Love, Joy, Feminism

Have You Been "Left Behind"?

2012-02-19T09:30:00.000-05:00

First, I just finished a series on the end times that deals with everything from dispensationalism to the rapture. Click here to read more.

Second, have you been "left behind" by my switch to FreeThought Blogs? Make sure to check out my new blog here, and to add it to your reader if you're a regular.

Final post here and a big change

2012-02-10T10:16:00.002-05:00

I've been blogging here for nine months now. I've laughed, I've cried, I've grown a lot. I've made new friends and thought and learned and become a stronger person. I've worked through a lot and analyzed just about everything. And now, I'm ready for a change. Or more specifically, a move.

I have, you see, been invited to join the FreeThought Blogs network. FreeThought Blogs brings together a group of individual blogs under one umbrella, which allows readers to easily move from one to another following their interests. As you might guess, this blogging network is united by "free thinking" - in other words, while they write about everything from science to politics to feminism, all of the bloggers on FreeThought Blogs are atheists of some sort or another.

Trust me when I say that this is an exciting opportunity. For one thing, FreeThought Blogs is home to many of my favorite blogs, including Pharyngula, Greta Christina, and Blag Hag. For another thing, FreeThought Blogs will likely give my writing greater exposure.

But never fear, Love, Joy, Feminism is not changing. My content will be the same. My blogging style will be the same. My comments policy will be the same. The range of topics I cover will be the same. It has always been my goal on this blog to approach issues with respect and understanding, and that goal won't change.

I am going to clean this site up a bit and keep it here as a reference, especially dealing with issues regarding Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull. Most of my past posts and archives will also transfer over to the new site. In the future, I may post articles I write that deal directly with Christian Patriarchy or Quiverfull here to augment this site's purpose as a reference tool (if I do this I will either also post it on my FreeThoughts Blogs site, or at least post a link, so you don't have to worry about following more than one site).

It is my hope that my regular readers will follow me to the new site. It is my hope that my religious readers won't be put off by my move to an atheist blog network. Like I said, my comments policy won't change. My attempt to address issues with understanding and graciousness won't change. And finally, it is my hope that my new site will be as enjoyable and personable as so many of you have told me this site has been.

Here is the link to my new site:

Love, Joy, Feminism

Abortion, GLBT, the Bible, and Cloaking

2012-02-09T07:27:00.000-05:00

I've written recently about conservative arguments that having abortions causes post traumatic stress disorder and ruins women's lives, and that being gay means leading a destructive "lifestyle" that elevates your risk of suicide and depression. In each case I've pointed to self-fulfilling prophesies - if you can convince women having abortions that they are murdering babies, then of course they'll have problems afterwards, and if you continually tell gay young people that homosexuality is an abomination and a depraved "lifestyle," then of course those gay teens will be at a higher risk for depression and suicide. But there's another point to be made here as well.

At the core, evangelicals and fundamentalists, along with their conservative Catholic and Mormon kin, believe abortion and homosexuality are wrong because the Bible says they're wrong. Have you ever seen those bumper stickers, "God Said It, I Believe It, That Settles It"? Well, that's what's really going on here. This other stuff about abortion and homosexuality leading to depression and worse? It's all just extras, but extras that serve a very important purpose.

If you could prove that abortion did no damage at all to women (wait - that's what studies already say) or that being gay does not in and of itself make someone predisposed to suicide or depression (ditto), do you really think evangelicals and fundamentalists would change their minds? NO. Because that's not actually why they're against abortion or gay rights. They're actually against abortion and gay rights because they believe the Bible condemns both.

Why aren't evangelicals and fundamentalists honest about this? Well, quite simply, they know that condemning abortion because "the Bible says it's wrong" or damning homosexuality because "the Bible calls it an abomination" isn't going to get them very far with today's public. They know that if they want to succeed, they have to appear to be against abortion and gay rights out of love and compassion, not out of the dictates of their Holy Book. They know that winning the rhetoric war will take more than Bible thinking.

Think I'm stretching here? Let me offer some more examples.

Answers in Genesis is quick to tell anyone willing to listen that the theory of evolution has led to racism, genocide, and despair. There's a whole section of the Creation Museum depicting the results of the theory of evolution, complete with rebellious teens, promiscuity, homosexuality, and suicide. Evolution, they argue, tells people that their lives have no purpose, that they are no different from animals, that they are nothing but an accident, and that there are no moral standards. They even link Hitler and Stalin to Darwin, striving to show the harm caused by his theory. But the leaders of Answers in Genesis don't actually reject evolution and embrace creationism because of any of this. Rather, they reject evolution and embrace creationism because of what they believe the Bible says. God said it, they believe it, that settles it. In fact, even if you could somehow argue that the theory of evolution did the opposite of all that, that it saved lives and improved morality, Answers in Genesis would still be against it.

