Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions

by Cami Ostman

  But her complicated delivery traumatized me, and the grief keeps surfacing. One morning after breakfast, Eva starts fussing and my mother tries to placate her with no success. She tickles Eva under her chin and, laughing, says, “Oh, Eva only wants her mummy, right Eva jaan? Okay, okay, I understand. Mummy is your favorite.” She straightens Eva’s onesie and hands her to me. Taking Eva into my arms, I hum “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” which quickly settles her down. I smile as she gazes up at me with her large, brown eyes, and I feel such tenderness toward both my child and my mother.

  WHEN MY MOTHER HAS been with us for two weeks, I decide to tell her the story of Eva’s delivery. I am hopeful that we can embark on a new relationship based on our shared desire to give Eva a happy family life. I sit cross-legged on the dark blue sectional sofa with Eva at my breast. I take off my glasses.

  “Ma, you know, my delivery really shook me. My water bag broke, but I was not having contractions.” I pause, recalling the morning I woke up with my underwear soaking wet. “The doctor said that if I didn’t go into labor within twenty-four hours, I would need to be induced. I tried all day but nothing worked.

  “They put me on Pitocin, which gives you artificial contractions,” I explain to my mother, who delivered all three of her children naturally. “These contractions were so horrible and intense, I didn’t think I could make it. But after eight hours of these crazy contractions, I was only dilated by half a centimeter.”

  I picture David’s face, his brown eyes ringed with dark circles, his forehead creased with worry. He held my hand through the contractions and kept me confident we were barreling down the path of labor.

  “They said I had to be given an epidural.” A golf ball rises in my throat. “That got me dilated, but she was still very high up. I guess she just wasn’t ready to come out,” I say ruefully. “But each time I pushed, her heart rate decelerated. The doctor told me he would use forceps to get her out, and well, that’s how she came out. The doctor said we barely missed an emergency C-section.”

  My mother sits stony and silent while I continue.

  “After Eva came out and they placed her on me, I started having bad convulsions, so they sedated me. David held her for the first three hours of her life.” I decide to skip the part about how the convulsions started after the pediatrician examined Eva and told us the forceps had caused mild nerve damage on the right side of her face.

  I pinch my lips together to stop trembling. I want to cry and scream at my mother that it wasn’t fair. After a blissful and uncomplicated pregnancy, this was not the glorious, natural delivery I had imagined for Eva and me. I want to tell her I was shocked by how little control I’d had over the situation. Through the tears coming to my eyes, I look at my mother’s face, seeking softness or warmth. I want her to hold me the same way I am holding Eva, cradled in my arms.

  My mother remains motionless except for her head, which she shakes back and forth slowly. “I don’t know what to say, Leila. Next time, pray to Allah during your pregnancy. I can give you some verses that you should recite.”

  I stare at her. That’s it? I scream in my head. But exhaustion and sleep deprivation numb me to the lack of sympathy in her response. I am too tired to get worked up, too drained to explain what I need from her. All I keep thinking is how I don’t ever want to be like her. I suddenly realize that, as I embark on my journey of motherhood, I will have to break these cycles of hope and disappointment, reconciliation and estrangement with my mother, because this is not the example I want to set for Eva. It won’t be easy, but if I am going to be the accepting parent I hope to be, I must start practicing now.

  I look down at my tiny baby, her lips puckered around my nipple, steadily drawing milk, her head full of straight black hair. I stroke her right temple. I will give you so much love. I will always offer you warmth and affection. I will always be your safe spot.

  I WISH I COULD offer her a religion as well, but my experience has robbed me of one that I would want to pass on. I don’t know a version of Islam or any other religion that is kind, gentle, and compassionate enough to give to my child. But these are the values I will pass on as a parent. And perhaps, one day, Eva will find the religion I always wanted but never had.

  The White Lie

  Nikki Smith

  Fundamental Doctrine #20: Sabbath

  The beneficent Creator, after the six days of Creation, rested on the seventh day and instituted the Sabbath for all people as a memorial of Creation. . . . The Sabbath is a day of delightful communion with God and one another. . . . Joyful observance of this holy time from evening to evening, sunset to sunset, is a celebration of God’s creative and redemptive acts.

  Friday night dinner, especially with guests, was always hectic. At times I wondered why I continued to put myself and my family through this gauntlet of housecleaning, cooking, bathing, and hair washing—all before that golden orb disappeared below the horizon.

  Of course it was easier for me than for many of my friends since I taught at a Seventh-day Adventist University, which closed on Fridays at 2:00 PM to allow us believers to go home and get ready. But regardless of this extra time, I always felt like I was running the fifty-yard dash and barely making it to the finish line.

  I was nine when my mother came back to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. From fifth grade through graduate school, I was immersed in the Adventist way of life. Between the classroom, my church attendance, and my mother’s strict tutelage, the moral certainty of my church was instilled in me. I believed fervently in the church’s theology, followed all its precepts given through the Bible and Ellen G. White, our prophet, and, most assuredly, asked for forgiveness of every sin, big or small, so that I could claim my Christian salvation. This was why I continued to prepare for the Sabbath, to eat no meat and wear no jewelry, to avoid drinking and dancing. This was why I’d spent four years in the mission field—one on my own in South Korea and three with my husband, Lee, in Guam—and why I now spent my days educating the next generation of believers. I engaged in this weekly Friday night chaos because I had been raised to believe in the Truth: the capital-T Truth of the Bible and the claim that Seventh-day Adventists were the only church that followed God’s laws explicitly.

