Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions

by Cami Ostman

  “No problem, Bishop. I appreciate your flexibility on such short notice.”

  I hadn’t been under this bishop’s watch for long, so he opened with a smattering of vague and easy questions, just as my first confessor had. Nervous and wanting to get to the point, I spat out details about my hometown in Illinois, how I was the only Mormon in the family, and yes, that is hard sometimes. Halfway into explaining what my major was, I paused. I was going to have a panic attack if I didn’t come out with it.

  “Actually, Bishop, I wanted to talk to you because I’ve done something I want to repent of.” He wore a grave expression now and waited for me to elaborate. “So I’ve been dating this new guy for a few months now. Spencer. And we really care about each other. I actually think he might be the one. And after my divorce I never expected I’d meet someone as good or kind or exciting as he is. We’ve been getting much closer lately, and, well . . . ”

  “You went too far?” The bishop was kind but severe. I nodded, my shame washing over me. He pressed for further details. Just how far was too far? Were we talking about intercourse or something else? Did I realize that oral sex and intercourse were equally severe in God’s eyes? Did I remember what the Book of Mormon says about premarital sex?

  Of course I had read many times what the Book of Mormon says. That dog-eared page in my scriptures was scarred with underlining. The message stood indelible on the flimsy page: Sexual sin is second only to murder. This meant that, despite my exhusband’s abuse over the years—all the quiet manipulation culminating with the physical danger that led up to our divorce—because it hadn’t killed me, under Mormon ideology he was far more righteous than Spencer was, though Spencer only committed the sin of covering my body in an arrangement of sweet and well-intentioned kisses. As a devout Mormon, I was asked to take this doctrine seriously, and I did. But for one brief instant, it occurred to me how shortsighted it was to regard those tender and beautiful moments with Spencer as pure lust, comparable to murder, a grievous sin to be constantly lamented. It was illogical—and wrong.

  Suddenly I didn’t want to confess. Instead, I wanted to explain that this had happened because I was twenty-one and for the first time felt deeply in love with a beautiful person, that this was normal, but that I cared enough about God that I was going to try to make it right.

  Penitent for the second time in my life, I sat before another old man I’d just met and mustered all the faith I had to pour forth my intimate secrets in an attempt to reconcile my secular joy with the laws of heaven. Once again, I was told not to worry, that although the sin was severe, it could be erased. When Christ was through with the situation, it would be like it never happened.

  “Of course,” he said after a moment’s arrest, “I don’t think you should ever see that boy again.”

  I shuddered. No, that couldn’t be right.

  Spencer himself was the bridge between my growing doubts about faith and my desire to pour myself back into the gospel. On the night we met I had been ready to give up my religion for good, to drop out of college, quit my first real job, and head back East a failure. Religion wasn’t worth it if solitude, divorce, and decimated self-worth were the fruits of trying so hard to do the right thing. But Spencer had looked deep into my spirit and beckoned my most valuable qualities to surface. It was like he had crashed through the ceiling of my rickety life, an emissary from my better self. Without meaning to, he drew me back from the edge and convinced me to take a second shot at being something more than a wreck. And he did it all without being anyone other than the one-and-only Spencer.

  How could Spencer, of all people, not be worthy of my future? Without him I’d surely meet other guys and wind up with great friends, a satisfying career—a beautiful life. But you meet only one Spencer. I abandoned submission with the shake of my head. Not see Spencer? The person whom I was sure God had sent to help me?

  “Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” I spat back. The bishop shifted in his seat, uneasy, as if I’d shot him hard in the face with a rubber band. “We broke the rules, and I accept that. But this was only a sin because we aren’t married, not because the act itself was ugly or wrong.”

  He admitted I had a point, and he met me halfway by suggesting I stay away from Spencer until it had been decided that I’d fully repented.

  With forced restraint, I ignored the pounding in my temples and the protest stuck in my throat. God was surely worth at least some compromise, so I agreed. The bishop and God took a few months to decide that Spencer and I could be together again. It felt like forever.