Have you noticed that abstinence only sex education programs generally focus not on remaining abstinent because God commands it but rather on remaining abstinent because the alternative is dangerous to your health and emotional well being? For instance, one exercise involves giving each child two tin foil hearts and telling them to crumple them together and then find a way to untangle them without ripping one. Another involves taping two kids' arms together, and then ripping off the tape and having one of the kids switch for another and doing it again, etc. The point is that every time you have sex with someone it creates a bond, and the more times you create that bond and then end it the weaker your next bond becomes. Yes, these exercises take place in public schools. Teens are told that having sex increases their likelihood of dropping out of school, dying of sexual diseases, or becoming unwed mothers. They're told that casual sex leads to higher risks of depression. Advocates of abstinence only education, though, don't actually believe sex before marriage is wrong for any of these reasons. They actually believe that sex before marriage is wrong because God said so. If there were no such thing as STDs and it were proven that having premarital sex didn't cause any harm at all, heck, even if it were proven that premarital sex made people healthier and happier, these evangelicals and conservatives who champion these abstinence only education programs would still be against premarital sex.

I'll stop here, but I bet you could think of some more examples without any trouble.

In addition to offering a new strategy for gaining a sympathetic public ear, these sorts of extras also offer evangelicals and fundamentalists a further assurance that they are right, that the Bible is true. No matter how many studies show that there is no real link between having an abortion and suffering subsequent depression, evangelicals and fundamentalists will continue to believe and argue that there is. And the same for the other issues. The reason is that believing in these extras allows them to buttress their belief in the Bible's dictates and to see God as truly kind and wise. After all, if God said homosexuality was destructive and sinful but gay people's lived experiences showed that it wasn't, that would make God look like a bit of a dick. But if God called homosexuality an abomination and, low and behold, gay people have higher suicide, depression, and disease rates, well, God's just that smart and compassionate. Believing in the negative consequences of things like abortion and evolutionary theory backs up evangelicals and fundamentalists' belief in the Bible and paints God as a knowing father rather than a dictatorial power-grabber.

Growing up, I was told that scientific knowledge has shown that pig meat was especially prone to be disease ridden during the time of Ancient Israel, and that this explains God's prohibition of pork. In other words, God commanded the Israelites not to eat pork because it would keep them from sickness and poisoning. I have not looked into this issue since, so I have no idea whether ancient pork was more dangerous than ancient beef, but I do know that this was used as an example of God's wisdom, and as a reason why we should trust God even if we don't understand his prohibitions at the time. Further, this understanding of God's prohibition of pork backed up our belief in the amazing truth of the Bible.

This leads to another point as well, though. My parents taught me that the Israelites at the time did not know why God prohibited pork. Rather, they simply had to trust and obey. Even if evangelicals and fundamentalists could be made to believe, say, that being gay is not destructive or depression-inducing, the words of the Bible would still be there. Believing that homosexuality is destructive may buttress one's belief in the Biblical prohibitions, but it is not the core. At it's core is "the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it." At it's core is trusting God, having faith, and obeying the Word.

Anoka, Minnesota, and "Curing" the Gay

2012-02-08T07:17:00.001-05:00

Many of you may already have read this piece on Rolling Stone about the rash of suicides in Minnesota's Anoka-Hennepin School District. In a nutshell, the districts "no homo promo" policy has resulted in a very negative school atmosphere for gay teens, a half a dozen of whom have taken their lives in response. The district is now reexamining its policies in this area. As it does so, the local Parents Action League has submitted its own proposal, urging the school to teach "ex-homosexual therapy."

Just what is going on here? To understand, you have to be able to get into the minds of each side. You see, each side thinks it's doing what's in the best interests of these gay teens. Each side thinks the other wants to ruin these teens lives. It's the sort of irreconcilable conflict that makes actual communication between the two sides difficult if not impossible.

First, some excerpts from Rolling Stone.

Every morning, Brittany Geldert stepped off the bus and bolted through the double doors of Fred Moore Middle School, her nerves already on high alert, bracing for the inevitable.

"Dyke."

Pretending not to hear, Brittany would walk briskly to her locker, past the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders who loitered in menacing packs.

"Whore."

