Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions

by Cami Ostman

  BEYOND BELIEF

  THE SECRET LIVES OF WOMEN

  IN EXTREME RELIGIONS

  edited by

  Susan Tive & Cami Ostman

  SEAL PRESS

  BEYOND BELIEF

  The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions

  Copyright © 2013 by Susan Tive & Cami Ostman

  Note to the reader: In some stories, names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

  Published by

  Seal Press

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  1700 Fourth Street

  Berkeley, California

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ostman, Cami.

  Beyond belief : the secret lives of women in extreme religions / by Cami Ostman & Susan Tive.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-58005-461-4

  1. Women and religion. 2. Religion—Controversial literature. 3. Patriarchy—Religious aspects. I. Tive, Susan, 1962- II. Title.

  BL458.O88 2013

  200.92’52—dc23

  2012041943

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  Interior design by Domini Dragoone

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  To all who have trusted me with their stories

  and listened to mine in return.

  —Cami Ostman

  To my parents, who taught me that good conversation

  is more important than table manners.

  —Susan Tive

  Contents

  Introduction

  IN THE BEGINNING

  Church Bodies ~ Naomi J. Williams

  Direct Line to God ~ Cami Ostman

  Beaten by Devotion ~ Huda Al-Marashi

  Baptizing the Annas ~ Caitlin Constantine

  Uniforms ~ Leah Lax

  Seducing God ~ Joshunda Victoria Sanders

  Show Me the Way ~ Elise Brianne Curtin

  Swan Sister ~ Yolande Elise Brener

  BURNT OFFERINGS

  Turning Twelve ~ Lucia Greenhouse

  Touch ~ Elise Glassman

  Body Language ~ Pamela Helberg

  A Mother in Israel ~ Stephanie Durden Edwards

  Poisonous Promises ~ Grace Peterson

  Tilapia Mikveh ~ Susan Tive

  Witness ~ Melanie Hoffert

  Eva ~ Leila Khan

  White Lie ~ Nikki Smith

  EXODUS

  Always Leaving ~ Donna M. Johnson

  Separation Colleen Haggerty

  Dirty Girl ~ Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  Can I Get a Witness? ~ Elizabeth Taylor-Mead

  Lucky Cat ~ Kyria Abrahams

  Church of the Snake ~ Carolyn Briggs

  The Imperceptible Head Shake ~ Julia Scheeres

  Duct Tape and Baling Wire ~ Valerie Tarico

  Nun Hands ~ Mary Johnson

  Introduction:

  Reflections from the Editors

  Cami Ostman and Susan Tive

  We met in a memoir writing class taught by author Laura Kalpakian in the fall of 2006. Susan was writing about her years spent in Orthodox Judaism, her difficult divorce, and the disorientation of transitioning out of living an Orthodox life. Cami was writing about how her journey to run a marathon on every continent was helping her find her way after a divorce and a profound change in her relationship with God. As we shared our respective stories—both in class and over coffee or wine outside of class—we discovered surprising parallels in our lives. Both of us had chosen to enter religious communities we weren’t raised in. We had each adopted faiths that asked us to eschew many personal “freedoms” and choices most nonreligious women take for granted. Though Cami was not asked to cover her head or stop wearing pants as Susan was, she was asked to believe that women shouldn’t teach men in church and that her husband should be her “head.”

  Comparing notes further we realized that, despite the differences in our respective religious practices, we could empathize with each other’s difficulties reintegrating into the secular world and shared the doubts and second-guessing of our decisions to leave. We understood the self-blame and guilt that comes with leaving strict religion behind. We experienced similar struggles surviving the wistful, nostalgic, and sometimes heart-wrenching emotions that arise from missing familiar community and ritual.

  The more we talked, the more we began to ask ourselves, “Why did we choose to join such restrictive religious practices?” Even more compellingly, we wanted to explore both “Why did we stay so long?” and “Why was it so hard to leave?” After all, although we each experienced intense emotional and psychological pressure from friends and family to stay, we were not obliged by fear of violence as some women around the world are. What did we gain by staying—what kept us in even through years of serious misgivings?

  As we formulated more questions and explored our own answers to them, we began to wonder about all the other women who, like us, had lived or were living through their own version of this story and were grappling with many of the same experiences, emotions, and questions. As our friendship with each other taught us, women living life inside extreme religions have much in common despite their differences of practice and belief. Sharing our stories with one another through writing and in conversation helped each of us to feel less isolated, learn from our experiences, and become willing to dig deeper. Realizing that the commonalities of our lives within extreme religion far outweighed the differences of our particular paths inspired us to widen the conversation. We decided to share our stories and give other women the opportunity to tell theirs. Thus, the seeds of Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions were first sown.