  The Adventists’ emphasis on perfection was the reason I pushed myself to be the ideal mother, wife, university professor, Sabbath School teacher, homemaker, and hostess. In return for my faithfulness, God promised me eternal salvation in the afterlife and assurance and peace in this one. The only problem was I had not attained the promised serenity of this life. I studied, prayed, attended services, gave my tithes and offerings, donated my time, and followed all my church’s teachings, but still I couldn’t see God’s “well done, my servant” smile. All I could visualize was His fiery eyes burning through my soul and saying, “You can do more. You’re not good enough.”

  Where was this abiding happiness the preachers kept promising? Why couldn’t I attain that surety of God’s forgiveness?

  MY HUSBAND, LEE, WELCOMED in Barb, newly separated from her recently announced gay husband, and her two sons. She headed toward me with a tossed salad just as I finished putting the dishes on the table. “You boys can sit with the other kids at this table,” I pointed to the small card table I’d set up in the corner of the dining room.

  Next, Doug, a fellow university colleague, and his school-teacher wife arrived, as did Bill, who had once been a minister but now sold Adventist books door to door. Bill stepped into our foyer with his new wife and their little girl. Soon all twelve of us (including the five children) sat down. We said grace and plunged right in to both our vegetarian potluck meal and our weekly religious debate. It was Sabbath, so our talk would be centered around biblical matters, and with this varied group I anticipated a lively theological discussion. But I wasn’t ready for the topic to be the one that troubled me most often in my private thoughts.

  Barb, who was usually soft-spoken, started us off with a question. “Who do you think will b
e saved? Just us Adventists? Other Christians? What about non-Christians, or heathens?”

  I sighed. Here we go, again. It had been a hard day and I wasn’t up for this one. Doug, our card-carrying Mensa member, cleared his throat and intoned, “Well, Dr. Maxwell, who teaches my Sabbath School class, believes that anyone whom God accepts as ‘safe to save’ will go to heaven. This means people who will be able to ‘fit’ into our heavenly paradise will be there. Those who would just be too unhappy won’t get in. The question is, will a person want things that are not available in heaven, like alcohol, cigarettes, or meat? Will they want to keep the Sabbath? He may not be an Adventist, but if his character is in keeping with God’s requirements, he may well want to fit in . . . to please God.”

  Grace, Bill’s wife—probably one of the most conservative in the group—shook her head in disagreement. “No. I believe our prophet when she said that there are many people who will be as if they never were. They will go to neither heaven nor hell because they never had the chance to know the Truth,” she said with finality.

  I glanced around the group. Heads nodded in concurrence.

  Bill took it from there. “Well, that’s why we have to spread the Gospel. It’s our church’s responsibility to bring as many as possible into the fold. Everyone should have a chance to make a decision. Who will they choose? God or the devil? As a church we need to give more money and send more missionaries into foreign lands. The world needs to know the Truth.”

  This question of who would get into heaven had been secretly tearing at me ever since I’d returned from my own missionary work five years earlier. And my dinner companions’ answers were the same old litany of arguments that had never felt satisfactory. I felt a flutter in my chest as anxiety (or was it anger?) clawed at me. How could we think our church of a few million people could proselytize to the billions of people in the world? I believed in spreading God’s word, but I also knew it was impossible to reach everyone. And why would God want to annihilate most of the world simply because they hadn’t heard the Gospel? More importantly, if He did, was this a God I wanted to believe in and follow so fastidiously?

  I could feel the anger build, like a slow heat, starting in my heart and moving up to my throat until I could taste words forming in my mouth. Too suddenly, I blurted out, “I just can not imagine a God who wouldn’t admit to heaven a Laotian, a Tibetan, an African who’d never even heard the word Christian. How can an all-loving, just God deny eternal life to someone just because he was unlucky enough to be born in a pagan country? I can’t see God that way . . . it’s just . . . too mean.”

  I looked around the table. Lee’s mouth gaped open. Bill was shaking his head, obviously formulating a theological response, while Barb wiped her mouth and hid behind her napkin. Even the children’s table went quiet.

  At first their response to my outburst made me even angrier. Then I was just embarrassed by my own admission of doubt. A long heavy moment of stunned silence hung in the air.

  “Well, who’s up for dessert?” I said finally, pushing my chair back to retrieve my apple crumble from the oven.

  Fundamental Doctrine #18: The Gift of Prophecy

  One of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is prophecy. This gift is an identifying mark of the remnant church and was manifested in the ministry of Ellen G. White. As the Lord’s messenger, her writings are a continuing and authoritative source of truth that provide for the church comfort, guidance, instruction, and correction.