Like many 13-year-olds, Brittany knew seventh grade was a living hell. But what she didn't know was that she was caught in the crossfire of a culture war being waged by local evangelicals inspired by their high-profile congressional representative Michele Bachmann, who graduated from Anoka High School and, until recently, was a member of one of the most conservative churches in the area. When Christian activists who considered gays an abomination forced a measure through the school board forbidding the discussion of homosexuality in the district's public schools, kids like Brittany were unknowingly thrust into the heart of a clash that was about to become intertwined with tragedy.

...

There was another common thread: Four of the nine dead were either gay or perceived as such by other kids, and were reportedly bullied. The tragedies come at a national moment when bullying is on everyone's lips, and a devastating number of gay teens across the country are in the news for killing themselves. Suicide rates among gay and lesbian kids are frighteningly high, with attempt rates four times that of their straight counterparts; studies show that one-third of all gay youth have attempted suicide at some point (versus 13 percent of hetero kids), and that internalized homophobia contributes to suicide risk.

Against this supercharged backdrop, the Anoka-Hennepin school district finds itself in the spotlight not only for the sheer number of suicides but because it is accused of having contributed to the death toll by cultivating an extreme anti-gay climate. "LGBTQ students don't feel safe at school," says Anoka Middle School for the Arts teacher Jefferson Fietek, using the acronym for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning. "They're made to feel ashamed of who they are. They're bullied. And there's no one to stand up for them, because teachers are afraid of being fired."

These teens, then, were victims of the anti-gay climate fostered in the school district by school rules against discussion of homosexuality put in place under pressure from local evangelicals. If you're told that you are an abomination every day, day after day, you eventually start to feel like there's something wrong with you. If even teachers don't stand up for you, you start to feel like you're not worth protecting. Maybe you should just end it all. And an alarming number of these teens did.

In April, Justin came home from school and found his mother at the top of the stairs, tending to the saltwater fish tank. "Mom," he said tentatively, "a kid told me at school today I'm gonna go to hell because I'm gay."

"That's not true. God loves everybody," his mom replied. "That kid needs to go home and read his Bible."

Justin shrugged and smiled, then retreated to his room. It had been a hard day: the annual "Day of Truth" had been held at school, an evangelical event then-sponsored by the anti-gay ministry Exodus International, whose mission is to usher gays back to wholeness and "victory in Christ" by converting them to heterosexuality. Day of Truth has been a font of controversy that has bounced in and out of the courts; its legality was affirmed last March, when a federal appeals court ruled that two Naperville, Illinois, high school students' Day of Truth T-shirts reading BE HAPPY, NOT GAY were protected by their First Amendment rights. (However, the event, now sponsored by Focus on the Family, has been renamed "Day of Dialogue.") Local churches had been touting the program, and students had obediently shown up at Anoka High School wearing day of truth T-shirts, preaching in the halls about the sin of homosexuality. Justin wanted to brush them off, but was troubled by their proselytizing. Secretly, he had begun to worry that maybe he was an abomination, like the Bible said.

This is what is meant by creating an "anti-gay" climate. And yes, Justin went on to commit suicide. How did evangelicals respond to accusations that they had created an anti-gay climate that had led these gay teens to commit suicide?

Minnesota Family Council president Tom Prichard blogged that Justin's suicide could only be blamed upon one thing: his gayness. "Youth who embrace homosexuality are at greater risk [of suicide], because they've embraced an unhealthy sexual identity and lifestyle," Prichard wrote. Anoka-Hennepin conservatives formally organized into the Parents Action League, declaring opposition to the "radical homosexual" agenda in schools. Its stated goals, advertised on its website, included promoting Day of Truth, providing resources for students "seeking to leave the homosexual lifestyle," supporting the neutrality policy and targeting "pro-gay activist teachers who fail to abide by district policies."

Asked on a radio program whether the anti-gay agenda of her ilk bore any responsibility for the bullying and suicides, Barb Anderson, co-author of the original "No Homo Promo," held fast to her principles, blaming pro-gay groups for the tragedies. She explained that such "child corruption" agencies allow "quote-unquote gay kids" to wrongly feel legitimized. "And then these kids are locked into a lifestyle with their choices limited, and many times this can be disastrous to them as they get into the behavior which leads to disease and death," Anderson said. She added that if LGBT kids weren't encouraged to come out of the closet in the first place, they wouldn't be in a position to be bullied.

