Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions

by Cami Ostman

  MY FATHER WAS THE pastor of an independent Baptist church, my mom the pastor’s wife, which meant she was like the First Lady, an unpaid figurehead who helped with her husband’s ministry—she picked up nursing home residents for church, coordinated potlucks, sewed costumes for Christmas plays, typed up the handouts for the occasional funeral. Our parents homeschooled Maggie and me and our little sister because they believed they were supposed to obey the Bible literally, to “train up a child in the way he should go.” They were certain they could do better than the godless Bellingham public school system, not to mention the local Christian schools, with their Christian rock music and boys with hair down over their ears and girls in sweatpants during P.E.

  So Monday through Friday, from eight to three-thirty, my sisters and I went to school right in our own living room. Homeschool was where I learned that the Earth was six thousand years old and the fossil record a secular tale aimed at eliminating the Lord from Creation; I learned that modern art and jazz encouraged promiscuity and drugs, that human emotions would always betray me, and that having high self-esteem meant that I was prideful and setting myself above the Lord. I learned that my body was a skin sac of wantonness and betrayal, and that doing what I felt like doing, what felt good, was the worst sin of all because our only goal as Christians was to do the Lord’s will. And while going to church and praying and reading the Bible and denying myself might not feel good, it pleased Him and so it was enough, it was the only thing; it was everything.

  This isn’t to say that we didn’t get out of the house sometimes; we went on field trips to museums and the salmon hatchery, and once a week Dad conducted P.E. class at Cornwall Park. I was as much of a jock as any chunky four-eyes in a split skirt could be. I did have a decent jump shot and a solid right hook, and once in a while, dribbling down the cracked basketball court in my slick-soled Keds, I forgot about the slip hiking up around my waist and the teenagers smoking and watching from the picnic benches and lost myself in the game.

  One time, after I sank a pair of free throws, a guy called, “Nice guns, Amish Baller,” and his friends laughed, smoke curling out of their pierced nostrils, and I realized how ridiculous I must seem. A part of me wished I could hang out with those kids and smoke and casually make snotty remarks, but I knew that with my Sears glasses and zits and calf-length skirts, I’d only be a target for humiliation. Imaginary people—in my books, in my daydreams—were the only people I trusted. I knew their faults and follies and dreams and they could never say or do anything to hurt me.

  “SIS. WHAT’S THE SPANISH word for Bible?”

  I looked up from my American Lit test. Maggie and I were sitting at the dining room table. I could hear Mom in the other room, giving our little sister a spelling quiz: “Bursar.” “B-u-r-s-a-r.” “Succumb.” “S-u-c-k-u-m.”

  “Biblia,” I said, watching her scribble. “You better pass your test. Dad said we can’t go to the youth rally in Prosser this weekend if we don’t all get As.”

  She tossed her hair, silky and blonde, whereas mine was broom-handle brown and frizzy from a recent Toni home perm. “We’ll go. Sis, we have to. Rob and Aaron will be there.”

  I agreed with her. We had to go. Every independent Baptist teenager in Western Washington would be there. But it was far from a done deal. Although Maggie was a decent student, Mom always graded her more severely than she did me. I wondered sometimes if it was because Maggie was so pretty and sunshiny, so unlike Mom and me—we were dark haired, serious, reserved. It was very possible that our parents had decided to teach her humility.

  Anyway, we were going to have to partner up if we wanted to get to Prosser. “Concentrate,” I told her, seeing that she was staring off into space. I’d spent most of the past weekend lying on my bed and fantasizing about Aaron, even though I was afraid I’d be far too shy to talk to him. We’d met Rob and Aaron—best friends from a church in Renton—at a rally last year. Rob was brash and dark haired, and most girls, including Maggie, thought he was cute, but I liked tall, skinny, funny Aaron.

  “Girls, no talking in there,” my mother called from the other room.

  I looked again at my test. I’d been counting on the usual true/false softballs, and now I was staring at a page of multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and essay questions.

  “What’s the word for church?” my sister whispered.

