Normal Is Not An Option

Since the most recent presidential election, I've read a lot of pundits who are mystified as to why evangelicals broke so hard for Trump, given that the thrice-married adulterer and admitted sexual assaulter doesn't live up to their much-vaunted family values. I wasn't a bit surprised because, in my experience, people in these conservative churches tend to be deeply sexist and authoritarian, and they will ALWAYS vote for a man, especially one who tries to bully and intimidate his opponents. There is no doubt that the culture of the Church of Christ is sexist. They openly teach (and quote scripture trying to prove) that men are in charge and women are to be subservient to them. I've heard COC preachers say that, if a woman ever becomes president, they're moving to Canada because they believe it is sinful for a woman to have any sort of authority over a man, let alone millions of men. Satan himself could have run for president against Hillary Clinton, and COC vote...

Every year my church organizes some small study groups that meet once a week during Lent. This year I signed up for a group led by my choir director that is doing an in-depth study of Bach's magnificent St. Matthew Passion . I wasn't familiar with this work at all (I did attend a performance of its twin, Bach's St. John Passion, last year), so I was really intrigued to see what we would learn. So far, we've talked about the history of the work, both in Bach's lifetime and after his death. I was surprised to learn that I already knew the tunes to several of the chorale sections in the work. It turns out that Bach took some older Lutheran hymns and reharmonized them for the passion. The work is extremely dramatic and theatrical and straddles the line between opera (which was forbidden in Protestant Germany) and church hymns. I'm really enjoying the study group so far. The work is 3 hours long, so just listening to it is a big time commitment, but it's also...

A couple of weekends ago I went with 25 other women from my church to a retreat at a Loyola University center in the northwest suburbs. The campus was beautiful, peaceful, and quiet. If nothing else, I figured it would be a nice getaway from the bustle of the city. I had never done a church retreat before. The Church of Christ doesn't do retreats, per se. I do remember a women's day at our congregation once where no men were allowed and all the speakers were women. Of course, the only subjects discussed were how to be a better wife and mother because those are the only roles women are supposed to have in the COC. I knew the Episcopal retreat wouldn't be like that, but I still wasn't sure what to expect. The topic was women's faith development through alienation, awakening, and relationships. Much of the material was taken from a book by Nicola Slee on women's faith development. We also read a lot of the prayers from her book about women's prayers . I ...

As I've mentioned before, I now sing in an Episcopal church choir. This week our church organist is on vacation. Before he leaves, he always lines up a substitute organist or pianist to play with us and help direct our summer pick-up choir (we don't have midweek rehearsals in the summer, we just show up 45 minutes before the service and rehearse something really simple for the anthem). Today, the guest organist called in sick, and there was no one to play with us, so we were prepared to do all the songs acapella. At the last minute, a parishioner jumped up and played the piano for the songs she knew, so we didn't have to do all of them without an accompanist, but I'm still very glad that I'm comfortable singing without a musical instrument. Most of these lifelong Episcopalians aren't, and they visibly freak out when we sing acapella. Who would have ever guessed that the COC was good for something?

I downloaded Leah Remini's tell-all book, Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology , onto my Kindle the day it was published. I made short work of it, reading it in just a couple of days. It's a fascinating inside look into an insular religion that is closely linked to Hollywood. Remini actually grew up in the church. Her mother joined when Leah was just 8, and she and her sister were soon spending all their time after school at the church. She and her sister both eventually joined the Sea Organization, which is Scientology's version of the clergy. To join, they both had to sign billion-year contracts. The church believes in reincarnation, and they expect members to rejoin the Sea Org in every lifetime. From the time she joined Sea Org and her mother moved the family to the church's compound in Clearwater, FL, Remini's formal schooling was done. She and her sister worked on the compound all day doing manual labor, and all night they had to study the pre...

The choir season at my church kicked off just a couple of weeks ago. We are rehearsing Maurice Durufle's requiem to sing at the All Saints service on November 1. Durufle was inspired by Gabriel Faure's requiem, which we sang last year, and it's equally beautiful and inspiring. If you have the time, I highly recommend that you listen to the Durufle requiem . There are some parts that send chills up my spine. The soprano part is challenging, but I'm very excited to sing it. I certainly never felt this way about the songs we sang at the Church of Christ. Some of the songs were pretty and I enjoyed them, but most of them were not terribly interesting or inspiring. We used the Sacred Selections songbook (only denominations call them "hymnals") and I don't think there were any songs in there written after the 1960s. Most of them were frontier-era songs with simple harmonies and repetitive lyrics, written with shape notes, and intended for people who had no mu...

A friend of mine who is a Disciples of Christ minister recommended that I read "Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint" by Nadia Bolz-Weber because Bolz-Weber also grew up in the church of Christ. She is now a Lutheran pastor in Denver at a congregation she founded, the House for All Sinners and Saints. Bolz-Weber was baptized at age 12 but left the church of Christ at age 17 and was a Wiccan for a while, a period she refers to as "hanging out with God's Aunt." She said it was helpful for getting past the toxic, patriarchal image of God that she had been taught in the CoC. She was a stand-up comedian for a while and struggled with alcohol and drug addiction. Eventually, she got sober, met her husband, who was a Lutheran seminary student, and converted to the Lutheran church herself. About 4 years into her sobriety, a good friend killed himself. Some mutual friends asked Bolz-Weber to conduct the memorial service because she was the only...