To evangelicals, the problem is gay activism. These teens, evangelicals argue, committed suicide not because they were bullied or made to feel worthless, but rather because they were gay. Being gay is a "destructive lifestyle" that leads to high suicide rates, spiritual darkness, devastating diseases, and, finally, death. The solution is not to validate these teens' "homosexual temptations" as gay activists would. The solution is not to tell these teens that "this is how you are and you can't change" but rather to work to change these teens so that they can live long happy godly lives.

This is why evangelicals in the Parents Action League have responded to these suicides by urging that ex-gay therapy be taught in the schools. It is also the reason the PAL wants the district to teach students about "Gay Related Immune Deficiency" ("GRID") and the other health risks of the "gay lifestyle." AIDS has not been referred to as GRID in the medical community for over twenty-five years, and is no longer seen as a "gay" problem, but you have to understand that when AIDS first came to public attention in the 1980s it was seen as a gay problem and was even seen by many as God's judgement on gay people for their gross immorality.

The evangelicals in the Parents Action League mean well. They're not rubbing their hands in glee wondering how many other gay teens they can rid the earth of. They believe what they're saying. They believe that gay tendencies can be cured, that the "gay lifestyle" is destructive and harmful, and that the most loving thing you can do for these "gay teens" is to teach them the Truth, not tell them that they are stuck with their immoral feelings and locked into a tragic life.

And that is why I say it's almost impossible for these two groups to communicate. Anytime a gay rights advocate says "we just need equal rights, freedom, and safety for all, including in our schools" these evangelicals hear "we want to tell these kids they have to follow our immoral and destructive lifestyle." When the evangelicals say "we just need to cure these kids and turn them away from destructive lifestyles," gays hear "we need to make these kids' lives hell and fill them with self loathing." It makes me think of this poster that was recently sent home with high school kids in Maryland:

This poster turns everything on its head. It's all about explaining that people with gay attractions can change their sexual orientations and be straight. They don't have to be gay and shouldn't be forced to. The most relevant excerpt is this:

However, there are those in society who refuse to respect an individual's right to self-determination. Consequently, formerly gay men and women are discriminated against simply because they dare to exist. Ex-gays and their supporters are denied equal access and support, forcing them to remain silent for fear of negative reactions and disapproval.

In other words, the ones who are being discriminated against are the ones who are spreading the message that gays can change, that they don't have to live those destructive "lifestyles," they can live long, happy, normal lives if they want. The problem is the gay rights advocates who are trying to make people gay whether they want to be or not. If they would stop telling people with gay tendencies that they're gay and it's okay, those people could find a way to change and gain love, acceptance, and spiritual healing.

Of course, this is all predicated on several myths.

Myth #1: People aren't born gay, they are made gay by environmental factors.
Myth #2: Gay people can actually become straight through reparative therapy.
Myth #3: The "gay lifestyle" is destructive and leads to depression and early death.
Myth #4: Gay people commit suicide because it gives them a tendency toward suicide.

The truth is that gay people don't "choose" to be gay any more than straight people "choose" to be straight. You can't choose who you feel physically attracted to. Try looking at a picture of someone you feel no sexual attraction for, and then forcing yourself to feel sexually attracted to him/her. Or vice versa, try looking at a picture of someone you find very sexually attractive and then feeling no sexual attraction for him/her. It doesn't work that way. Gay people can choose to love celibate lives or can marry someone of the opposite gender in an attempt to "fix" themselves, but that doesn't change their sexual attractions. Oh, and no one is trying to tell gay people want to be celibate or marry those of the opposite gender that they can't do that, but rather that there are other valid options out there for them.

The truth is that gay people are at higher risk from suicide because of homophobia, not because they're gay. I know a gay guy who tried to kill himself in high school because of the messages he received in church. He didn't try to kill himself because he had gay attractions, but rather because he believed those gay attractions meant he was sinful and evil, and he try as he might he couldn't change those attractions. Those gay teens killed themselves because they couldn't see a worthwhile future in the midst of the hell they were living in, a hell created by homophobia, not by their gayness.

But there's a deeper problem. Even dispelling these myths won't change the minds of evangelicals like those on the Parents Action League. Why? Because their real objections come from the Bible. They dress it up by talking about the "destructiveness" of the "gay lifestyle" (and they really do believe that), but their objections come, at the base, from Bible verses condemning homosexuality as "an abomination." Now there are gay Christians who explain that those verses are all misunderstood, but evangelicals, like their fundamentalist kin, generally take the Bible fairly literally and look askance at attempts to "reinterpret" the traditional understandings of key Bible passages. For them, the Bible says it's wrong, so it's wrong.

