Normal Is Not An Option

In the year since I last posted, my life has entirely changed. I started a new job, my father and step-mother died, I moved, and just as I was getting settled in the new place and thinking about having a housewarming party, the COVID-19 pandemic started. As much as I miss my dad, I keep thinking that I'm glad he's not around for this mess. Not only did he and his wife have several underlying conditions that would have made them prime targets of the virus, they both were hardcore Church of Christ members who believed that they had to attend each and every church service no matter what. I would have been living in terror every week, worried that they were going to that church and bringing home a deadly infection. Honestly, I think you would have had to post a member of the National Guard in front of my dad's door to keep him from going to church. They were my last link to the congregation they attended, so I have no idea whether that church is continuing to meet in defian...

I have lost count of all the times someone in the COC tried to get me involved in Amway or some other multilevel marketing (MLM) scheme. If it wasn't Amway, it was baskets or scrapbooking supplies or "gourmet" convenience foods or knock-off Tupperware or makeup or jewelry or home decor or some other junk no one needed. At one congregation I attended, there were people who NEVER invited anyone from church to their house unless they were trying to sell them something. It was mostly the women, although a few men were involved, too. I just cringed every time some guy tried to get me to come to a "business meeting" on a Friday night, because I knew I was in for the hard sell on how I could achieve financial independence through Amway. Heck, you practically had to sell Amway in order to be considered a member in good standing. On the basis of my reading, I realize now that this phenomenon is not unique to the COC. It's quite prevalent in many fundamentalist and ...

Not long ago I read Tara Westover's memoir "Educated," in which she recounts her childhood in a Mormon separatist group that did not believe in formal education. She didn't go to a school until she was 17, when she went to college. Her family disowned her for doing so because they believed that getting a secular education was a sin (her story is more complex that that, but this is the nutshell version). Even though my upbringing was not nearly as extreme as hers and I was sent to secular schools from preschool onward, I also encountered similar antieducation sentiments growing up in the church of Christ. The mainline churches of Christ are actually affiliated with some prestigious schools , including Abilene Christian University and Pepperdine University, and kids who grow up in that branch of the church are encouraged to attend those schools. Unfortunately, I grew up the noninstitutional branch of the church, which is much more conservative and, to my knowledge, i...

Let me state immediately that I have no statistics on rates of child sex abuse in the COC. I haven't been able to find any stats online and I suspect it's because each COC congregation is independent, and there's no single governing body to keep such records. If anyone can find such information from a reliable source, please pass it along because I would be very interested in reading it. All I can tell you is that, of the four COC congregations I attended in my lifetime, half of them were plagued by adults who behaved inappropriately toward children. One of them hired a preacher who liked to date underage girls (see my previous post on how I was nearly a child bride), and another one had a full-blown pedophile ring operating in it, and my sister and I narrowly escaped being among their victims. The church in question was the very first one I ever attended. My parents were married out of that church, and they brought me to church services starting a week after I was born...

Last night a friend and I were talking on the phone, comparing notes about the various physical problems we're facing as we skid into middle age. As much as my body is creaking under the weight of the years, in some ways, I've never felt better. In particular, I almost never get the horrible stress headaches that plagued me when I was younger. I used to have one almost every week. Funnily enough, they stopped around the time that I made my decision to leave the COC, and I don't think it was a coincidence. Being in that church and having to put up a front all the time really took a toll on me, and I often wonder how much longer I could have held out without cracking under the strain. As with much of what I write on this blog, I have no scientific data to offer--only my observations and personal experiences--but I can confidently say that a good quarter to a third of the women in the COC are taking antidepressants, assuming that the churches I attended were representative s...

OK, that headline is somewhat misleading because my parents NEVER would have consented to me marrying before the age of 18, but there was a much older man in our church who expressed interest in marrying me when I was only 14. Can you imagine? But I'm getting ahead of myself.... I have absolutely no statistics on the age of marriage in the Church of Christ, but anecdotally, I can tell you that people tend to marry young, either right out of high school or college. Since most of them in the noninstitutional churches tend to go to 2-year colleges like Florida College, they're getting married in the 18-21-year-old range. Most people I knew in the church were married by age 25. Anyone who was still single at 30 was written off as a "confirmed bachelor" or a spinster. Still, most people in the Midwestern churches I knew waited until they were at least 18 to marry. I did know a few people who married much earlier, though, and all the stuff in the news recently about Roy M...

Recently, I read the 6-part story in the L.A. Times about a man nicknamed Dirty John. If you haven't read the story or listened to the companion podcast, I highly recommend that you do so. In brief (and without spoiling the ending), it's about a con man named John who marries a woman, Debra, and victimizes her and her family. The aspect of the story that jumped out at me was Debra's evangelical Christian faith. Years before the events of this story occurred, Debra's brother-in-law murdered her sister, and their mother pleaded for the whole family to forgive him immediately. She felt that it was required by her faith. She passed this ideal down to Debra, who was extremely quick to excuse, overlook, and forgive her husband John's many misdeeds. She believed that she should always look for the best in people, always give them the benefit of the doubt, and always forgive, no matter how heinous the crime. I'm not trying to blame the victim here. No one is respons...

I've been looking through old posts, and I don't think I've told this story before, at least not the whole story. So here goes. Most COC congregations have gospel meetings (i.e., revivals, but they don't use that term because the Baptists do) once or twice a year, when they invite a guest preacher to come in and preach every night for a week. When I was 6 or 7, the church invited this old Southern preacher to hold a gospel meeting. One night during a sermon, he started yelling from the pulpit and pounding on it. He was so worked up that I actually looked up and listened to what he was saying. Mind you, up to this point in my life, I hadn't paid a bit of attention to a church sermon because they were unremittingly boring. Instead, I sat there playing with my little dolls or coloring in my Jesus or Noah's ark coloring books. This guy had the thickest accent, so I had trouble understanding him, but I finally realized what he was saying: he denounced the women...

It often happens that when I tell someone my horror stories about growing up in the church of Christ, the person will look at me in amazement and say, "I can't believe you still go to church!" Honestly, I can't quite believe it myself. After all those years of spiritual abuse, you would think I would be done with religion. Both of my siblings have left Christianity altogether, which seems to be typical of people who escape the COC (I have only anecdotal evidence to back this up). I won't say my siblings are atheists, but they simply refuse to be involved in any kind of organized religion. They think it's all a scam--that all preachers are money-grubbing charlatans and all congregations are full of toxic, controlling people. I don't judge them for feeling that way. The sad truth is that a lot of churches are like that. I guess I've been lucky to find a church that I find uplifting and nourishing, rather than soul draining. So why do I still go to chur...

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'...