The Real Lesson of My Story

Quick Libby Anne, rewrite the ending of your story, it’s not playing well with Christian test audiences!

A regular left this comment on my post about the Duggars, in response to comments from Christians suggesting that my own apostasy was proof that college turns people into atheists and that the Duggars are right to keep their kids from college. Yes, this commenter was being sarcastic in her suggestion that I rewrite my story. But frankly, it is this more than anything else that originally gave me qualms about telling my story. I knew people would say this.

You see, I am their worst nightmare.

Many in the Christian homeschooling world homeschool in large part to ensure that their children grow up to be conservative evangelical or fundamentalist Christians just like them. They are told by Christian homeschooling leaders that if they do just so—shelter their children, have them study from Christian textbooks, and keep them from the evils of world—their children will turn out perfectly. They are eliminating risk, they believe, and creating a hothouse environment for raising strong, secure, unwavering conservative evangelical or fundamentalist Christians.

But my parents raised me this way and I am today a feminist, a progressive, and an atheist. When coming in contact with my story, those in the Christian homeschooling world have two main options: they can conclude that the hothouse environment of Christian homeschooling doesn’t work after all, or they can conclude that my parents did something wrong and the hothouse was breached. If they go with the latter conclusion (which is unfortunate) the most obvious thing to blame is my parents’ willingness to send me to a secular college. (Actually, this is what my parents blame as well.)

But let’s talk about what actually made me lose my faith, shall we? At my secular college, I met evangelical young people who had attended public school and were still devout and Bible-believing. I realized then that much of what I had been taught about public schools was a lie. While there I came in contact with individuals who explained what evolution was and was not, and pointed out the glaring problems with creationism, and I realized, again, that I had been lied to by my parents and my community. Again and again this happened as I was confronted with the reality that the insular environment of my Christian homeschooling upbringing was built on a large number of falsehoods.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know the proper apologetics or creationist answers. My parents had taught me well, and I had been an eager student and had read and read and read from apologetics and creationist literature. This is why my parents were willing to send me to a secular college—they believed I was prepared, and would be in a position to influence others and win souls for Christ.

But the result was that I felt like things had been kept from me. I felt lied to. It was a terrible feeling and incredibly disillusioning. I began reevaluating everything my parents had taught me, because I had to. I couldn’t know what was truth and what was falsehood. Sure, you could argue that this wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t attended a secular university. But it also wouldn’t have happened this way if I hadn’t been fed falsehoods and half truths in the first place. If your beliefs can be maintained only by keeping out other information, your beliefs are shallow and delicate indeed.

I didn’t leave because I was brainwashed by the outside world. I left because we realized I was lied too in our own world. The trouble was not too much freedom, it was too much sheltering.

My sister Heidi’s journey away from out parents’ beliefs began when my parents dragged her through hell when she began dating another Christian homeschooler at age 18 without asking permission (this was after she had graduated and moved out of the house for school). That our parents—who were supposed to be Christians—could treat her like that shook her faith to its core. After, they did all the right things—they read the Bible, they prayed, they were on fire for God—and yet they could turn on their vulnerable fragile young adult daughter and treat her as broken, outside the fold, and in need of correction, just like that. She began wondering if this Jesus and his love were all they were talked up to be, if those so obviously devoted to him could do something like this.

Heidi didn’t leave because my parents didn’t spend enough time modeling regular prayer and Bible reading. She left because they claimed they loved Jesus and then turned on her when she most need them. The trouble was not too few devotions and prayers, it was too little acceptance.

And then there is my brother Judah. He dated on the sly in high school, and then felt the repercussions. He watched as the Christian homeschooling families around him, including our own, pecked their children apart over the smallest thing. It was the constant judgement—the picky rules that mattered more than people—that made him first question question our parents’ beliefs, and then determine that there must be a better way. He walked away and hasn’t looked back since.

Judah didn’t leave because there were not enough rules to keep him on the straight and narrow. He left because there were too many rules. The trouble was not too much freedom, it was being smothered by the constant surveillance.

I was talking to my husband Sean about his own family recently. His parents are observant Catholics, but they have sent their large brood to public school and have given their children a great deal of freedom. The rules, the judgement, the attempt to shelter—they don’t do those things. And you know what? So far, they have a better track record at keeping their children within the ideological fold than my own family. And when I look at my own family and at those who are still in the ideological fold, I realize something interesting—those still in are those who were given the most freedom, and those who experienced the least control. It is those they came down on who have left. I understand that this is all anecdotal, but it does raise some interesting questions.

And so my message to those who come here to my blog and say my story validates the evils of sending your child to college is this: If you want to keep your children in the conservative Christian fold, open your doors. Set your children free. They are more likely to take up residence in your vicinity if they have your unconditional love and acceptance and the world outside open to explore as they may desire than they are if you keep them locked in a cage. The cage they will escape, and they won’t come back. And why should they?