I Fired God

by Jocelyn Zichterman

  “How could I be so stupid as to let him around my children?” I kept asking.

  “Jocelyn, you were beaten bloody,” Melissa assured me. “He had you locked in fear of death. They didn’t even tell us what sexual abuse was. How could you have known? You didn’t even understand it yourself!”

  Melissa had gone through a lot to gain this perspective. She had been making this slow, arduous journey along with me and had decided to go to therapy herself. She had done extensive eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, a treatment most often used to rehabilitate soldiers who were prisoners of war, to put the terrible ghosts from our past to rest. Melissa and I were both diagnosed with PTSD—a common side effect of extreme abuse. She understood me like no other person could. I couldn’t have asked for a wiser, more empathetic confidante, but her words gave me little consolation. Knowing I had failed to protect my children was a heartbreak greater than anything we had yet gone through. I cried myself to sleep every night while my sister consoled me. I wouldn’t have made it through that time without her by my side.

  Marinette County detective Tony O’Neill’s voice sounded gruff over the phone. “Why do you want to press charges against your father?” he demanded.

  “Because he molested my daughters,” I explained.

  That didn’t seem to be enough for O’Neill, though. He kept pressing, firing questions at me. O’Neill was the senior detective in a town of fewer than 2,000 residents, and I knew he had investigated other criminal cases at Northland. I was beginning to wonder if Northland had prejudiced him against me because he seemed disinclined to believe everything I said.

  I couldn’t handle his unexpected bullying, so Joseph took over. O’Neill was just as rude and dismissive with him. He seemed incredulous about our desire to press charges against Bart and skeptical that a case would be prosecutable without DNA evidence.

  “We want this man arrested!” Joseph said emphatically. “Why hasn’t anyone moved on this? Didn’t you get the videotaped interviews of our daughters that the police in Hawaii sent?”

  “Nope,” O’Neill said.

  We were exasperated. Bart Janz had threatened to kill us. His molestation of our daughters had been confirmed by the Honolulu sex crimes unit. But with the police in Wisconsin unwilling to take action against him, the man would remain a senior pastor with access to vulnerable children every week. “How can the justice system be so unfair?” I fumed to Joseph. “Vulnerable children get wronged at every turn!” Joseph even sent a letter to the district attorney in Marinette County, insisting that something be done, but we received no reply. We couldn’t believe it.

  Not long after this, we got word from a relative that my father was planning a vacation to the island of Oahu where we lived. The news threw us all into a panic and we went to the police to get a more extensive restraining order. My sister documented her side of the abuse and submitted it to the court while I documented mine.

  Bart attended the hearing by phone and was brusque even with the judge, who granted a twenty-year restraining order for my children and me, effective in all fifty states. My father asked for the right to retain his firearms, and when the judge asked, “Why?” Bart responded that he “went to the gun range to practice hitting targets.” The judge glanced toward my direction and I shook my head no emphatically, using eye contact to plead with him because I was sure it was yet another veiled threat on my life. To my immense relief, the judge denied his request.

  The Marriage Contract

  Joseph had been looking for work every day for several months on the island, but again, no one would hire him because of his unaccredited degrees. Finally, even though he hadn’t completed his dissertation yet, he decided it was time to start sending his CV to colleges across the country for a teaching position in theology. Unfortunately, the economy was still sluggish, and job openings were scarce. He got a few job offers from smaller schools, but nothing seemed to fit our family’s needs. Then one day he opened his e-mail account to find a message from an evangelical university in Portland, Oregon, inviting him to interview for a position. Excited at the prospect, he Googled the school’s Web site.

  “I don’t know,” I told him warily. “It looks extremely conservative.”

  “Let’s at least check it out,” he said. Our roles seemed to have reversed. He sounded like me back in our last days with the IFB, when I was gingerly coaxing him to send out feelers and keep an open mind about new possibilities. “It’ll be fun to do the interview and get away for a few days,” he said. But what if he saw the campus, fell in love, and let his old passion for teaching guide his decision, regardless of what it meant for me? To put my mind at ease, I asked him to sign a contract before we left. It said that if the school didn’t take an egalitarian position regarding men and women, he would walk away and wait until the right opportunity came along. I guess I had learned this “tactic” from the IFB rather well, but this time I was putting it to good use. He signed—and we both laughed about it—but I was determined never to sink into a patriarchal subculture again.

  We flew to the school and met the co-chairman of the Bible and Theology Department. He was friendly, humble, and unequivocally egalitarian, which took me completely off guard. He said he understood our history and was glad we were free. I was delighted to discover that he and I were passionate about many of the same issues. Even more unexpected, the employment committee invited me to join Joseph during his first interview, explaining that having a wife onboard when a husband accepted a new job was crucial. Oregon’s rain could drastically affect anyone with seasonal affective disorder, and they had lost more than one new faculty member because a spouse couldn’t take the dreary climate.