  I sighed. “Um—iglesia?” Why hadn’t I studied my American Lit harder? I’d started to buckle down last night, had settled on my bed with my notebooks and some pretzels. Then I’d gotten distracted—again—by The Book.

  My parents had never said much about sex, except that God wanted us to remain virgins for our future husbands. I’d taken to examining encyclopedias and health textbooks at the library, looking at drawings and trying to imagine the mechanics of it. What did Aaron’s penis look like? Would he want to touch me with it? Last night I’d read The Book until Maggie fell asleep, and then I’d turned off the light and hugged my pillow, pretend-kissed it, imagined that I was a princess and Aaron a handsome prince. I’d reached into my panties and stroked my wet center and felt all my worries about tomorrow’s exams melt away in a wash of pleasure.

  Deep in my fantasy, I hadn’t heard my mother come into the room for prayers. Suddenly she was standing over me, praying softly, “Dear Heavenly Father—” I froze, eyes squeezed closed, hoping she couldn’t see the mound of my hand tucked between my legs. Only after she said “Amen” and went away did I realize I’d been holding my breath. The warmth between my legs had cooled. I felt like crying. Rolling onto my side, I tucked my hands under my pillow, my fingers stiff and smelling like myself.

  Concentrate, I told myself now, and looked again at my test. I took a deep breath. “In Pilgrim’s Progress, compare Christiana’s pilgrimage to Christian’s, and for extra credit, show where similarities may actually . . . ” Blah blah blah. I couldn’t concentrate. I was going to fail, and it was going to be God’s punishment for sneaking dirty books home, for not studying, for thinking bad thoughts about Aaron, for allowing my hands to roam and ravish my body.

  “Mom!” Maggie called. “May I go to the bathroom?”

  “You may be excused. Leave your test facedown on the table.”

  As soon as Maggie left the dining room, I was up. I grabbed the American Lit Teacher’s Edition off Mom’s stack of books at the end of the table and flipped to the key in the back. On my wrist I wrote answers: ABBAD, DCABA, and so on. I scanned “What to look for” on the essay questions and quietly closed the book.

  “What are you doing?” Maggie was back, frowning.

  Startled, I sat down, my legs shaking. “Nothing. I had to get another pencil.”

  “Can you help me with my quiz?” she whispered.

  “Girls,” Mom said. “I thought I asked you not to talk.”

  “Maggie’s talking,” I said loudly, and my sister’s eyes widened.

  Mom called, “Come in here, please, Margaret Anne.”

  Face flushed, Maggie hurried into the other room. She’d get demerits for sure. She might even get spanked. I grabbed her test. For crying out loud. I’d never taken Spanish and even I knew that queso was cheese. Picking up a pencil, I started to fill in her answers.

  I GOT GOOD GRADES, but good wasn’t enough in homeschool. Anything less than perfection was evidence that I wasn’t trying sufficiently hard enough to obey the Lord, that homeschool was a waste of everybody’s time and I might as well go to a public school. If I got a 90, my father asked what happened with the other 10 points. Recently, I’d aced an algebra quiz, and as I sat basking in my accomplishment he’d handed me extra credit homework.

  “But I got a hundred,” I’d said, incredulous.

  “Does somebody have an attitude problem?” he snapped.

  Across the table, Maggie stared down at her textbook. “No sir,” I said. “But—”

  “Are you sure about that? Who gave you the ability to learn algebra? And who can take it away quicker than you can
say ‘pride goeth before destruction’?”

  “‘And a haughty spirit before a fall,’” Maggie quoted softly. I wanted to slap her.

  And so, in a roundabout way, I concluded that the only way to succeed was to excel, to become so good—on paper, anyway—that my parents could find no fault with me. I learned to shut off my brain and fill in the correct answer and tell them what they wanted to hear. I dedicated myself to my studies, holing up at the library for hours, laboring over research papers that only my mother would ever read, helping my father type up prayer lists for Wednesday night church. I ratted out my sisters and kept a close eye on the kids in Junior Church, monitoring the girls to make certain their skirts covered their knees and the boys to be sure their hands weren’t dug deep in their pants pockets playing pocket pool. My whole world was studying and self-control and the Bible. Perfection was my obsession. I even cut back to just a few hundred calories a day until I could burn off my stomach pooch. I was living a life of calculation and control: pleasing my parents, obeying the Lord, with a few exceptions, and growing into an obsequious, cringing ball of emptiness, holier-than-thou—especially if you didn’t count my nighttime secret.