Given that, I'm not completely sure how to fix this problem. The best solution, I suppose, is to continue the strategy of normalizing homosexuality - the more gay people someone knows, normal, worthwhile, fulfilled gay people, the harder it becomes to sustain beliefs in the immorality and destructive nature of the "gay lifestyle." In other words, we can keep working to dispel the four myths listed above. And if poll numbers are any indication, this strategy is succeeding. But it's important to remember that as long as there are those who believe the Bible condemns homosexuality as sinful, immoral, and destructive, though, we will always have people like those on the Parents Action League urging that the real solution is to "cure" gay teens. Deeply held religious beliefs don't always allow for a lot of give, and this is one situation where we see that loud and clear.

Abortion, "God's Plan," and "Selfish" Women

2012-02-07T06:17:00.001-05:00

I've often said that when I was pro-life it was because I honestly believed the embryo/fetus was a person with a soul. This is true, but there's something more. The reality is that I had no idea what women who found themselves with unplanned pregnancies faced. I had no understanding of the reasons someone would choose to end a pregnancy.

I was raised by a stay at home mother who had baby after baby without ever a threat to her health or the family's finances. No pregnancy was planned, but every pregnancy was welcome. No pregnancy was ever inconvenient or any trouble at all. I couldn't conceptualize what it would be like to want only two children, or none, or to face an unplanned pregnancy on a tight budget or as a working mother. Things like maternity leave or daycare costs were foreign to me. I had but one word for women who had abortions: selfish.

I believed that it was women's role, as laid down by God, to have children. Many children, presumably, because children I believed children were always a blessing and never a burden. And child bearing was what women were made for, after all. It was also women's role to remain within the home, cooking, cleaning, and rearing and educating the children. It was laid forth by God. Women whose chose anything else were selfish, seeking personal fulfillment over the needs of their families. Women who wanted to limit their family size were selfish. Women who felt their hearts sink rather than leap at a positive pregnancy test were selfish.

The problem was not unplanned pregnancies. The problem was not tight economic situations or a work environment for women that does not always accommodate pregnancy. The problem was selfish women, women who didn't want to be pregnant, women who didn't want to be mothers, women who didn't want to stay home and care for their children. If women would just stop being selfish and realize the role they were created for, the whole abortion issue would disappear.

Today, I don't want a dozen or more children. I don't even want eight children, or five. I don't want to be a stay at home mom. I don't want to spend ten full years pregnant or twenty years changing diapers. I don't actually particularly enjoy being pregnant. I want to work, to continue on a career that I find intellectually stimulating and fulfilling. I want to raise only a few children, but to invest in each one and raise them well. I want to choose when and if I become pregnant, to be able to have my economics and work situation in order, to be as prepared as possible for each child I decide to bring into this world. I have become one of those selfish, selfish women.

Except that I don't feel selfish. I feel responsible. I feel loving. I feel happy.

The truth is, not wanting a large family isn't "selfish." Not wanting children at all isn't "selfish." Wanting to plan when and how many children to have is not "selfish." Wanting to work outside the home isn't "selfish." Feeling your heart sink when you learns that you are unexpectedly and inconveniently pregnant is not "selfish." In fact, it's kind of normal.

You know what strikes me as selfish? Thinking your own choices are the only acceptable ones and wanting to impose those choices on everyone else. Telling other people how they should live. Expecting every woman to fit a one-size-fits-all mold you've fashioned from your reading of your holy book.

Many women have abortions not because they are "selfish" but because they are responsible. Sixty percent of women who have abortions already have children. For some women, an abortion is the only financially acceptable option. For some women, an abortion is needed so that they can properly care for the children they already have. For some women, an abortion allows them to finish their education so that they can someday give their future children better lives than they themselves had. Women don't have abortions lightly or on a whim.

It's often stated that women faced with unplanned pregnancies should just go through the pregnancy and then give the child up for adoption. This is the "selfless" thing to do, and those who choose to abort rather than offer their child for adoption are "selfish." There are several problems with this argument.

First, not everyone is comfortable with the idea of having a child and letting someone else raise it, probably without ever seeing it again or knowing if it is having a good life. I know I'm not comfortable with that idea.

Second, pregnancy is an extremely difficult and arduous and invasive and inconvenient process. Pregnancy means losing control of your body for nine months, facing debilitating nausea and food aversions, a lowered immune system, a swollen belly and altered sense of gravity, physical discomfort and potential back problems, and finally, the painful and difficult process of labor, followed by a recovery that takes months. Oh, and did I mention that pregnancy includes having to buy a whole new wardrobe and answer questions from family, friends, and ever-friendly strangers?