My brother and I have talked on several occasions about how growing up in the CoC was like being Neo in the first Matrix movie: you can sense that something is off, but you can't quite put your finger on what it is and you certainly have no language to describe it. You just know in your gut that things aren't what they seem and something is very wrong. I remember even as a very small child feeling uncomfortable and uneasy in that church, and I never felt that I fit in. I always felt like an interloper, an observer, not a true participant. I'm still not entirely sure why I felt that way, but now that I've done some research on fundamentalist churches and have talked with other people who grew up in the CoC and similar churches, I do think I've identified at least one of the factors that made me so uneasy as a child: the ever-present threat of physical, verbal, and spiritual violence. Physical violence: I've long thought that people in the CoC have an 18th-ce...

SPOILERS AHEAD: In the final 5 episodes, Kimmy celebrates her 30th birthday. The party ends up being a disaster when her boyfriend Logan and her friend from GED class, Dong, get into a fight over her, and Dong admits to her that he wants to be more than just friends. At first, Kimmy decides to stick with Logan, but when he reports Dong to the immigration authorities to get him out of the way, Kimmy realizes that Logan is not the nice guy she thinks he is and she dumps him in favor of Dong. Before she and Dong can explore their new relationship, however, she is called back to Indiana to testify in the trial against her former captor and abuser, Rev. Richard Wayne Gary Wayne. The trial doesn't go well at first, partly because the prosecutors are incompetent, partly because one of the Mole Women, Gretchen, refuses to testify because she is still brainwashed by the reverend, and partly because another of the women, Donna Maria, pretends that she can't speak English, and no one in...

I think the theme song to this show is permanently lodged in my brain. For a show with such a dark premise, the theme song is relentlessly upbeat: "Unbreakable! They alive, dammit, it's a miracle/Unbreakable! They alive dammit, 'cause females are strong as hell." This may become my new personal theme song. Anyway, SPOILERS AHEAD: So in episodes 5-8, Kimmy kisses a boy (her co-worker), receives a visit from her fellow Indiana Mole Woman Cyndee, goes to school (a GED review class taught by a teacher who gave up years ago and doesn't care whether they fail), goes to a party at her boss's house, and gets one of her fellow GED students to tutor her in math. By the end of episode 8, it's clear that her fellow student has a crush on her, even though she's dating one of her boss's wealthy friends whom she met at that party. Kimmy also finally admits to her boss Jaqueline who she is in an effort to get Jaqueline to be brave enough to divorce her unfaithfu...

SPOILERS AHEAD: When I heard the premise of Tina Fey's new show on Netflix, "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt," I knew I could not miss it. It's about a woman who was held prisoner in an underground bunker in rural Indiana for 15 years by a cult leader who told her and the other women that the rest of humanity had been destroyed in a nuclear apocalypse. The women are rescued and go to New York City to appear on the Today show. Kimmy decides to stay in New York and make her life there, and we get to watch her adventures as she finds a roommate, gets a job, and tries to navigate a world that is very different from the one she last experienced over a decade ago. Obviously, I didn't grow up in a bunker (or even a cult, for that matter, although the church of Christ has some cultish tendencies), but I can relate to that feeling of disorientation that occurs when you step outside a restrictive religious group and try to make your way in the world on your own terms. It'...

If I haven't mentioned it already, the Church of Christ believes in acapella congregational singing only. This means that there are no musical instruments or choirs allowed. Everyone must sing, no matter what their abilities, and there is no piano or organ to help keep everyone in tune and on the beat. Most congregations do have a man designated to be the song leader. He chooses the songs and stands in front of the congregation and starts the songs, sometimes keeping the beat with his hand. Some song leaders will use a pitch pipe to get the correct starting note, but the more conservative congregations even frown on those because they consider them to be musical instruments, so your starting note at the beginning of each song is going to be anybody's guess. In a very small congregation of only 40-50 people (which is the size of the churches I attended growing up), acapella singing could be either wonderful or terrible depending on who showed up that day. Most of ...

I'm in the middle of re-reading Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion by Marlene Winell. My first read of it was about a month ago, and now I'm re-reading it because it's so good and has been extremely helpful. I really wish I had read it 20 years ago when it was first published, because I think it would have helped me get over some of those huge emotional hurdles of leaving the COC much faster. It would have helped me realize that I wasn't crazy and that I certainly wasn't the only person facing the challenges of leaving a toxic church. It has also helped me better analyze the dysfunctional dynamics of my family. For a long time, I thought my family's problems were unique, but they really aren't. One point that Winell makes in the book is that children of fundamentalist parents often have psychological problems and profiles similar to those of children of alcoholics. Whether the parent's addition is al...

