Fortunately, Willow Creek was a big church with parking lot ushers and lots of services every weekend, so we knew it wouldn’t be easy for them to find us there.

  Still, Jason sounded supremely confident that Willow Creek’s pastoral staff would be sympathetic to the IFB godfathers’ cause and would force us to meet to “clear offenses.” After all, that’s how the IFB works. Surely, every other church would be the same. When I got off the phone with him, I was shaking and my head was starting to throb as if one of my old migraines was returning to debilitate me.

  Feeling Some Protection

  Panicked, Joseph and I immediately called Willow Creek. We explained the situation to one of the pastors.

  “Don’t worry,” he assured us. “We would never allow anything like that to happen in the church. I’ll put the security staff on alert. And if those men show up for a confrontation, they’ll be ushered out the door.”

  It was all I could do not to cry as I thanked him and hung up, overwhelmed with gratitude. For the first time, I felt protected by people who claimed to be Christians. Joseph and I called Jason and told him what the pastor at Willow Creek had told me. He was shocked.

  “They wouldn’t be willing to sit down for a confrontation on this?” Jason was exasperated.

  “No. They won’t,” I told him. “And the men will be escorted off the property. That’s not how they do things here.”

  I could declare their position now with certainty. Relief swept over me, and the men from Northland never tried to show up after that.

  Firing “God”

  Despite all the care and support showered on us by our friends and pastors from our new church, I spent my first months in Illinois raging against God in private. I blamed Him for everything that had happened and I hated Him with a passion. I would go to my room and scream to the sky, “I fucking hate you! Fuck off!” Then I’d thrust two middle fingers toward Heaven. Every day, I would rage in my bedroom. All the negative emotion I had dammed up inside myself for years, never allowed to show “sinful” feelings in the IFB, came pouring out in a torrent—along with enough four-letter words to make a sailor blush. Thirty years’ worth of pent-up profanity came spewing out of my mouth.

  “I fuckin’ hate your goddamn church! I fuckin’ hate you and everything about you! Fuck off and leave me alone!” I would shout. “You are nothing but a bastard and I want nothing to do with you or your sick sock-puppet followers!”

  It felt good. I tried to string together the worst sentence I could think up and aimed it right at God. “You cocksuckin’ piece of shit! Fuckin’ lunatic monster, motherfucker, bitch, cunt!” Out of all my new words, “fuck” was my new favorite. I screamed it all-out, glaring at my ceiling.

  I had been taught my entire life that God was waiting to strike me dead if I ever turned my back on Him, so I waited for the lightning bolt. But instead, the more I vented, the better I felt.

  “What are you doing, motherfucker? Trying to woo me back! Well, I ain’t going back to you or your stupid groupies! You can brainwash them all you want, but you ain’t gonna brainwash me again! No way, sucker! We’re done!”

  I waited for the floor to crack open and drop me screaming into the lake of fire from my childhood nightmares, but instead, I felt a sense of peace and comfort. I could almost hear a still, small voice assuring me, “It’s okay. Let it all out. I’m with you. You’re not alone. I’m here whenever you want to talk.” I thought that was another figment of my imagination, another delusion. And I didn’t want to listen. I wanted to hate God for the rest of my life.

  One night, I ranted to my friend Rory after a service at Willow Creek. “I hate everything about God!” I told him. Before joining Willow Creek, Rory had been a pastor in a strict religious denomination, and its rules took such a toll on his relationship with his wife that they ended up divorcing. He had lost everything and was rebuilding his life piece by piece.

  “Jocelyn, please don’t give up on God,” he pleaded, tears in his eyes. “Don’t lose your faith. The light will shine again one day, I promise.”

  But the truth was, I didn’t want the light to shine again. My life had been one long horror story and I had no energy left to rebuild it. I just wanted to die.

  Joseph knew what deep turmoil I was in and he apologized profusely for the role he had played in my suffering. After a year of sleepless nights and intensive counseling to come to terms with his own anguish, at last Joseph understood the pain I had endured at the hands of the IFB. Finally, he convinced me to meet with some of the pastoral staff at Willow Creek to see if they could help me. When Ron Erkley, a licensed psychologist who worked with the church, met with us and asked what I was feeling, I let it all out.

  “I hate God! I hate this church!” I shouted at him. “I tell God to fuck off every day! And I want to say that you can fuck off too!”

