Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions

by Cami Ostman

  “Can we go sit by the river?” I asked.

  Thom tried to subdue his impatience with me. “We’ve only started,” he said. “Later, we’ll take a break, okay?” He was intent, knowledge his aphrodisiac; I knew that. His gray eyes deepened. “Come on. The next cave is fucking fantastic—Yilanli Kilise.”

  We entered the arched doorway and stepped into the domed room. The frescos were even more intact. An enormous spotted snake writhed over the walls, a woman caught in its grip here and there. Saints gasped in horror as this snake attacked. It was primitive and ridiculous, such an obvious threat I wanted to laugh, but I was afraid if I did, I’d cry instead. Thom launched into lecture mode.

  “Some say this is the dragon that Saint Michael wrestled, but it could be a snake sent to punish sinners. Or is it the devil, straight from the Garden of Eden?”

  “It’s rather misogynistic, wouldn’t you say? Why is it the women who are being punished?”

  “Eve, of course,” Thom said. “It was all her doing, the fall from grace. Poor Adam, minding his own business, and next thing you know, he’s naked.”

  I focused on one of the women in the painting. She stood still as the snake approached her. She wasn’t screaming or running like the others. It was as though she knew this moment would come. God would not be mocked. I took Thom’s hand to pull him away. He squeezed my hand.

  “Stop it,” I hissed.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “You crushed my hand,” I said, and couldn’t stop myself from crying. My defenses were down, and I was suddenly aware of how much I had lost, all that confidence in an ordered universe, an approaching day of reckoning, a settling of accounts, and justice for all. I couldn’t make myself believe in any of it any longer.

  “Ah, this is too much for you. I’m sorry,” he said and put his arms around me. I let him hold me.

  “Would you mind if I waited for the guide? I have to hear more about this,” he said as he wiped the tears off my face with the back of his hand and kissed the top of my head. “A fucking anaconda in a church, good God.” He looked up at the snake with obvious admiration.

  I told him it was fine if he wanted to stay and that I’d find him later. I made my way back down the hill and sat by the river with my back to the cave churches. A woman knee-deep in the Melindiz Suyu carried a log on her back. Though it wasn’t large it looked heavy. It made my own shoulders ache in sympathy. How many years had she been gathering wood in this river? I wondered if she resented this task or if it had become automatic and not worth thinking about anymore.

  I threw little stones into the river and imagined floating down the Melindiz, away from these small rooms carved from rock, past the minarets with their loudspeakers insisting on prayer, past the whirling dervishes lost in ecstasy, past the glimmer of stained glass, the whiff of incense, until I arrived somewhere I could breathe again.

  A light step nearby made me turn around. A little girl, probably about seven, brown hair and eyes, stood nearby. She was dressed in a plain brown tunic and wide cotton pants. She pointed to her lips and then to my purse.

  “Lipstick?” I asked, miming the tube across my lips. She nodded, happy. A first-rate germophobe who had only reluctantly shared a lipstick in the past, I unzipped my purse, fumbled for the tube, and rolled it out. I held her chin and carefully applied Dusky Mauve to her solemn mouth. Then I watched her climb toward the chapels on the hill, her tiny feet picking through the roots and rocks and scrambling for balance.

  What could she be looking for up there? I wondered. I hoped it was lira and lipstick, a handful of berries, something she could taste or touch, anything she could see. You couldn’t go far wrong in loving things like that. But I had stopped doing exactly that when I was eighteen years old, when I’d wrapped myself in a cocoon of scripture and sermons and tattered hymnals.

  I had spent a lifetime bending knee to that which I could not see, and I wasn’t ready to say that was a waste or a tragedy or anything of the sort, but now I wanted to praise the threescore and ten, the running water and poplar trees, that singular ride from the airport through Istanbul leaning into the side of a man I loved, his lips on my hair, the apple tea we sipped as we cruised the Bosporus, the canvas bags of spice that filled the market. I took a deep breath. It wasn’t too late for me, after all, and it certainly wasn’t too late for her. I dug through my purse for an extra tube of lipstick, and then I went hunting for the girl.