  A FEW YEARS LATER Spencer and I sat before one more bishop for our premarital consultation. I’d obtained my legal divorce years before, but because I had been married in the temple, I had to get special permission to remarry. I could be married again outside the Mormon temple, but if I wanted my marriage to be eternal, I would need a temple divorce—a sort of get for Mormons.

  “We’ll need to get your ex-husband’s approval, of course, and I will need you to write down any sexual indiscretion that happened since you two separated.” My new, white-haired bishop had taken the day off from his job as a financial analyst to help us with a mountain of premarital paperwork.

  “Well, there was something—but I took care of that with my bishop a long time ago.”

  “The brethren in Salt Lake still need to know, even if you’ve repented.”

  I sighed, my patience beginning to unravel. Would I have to go through the whole story again? Was it really necessary to defend myself before a stranger and repeat the weighty business of admitting fault and reliving guilt? “But doesn’t repentance erase the sin?” I tried. “Didn’t the Savior suffer so that my sins would be forgiven? Why do I have to keep dragging them out in meetings and writing them down for strange men to read any time I want something from the church?” I watched as the bishop searched for just the right way to soothe me into compliance.

  “They just need all the facts so they can make the right choice about letting you be sealed to someone else.”

  All that repentance, all those nights spent in tear-streaked supplication, and the Mormon Church still wanted a book somewhere with all my sexual sins scribbled in indelible ink. Why was sleeping with someone I loved a sin worthy of a lifetime of red tape? God forgave me, but one old man after another lined up to punish me for believing that sex wasn’t the worst way to spit in the face of religion. I didn’t believe God lost too much sleep over whom I coupled with, but his Church couldn’t get my erotic life off its mind.

  The brethren wanted to keep me chaste, demure, and teachable. Women were to be passive nurturers while men became patriarchs and eventual gods. I wasn’t a disciple of Christ if I was free-loving, outspoken, and logical. The fate of my eternal life was directly tied to my gender and to my willingness to fill my role and obey these older men. But I could no longer do this without betraying myself.

  Sex was complicated and beautiful, an enormous weight and the greatest joy. It was time to turn my back on guilt and embrace a life of joy. My mother’s romance novels had long ago showed me the secret joys of living, but religion forced me to separate myself from that joy in favor of submission. I wouldn’t do it. As long as you believe . . . My mother’s advice rang from someplace within me as I walked away from the bishop’s office, my hand entwined with Spencer’s, and the sun shone over a brand-new God and a guiltless future. The wedding was set for late March, without the temple, and without another fruitless moment devoted to the past. I was free, with nothing before me but faith, love, and eternal possibility.

  Can I Get a Witness?

  Elizabeth Taylor-Mead

  There were only three kinds of books in our house: Bibles, cookbooks, and diet books. None of them offered the kind of nourishment I craved. “The wisdom of this world is foolishness to God” was a common refrain at home, but like Eve, seduced by the tree of knowledge, I knew there were apples in the neighborhood and I was hungry.

  I loved school and managed to main
tain top grades without any encouragement or even interest from my parents. My parents had no academic sights set for me; we were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and, as such, higher education was deemed “unwholesome.” Throughout my elementary and junior high school years my family moved often. It wasn’t that my stepfather was in the military or diplomatic service. Quite the contrary: He didn’t get along with anyone, especially customers. He could not keep a job.

  By the time I entered high school we’d settled in a Long Island town with high educational standards and a great library. I made friends with classmates who took part in Vietnam War protests, boycotted grapes in solidarity with César Chávez, and debated the superiority of Stones vs. Beatles. At home, my stepfather, who’d only dipped his toes into the tributary of “the Truth” early on at my mother’s prodding, now refused to participate, preferring to call himself a “lapsed Catholic.” He took umbrage at being abandoned by his family when we went to five weekly meetings at the Kingdom Hall or out in service, knocking on doors, on the weekend. He fumed, he slammed doors, he issued ultimatums. My mother, like all Jehovah’s Witnesses, saw “persecution” as proof that we were special and beloved by “the One True Master.” She stuck to her scriptural guns and soon every dinnertime turned into World War III.

