Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions

by Cami Ostman

  But this book of accusation I’d spent my evening with was saying even more than that. It was claiming that the church itself was complicit in this fraud and had, in fact, been both enhancing and perpetuating her claim of prophetic abilities.

  I unfolded my aching legs, shoved the books back onto the shelf, and slammed shut The White Lie firmly and decidedly. Before I tossed out the foundation of my entire life, I needed more information.

  Fundamental Doctrine #22: Christian Behavior

  We are called to be a godly people who think, feel, and act in harmony with the principles of heaven. This means that our amusement and entertainment should meet the highest standards of Christian taste and beauty. While recognizing cultural differences, our dress is to be simple, modest, and neat, befitting those whose true beauty does not consist of outward adornment but in the imperishable ornament of a gentle and quiet spirit.

  IT TOOK YEARS TO come to terms with The White Lie, and during that time I lived my own version of deceit. I maintained my good-Adventist behaviors—wearing no jewelry except my wedding band, keeping the Sabbath faithfully, paying my tithe on time and to the penny, drinking no caffeine—but inside I became a seething, questioning skeptic. The more I came to the painful but inevitable realizations, the more I knew this double life could not be maintained, that at some point something would have to give. I dreaded that impending moment. My entire life had been dedicated to the Adventist church; my job depended on it and my whole family revolved around it. There was so much to lose.

  Lee was having his own crisis during this time, also questioning his rigid beliefs, but we each respected that we had to make our own decisions. Short of walking away from the church, I looked at several options for myself. I could stay and pretend I still believed in Ellen White. Or I could ignore the lie the church had been founded on and focus only on Jesus—at least I still believed in that part. In a desperate attempt to work out my dissonance I attended several meetings with Pastor Desmond Ford, a brilliant defrocked SDA minister from Australia who challenged the Adventist emphasis on works rather than on righteousness by faith. His teachings made sense. Could I stay—but with some reformed understanding of my faith?

  In that vein, Lee and I had joined a more liberal SDA church where we had many friends. But the end for me was at hand, partly precipitated by grief. Three horrific events brought my faith to its proverbial knees.

  First, a drunk driver hit our friend’s car as she was driving her children to school. Her eight-year-old daughter sustained a severe spinal injury and was left in a coma. Next, a newly married couple from our Sabbath School class was camping in Yosemite when a fellow camper picked a fight and slugged the man in the chest. Due to a genetic anomaly, our young parishioner became instantly paralyzed on impact. Then another young member was implicated in a drug deal and faced imprisonment.

  These tragedies happened in quick succession. Everyone in our congregation fasted and prayed fervently for positive outcomes, but in each case our prayers were not answered: the little girl died, the groom never walked again, and the young man went to jail.

  I was devastated. I’d been taught to believe in miracles. Even though I was coming to terms with the falseness of my prophet, I still longed to have faith in a loving God who listened to prayers and doled out real justice.

  As our community grappled with grief, our liberal Sabbath School class uncharacteristically decided to study a non-SDA book written by a Jewish rabbi, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, trying to reconcile what we wanted to be true about God with the unfairness of these three terrible situations. Some in our congregation reasoned that since God knows the end from the beginning, He knows the best time when someone should die. Since we didn’t know what would have happened in the life of the little child who died, for example, maybe God took her while she was still saved. Maybe later she would have left the church or done something to bar her from heaven.

  This and similar arguments were supposed to give comfort, but I couldn’t buy in. I found myself coming away from every Sabbath School discussion thinking that God was acting more like a dead-beat dad than a loving Father who watches out for us.

  The final straw came near the end of fall quarter. Dr. Hopp, the dean of our school, came into my office and cheerfully told me she had an anecdote to share. She had never chatted with me before, so I welcomed her and listened intently as she launched into a story about a former master’s student.

  “Remember, in graduate school, the South African minister in class with you?” she started.

  I nodded. I remembered Hugh. I’d liked him.

  “You realize he didn’t graduate, don’t you? Do you know why?”

  I shook my head.

