IFB members sometimes called Oprah the Antichrist. They’ve even made YouTube videos to that effect. But I admired her a great deal. I was forbidden from watching her talk show as a kid, but during my year of unmonitored homeschooling I would sometimes sneak off to watch. Even at that age, I knew she had answers to problems I was unable to solve. So at the age of fifteen, I did what came natural to me and I got on my knees and prayed that I would meet her someday. I wonder now if I unconsciously was drawn to her because she stood up for victims of abuse. But now I was meeting her in a different way, thrilled to be able to watch her Lifeclass every day and to absorb her advice.
Between Ron Erkley’s counsel about firing the vindictive “God” of the IFB and the fresh views on spirituality I was discovering, I started to see God in a whole new light. After years of apocalyptic IFB thinking and belief that our time on earth was just a dress rehearsal for the afterlife, the idea of living in the moment seemed wonderful to me. I read Tolle’s The Power of Now so many times it grew dog-eared and torn. I created a gratitude journal and started writing down all my joys and blessings. At first it was a short list: my children, my husband, and my sister Melissa. But gradually it expanded to include our home, our friends at Willow Creek Church, our friends at Moody Bible Institute, our friends at Life on the Vine Church, and many more wonderful people whose love and encouragement guided us through the eighteen months we spent slowly detoxing from the cult. I also gained new insight on the mind control techniques cult leaders use by reading books about the Amish by Beverly Lewis.
I got another big shock when Joseph told me that the men in his classes at Trinity treated the female students and faculty as intellectual equals, taking their opinions and beliefs into serious consideration. Unlike those in the IFB, women in our new community didn’t preface their insight with self-deprecating statements like “I could be wrong but…” or “My husband believes…” or “I’d like to confirm this with my pastor, but I think it might be true that…” We had truly entered a different world.
Studying church history slowly began to free Joseph’s conscience too. In the IFB, almost every acceptable opinion on any issue had come down from Bob Jones and his university. But now Joseph began to believe that sincere Christians could hold many different beliefs about what the Bible taught.
People who have no experience with cults often find it hard to understand how an intelligent person could be brainwashed so profoundly. But a child’s conscience is easily trained and if you spend your entire life in a cloistered community, isolated from dissenting viewpoints, there are almost no limits to how much your mind can be manipulated. This is among the most humiliating realizations you have to face once you leave a cult. It was especially hard for Joseph, who had devoted his life to gaining and sharing knowledge.
Another one of the hardest aspects of leaving a cult is relinquishing the concept of yourself as spiritually elite, the focus of heaven’s attention. Like other religious cult leaders, IFB pastors indoctrinate you from childhood into believing that what your tiny group is doing is the most important thing happening on earth from God’s perspective. The sense of higher purpose and mission gives you a high almost like a drug. When you leave the cult, you realize how utterly unimportant you are in the larger scheme of things and it’s a profound letdown, a staggering blow to the ego. It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that you are just an ordinary person, a very small fish in a very big ocean when you’ve been told your whole life that you are superior to the rest of the human race because of your “special enlightenment.”
The more acclimated to my new life I grew, the more my spirits lifted. Even my migraines receded slightly. I’m positive now that the stress of my situation in the IFB was a strong contributing factor to my years of pain. And even though I needed to continue my MRIs and have medical professionals monitor my brain tumor closely, I resolved not to continue obsessing over what might happen if it started growing “fingers”—an indication of malignancy. I wanted to live fully in the present, enjoy every moment with my family, and continue to hope for the best.
The Surprise Letter
I was in such a positive frame of mind that even the letter that arrived in the mail from Bob Jones University in May of 2007 couldn’t dampen my spirits. It informed Joseph that he had been kicked out of the BJU Alumni Association.
Dear Joseph,
I am writing this letter with a heavy heart. One of the criteria for continued membership in the BJU Alumni Association is that the individual be in good standing with the University. We understand that is not so in your case at this time. In light of that, we regret that we will not be able to continue your membership in the association until such time as the problem has been resolved. Enclosed is a refund check. I trust that whatever has brought this breach will be dealt with and corrected soon.
Director of Alumni Relations
Given the fact that Northland had allegedly terminated my husband’s contract due to “budget cuts” and Joseph had had no dealings with Bob Jones University, positive or negative, since then, this was yet another message from the cult leadership that the IFB would not tolerate defiance, rebellion, or defection. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had tried to revoke Joseph’s actual degrees, but it no longer mattered to me. We were out for good, and I was thrilled.
Every person who leaves a cult has to overcome three primary hurdles. First, he must reprogram his conscience not to fear God’s imminent wrath for leaving the “truth” and instead learn to how think reasonably for himself. After a year out of the IFB, we were making strides in that direction. Second, a defector has to rebuild his entire network of personal and professional relationships. This can be a long and lonely process, but Joseph and I were progressing. The third and often the most difficult step is to find new employment and sever old financial ties to the cult. That was the most arduous task for us, partly because, no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t sell our house in the small IFB community surrounding Northland International University. And regardless of how strapped we were, the mortgage payments still had to be made.