  You’d think I would’ve had trouble reconciling my double life, my strict belief system, with my cheating, lies, and growing sexual curiosity. This duplicity was arguably un-Christian and required increasingly complex mental gymnastics to justify. But I had role models: my parents, pastor and wife so full of certitude and sanctimony, praising the Lord on Sunday and talking trash about church members on Monday. We prayed for dear Deacon X and his wife that they would give up the sin of cable TV, even as my father stopped by their house when the World Series was on. When Mrs. Z came by our house one day to drop off church linens she’d laundered, my father watched from behind the living room curtains, quipping as she left, “Call the Department of Licensing, there’s a boat without a license plate out there.” I laughed at this—my father had a wicked wit—but later I thought about fat Mrs. Z and all the times I’d seen her praying up front at church during the weekly altar calls and I felt sad.

  Every human interaction my parents had seemed to be an opportunity to establish distance, to sever any connections founded on anything but the Lord, to judge and reject all who didn’t meet their harsh standards. We didn’t talk to supermarket clerks, because they sold alcohol and cigarettes and as such were instruments of Satan. Police officers we treated with exaggerated courtesy, because law and order were precepts ordained by the Lord, but in the coming End-Times the cops would become tools of the state and hence our obeisance was probably temporary. Not even my grandparents were exempt, receiving harsh comments for skipping Wednesday prayer meetings here and there and for their occasional pinochle game with neighbors.

  More and more I feared my parents’ ruthless eye, the spotlight gaze examining my flaws, finding my inevitable shortcomings, and casting me out of their hearts. Regardless of all I was doing to prove myself worthy, if they deemed my motives and my heart—me—not spiritual enough, then what? Punishment, damnation, a lonely life without God and my parents? I felt empty most of the time, but I figured that was probably just my excessive dieting.

  WE LEFT FOR PROSSER at 5:00 AM Saturday. Dad drove the van, listening to sermon tapes and drinking coffee from a Thermos. The rest of us dozed. I woke up as we turned into a gravel parking lot. “You girls worked hard to get here,” Dad said, pulling into a spot. “I’m proud of you for doing well on your tests. The Lord is too.”

  “We’ll see you at lunchtime. You two stick together,” my mother instructed.

  I climbed out of the van, stiff and yawning. “You think Rob and Aaron are here?”

  Maggie shrugged. “I need to go to the bathroom.” As we walked away from the van, she added softly, “Thanks for helping me with my test.”

  “Next time, study,” I snapped, and walked ahead of her.

  Crossing the parking lot, we eyed the other kids heading toward the church. The girls seemed impossibly cute in jean skirts and flats; the boys were like beings from another planet, laughing and shoving. At the bathroom we joined a long line.

  “Hey. That’s a pretty crazy jumper,” a girl behind us said, cracking her gum.

  Pleased, I smoothed my corduroy jumper and said, “It’s vintage. I got it at a thrift store.”

  “My gramma has one exactly like it,” her friend said, and the two giggled. “What’re your favorite jeans?”

  “We don’t wear pants,” I said, trading looks with Maggie. The kids here were from pretty liberal schools and churches. These girls wore skirts above their knees and loads of makeup.

  “I like Jordache baggies,” the girl said.

  The line moved. Maggie went into a stall.

  I stared at the row of hand dryers on the wall. I’d been so excited to get here and already it was shaping up to be a long day. How did these girls know, just by looking at me, that I was a square, a loser? What would it feel like to be a part of their little clique, invisible but accepted, lovingly kidded, the way it happened in books and in my imagination?

  “So my cousin gave me a Judy Blume book to read,” the friend was saying quietly.