  “Back then Dr. Mervyn Hardinge [the dean of Public Health] came to me and said he’d received a tip that Hugh, who was married and was doing his field work in Arizona, was carrying on with one of the other students. The dean planned to ask a friend of his to visit the campground where Hugh was staying and befriend him. This way the dean could find out what was going on. The dean’s friend reported back that he’d met Hugh and the student he was allegedly having the affair with, and that he had in fact seen the woman at Hugh’s campsite the next morning.”

  “Oh,” I said, looking down at my hands. I was shocked to hear this story coming from my dean, who had usually been quite professional. She was now stooping dangerously low, not only for an academic head but also for an Adventist. Though it was actually quite prevalent, gossip was frowned upon in the church, and her self-righteous tone made me anxious.

  “So the dean caught him red-handed,” Dr. Hopp said gleefully.

  “I guess so,” I responded, uncomfortable. “Listen, I just realized I have an appointment,” I said, gesticulating that I needed to wrap up our exchange.

  “Sure. Almost done,” she said. “Anyhow, we all agreed that Hugh had to be dismissed. He and his girlfriend were both kicked out of the graduate program. Then of course this led to him being removed from the ministry.” With delighted finality, she ended her tale with the punch line she’d come in to deliver: “And, would you believe it, a few years later, Hugh got cancer and died.”

  I flinched and felt my throat go tight.

  She popped out of her chair and suddenly left my office with no explanation as to why she felt she needed to tell me this story, giving me only a judgmental look of “see what happens when you mess with God and the church.”

  My blood ran cold. Why had she told me this? Did she actually think I’d be glad to hear about this man’s demise? Or had she sensed my less-than-fervent commitment of late—was this a warning of some kind?

  In the end, it didn’t matter. Her narration was enough to put to rest my own emotional struggle and deliver me to a decision. I no longer wanted to work under or be part of a church that had such vindictive and heartless leaders. Like the volume knob on a radio, my faith in the the Truth had been slowly decreasing; with this one final twist, it switched off.

  I went home early that day, stunned. And yet, at the same time I also felt relieved that my years of questioning had found resolution. I no longer questioned walking away from the church, the only employer or faith I had ever known.

  Fundamental Doctrine #11: Growing in Christ.

  As we give ourselves in loving service to those around us . . . His constant presence with us through the Spirit transforms every moment and every task into a spiritual experience.

  THAT SUMMER, JUST A few months after the dean’s revelatory story, my family went to Lake Mead for a houseboat vacation. One Saturday morning found me sitting atop the houseboat sunning and reading a National Geographic magazine (condoned for Sabbath consumption). The cover story was about the age of the Earth and the early formation of its continents. Usually I’d bypassed these types of articles since I had been taught that God made the world in six literal days only six thousand years ago. Now, however, sitting within the majesty of towering cliffs, I plunged into the article with an open m
ind. I read breathlessly as I acknowledged for the first time the irrefutable evidence of nature and geology. There was so much I didn’t know, so much I’d never exposed myself to.

  I leaned back into the warmth of the sun hitting my face. In that moment, I didn’t need to search for the elusive impossibility of the Truth. I didn’t need to constantly beseech God for forgiveness, a practice that had only made me feel anxious and discontent. I no longer needed to ignore my cognitive dissonance or keep myself pure from the evil influences of the world.

  In the stillness of that Sabbath moment, I realized that the most important thing for me was to have love in my heart and to be kind, to follow Christ’s words of being merciful, to be a peacemaker and to do good for other people. That was it. It didn’t matter what I believed about the State of the Dead or if I held that Ellen White was a prophet or if I wore jewelry.

  In the months to come, I would continue my gradual and painful separation from the Adventist ways and community. I’d find other work and grieve my losses one by one. Lee and I would find new ways of thinking about faith and love. All of that would come. But for now, I closed my eyes, and as I did so, years of fear and anger gave way to a precious moment of peace.