Sabotaged House Auction
In the spring of 2007, we borrowed $10,000 from Joseph’s grandparents to hire the region’s best auction company to advertise our house and host a series of open houses. More than a hundred people toured our beautiful onetime dream home, traveling from a five-hour driving radius in all directions, and about thirty showed up for the auction. At the time, our house was priced at $450,000.
On the day of the auction, our auctioneer told us that a man who identified himself as a member of the faculty at Northland offered $40,000 and argued with him in front of everyone for the better part of half an hour that we had to accept his bid. After that, no one else made an offer and our $10,000 was wasted. Joseph and I have no doubt that the altercation disconcerted potential buyers and suggested to them that there was something extremely strange about the situation. We had long suspected that the college leaders were discouraging people from buying our house, telling them it was overpriced, and this incident made us wonder once again if they would ever let us sell our home.
We Are Not Alone
During our first year detoxing from the IFB, Joseph and I met many fellow “defectors.” At first we thought our experiences were unique, but we soon began to realize that the leaders used the same basic tactics to discredit, intimidate, and threaten everyone who left the cult. Finally, Joseph decided to post a ninety-minute audio on the Internet explaining why we had left the IFB, sharing many of the insights we had gained over the previous year. He knew that appealing to IFB leaders, whose control and income would be threatened by his comments, was a waste of time. However, he hoped that rank-and-file members of the cult might start to open their eyes to the brainwashing we had all experienced.
Within three days of posting his lecture, the audio file had been downloaded close to thirty thousand times and the IFB blogosphere lit up like a Christmas tree. “Joseph Zichterman should
be officially turned over to Satan in church discipline for his rebellion against God and the Bible,” one listener wrote. Another remarked, “Zichterman is a heretic and an apostate, seeking to make those he influences ‘children of Hell.’” And still another wrote, “Joseph is part of the ‘great falling away’ from the Christian faith, which was prophesied in the New Testament to come immediately before the appearance of the Antichrist.” Prominent IFB evangelist “Dr.” Steve Pettit, BJU graduate and board member at Northland, quickly responded on my brother’s immensely popular blog (“Sharper Iron”), stating that Joseph needed to apologize for his “inconsistency in practise [sic] and dishonesty in message.” Little did we know at the time the lengths they were willing to go to in order to discredit us.
My husband received hundreds of e-mails from the IFB faithful. One came from a woman named Gloria Everson, a graduate of BJU and a former co-worker at Northland. She wrote, “I pray that you will come back to the truth. You have been deceived and Satan is using you to destroy the work that you have done.” Dave Doran, BJU graduate and president of Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote accusing Joseph of “shameless self-promotion” and demanding that he “quarantine” himself for a long time. Matt Herbster, BJU graduate and assistant program director at The Wilds camp, wrote, “I’m … praying for you to extend God’s love and forgiveness to those you feel have hurt you in the past.” A short time later, Bobby Wood also wrote Joseph, criticizing him for “attacking” his close friends at Northland, saying, “Don’t let bitterness destroy your life.”
Joseph had obviously touched a nerve. In the midst of all the attacks, he was also inundated with supportive e-mails. Many were from former IFB members who had left the cult and others from mid-tier up-and-comers still trapped inside—almost all of them scared to death for anyone to find out they were starting to question the leaders.
The Move to Hawaii
By August 2007 Joseph was a few months from finishing his classes at Trinity and contemplating what we would all do during the time he was writing his dissertation. That’s when my sister Melissa came up with an interesting proposition. “Why don’t you move to Hawaii and live with us?” she suggested. We would have to sell everything we owned to pay for the move and pack only the bare minimum, but we decided to take the gamble. For the plan to work, Joseph would need to stay in Chicago to finish his final course work, while I took the kids to my sister’s and waited for his arrival.
Melissa and Vance’s home was large by Hawaiian standards, but not nearly spacious enough to accommodate ten extra people. They built two large triple bunk beds for the kids and put them in a closed lanai, and we stuffed all the clothes and toys we had brought into storage bins under the bottom bunks. The mattresses came from a Navy ship and were spacious enough that our two small children could share the bottom bunk. Meanwhile, Joseph and I slept in the guest bedroom next to the lanai, where our children could reach us easily if they needed us. The kids’ quarters were laughably tight, but they were delighted to embark on yet another new adventure. Every day we headed to the beach with surfboards, body boards, Frisbees, buckets, and shovels. It felt like we were on one long, delightful extended vacation. Melissa also introduced us to hundreds of popular movies that almost everyone in America had seen in the past twenty years—except those of us in the cult. There was a mind-boggling amount to catch up on in terms of American culture.
Every night when my brother-in-law came home from the office, the kids would clamber over each other to regale him with the day’s escapades and exhibit their latest boo-boos to the family doctor. “Uncle Vance! Uncle Vance! Look at this cut on my toe! Wanna know how I got it?” They were all convinced he had magical powers of healing.