  I had to make a conscious effort to keep my jaw from dropping. I had come out of a culture where women were supposed to be meek, submissive “help meets” who didn’t even have opinions of their own, let alone voice them. I had lived in a place where the sky was dark and gloomy most the year, in minus-20-degree weather, where men required women to wear skirts while trekking through drifts of snow. Now an entire group of men at an evangelical university were concerned about my mental health?

  Our interview devolved into fits of laughter when the committee mentioned reading the glowing employer reviews my husband had saved from his IFB days. In one written long before anyone knew we were leaving the IFB, Joseph’s old boss Curt Lamansky had said, “I’d like to assure you that Jocelyn is a submissive and faithful woman who serves as a wonderful helpmeet for her husband.” The very idea that an employer would write that in a letter of recommendation for a job seemed crazy to the entire committee. It seemed like a different lifetime to us now too.

  We bonded quickly, and the committee felt comfortable enough with us to reveal that one member had seen Bob Jones University and Pensacola Christian College on Joseph’s CV and thrown it in the trash, saying “he wouldn’t be a good fit here.” However, this man’s curiosity eventually got the better of him and he Googled Joseph. He didn’t have to read much to realize that Joseph had been banished from the IFB boys’ club—and that convinced the committee to give his résumé a second look.

  Joseph couldn’t conceal his delight. All this time he had been afraid that the vicious comments circulating in IFB chat rooms and on IFB message boards would keep him from getting a job. But the cult’s penchant for backstabbing and denigration had turned out to be better than a letter of recommendation to sensible academicians in the real world. The committee made it clear that they would be happy to have another “apostate” join them, all laughing at the thought.

  A few days later, Joseph was offered the job—and accepted. Soon we were packing our bags, showering Melissa and Vance with thanks and well wishes, and moving to Oregon to embark on the next stage of our journey.

  14

  FROM IFB TO LIBERAL

  We are addicted to counseling in America today and we’ve got to get over it. Do you know why we’re addicted to counseling, because you’re
not reading your Bibles, that’s why.

  —Bart Janz, sermon, Holly Ridge Baptist Church, “When Men Don’t, Women Do,” 2007

  Hopes for the Future, Ghosts of the Past

  We found a suitable house, enrolled the kids in the local public schools, and settled in to Portland in July of 2008. In addition to teaching full-time at a conservative evangelical university, Joseph soon took a weekend job pastoring a local Baptist church, which is not part of the IFB. (He is a pastor there even now, which means I am still a Baptist pastor’s wife—humorous, given my work exposing abuse in the IFB.) However, by this time, our family conversations were getting quite lively, as our kids starting calling me “the liberal” and Joseph “the conservative.”

  Soon after arriving in Portland, we attended a student body function at Joseph’s university, where the student body president gave a talk about growing up in a hyper-perfectionistic homeschooling family and having a complete mental breakdown at age seventeen from the pressure. He ended up in a psychiatric hospital and took a year to recover any semblance of a normal life. Chagrined and horrified, I remembered my own drive to raise “super-children” who would master foreign languages, play musical instruments, and surpass their peers academically. Now my children reveled in their freedom—singing and dancing to pop songs, living in the moment, and brimming with happiness. I hugged them all a little tighter that night, profoundly grateful that they had been spared from the life he described—the life we had left behind in the IFB.

  Barack Obama was running for president when we moved to Portland and I contemplated joining his campaign, but there were two major stumbling blocks: homosexuality and abortion. In the minds of the IFB and many other right-wing evangelical organizations in the U.S., no “good Christian” could ever vote for a Democrat because the party’s stance on these two issues opposes “God’s biblical guidelines.” The pastors thundering from their pulpits made it perfectly clear that voting Republican was the only option. It had been drilled into my head even as a little girl. Now I find it dismaying that IFB churches, schools, and universities claim tax-exempt status and yet shamelessly promote a specific political position. Don’t they understand what “separation of church and state” means? Why can’t the church develop a mutually respectful relationship with the government and vice versa? What about a “middle ground” of pro-choice (the state), yet anti-abortion (their church)—in other words, you can oppose the concept of terminating a pregnancy but respect other women’s right to have opinions and make decisions that differ from yours? Or pro–gay marriage (the state), yet anti-homosexuality (their church)? Once again, it seemed clear to me that the IFB’s stand on these issues was about power and control over other people. It’s one thing to have a personal moral belief based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. It’s something entirely different to demand that the rest of society adopt your beliefs. By this time in my journey, I was glad the government allowed me to make my own choices about my body and my personal life. I had become an advocate of free will and would never ask another person to give up his rights. With that, I took a pro-choice and pro-gay marriage position and have never faltered in my political positions on either.

  I went to work for the Democratic National Committee. Campaigning for Obama made me feel marvelously liberated. A few years earlier, I would have thought “I will burn in Hell” was part of the job description. But now I was on the side of freedom, progress, and forward-thinking. Every morning after my children left for school, I would slap magnetic “Yes We Can” magnets to the side of our twelve-passenger van and haul DNC staffers all over Portland, dropping teams off at strategic locations. I drove the only “Obama van” in town, and we called it the Dancemobile. Every day, we popped Obama’s playlist into the CD player and the college students working with me rocked out in the van at all the stoplights. We got either a thumbs-up or the middle finger, depending on whether the driver in the next lane was a Democrat or a Republican. I loved my work and I met some of my closest friends through it. They had all been raised by hippies, businesspeople, and progressive professors, so they were fascinated by my life story. I read books they recommended, such as The End of Faith by Sam Harris, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, Letting Go of God by Julia Sweeney, and The Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom. While I didn’t agree with the authors’ conclusions, it was another fascinating step in my spiritual journey. Our diametrically opposed backgrounds set the stage for lots of great conversations.