  FOR MONTHS THE DISCOMFORT I’d felt during that Sabbath dinner conversation kept cropping up in my consciousness. Our brief debate had freed up the dissonance within me, and I now grappled with a cascade of doubts on a daily basis. I prayed and studied for clarity, but my uneasiness remained.

  Several months later one of my teaching colleagues walked into my office and closed the door. Howard came across as a conservative, play-by-the-rules type of guy, but under his buttoned-up exterior he was a free spirit who was always questioning. I had feared he had stopped going to church altogether lately, but I couldn’t ask. I didn’t want to know if he had actually fallen that far.

  It’s funny I was concerned about his churchgoing during my own crisis of faith, but I still couldn’t picture myself abandoning the Sabbath by not attending church. Questioning and criticizing the church I could handle; leaving the community was a Mount Everest. I didn’t want him to expose me to the same slippery slope I suspected he was sliding down.

  Howard sat down and leaned forward, holding up a book, and even though we were alone whispered, “Nikki, you must read this. You’re not going to believe it, but Ellen G. White was a fraud!”

  I jerked away from him, irritated, my mind screaming at me to get him out of my office. I was already feeling exhausted and guilty for questioning the Truth. I had gone through college courses evaluating my prophet’s spiritual gifts; my professors—smart people, all—had accepted her prophetic abilities and piety, though some less vigorously than others. Belief in Ellen White and her writings were central to my life. Without her, other church doctrines would be thrown into disarray. Could I even entertain the possibility that she was a fraud? Could I spend the time and energy it would take to evaluate such a heresy? I took a deep breath.

  “Oh come on. It’s probably just a disgruntled member who wants to blame the church for everything,” I sighed, signaling my desire to get back to work.

  “No,” Howard shook his head vigorously. “In fact this author has been an SDA minister for many years. He’s done extensive research with a ton of examples showing where Ellen White copied complete passages from other authors and claimed them to be hers. Read it for yourself and then tell me what you think.”

  He placed the book on my desk, turned, and left.

  I looked down at the title, The White Lie. Was this some sort of joke, calling our prophet a liar? I hurriedly threw the book into my bottom desk drawer. I didn’t want to read it, let alone risk anyone seeing it on my desk.

  For the rest of the day the book’s title kept intruding into my thoughts . . . white lie, white lie. By five o’clock I opened my drawer and stared at it, turned it over, and read the fly leaf. Finally I reasoned I at least needed to know this pastor’s claims so that I could rebut his arguments.

  That night, after the kids were in bed and Lee had left for a church deacons’ meeting, I slipped the book out of my handbag.

  Settling in on my side of the bed where I normally sat for evening devotions, I took a deep breath and opened the book. I realized that the author, Walter Rea, was the same minister my brother (also a minister) had recently praised for his ministerial gifts. I leafed through the chapters and saw that it was heavily annotated. Extensive footnotes gave proof of copious references and corroborating material. As an academic, I knew this meant I could verify (or refute) whatever this book might say. It certainly looked as if Elder Rea had done his due diligence.

  I quickly read through the introduction to get the gist of the book. Then I stopped and stared at my quiet bedroom.

  What the author was proposing was absolutely earthshaking to any Adventist who fully believed in Ellen White as a prophet—especially to someone like me who had been protected from outsiders’ views of my church for my entire adult life. Elder Rea was suggesting—no, absolutely stating—that Mrs. White was a complete fraud and that the church, down through the years, had not only hidden this fact but had embellished her “gifts” to make her words seem to have come directly from God. I was breathless. Could this possibly be true? I wouldn’t even entertain these ideas if they came from a nonmember—but Pastor Rea was one of us.

  “The true believers,” the text read, “will be the unwary, the fearful, the guilt-ridden, the overzealous, the well-intentioned, the unquestioning. Lacking personal confidence in God, they seek him through their chosen saint, who they think has an unfailing pipeline to the heavenly places.”

  Was I an unwary “true believer” taking Ellen White’s words as gospel because the church exalte
d her as a messenger from God? Was it possible I’d been naive in accepting what I had been told for decades?

  My heart beat faster. As my eyes raced through this incendiary publication, Mr. Rea laid out his treatise fact by methodical fact about the beginnings and growth of this church . . . my church. He recounted how Ellen White had suffered from a traumatic brain injury before she began hearing God’s voice and prophesying to her followers. He explained how she and the other church pioneers had come up with the Sanctuary Doctrine after Jesus had failed to return in 1844 as many had believed He would.

  Sadness and confusion settled over me. If even part of what I was reading was true, I knew I’d have to respond to this new information somehow. Although I’d felt the need to hide my own slowly growing crisis of faith, I do not advocate intellectual dishonesty.

  I badly wanted to ignore the possibility that my whole inner schema was about to crumble, but I knew I couldn’t. I got out of bed and snuck down the hall to our family room. Kneeling in front of my bookshelf, I pulled out several Ellen White books to check Elder Rea’s references, hoping he’d misquoted or misunderstood. But I quickly ascertained that, at the very least, Walter Rea had gotten his E.G.W. quotes right. Cross-legged on my cold, drafty floor, I stared into space again, barely breathing. My head reeled with the possibility that my church—that I—had been taken in by a brain-injured woman with a penchant for plagiarism.