  I was forbidden to date boys from school. Instead, I was expected to accept invitations from young men in the congregation or those I’d meet at regional conventions with themes like “Fruitage of the Spirit” or “God’s Blessings Near at Hand.” The boys that set my heart aflutter, however—in other words, those condemned to perish imminently in the global annihilation that would be Armageddon, a.k.a. God’s Judgment Day—were smart, funny, artistic, and slightly aloof. Two were particularly magnetic.

  Peter, with amber cat eyes and chestnut hair falling over his collar, was a musician. He collected rare recordings by blues singers from the Mississippi Delta. He sometimes walked the school halls with me between classes, teasing me, the missionary in training, by leaning in close, rasping lyrics from a current favorite, like Robert Johnson’s “Kind-Hearted Woman Blues.”

  “I’m gonna get deep down in this connection, keep on tanglin’ with these wires / And when I mash down on your little starter, then your spark plug will give me fire.”

  Blushing tomato red, the furthest thing from my mind was parsing scripture.

  Peter took my breath away when he was close by, but it was George who kept me tossing and turning at night, plotting how I might spend more time with him without incurring Jehovah’s wrath. George was an effortless honor student. I was amazed by his intricate knowledge not only of Shakespeare and Cervantes but also of television and movie trivia. He developed the latter skill in order to keep his alcoholic single mother happy. When her regular three-day benders gave way to seesaw periods of self-flagellation and self-pity, George distracted her by providing a running commentary on reruns of Petticoat Junction and The Beverly Hillbillies. On the afternoons I wrangled permission for us to study together, slightly fudging the optional/required status of the activity for my mother’s benefit, we’d sit in his kitchen, chatting and sipping Constant Comment tea, which felt at the time like the epitome of sophistication. More than once I had to leave in a rush, pursued by George’s mother wildly batting at me with a broom, screeching, “You’d better get the hell out of here, girl! I’m gonna kick your ass back to Texas!” As she was from Tennessee and we were in New York, I chose to see her boozy threats as surrealistic happenings rather than acts of malice, and returned as often as possible.

  The boys my mother pushed me to date, the “young brothers in God’s organization,” were awkward and dull, predictable and dismissive of anything that captured my imagination. It was clear to them, and they made little effort to be polite about it, that I was tempting Satan’s army by suggesting a trip to the Museum of Modern Art or the Guggenheim on a Saturday afternoon (after service, of course). Instead, they’d treat me to an insipid lunch at a chain restaurant followed by a chaste walk around the park. With increasing dread, I found that most of these dates ended with a repressed daddy’s boy trying to plunge his tongue down my throat or stick his hand up my skirt, clumsily groping for a premature peek at paradise.

  At first I complained to my mother in the hope that she’d stop prodding me to accept these invitations, but I quickly learned she wasn’t going to see things my way.

  “Reexamine your behavior. What did you do to provoke him?” she would ask, or “How many times have I told you to wear longer skirts? Men are made of flesh and blood, honey. The sooner you get married, the better.”

  I DID NOT GET married but instead graduated from high school. Though I wanted to go to college, and my teachers tried to intervene, making appeals on my behalf, my parents wouldn’t let me. So I watched all my “worldly” friends take off for college—though some of the boys went to Canada or Israeli kibbutzim to avoid the draft—while I stayed at home and barricaded myself from the constant room-shaking parental battles that raged on.

  I was in limbo—neither able to satisfy my mother’s plan for me to get with the Witness Protection Program, as I’d begun to see it, for offering believers the only insurance policy against Armageddon, nor able to defy her outright and apply to college. Since childhood I’d been groomed to enter Bethel, the residential facility for JW missionaries in Brooklyn Heights. I had to admit Brooklyn was appealing, but I knew my attraction was more because of its proximity to Manhattan than to my eternal salvation.

  My desire to leave kept bubbling up inside me, growing more insistent, a pushy patient in my internal waiting room. But still I didn’t go. My obstinate ways, however, became an increasing source of friction at home. Though my mother would take my side against my stepfather when he railed against my dreaminess and lack of common sense, in private she rebuked me constantly, swearing that my stubbornness would be the ruin of us both.