When I was growing up in the church of Christ, we had to go to church three times a week: Sunday morning for Bible study followed by a worship service that included communion, Sunday evening for a second worship service sans communion (some congregations do offer communion at the Sunday night service for people who have to work on Sunday mornings, but the congregation of my childhood was hardcore and only offered it once each week), and back again on Wednesday evening for another Bible study. Sunday night was the worst for a couple of reasons. First, it meant we always had to miss "The Wonderful World of Disney," which was an awesome TV show. At the time, it was a source of great frustration to me that on Mondays, all my friends would be talking about whatever great movie had aired on Sunday night, and I would be sitting there like a lump and feeling angry that I had missed it. Second, it was exhausting to go back to church on Sunday night after enduring 2 or more hours o...

When I was growing up in the COC, there were very few people who had converted from the outside. Everyone else was born into it like I was. As a kid who was neck-deep in it and perfectly miserable, I used to wonder, "Why would anyone come here if their parents weren't forcing them to?" Most of them converted because they wanted to marry someone who was a member of the church. The COC teaches explicitly that marrying a non-Christian (which, of course, means anyone who isn't a member of the COC) is a major sin. They refer to it as being "unequally yoked with an unbeliever." So getting your fiance to join the church is a big coup. The other group of people who converted were those going through some trauma--adultery, divorce, drug or alcohol addition, or a major illness--and they were looking for answers. And if there's anything the COC loves, it's giving answers for everything and telling people how to fix their lives. I guess this issue is on my...

The other day, I was telling my sister about participating in the church bake sale and how we're having extra choir rehearsals in preparation for Christmas Eve, and she suddenly laughed and said, "I love how you're doing all these heathen church activities! People in the church of Christ would be shocked and appalled! Of course, I don't know which of us they would hate more--you for going to a church bake sale or me for going out to buy smokes, booze, and lottery tickets?" I had a good laugh and said, "I think they would say I'm worse than you, because at least you're not actively participating in a false religion. They would think they still had a chance at converting you back." I encountered this attitude many times over the years when I was in the church of Christ. Someone would "fall away" (i.e., stop attending church three times weekly), but as long as they didn't join a different church, there was always the hope that they c...

As I've written before, I've been attending an Episcopal church and singing in the choir for about 18 months, and I love it. Recently, I was out of town for a weekend, and the next Sunday, one of my fellow choir members said, "I missed you last week." And do you know what my ex-church-of-Christ knee-jerk reaction was? I immediately apologized and launched into an explanation of where I was. She stared at me for a second and said, "You know, when I say I missed you, I just mean that I missed you. I really enjoy singing with you. That's all." I said, "Oh" and made some joke to cover up my embarrassment, but I was really touched that she said that. Why did I react that way? It's because, in the COC, "We missed you" really means, "We're keeping tabs on you and your errant ways, and if you miss one too many services, the elders will be contacting you." No one ever "misses" you because they truly l...

I try hard not to lay all my psychological and social maladjustment at the door of the Church of Christ, because there are other issues at play, but one thing I can definitely blame on them is my tendency to get involved in dysfunctional organizations and relationships and stay much longer than I should. This has happened to me in several different contexts, including civic organizations, book clubs, hobby-related groups, friendships, homeowners associations, and even jobs. I'll get involved, realize that it's dysfunctional and toxic and that I'm not happy, but I'll stay in hopes that if I just work hard enough, I can change things and make them better. In fact, I'll labor under the delusion that I can change the other people and their behavior and make the situation better, until finally something really horrible will happen, and I'll "hit rock bottom" and realize that I have to leave. And even then, I'll feel terrible guilt about it, like I'm...

As you might imagine, I can't help but compare my current experiences at an Episcopal church with the ones I had growing up in the COC because they're polar opposites--and because sometimes I can't believe my good fortune in escaping. This past Sunday, two things happened that reminded me of the joyless rigidity of the COC. First, right before the service started, a little boy was skipping around the sanctuary, and no one reprimanded him or yelled at him. In fact, everyone who saw him smiled at him. I turned to the woman next to me and said, "Look at that little boy! At the church where I grew up, he would have gotten yelled at or slapped for not showing the proper respect in the church building." I don't think she entirely believed me. Then, during the communion, we sang a lively African-American spiritual, complete with hand claps, and when the song ended, a small child in the back yelled, "Yaaaaay!" and applauded vigorously. Everyone laughed fon...

Recently, I read Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright. It's a fascinating look at a secretive religion that many people claim is a cult. After reading this well-researched book, I would have to agree. It certain fits the generally agreed-upon definition of a cult . I've said before on this blog that I do NOT think that the COC is a cult , but rather a sect with cult-like tendencies. However, as I was reading this book, I did see some disturbing parallels between Scientology and the COC. First, they both claim to have specialized knowledge of an ultimate truth that no one else in the world understands. Second, they strongly discourage members from associating with people outside the group. The COC is especially adamant that you have to marry within the church, lest your "unbelieving spouse" be a bad influence on you and lead you away from The Truth. Third, it's really hard to get out of both groups without losing your ...