When I was growing up, I saw adoption as the solution to the problem of abortion. I threw the idea out there flippantly, like it was so obviously a simple and easy solution. I now realize that it absolutely isn't. If a woman wants to go through the pregnancy and give the child up for adoption, great. But no woman should be expected or forced to do so.

Today I understand abortion as a much more complex issue than I did growing up. If I still thought that an embryo/fetus was a person with a soul and all that, I would likely still oppose abortion, but I would at least understand it as a much more difficult question than I had thought it was. Abortion isn't about "selfish" women flouting "God's plan" for their lives. Abortion is about women in tight situations trying to make the best decisions for themselves, their current and future children, and their families. Sometimes, there are no easy answers.

On Weakness and Temptation: The Checkout Aisle and Me

2012-02-06T09:34:00.000-05:00

I learned growing up that everyone has their own particular weaknesses, their own particular points of temptation. For men it might be porn, for women it might be gossip. In order to avoid your temptation you might have to avoid a particular store - like Victoria's Secret - or a particular activity - like watching chic flicks. Mine was the checkout aisle.

Every time I approached the checkout aisle at the grocery, I knew I was in for a battle. It was the magazines, you see.

The trouble wasn’t that most of the models on the magazines were immodestly dressed. I was a girl, after all, and (in my understanding at the time) only boys dealt with that trouble. Instead, the problem was that the magazines were not godly. They were worldly and broadcast worldly ideas. I had to avoid such corruption like the plague.

And so as I entered the checkout aisle, I would do my best to avert my eyes. Let me tell you, not looking at something you really want to look at is really hard, especially when you insert the allure of the forbidden. Sometimes, furtively, so that my mother or sisters wouldn’t see, I would glance at the magazine covers.

50 Great Sex Tips!

Brad Breaks Up With Jennifer – Again!

How to Make Your Man WANT You

And then I would avert my eyes in shame. Once again, I had faced temptation and lost. The guilt followed me out of the store. Why did I feel such a desire to look, I wondered. What was wrong with me that I couldn’t avoid worldly things and keep my mind on what was pure?

I felt sorry for my brothers, because they had it worse than I did. When we would go to the mall, which was rare, my mom would tell them “look right” or “look left” or “eyes on the floor” to warn them when there was a storefront with immodest mannequins or pictures. When we would watch a movie that had women dressed immodestly or kissing or making out, mom would tell the boys when to look away. If it was hard for me to keep my eyes to myself in the checkout aisle, how much harder it must be for my poor brothers to avoid the temptation the world set in front of them, practically naked, every day!

I hadn’t thought about all this for a long time, but was reminded of it this past weekend in the checkout aisle. As I stood looking at the magazine covers, laughing at the images and article titles, I suddenly had a flashback and remembered the struggle I used to have there. I remembered the angst, the shame, the guilt, the fear. And I realized that it was gone, totally and completely gone. I still feel the desire to look at the magazines in the checkout aisle, but now I simply laugh at them.

Today, I’m not concerned that the magazines in the checkout aisle will cause me any harm because I no longer see them as anything other than what they are, magazines. Sometimes I even leaf through one as I wait, something I never would have dreamed of long ago. The power these magazines used to hold over me is gone.

I wonder sometimes if these ideas of “weaknesses” and “temptations” don’t create more problems than they solve. The thing is, a glance at these magazine covers would never have caused me to lose my faith. By thinking that they might lead me astray, though, I gave them a power over me that they never would have had otherwise. By seeing them as something forbidden and corrupting, I only elevated my desire to look and magnified my sense of guilt and shame if I did.

I think of my brothers. Did believing that looking at this or that storefront in the mall, or this or that modernly dressed actor, would lead them astray into sin and corruption actually magnify these things and invest them with a power they would not otherwise have had? Did holding these things up as forbidden make them a stumbling block in their own faith lives in a way they need not have been?

Either way, I’m glad the checkout aisle has ceased to be a place of battle for me. Rather than feel guilt and shame and self-loathing for looking, I can laugh at the magazine covers and then head home with a light heart and a car full of groceries.

The Ability to Disagree

2012-02-03T09:07:00.001-05:00

I've been thinking more and more about how much I appreciate being able to disagree - or, more specifically, being able to disagree without having people flip out.