  The Jordache girl gasped, clearly shocked and impressed. “No way.”

  My breath caught in my chest. I heard a flush and prayed no stall doors opened just yet.

  “She’s Episcopalian,” the friend said, as if that explained something. “I mean, a Judy Blume book. My mom would freak if she found out!”

  “I read Judy Blume books,” I said ultra casually, I hoped.

  The Jordache girl turned to look at me like she’d smelled something offensive. “Those books talk about gross things,” she said.

  “People who do those things are gross,” her friend agreed.

  Now everyone in line was looking at me. I tried to shrink within my senior citizen’s jumper. I did those things. Those things felt good. When I touched myself, I felt so warm and safe and loved—if only for a few minutes, before the guilt and shame moved in. Could these girls tell by looking at me that I did those things? Oh dear Jesus, why had I opened my mouth?

  A stall opened up and I ducked inside. When I came out, Maggie was waiting, looking worried. She’d applied lip gloss. “What’s a Judy Blume book?”

  “Nothing,” I said, hurrying her toward the door, away from the Jordache girl and her friend who were giggling inside the handicap stall. “I haven’t read any. I was just kidding.”

  “You better not be hiding books from Mom and Dad,” she said, pushing past me and out into the hall.

  AT THE LUNCH BREAK we spied Rob and Aaron at the dessert table. “Let’s go say Hi,” Maggie said. I glanced around the cafeteria. No sign of our parents but I was sure they were somewhere nearby, watching and omnipresent, like the Lord. I was so nervous as we moved closer to Rob and Aaron that I thought I might faint.

  We all said Hi. I added, to Aaron, stammering a little, “How you?”

  He grinned and said teasingly, “I fine.”

  “You guys going to the midnight skate tonight?” Rob was busy piling cherry crisp on his plate.

  Maggie said, “No.”

  “Maybe,” I said, even though I was pretty sure we wouldn’t be allowed.

  In the afternoon, I tied for second in the Sword Drill, a competitive Bible verse lookup contest that rewarded nimble fingers and intimate knowledge of lesser-known books of the Bible, such as Haggai, and Second Thessalonians. As I stood onstage with the other champions, shaking some youth pastor’s hand and accepting a shiny satin rosette embroidered with the image of a Bible, I cast an embarrassed, covert glance at the Jordache girl, but she and her friend were busy whispering and giggling.

  Next, there was special music played by a band with an electric guitar. The song definitely had too much of a rock-and-roll beat for my parents, but they couldn’t very well march us out of our seats up front without causing a ruckus, so Maggie and I sat furtively tapping our feet along to Amy Grant’s “Everyw
here I Go” while everyone around us sang along and clapped.

  After the final sermon, Preacher Todd, from Portland, who was movie-star handsome, stood at the altar and implored everyone to get right with the Lord. All the visiting pastors and pastors’ wives, including my parents, stood at the front, waiting to pray with sinful teens. Even with my head bowed, I could feel the weight of Mom and Dad’s eyes. Guilt churned my stomach. I thought about The Book, hidden under my mattress, remembered the way I’d bragged about it in the bathroom, trying to make myself look—what? Worldly? Experienced? Cool? Everything my parents—and the Lord—abhorred.

  Maggie pushed past me and went forward to confess her sins. I could already see how this would go. She’d pray for forgiveness, get right with the Lord, and later she’d confess about both of us cheating, possibly even mention Judy Blume. If I stayed in my seat, my punishment would just be that much worse. The only thing now was to go forward too, and repent. I’d have to show my parents The Book, have to confess to lying and deceitfulness. Would they have to know about the rest? About those things?

  I walked slowly to the front. Ten or twelve kids were already kneeling at the altar, many crying, one slender boy sobbing openly into his folded hands. My mother met my eye and smiled slightly. A woman with her hair up in a bun knelt beside me. “Oh Lord, hear our prayer for forgiveness,” she prayed, and, yielding to the bubble of sadness swelling inside me, I wept, more from hopelessness than penitence for my sinful mind and hands.