  In the fall of 2008 I also enrolled in a community college, later transferring to George Fox University and graduating in 2011 with my bachelor’s degree in social and behavioral sciences. It was quite the job, having eight kids at home and being in school full-time, but I was proud to be a real student in real schools. I literally cried my way through my psychology and women’s studies classes, realizing how miseducated all my years at IFB schools had left me. There had been yawning gaps in some subjects and outright lies taught in others. My only brush with “feminist history” had been the many diatribes I heard on how those evil working women were destroying the American home. It had never dawned on me that I was sitting in a classroom at Bob Jones University because feminists had risked everything and devoted their lives to fighting for a woman’s right to higher education. I knew even less about African American history and music. I made some close friends at college, and one brought me a towering stack of CDs from her collection so I could catch up on all the music trends I had missed. The kindness and warmth of the people I met continually amazed me. How many sermons had I heard in the IFB warning me about the evil and dangerous sinners outside the cult? The truth was, the cruelest, most spiteful people I had met in my life were those inside the cult.

  I also took my first domestic violence course and read Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft. It convinced me that every seminary, rabbinical school, and teachers college should make the subject mandatory and put Bancroft’s eye-opening book on its required reading list.

  The criminal justice class I took had an equally profound impact on me. I became a passionate advocate for the restorative justice model, which stresses repairing the damage criminal behavior leaves in its wake and enabling offenders to repair it. Having been raised under a punitive justice model, I knew firsthand how debilitating that approach is to the soul. Studying restorative justice convinced me that change is possible but that abusers don’t often get proper treatment or face stiff enough consequences. It also prompted me to start asking tough questions about the roots of my father’s violence and whether the model might be helpful for a man like him.

  When I wasn’t crying over all the years I had wasted misinformed and ignorant, I felt angry—angry at the U.S. Department of Education for allowing schools like First Bible Baptist Elementary School in Wisconsin, Silver State’s K–12, Northland Baptist Bible College (now Northland International University), and BJU to exist without appropriate accountability. Because I’d had the misfortune to be born into the right-wing extremist fringe, the government had turned a blind eye to my basic human rights and catered instead to the extremists who controlled me. I was a casualty of the shipwreck the religious right had caused, sailing under the religious persecution banner. Realizing this ignited a passion in me to push for changes in the laws.

  Another Shattering Revelation

  I was out with my college friends one night when Joseph called me. From the tone of his voice, I knew instantly that something was wrong. “What’s the matter?” I asked urgently, worried that one of our children was sick.

  His answer left me winded and weak, as if I’d been blindsided by an invisible punch. Another one of our daughters had just come to him, crying hysterically, and told him that my father had molested her too. I made a hurried excuse to my friends and rushed home, where Joseph and I called 911 and filed yet another police report.

  The next day we contacted an organization called CARES Northwest that specializes in conducting ab
use assessments for victimized children. The group knew about our two daughters who had already come forward and now, hearing about a third little girl, the staff asked us to bring our five oldest children in for forensic interviews. Knowing that we had escaped from a cult, they devoted an entire team of specialists to our family. Our children were interviewed by a mental health specialist, examined by a pediatrician, and forensically interviewed while the police observed from behind a one-way mirror. CARES even brought in the FBI to gather as much information about the cult as possible.

  After their in-depth assessment, the staff met with us and assured us that they didn’t suspect Joseph or me of child abuse. They knew I had spanked my children in my cult days because I had been convinced it was the only way to save their souls from Hell, though I was always very careful to administer minimal “swats” because I didn’t want to be like my father. Joseph, since he was working two jobs to make ends meet and spent long hours away from home, was rarely the one who doled out corporal punishment.

  I found a wooden spoon preferable to any other spanking instrument. Somehow it sounded more Little House on the Prairie and less sadistic than pipes, rods, or glue sticks. I had heard lots of women I knew—even those who hadn’t been raised in the IFB—mention that their mothers had used a spoon to spank them, and that normalized it for me. I always wanted to be as “normal” as possible—though that term seems strange now, realizing there was nothing normal about my parenting style in my cult days.

  Understanding the warped mind-set that had guided my actions did nothing to console me. Having spanked my children was one of my deepest regrets and I lay awake at night sobbing about my past actions. My remorse intensified now, because I realized that my children had probably been acting out as a cry for help. I had been so heavily indoctrinated to believe they were “in sin” when they showed negative emotions that I had completely missed the warning signs suggesting that they were being molested—signs any mother, especially one who is an abuse victim herself, should have seen. I couldn’t think of anything worse.