“Dad, when do you think the rapture will happen?” “Oh, probably in the next five or ten years.” I was eleven. Eleven. And I trusted my dad. I respected him, a lot. He was the smartest person I knew – well read, intelligent, a thinking person. You know how doctors sometimes tell cancer patients how many years they have left to live? That’s what this felt like. I had ten years. Ten. No wonder I hoped to marry and have children early. I didn’t want to miss my chance.
I’m afraid I rather made my husband Sean miserable during our engagement and early marriage. Because I was taught that men constantly think about sex and that my husband thinking sexual thoughts about another woman would be the equivalent of adultery, I quizzed him daily on whether he had “cheated on me.” One thing the purity culture doesn’t do well is trust.
Today is Halloween. Sally is giddy with excitement. I’m taking her trick-or-treating this evening, and she’s been asking every day for a month now if it is “Halloween Day.” Bobby will be going too, his first Halloween. But today, I can’t help but remember experiencing Halloween as a child raised on the border between evangelicalism and fundamentalism. I was taught that Halloween was Satan’s high holy day, complete with sacrifices by covens of witches and increased demonic activity. Halloween scared me to death.
If you listen to leaders on the Right it sounds like this election is the most important election of all time and that all of America’s freedoms are staked Romney defeating Obama. There’s just one problem. They do this every single year. For example, in 2008 Focus on the Family released a document called “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America,” explaining all the dire things that could very likely happen if Obama was elected. The goal was to scare evangelicals out of voting for Obama. Let’s see how the letter’s predictions compare with reality, shall we?
Fred Clark of The Slactivist recently put up a post about how evangelicals’ beliefs about the end times are influencing public policy, especially the belief that the UN is just a placeholder for the coming one world government that will be led by the Antichrist and will be dedicated to the extermination of Christians. To [...]
Evangelicals in a school district in Louisiana are objecting to a palm scanner that kids could use to pay for their lunches, thus eliminating the need for lunch money. Why? Because it sounds too similar to “the mark of the beast.” “As a Christian, I’ve read the Bible, you know go to church and stuff,” [...]
Growing up, “lust” was a big no no. No lusting allowed! Absolutely none! Lust was sinful, shameful, evil. It was the kind of word that was whispered. And what exactly was lust? Joshua Harris, the man who single handedly normalized the term “courtship” in evangelicalism, wrote a book called Sex Is Not the Problem (Lust [...]
The whole reason I was sold on the idea of participating in a parent-guided courtship in the first place was my fear that if I chose my own husband I would be blinded by love or manipulated by an unscrupulous young man and thus end up in a hellish marriage. Following a parent-guided courtship was [...]
As you may have noticed, I can sometimes be a bit angsty about raising my young daughter Sally without God. For one thing, God was just about the most important thing about my upbringing, and that makes raising children outside of religion seem completely foreign. For another thing, essentially all of our relatives on both [...]
I just today found out about something called Heritage Defense. Do you remember what I wrote before about the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA)? Basically, HSLDA is a form of legal insurance – you pay an annual premium and in return have any legal fees covered – for homeschool families. While HSLDA only defends [...]
What did you struggle with most when you were in the midst of questioning and/or leaving Christian Patriarchy/Quiverfull ideology? What was the hardest part? Joe: Hell. I struggled with that for all of five minutes. Then, it didn’t matter anymore. There was no proof of anything. So, if a god required me to believe in [...]
What first made you question the beliefs you were raised with? Was this initial questioning a frightening or liberating experience? Joe: I can’t put a finger on one experience that made me question my beliefs. When I mention my beliefs, I must say that I have rejected everything from quiverful and fundamentalist Christianity, all the [...]
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