Growing up on the line between fundamentalism and evangelicalism, in a family influenced by the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements, disagreement was not allowed. Or to be more specific, disagreement simply did not happen. I have to be completely honest, the first time I learned that mainstream couples are okay with not agreeing with each other on everything regarding religion or politics I was shocked. Coming from my background, that made no sense.

As a child and teen, I never disagreed with my parents, or with my church. Why would I? What we had was truth. When I reached college and began asking questions, my parents and my church had no ability to agree to disagree. Why? Because if I disagreed with them, then I disagreed with truth, and that meant I was flat wrong.

Conservative Christians believe that they have the absolute truth. Further, they believe that those who believe differently are misled or worse, even heretics or bound for hell. Growing up, everyone I knew believed the same thing. If someone had decided to vote Democrat, they would have faced censure. If someone had suddenly announced that they believed God created the world using evolution, they would have been accused of heresy. If someone had declared themselves pro-choice, they would have faced rejection.

This is a big part of why you see churches and denominations split so often. If you hold truth up as absolute, you cannot have disagreements. Churches split over how to hold communion, how salvation takes place, or whether to baptize infants. When your eternal security is at stake, disagreement cannot be accepted.

When you believe you have absolute and final truth, and that having that truth is necessary to keep you from eternal torture and send you to the bliss of heaven, you lose the ability to agree to disagree. You also lose the ability to look beyond what you have and consider other ideas.

This was one of the biggest problems I faced when I started to question the things I'd been taught. Disagreement was not accepted. It was not okay. It could not be tolerated. This put me on a collision course not only with my family but also with the friends I grew up with and the church I grew up in. I had gone from one of them to an outsider overnight.

As I walked away from the pain, I have been amazed again and again by the beauty and freedom of being allowed to disagree. Like I've said before, I was no longer expected to stay inside a box. I was no longer being judged, censured. Instead, the sky was the limit.

My husband and I don't agree on everything, especially when it comes to politics. But you know what? That's okay. We agree to disagree. Sometimes we discuss a given point of disagreement, each trying to get the other to understand and each trying to understand the other, but sometimes that becomes frustrating and we put it aside. Because you know what? It doesn't really matter whether what companies like Bain Capital do is good or bad. It doesn't really matter whether jails should focus on punishing or rehabilitating. It doesn't really matter. And we know that. Neither of us claims to hold absolute truth - this is a complicated world, after all - so disagreement is okay. And normal. And healthy. Actually, if my husband and I always agreed on everything, I would be a bit concerned.

The other graduate students in my program generally assume that those in the program are politically liberal, but there are some who aren't, and no one cares. I very much disagree with some of my fellow graduate students on the issue of home birthing, and that's okay. One graduate student is ardently pro-homeschooling and some are extremely religions, but no one cares because no one expects uniformity. Disagreement is okay, and it is respected.

I love being able to try out new ideas. I love being able to explore. I love being free to disagree. I love not having to face consequences or censure for disagreeing. I love it.

Sex, Back Rubs, and Socially Constructed Value

2012-02-02T07:48:00.000-05:00

In a comment on my Purity Myth post, I said the following in response to comment:

"As to the "deeply physical, emotional, and spiritual act" you say sex is, I would just point out that there are a LOT of people disagree with you. I personally don't see anything spiritual about it at all, and I think the only emotional thing about it is what you choose to invest in it. As for it being "deeply physical," so is a back rub or playing football or wrestling."

I have gotten a lot of flack for saying the part in bold. I have actually deleted some of the comments I have gotten in response because they were crude and offensive. But since so many people have found what I said above incomprehensible and itself offensive, I thought I would explain what I meant by it.

Stripped of all cultural connotations and constructed meaning, sex is simply a physical act like any other physical act. It is two people rubbing their genitals together to obtain physical pleasure. Bonobo monkeys, as an example, use sex as a social bonding tool just as other monkeys groom each other. Dolphins similarly engage in recreational sex (i.e., having sex purely for pleasure), and are not monogamous. When ducks have sex, it is nothing but an annoyance to the female, who either stays still to wait it out or struggles until it is over. At its heart, sex is simply this physical act.

The value we place on sex is socially constructed. The reason that so many people see sex as something incredibly intimate and emotional, something completely different from a back rub or wrestling, is not because sex naturally that has these characteristics but rather because that is the social construction our society has built up around it. As I said above, the only emotional thing about sex is what we choose to invest it with.