  I braced myself, expecting IFB-style wrath, but Ron seemed unmoved. “Can I try to help you?” he asked calmly. “Jocelyn, what those men did to you, none of that was God. That was abuse. That god, the one they believe in, that’s a fictitious and false god. He doesn’t exist. God is a God of love and compassion and humility. And you should FIRE that god from your childhood! Just fire him! That is not the true God. Fire that false god and hire the God who does nothing but love and care for you and want the best for you.”

  Throughout his previous sessions, Ron had listened patiently to Joseph drone on and on about all he had given up for me, leaving all he knew behind so I could be happy. But now he turned to Joseph and said, “You simply did what you should have done years before. Your family was deeply hurt by you. You should have been a partner to your wife the day you married her. She needs you to step up and do the right thing now.”

  Joseph sat in stunned silence. This was my husband’s epiphany, his wake-up call. Throughout our transition he had thought he deserved a medal for his “incredible sacrifice.” Suddenly, he understood fully his role in all of it. He realized he was just as culpable for his inaction as others were for their actions.

  “I honestly never thought of it that way before,” he said at last.

  Ron continued to reason with him. “You have a hyper-sensitive conscience,” he told him. “What they drilled into you has warped your view of God and robbed you of any peace. Now you think this god that they created is unreasonable and ready to exact punishment on you the minute you do the slightest thing wrong. The IFB’s mantra of ‘if you doubt, don’t’ has debilitated you, crippling your clarity in decision making. So, my suggestion for you is for the next six months, if you doubt, DO IT! Have fun! Test the boundaries of your conscience and see what it can handle. At the end of the day, you’ll know what you feel comfortable with and then you can draw a healthy boundary.”

  Ron hit the nail on the head. For as long as I had known him, Joseph had been tormented by doubts about whether he was really “born again,” even though he was one of the most committed Christians I knew. He was also continually stressed about whether he was following God’s will in every detail. The IFB ideology drove nonemotional members like Joseph toward perfectionism by instilling an irrational fear of an unreasonable God in them. Meanwhile, it drove emotional people like me to an irrational fear of people by filling our heads with guilt, shame, and fear. But we were both so consumed by the tortured, guilt-laden belief system our pastors had ingrained in us that we were like addicts, insecure and frightened without it.

  My wheels started tu
rning. Could I really fire the “God” I had always known, the “God” of hellfire, brimstone, and eternal damnation? Could I erase the images burned so deeply into my mind of Him as a wrathful old white man, an omnipotent version of my father and every other IFB pastor that had ever made me cower? Could I replace him with a loving, forgiving, magnanimous God?

  I finally decided to start reading the Bible again—but only The Message version, a modern language edition that summarized the spirit of each passage. I couldn’t handle reading much of it, but what little I did read made me realize the IFB had lied to me and severely skewed my childhood belief system. I also began to grasp the power of language. Subtle rephrasing could shift the implications of a sentence dramatically. Take the ubiquitous IFB phrase “You just need to forgive.” Worded that way, it’s a chilling bit of cult lingo meant to silence victims. But if someone tells me, “Forgiveness is for you, not them,” I can embrace the notion as a victim, knowing that bottling up anger and thirsting for revenge can hamper my own path to healing. I realized that sometimes we fail to get through to people because we don’t understand their background and culture and, by extension, their language triggers. You might be telling the truth, but if you say it the wrong way, your audience won’t hear you. It was a lesson that would serve me well in the years to come, when I began working to help fellow cult survivors.

  Living in the Moment: Exploration into the Unknown

  In 2007 I discovered Eckhart Tolle’s books A New Earth and The Power of Now. Later, I started watching Oprah Winfrey’s new Lifeclasses on TV. Tolle gave me an inspiring fresh perspective on spirituality, something I desperately needed as I reevaluated everything I had ever been taught. I was still reeling from my grief, but this spiritual exploration gave me hope for brighter days in my future. I became even more adventurous and started reading books like Spiritual Solutions by Deepak Chopra, Living Buddha, Living Christ by Thich Nhat Hanh, and Be Here Now by Baba Ram Dass. Even though these books would have been banned from IFB bookshelves, I found them packed full of new thoughts and insights I’d never considered. It was wonderful to be able to question the “truths” posited by other spiritual teachers—instead of categorically denying their veracity. With such an exciting new world to explore, I was convinced I would never feel bored again.