  The Imperceptible Head Shake

  Julia Scheeres

  I was thirteen the first time I doubted Christianity.

  My family had just finished eating dinner, and, as usual, Dad was reading to us from the Bible. He would read a chapter at a time, usually from the New Testament, as he sipped his sugared coffee and my brothers and I silently urged him to finish already so we could get back to our kid business.

  His scriptures-reading voice was a soporific drone; he may as well have been reading the list of ingredients off a box of cornflakes. While he spoke, I’d usually zone out until he bent his head to pray, the cue that we were about to be released from our familial obligation. But for whatever reason, on that particular day, this passage caught in my ear:

  I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love, and holiness with propriety.

  That’s 1 Timothy 2:12–15.

  I felt slapped. Angry. Disturbed. I don’t know what struck me more—my father’s nonchalance as he read the passage, or the words themselves, which brimmed with injustice. (At thirteen I wasn’t familiar with the term sexism.)

  I do, however, remember my reaction. I looked down at the plastic white tablecloth and shook my head in disagreement. Mind you, this headshake was imperceptible to anyone but me. My father was a violent patriarch who brooked no disagreement, especially with his beloved scriptures. But it mattered to me, this headshake. I was taking a stand. I wasn’t going to passively sit there and be told I was worth less than my father and brothers because I was born with a vulva instead of a penis. Why should I be punished for something a woman did six thousand years ago? I remember thinking.

  There was no gendered division of labor at our house, as far as we kids were concerned. I shoveled snow from the driveway and chopped logs for the wood stove beside my brothers; they took turns peeling potatoes at the kitchen sink. I prided myself on my toughness, on swinging an axe as capably as they did. Why didn’t this same equality extend to our roles in church? On that evening, I looked across the table at them with great resentment. I imagined a smugness blooming in their chests as Dad read the Apostle Paul’s sexist screed, but in reality the passage probably didn’t even register with them. They tended to zone out just like I did.

  SHORTLY AFTER MY RUN-IN with Paul, I had a run-in with the head usher at our church.

  My brothers, who were roughly my age, took great pride donning their wide-lapel suits and leading families through the hushed sanctuary to their pews. Like all the other girls, I volunteered in the church nursery, which was in the basement. But once the novelty of bottle-feeding and diaper-changing wore off, I decided I wanted to take a turn at ushering as well. I approached the head usher. Our exchange went something like this:

  Me: “I’d like to usher.”

  Head Usher: “Yes, well. All the ushers are male.”

  Me: “My brothers are ushers.”

  Head Usher: “Yes, well. They’re male.”

  Me: “So I can’t do it?”

  Head Usher: “All the ushers are male.”

  Me: “I know.”

  Head Usher: “You’re better off helping in the nursery.”

  With a condescending pat on my shoulder, he walked away. End of conversation.

  The entire dialogue was spoken through polite, albeit tight, smiles, mind you. But anot
her log had been tossed onto the growing fire of my resentment. Sitting in the pews afterward, I looked around. The preacher was male. The deacons were male. The elders were male. None of those positions was open to women. During the offertory, I watched the deacons, so officious and self-important, march in unison to the altar to distribute the brass collection plates. I began to hate what they stood for.

  I now read the Bible with a new awareness, stung by the anti-female sentiment in so many passages. A sampling:

  1 Corinthians 14:34–35. Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.

  That explained why women who volunteered in my church were relegated to the basement child care.

  Genesis 3:16. Unto the woman he said, “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”

  That explained why the wives in my church seemed so listless and mute, forever deferring to their husbands.