  EXODUS

  Always Leaving

  Donna M. Johnson

  I guess I was always leaving. Even when it was my mother who drove away, waving through the dusty rear window of someone else’s car, while my brother and I went to live in someone else’s house. Even then. Especially then. She always promised not to leave again, then God and Brother Terrell came calling, relentless in their need.

  For almost as far back as my memory stretches, my mother traveled with Brother David Terrell and his rolling revival show. She played the Hammond organ for the morning, afternoon, and evening services he held under his big gospel tent. When she wasn’t in the services, she was praying or reading her Bible or homeschooling the Terrell kids, all while trying to feed, bathe, and keep my brother, Gary. and me relatively safe. Everyone said it was hard to raise kids traveling with the tent. So when my mother began to leave us behind, I didn’t blame her. She said she was doing God’s will, that he had chosen her to help spread the gospel. I wondered why God, who everyone called good, was so greedy. Why couldn’t he leave our mother alone? Why was he so utterly without pity? I tiptoed to the edge of these questions throughout my early childhood, then, seeing no place to go, backed away.

  My mother had been a different sort of girl, gifted and full of faith instead of questions. The stories her father, an Assemblies of God preacher, related from the Bible took root in her imagination and shaped who she was in the most literal way. Like the boy Samuel in the Old Testament, she heard God call her by name, a sign he had chosen her as his own. She could play any instrument she picked up, and this too, she believed, was a sign of God’s favor. My mother believed God had something important for her to do, something bigger than marriage and kids, something that would use her musical talent and take her all over the world. Like most women who came of age in the fifties, she married anyway. When it didn’t work out, she returned home, pregnant and towing a toddler. She had almost given up on a bigger life when the whirlwind that was Brother Terrell blew through her father’s Assemblies of God church. She sold all our belongings and signed on as organist for his traveling tent revivals. I was three and Gary was one. This was the beginning of our time with the tent, a time that lasted for almost three years, before our mother began leaving us behind. So brief a time, and yet its memory flashes through the years, a welcome and a warning.

  The tent was little more than a pile of rough moldy cloth until a team of men with names like Red and Dockery pulled it from the belly of the eighteen-wheeler, sewed it together, and cranked the winches on the center poles. By opening night they had transformed a dirty brown canvas into a nomadic cathedral that billowed thirty feet in the air.

  It was the dawn of the 1960s. Thousands of people came from hundreds of miles to hear Brother Terrell preach. People too poor, too black, too white trash, too uneducated to matter to most of society. I remember the slow, apologetic way they moved down the sawdust-covered aisles and between the long rows of wooden folding chairs. “Excuse me, excuse me.” Their eyes sliding toward the ground, as though their existence were an affront. The way their thin, nervous kids trailed behind. They came for hope, healing, salvation. They came to see the show. Brother Terrell ranted and paced and riffed on scripture for hours at decibels that exceeded legal limits.

  “Bles-sed, I say bles-sed, are the poor. You are the ones, the only ones, the ones ordained before time, the ones whose names are written in the book.”

  He is bent over, running up and down the aisles; the veins on his neck pop up. Hundreds of hands wave in the air. A murmur rises from the audience and builds. Yes, Lord. Yes, Lord. Thank you, Jesus.

  “The kingdom of heaven is yours. I said it’s yours! But you got to get up and claim it. I said get uuuuuup.”

  People jump to their feet across the tent, arms outstretched, palms up, reaching for something none of us can see. From my seat in the audience I watch my mother on the platform, high above me, a gapped-toothed smile on her face. Her hands begin to pound out a backbeat on the Hammond and the music takes over. Feet shuffle and stomp. Bodies flail. Faces register utter forgetfulness, bliss. Mothers, fathers, and children churn the sawdust and dirt into a heavy haze that hangs in the air. I stand on my chair and watch, hoping that whatever has possessed them will take me as well, and praying, always praying, that it won’t. I watch people stumble through the haze and fall against each other. I watch them wilt or slam backward like felled trees, slain in the spirit. I watch Brother Terrell on the platform, eyes closed, dancing with his hand on his hip. The microphone bounces on his chest.