Melissa’s house was right on the beach and we sat around a bonfire in the evenings with Clark and Jan, her wonderful neighbors. We were in a terrific new world of freedom, sitting outside watching the beautiful sunsets and the ocean waves hitting the rocks while Beatles and Rolling Stones music played in the background. We sipped wine (our favorite indulgence after a lifetime of fear that a glass of alcohol was a one-way ticket to Hell) and talked about how distorted our perceptions had been, as well as how far we’d come. Melissa was pregnant with her first child and had decided to cut back on her hours at work as her due date drew near, so, while the kids played nearby, we spent several hours every day discussing our childhood, helping us both to come to terms with the terrors of the past. I was there for the birth of her adorable baby girl and was able to help out during the first few months of her life. Those were halcyon times. It felt as if we were starting life all over again together, full of hope and free of fear, something we had never thought possible.
The Bad Girls’ Club
During our time in Hawaii, I attended a conference on sexual abuse, where I met actress Alison Arngrim, who played Nellie on Little House on the Prairie. The show, based on the series of bestselling books about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life in nineteenth-century rural America, was one of the few my parents allowed us to watch growing up, and I had been an enormous fan. I’d passed my love of all things Little House on to my own daughters, building their playhouse in Wisconsin to the floor plan of the Ingalls family’s log cabin and even re-creating scenes from the series for Christmas one year. I had white nightgowns and nightcaps hand-sewn for them and gave them cinnamon sticks, red knitted mittens, tin dishes, and Little House dresses, aprons, and bonnets. All the outfits were made to match the show costumes, with meticulous attention to detail.
I introduced myself to Alison after her speech and told her about my obsession with the show. She wasn’t surprised. In fact, she surprised me by knowing all about the IFB. No matter where she goes, Alison seems to get cornered by adoring homeschooling moms and their daughters, all wearing long matching gingham and calico Little House dresses.
Next, I told her a bit about my personal history. I said I found it ironic to know that she had been sexually abused by one of her relatives while she was a child star in Little House, when I had so often longed to escape similar abuse in my own life by plunging into the Ingalls family’s perfect world. There, fathers were as kind and loving as its protagonist, Pa. Alison explained that Michael Landon, who played Pa, had created the series with kids like me in mind, to offer them a sunnier, gentler world.
We hit it off immediately and ended up spending the weekend together, bumming around the island. I loved hearing her memories of the actors I had adored as a kid and finding out what had become of them all after the last episode. We even went to a party together, where she showed me how to smoke my first cigar.
It was a full-circle moment for me. Whenever we had played Little House as kids, I insisted on being good girl Laura Ingalls. My sister Meagan was blond, so she played Laura’s golden-haired sister Mary. I always cast Melissa as Nellie, Laura’s nemesis and the stereotypical bad girl. In the IFB’s eyes, Melissa was still playing that role. Now I had joined her. And both Nellies, Alison and Melissa, had stepped in to guide me on my journey from IFB enslavement to freedom in Hawaii. I had come a long way and I was proud of who I was becoming.
Devastating Revelations
The kids were starting school partway through the first quarter, and the air crackled with anticipation as they prepared for the first day of class. Joseph and I gave them the standard parental advice every child hears. “Don’t chew with your mouth open.” “Don’t talk in class.” “Make sure all your papers come home in your backpacks.” But Melissa felt it was also important to discuss inappropriate hugging and touching to make sure they would know how to protect themselves.
To her horror, a puzzled frown crossed several of my daughters’ little faces. They explained to her that Bart had often touched them in the ways she was describing. Making a monumental effort not to betray her outrage for fear of upsetting the girls, Melissa hurried out of the room and told me.
My knees buckled as a crushing flood of grief, fear, shock, and guilt engulfed me. Hadn’t I always
been terrified of him harming my children the way he had harmed me?
My first instinct was to rush to them, wrap them in my arms, and promise never to let anything bad happen to them ever again. But I didn’t dare participate in any conversations with my daughters about sexual abuse. I knew that if I wanted to press charges against him, my father would produce his reams of Internet “research” and tell everyone I had provoked false memories in my daughters just as he claimed I had fabricated memories myself. So instead I called 911 and was connected to the Honolulu Police Department’s special sex crimes unit. My daughters were ready to talk, so we brought them in to meet with detectives for videotaped forensic interviews. Afterward, the detectives met with us and said they were convinced that both of our children were telling the truth. They offered to send the videotapes to the police detectives in Dunbar, Wisconsin, where the crimes had been committed. I was touched by the sensitivity and genuine concern they showed for our family. The detective who broke the news had tears in his eyes when he spoke.
Our next move was to get our daughters started in therapy with qualified counselors. One of our girls had been particularly distant and cold with us, but after she came forward about the abuse and sobbed out her pain, vomiting for three straight days, she became a different child. She was lighthearted, funny, and quick to show affection. The transformation was miraculous to watch, but I couldn’t help grieving over all the years we had lost with her. I knew all too well what deep pain she had suffered and kept locked inside herself for so long.
I Fired God Page 26