  Of course, all this sexism is rooted in Eve. The Bible establishes women’s second-rate status in chapter 2 of Genesis. Eve is an afterthought, created from Adam’s rib to become his “helpmeet.” In chapter 3, a snake tempts the weak-willed Eve with an irresistible apple, and therefore all female kind, from the first to the last, shall suffer her disobedience. Consider the injustice of this story. Then consider its absurdity. I mean really, people—a talking snake? If some dude told you that story today, you’d think he was nuts. There are many equally absurd moments in the Bible, and I find it stunning that otherwise lucid people would believe these stories, post-Enlightenment.

  The apostles were male. Jesus Christ was male. God the Father is male. Even the Holy Ghost is presumed male, but how can a disembodied spirit be one sex or the other? It was a mystery to me. But hey, if the Bible says so, it must be true. Right?

  In my teenage mind, the seeds of doubt kept growing.

  I WAS BROUGHT UP fundamentalist. By that, I mean that I was made to believe that the Bible was the inerrant word of God. It was all fact, all true. There was no innuendo or nuance. Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Balaam’s donkey did talk . . . as well as that damn snake in the Garden of Eden. When you’re six years old, the Bible is entertaining. Such imaginative morality plays! Good versus Evil! Magic tricks! All great material for Sunday School coloring books. But when you’re thirteen and starting to develop a healthy skepticism, the Bible becomes a natural target.

  My family was Calvinist—that dour, hellfire-obsessed denomination embraced by the Puritans. I attended church twice on Sunday, catechism on Wednesday nights, and Calvinettes on Saturday mornings. I went to a private Christian grade school run by Calvinists. We were a tribe and socialized, almost exclusively, with other members of our tribe. We believed we were the chosen people, far superior to the idolatrous Catholics and the babbling Pentecostals. They weren’t going to heaven. We were. And we surely wouldn’t let them drag us to hell by associating with them.

  At thirteen, I was a budding “women’s libber”—that most hated and denounced creature among conservative Christians—although I didn’t know it yet. There was no way I could talk about my growing skepticism with my mother. She was a firm believer in her secondary role, a woman who retreated into a wounded silence whenever my father barked at her for interrupting a slow-forming thought or suggesting he obey traffic signs.

  My questing adolescent brain collided smack-dab with the biblical dictate of not questioning. “Our brains are too finite,” I was often told, “to understand God’s infinite wisdom.” In church we sang the nineteenth-century hymn “Trust and Obey,” whose refrain was “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way, to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.” I was not happy in Jesus.

  THE LOGICAL CONCLUSION TO my thirteen-year-old epiphany played out four years later, when, at seventeen, I committed the worst possible offense for a young Christian woman: I lost my virginity, that “most precious gift” that I was expected to pack away in mothballs for my future husband. While my parents were away on a mission trip, the woman staying with me witnessed my boyfriend climbing from my window at six in the morning.

  Deuteronomy advocates stoning women to death for having premarital sex. I was sent to a Christian reform school in the Dominican Republic instead.

  At Escuela Caribe, where I spent my senior year of high school, I saw extreme examples of Christian sexism and hypocrisy. The Christian staff routinely brutalized students, and the housefather of my group home lorded his chosen-male position over us girls on a daily basis. It was during the year I spent at this isolated, miserable place that my resentment for Christianity and its practitioners fully blossomed. To survive, I played the part of the repentant teen, parroted their Jesus mumbo-jumbo, and got out as quickly as possible.

  Twenty years later, I wrote about all this in a memoir, Jesus Land. Some folks are offended by the title. So be it. I meant it as a pointed reference to the fake, plastic atmosphere of a Disney theme park. A place where the surface is all pasted-on smiles and welcome mats, but the pith is a putrid hairball of oppression, exclusion, and malevolent superstition.

  I also joined forces with other Escuela Caribe alumni to create a website warning parents away from the so-called Christian therapeutic boarding school, and convinced dozens of former students to complete surveys about their experiences. They wrote about the Christian staff slamming them into walls, whipping them with a leather strap until their skin broke, and molesting them while they slept. As a result of our activism, enrollment dropped, and the school, which had been operating for forty years, charging a monthly tuition of $6,000 a month, closed. I’ll praise my alumni sistren and brethren for making this happen—not any god. God enables child abuse. To paraphrase Proverbs 13:24: “Spare the rod, spoil the child.”