  I tried. I continued to go to all the meetings and out in service every weekend. I conducted Bible studies with “people of good faith” who were “hungry for the Truth.” Yet I knew in my heart I was starving. I was living an inauthentic life, taking no pride at all in separating “the sheep from the goats.” Like a racehorse at the starting gate, I felt pumped to run, snorting at the sight of the track, waiting for the bell to ring and the gate to open to a much wider world.

  That gate would open when I turned eighteen. This would be the perfect opportunity to test my mother’s commitment to “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 22:21). As she saw it, Caesar, in the form of the U.S. legal system, decreed that I became an adult at age eighteen and would thus no longer be her responsibility. Till then, I was pretty much her property, requiring constant guidance and surveillance. I saw my emotional, if not spiritual, salvation in this argument. We didn’t celebrate birthdays, but now my eighteenth would be gift enough.

  As soon as I could I secured an inexpensive room in a Queens apartment share and announced to my parents my plans to move out. My stepfather seemed relieved; my mother immediately checked to see if I’d be living close to a Kingdom Hall. I would and so she agreed, perhaps looking forward to a break from the tension between us.

  MOVING DAY WASN’T WHAT I hoped for. My mother had a last-minute change of heart. Perhaps she imagined I’d be whisked off to my new living quarters in a chariot sent by Jesus, but to her disgust my equipage was three school friends, home on a college break, honking from a waiting VW Camper. Not able to keep it together, she panicked, burst into tears, and commanded me not to leave. She blocked the door.

  “Please, Mom!” I cried. “It will be fine. I’ll call you later, I promise.”

  As I picked up the carrying case of LPs with one hand and my suitcase with the other, she began pulling at my clothes with frenzied force, tearing my collar, and ripping my pants, screaming. “You came into my life naked and you’ll leave naked! You think you know anything at all? You’ll leave when I tell you to leave!!�
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  Terrified but determined, I yanked her off me, grabbed my belongings, and ran out of the house and into my scary, necessary new life.

  WITH THE HELP OF an employment agency I found a job that felt like I’d won the lottery: secretary to the international sales manager at a major paperback publishing house. My boss, Mr. Alwyn, was an elegant Welshman. One of the first tasks he assigned me was choosing books to be packed in shipments to U.S. military outposts in Southeast Asia—gifts of literary ammunition for fighting the Vietcong. We both pretended he didn’t know I was slipping in copies of Dalton Trumbo’s antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun.

  I did not report this part of my job to my mother, as I’d been taught from an early age that Witnesses must remain neutral. To identify as a pacifist meant I was taking a political stand—at about the same level of “wrong thinking” as pledging allegiance to the flag. I seemed incapable of anything but wrong thinking in more and more areas of my life, but I was equally incapable of going back. I should have been reading Watchtower Society publications such as Make Sure of All Things; Hold Fast to What Is Fine on my daily subway commute. I tried, but I forgot the words as soon as I read them. I learned that my publishing job not only paid a decent wage, it also offered a complimentary copy of every new title. What I actually wanted to hold fast to was the literary alchemy of these fiction writers. I was thunderstruck by sentences from Donald Barthelme: “There was a sort of muck running in the gutters, yellowish, filthy stream that suggested excrement, or nervousness, a city that does not know what it has done to deserve baldness, errors, infidelity.” As I took in these words, my nerve endings donned pom-poms; my eyes became pied pipers, leading me over the edge of a cliff. I was unable to save myself.

  In order to pass muster in my adopted environment, in my new life I was an undercover agent disguised as a sophisticated young woman of the world. I didn’t want to reveal how small and proscribed my background was. There was so much I didn’t know, and social minefields to be avoided everywhere. Invited to join my young coworkers after hours, the conversation often turned to gossip about who was “banging” whom or who was bragging about “going down” on a certain member of a famous band. I nodded, clucked my tongue, and laughed in all the places I hoped were appropriate, trying desperately to evade detection as an alien interloper.