  Far and wide we flung our net, asking writers the same core questions we had asked ourselves: Why did you, a modern-day, liberated woman, join a religion that restricted your autonomy? What did you experience inside? What compelled you to stay? What compelled you to leave? How did you leave? What do you miss? How do you make sense of the world without your faith (or with an altered understanding of your faith)?

  As Beyond Belief began to take shape, the one question we were asked most often by contributors was, “What’s your working definition of extreme?” It’s true that the word extreme is an extreme word! For some of our atheist friends, any religion that espouses a belief in any kind of supreme being is extreme. Yet for those who live inside orthodoxy or fundamentalism, what they live is not extreme to them at all: It is quite normal and sensible.

  We agreed that we would let women who resonated with the term extreme define it for themselves. As editors, it’s not our place to pretend we have an objective, unbiased definition of what is extreme that we can apply like a measuring stick to other people’s experiences. What we do know is that, looking back on what we put ourselves through at an earlier time, we now see our religious commitments as extreme in comparison to our current lives. We hope you, the reader, will keep an open mind to the stories contained in Beyond Belief, and employ empathy as you read, even if certain writers’ beliefs don’t resonate with your own.

  Another question we encountered when we made our call for submissions was, “I was born into a family that practices this religion. Can I still submit a story?” Our answer at first was no, but we changed our minds. Although we originally hoped to find women,
like us, who chose to enter their faiths in adolescence or adulthood, we came to understand that, except for some women who risk their lives to leave their religion behind, even those who were born into a particular faith must choose to stay in it at least for some period of time (often because the consequences of leaving were, while not deadly, quite huge).

  Finally, potential contributors asked us, “I’ve left a conservative branch of my religion, but I still attend a more liberal church/synagogue/congregation. Does my experience count as ‘leaving’?” Again, our answer was yes. We understand firsthand that faith and spirituality can be in flux. Where we are today may not be where we’ll be tomorrow, and so it’s best not to judge as definitive where other people happen to be on their spiritual journeys at any given moment.

  In fact, it is precisely because we do not consider ourselves judges of other people’s experience that we asked our contributors to write “slice of life” stories rather than informative or opinionated essays. It is not our intention to refute or belittle religion. On the contrary, we, as editors, wanted to spark a conversation about the commonalities of women’s experiences in restrictive religions. The fact that most of the writers included in Beyond Belief have since left or greatly altered their religious practices is a reflection of our longing to hear from those who share the trajectory of our journeys and should not be read as a suggestion that women should leave. This book is entirely about sharing experiences in the way women do: by telling stories to one another.

  In Beyond Belief you will find appreciation and gratitude for experiences of faith side by side with deep resentment and anger. Some writers are still grappling to make sense of their lives both in and out of extreme religion, while others are absolutely clear about how to understand their histories. We have made every effort to include women from as wide a range of religious backgrounds as possible. And while we couldn’t include every single religion out there, we are proud of the quality and diversity of writing that has come together to form Beyond Belief.

  It’s our hope that you’ll see yourself, your friends, and even a few of the people who irritate you in these pages—and that your curiosity will be piqued and your compassion stimulated. We hope that in reading these stories you will become inspired to enter into open-ended conversations such as the ones we strive to nurture in our own lives.

  IN THE

  BEGINNING

  Church Bodies

  Naomi J. Williams

  1. IN WHICH I LEARN THAT CHURCH TRUMPS EVERYTHING, EVEN ILLNESS

  This Sabbath is to be kept holy unto the Lord when men . . . do not only observe an holy rest all the day from their own works, words, and thoughts about their worldly employments and recreations, but also are taken up the whole time in the public and private exercises of His worship.

  —The Westminster Confession of Faith, XXI:8 (1646)

  Going to church was of paramount importance in my family. Church was so important that we went twice every Sunday, morning and evening, and also Wednesday nights for prayer meeting. One Sunday morning when I was seven, I woke up with agonizing stomach pain and vomiting, and my parents took me to church anyway—that’s how important it was.

  We lived in Long Beach, California at the time and attended Pilgrim Reformed Baptist Church, a congregation so new and small we met mostly in people’s homes. On the morning in question we met at the home of the Wheaton family. They stuck me on a daybed in one of those dark 1970s dens with no books, provided me with a bowl to throw up in, and proceeded with church in the living room. I lay there for an hour, racked with stomach cramps, until a large Siamese cat jumped up on top of me. Terrified of the animal, I hobbled out of the room and into the hallway, doubled over in nauseated pain, until Mrs. Wheaton noticed me. She shooed away the cat and closed me back in the room. To this day, I’m phobic about vomiting. I’m not overly fond of cats either.