  I watch the crowd begin to move toward him. Everyone breathes the same breath, prays the same prayer. Here there is no separation. I want to belong in this tent, with these people. I close my eyes, but I cannot summon their delirium. What would it feel like to give myself to God, if I just stopped thinking? Would I see angels, speak in tongues; hear God’s voice like my mother does? Would I twirl in front of the altar until I too dropped in the sawdust? I open my eyes.

  Brother Terrell stands at the edge of the platform above the prayer ramp and waits, his right hand outstretched, red and hot. Everyone wants to be touched by that hand. They carry stretchers to the front. Frail, knobby hands reach up for him. People say they are healed. A tumor vanishes. A woman with a huge stomach. Then, whoosh. Nothing. We tell the story again and again. The memory and the story distill over time into a mythology of belief, but no one says this. We say we believe.

  We move the tent every two to four weeks. Brother Terrell preaches a gospel of sacrifice. He and my mother put all their money back into what they call the Lord’s work. We eat baloney and pork and beans. Brother Terrell’s wife doesn’t like it. She says her kids need better food, better clothes, a real home. My mother says Betty Ann doesn’t understand. Something in Brother Terrell reaches out for my mother. I can feel it, and then one night I watch his hand travel to her knee while we are driving. Betty Ann doesn’t want my mother to be alone with her husband.

  The adults have dark circles around their eyes from praying all the time. God will meet our needs if we pray harder. We pray day and night. Someone donates a house for us to stay in for a few weeks. Everyone says it’s a miracle. There is no electricity or indoor plumbing. Believers bring bags of squash from their garden. We eat squash every day for weeks until finally the squash plants give up and stop bearing.

  I watch Brother Terrell perform miracles under the tent and notice that they are whole and perfect. I watch the lame beat their crutches into splinters and walk. The blind see. The deaf hear. I wonder why the miracles in our regular life are always half finished, as though God loses interest and wanders off. Once I start to think this way, I can’t stop. The realization dawns on me that not everyone is healed. It’s a test of faith, my mothe
r says. Randall, Brother Terrell’s son, hemorrhages blood, a river of blood. I watch it pour from his mouth and stain the sawdust while his daddy preaches on and on about faith. Blood splatters the windows of the car we travel in, flows across state lines and rises like the tide in the rooms of the motor courts we pull into when we’re too tired to go on. Randall is always dying. The doctors say he will not live to grow up. His daddy prays and he gets better. The doctors say he can’t last much longer.

  This went on for forty years. When Randall finally died everyone said, I thought he was going to get a miracle.

  I was five and Gary was three the first time my mother left us behind. One day we looked up and she was gone. A few months later she was back. She came and went like this for three years. She always cried when she told us she was going back on the road. I didn’t cry, but my brother Gary did. Once I pulled him off the chain-link fence that separated us from the car that drove her away. I watched the blood run down the scratches on his skinny kid legs. I watched his mouth stretch into a wide, red O, like the entrance to a carnival fun house. I was always watching.

  I prayed my mother would return for good, and eventually she did. She made a home for Gary and me, a home Brother Terrell visited between revivals. I watched him emerge from my mother’s bedroom, sleepy-eyed and sheepish. I asked my mother if this was adultery, and she said no, because they were married in God’s eyes.

  The focus of Brother Terrell’s preaching switched from divine healing to giving everything to God. He told believers they must sacrifice everything for the gospel. They sold their homes and cars and gave the proceeds to him. Brother Terrell bought the World’s Largest Gospel Tent, a red, white, and blue canvas that ran the length of two football fields and seated between five and ten thousand, depending on how close together the chairs were placed and who tells the story. There didn’t seem to be enough wattage to light that tent. From a distance, the faces of the crowd appeared as bright little ovals against a sea of shadow. Brother Terrell’s followers were so united in their love and support of him the press called them Terrellites. When they ran out of money to give, they brought family heirlooms, china, silver, and wedding rings. When they ran out of valuables, they took off their shoes and gave those to him too. I watched the wealth accumulate; fleets of Mercedes, airplanes, movie-star horses, and house after house.