  Today the sight of any religious symbol—be it a twenty-four-karat gold pendant dangling from a woman’s neck in the shape of a cross or a Star of David; be it a turbaned cab driver or televised footage of a woman in a burka—makes me cringe. For me, these symbols signify all the things I was subjected to in my youth: ignorance; a sect that values superstitious dogma over basic human kindness; a system that believes I’m inferior because I don’t have a scrotum. The bile rises in my throat when I hear “Christianese,” that intellect-numbing vernacular riddled by Jesus this and that, He and His and Him and sporadic Bible verses. It brings me right back to that genteel sexism of my youth: All the ushers are male.

  Ancient misogynists used the Bible to establish male domination, and today, Abrahamic religions oppress women on every continent. Why would any woman participate in her own subjugation by believing such crap?

  Once in a while, people try to lure me back to Christianity. They’ll email me asserting that the Christians I knew in my youth weren’t “real” Christians and that they know other Christians who are the “real” Christians, and that I really should check them out before giving up on “God” altogether. I scoff. Yes, I do. I find this Christian compulsion to out-pious other Christians endlessly amusing. Furthermore, their threats of hellfire fall flat on my ears. I no longer believe in an afterlife. I believe I am like a zinnia, a plant that sprouts, grows, blooms, then dies, and provides mulch for next year’s garden. My daughters will be so much freer than I was.

  I never respond to these email pleas. I’ve wasted too much of my life to superstition. I just jab the delete key, sometimes with my middle finger.

  End of conversation.

  Duct Tape and Baling Wire

  Valerie Tarico

  I can’t recall his name—the small boy who severed the final strands of my faith—just a vague image of soft brown hair, pale velvety limbs, and trusting eyes. I was twenty-six, in the last stage of my PhD, which required a year-long internship at the University of Wash
ington. In one of my rotations, at Children’s Hospital, interns provided mental health consultation for families of patients on the medical wards. The child was two, in the first phase of treatment for a spinal cord tumor that would leave him paraplegic even if the nightmare course of chemotherapy were successful. I don’t know how long he survived.

  Maybe it was his eyes, or his inability to comprehend why he couldn’t walk anymore, or why people who looked kind kept hurting him. Maybe it was the unbearable tenderness of his parents, who simply wanted to take their child home and love him rather than watch him suffer inexplicable months of “treatment”—for a long shot at extending his life. But something inside me broke.

  For years I had been holding together the last remains of my evangelical Christian faith with duct tape and baling wire. As far back as grade school, I had struggled with the idea that my friend Kay, a Mormon-not-Christian, was going to be tortured in hell forever. I had inherited my own salvation. My father’s family of Italian immigrants had been saved from Catholicism by door-to-door Pentecostals. My sisters and brothers and I were raised in an independent Bible church. At the time, I didn’t even recognize Catholics as Christians. Dad’s childhood stint as an altar boy was a curiosity to us, almost as peculiar as Grandma’s stories about playing meat market with captured frogs next to her grandmother’s stone cottage in the hills above their village.

  MY FAMILY HAD COME far from Italy and Catholicism, and yet in some ways we were as culturally isolated as my grandmother had been in her small village. My sisters and brothers and I didn’t butcher the frogs we raised from pollywogs. But, like Grandma, we were taught that the Bible was the literally perfect word of God, a blueprint for this life and the next. Being Protestant, our church didn’t have altar boys, but it did have altar calls. With bowed heads the congregation listened to organ music as the pastor implored the unsaved among us to make our way to the front and confess our sins. I responded on more than one occasion, each time asking Jesus to be my savior, because, inherited or no, I never took my salvation for granted. I was acutely aware of my own imperfections, and hell, with its tortured hoards of burning souls, was a scary place.