  Otherwise I liked Pilgrim Reformed Baptist Church. Everyone else’s house was much nicer than our downscale apartment, and my younger sister, Mari, and I befriended some of the other girls. And I liked the grown-ups too, particularly the pastor, an Englishman called Ron Edmonds, and his wife, Thaïs. Mrs. Edmonds was Brazilian and had jet-black hair coiffed with meticulous, unliberated perfection. The Edmonds were genteel and never talked down to children. This mattered a lot to me.

  But my father, a fractious individual, had a falling-out with Mr. Edmonds, the first of many such estrangements. When I asked why, he said it was complicated, a disagreement between men over how the church should be run. One Sunday morning he woke us up and told us we wouldn’t be going to Pilgrim anymore. I cried. He found my grief touching; I remember sitting on his knee while he comforted me. He wasn’t a heartless man, my father, however much he pressed his family to extreme religious observance. My mother, a practical and unsentimental Japanese woman, had more moderation. But she rarely overruled my father.

  Leaving Pilgrim didn’t mean we’d be skipping church, of course. I don’t think we took even one Sunday off. But where to go? My parents always disparaged “church-hoppers”—ecclesiastically promiscuous people who cannot commit to a church family but keep shopping around in an endless, vain search for the ideal place of worship. But we did a lot of church-hopping ourselves. My Sunday memories of our post-Pilgrim years in Southern California are mostly of being on the freeway as we drove—and drove and drove—to one church after another. And although we were Baptists, almost all the churches we visited were Presbyterian. Orthodox Presbyterian.

  2. CONCERNING TWENTIETH-CENTURY CALVINISTS

  Our first parents, being seduced by the subtlety and temptations of Satan, sinned in eating the forbidden fruit. . . . By this sin they fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and so became dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body.

  —Westminster Confession, VI:1–2

  The churches we attended belonged to a subgroup of Protestants who call themselves Reformed. Reformed here alludes to the Protestant Reformation and describes a motley ecumenical category that includes Baptists, Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, Brethren, and even the occasional Episcopal outliers who see the Puritans as their spiritual forebears and point fondly to a 1646 document called the Westminster Confession of Faith as a summary of their core beliefs. They are, in a word, modern-day Calvinists.

  Christians of most stripes believe in some concept of sin. But Calvinists go for total depravity, the belief that people are entirely incapable of right action without God and deserve His wrath simply by virtue of being alive. In tandem with this bleak diagnosis is the doctrine of predestination, by which only those elected by God from before time will be saved from eternal damnation. I won’t dwell here on the myriad ways in which this peculiar and anachronistic set of beliefs played on my mind as a child. Suffice it to say that I lived with a level of terror—of death, of Judgment Day, of not being one of the elect—that years later would prove a bonanza for more than one therapist. I was also one of those hideous children who casually told playmates that they were going to hell.

  For Christians of the reformed persuasion, like my parents, adherence to these Calvinistic tenets was far more important than broader denominational labels like Baptist or Presbyterian. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church was, and may still be, one of the largest networks of reformed churches around. That’s why, after the blowup at Pilgrim, we often ended up with the Orthodox Presbyterians.

  I was not very clear on all this back then, of course. I remember more than one playground conversation that went something like this:

  “What religion are you, Naomi?”

  “Baptist.”

  “Oh, do you go to First Baptist?”

  “No. We go to a Presbyterian church.”

  “But you said you were Baptist.”

  “We are.”

  “So why don’t you go to a Baptist church?”

  “Because the Presbyterian church believes more what we believe.”

  “D
oesn’t that make you Presbyterian?”

  “No.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “I can’t really explain it. So what religion are you?”

  “Catholic.”

  “Oh. Too bad. You’re going to hell, you know.”

  3. ON BAPTISM

  Baptism is a sacrament of the New Testament, ordained by Jesus Christ, not only for the solemn admission of the party baptized into the visible Church; but also to be unto him a sign and seal of the covenant of grace.

  —Westminster Confession, XXVIII:1

  The only difference I could see between the Presbyterians’ and Baptists’ beliefs was baptism. My father told me that church government was another point of departure, but at age seven I couldn’t quite grasp that. (Years later I would come to appreciate this difference when the actions of a dictatorial Baptist pastor and his henchmen elders, accountable to no one, nearly destroyed my family, but that’s another story.) There was also a cultural difference I could sense even as a young child, and that had to do with volume. The Baptists were louder. Louder and more theatrical in the pulpit, in their singing, in their professions of faith. Presbyterians, on the other hand, practiced their dread faith with a certain polite restraint.