In our society, different people and subcultures invest sex with different meanings and value. In the circles in which I grew up, sex is invested with spiritual meaning and extreme intimacy and virginity is invested with incredible value and meaning. And yet, on the other hand, there are people who have casual sex who do not construct sex as something profoundly intimate or invest it with any sort of spiritual meaning. For them, sex is just something to do for fun. There are even people who have open relationships, in which they share an intimate and loving bond with their partner and yet have sex with other individuals. Because they do not see sex as something extremely intimate or spiritual, having sex with other individuals does not hurt their relationships with their partners.

Sex only has whatever meaning you invest in it.

I have a theory on why so many - though not all - cultures have constructed sex as something special, different, and to be highly guarded. Sex is linked to reproduction, and in the past this link could not be severed. Given that sex might lead to unplanned pregnancies, societies built up social and legal codes around sex, limited the sex of virtuous women to marriage (whatever that meant in that society), and carefully guarded the perimeters. It made sense to sanction premarital or extramarital sex if sex could not be separated from reproduction.

As for sex being especially intimate and emotional, that actually is probably a more recent invention. I'm not an expert on the history of sex and sexuality, but I do know that in Ancient Greece men had sex with boys in Ancient Rome men had sex with whoever they owned, whether it be their wives or their slaves, and in Ancient Israel men took multiple wives and had sex with concubines. Oh, and in all of these societies men had sex with female war captives as well. Sex wasn't seen as something that should necessarily bring pleasure to the female involved, and it wasn't something necessarily intimate or emotional. Rather, sex was something someone with power took from someone without power.

During the middle ages, women were seen as especially sexual and as therefore especially sinful. This changed in the early nineteenth century when women came to be seen as sexually passive, and therefore especially virtuous and moral. Women used their ascribed virtue to champion a variety of reform issues, and the church became overwhelmingly female as men gravitated toward work outside the home and a political life in the public sphere and women came seen as the keepers of the home, the nurturers of children, and the keeper of the family alter. Care for children's spiritual state transferred from the father to the mother during this period as well. All of this, though, was predicated on women's especial purity, which rested upon their sexual passivity. Close your eyes and think of England, anyone?

In her How Love Conquered Marriage, Stephanie Coontz reveals that until recently marriage was based more on economics and family ties than on any special intimacy or feeling between the spouses. The idea we have of marriage today, the "companionate marriage," actually only rose to prominence in the early twentieth century. It was then that the idea that marriage should be built upon sexual satisfaction and emotional fulfillment and support, rather than on economic or social necessity, was born. During this same period, the first three decades of the twentieth century, a wealth of sex manuals advising couples on finding joint sexual satisfaction flooded the market and women cast off the idea that they should be sexually passive, replacing it with a new idea of mutual sexual satisfaction. I would posit that the prevailing view of sex as especially emotional and intimate, an almost spiritual bond between two equal partners, probably arose in concert with new ideas about marriage that developed during this time.

The first few decades of the twentieth century also saw further challenges to the gender hierarchy with the coming of the "new woman," who worked outside of the home, cast aside her corsets and donned short skirts, dated, danced, and drank. I think it likely that the opening up of new options for women, which began to pick up speed in the late nineteenth century with the rise of job options for single women in new technologies such as secretarial work or telephone operating, was necessary for the development of the companionate marriage, which uncoupled marriage from economic necessity and instead coupled it to ideas of love between two (relatively) equal partners.

Today, now that sex has been decoupled from reproduction, it no longer needs to be carefully guarded or circumscribed as before. Sex no longer contains the potential threat to society that it used to, and it therefore no longer needs to be contained in the same way. This uncoupling of sex and reproduction also makes the act itself less different from other physical acts. The rise of casual sex should not be a surprise, because for those who don't view sex with a special degree of intimacy it truly doesn't have to be all that different from a massage or a playful wrestle. Now of course, plenty of people today continue to ascribe intimacy and emotional value to sex, still influenced by societal norms arising with the emergence of the companionate marriage, and it's therefore not surprising that even as some people have casual sex most don't have sex with those who aren't their partners (whether dating or married).

This entire conversation might be boiled down to one point: In everything beyond the basic physical act itself, sex is a social construct. That social construction of sex has changed over time - and note that this entire post has been discussing constructions of sex in the West, ignoring the rest of the world which adds greater difference and diversity. Sex is not naturally imbued with meaning, with emotion or intimacy - those are things we give it.

But of course, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians do not see their ideas about sex as a social construction. I earlier pointed to bonobos, dolphins, and ducks by way of comparison, but Christians believe that God has set man apart from the animals, giving him a soul and making him special. Given this, evangelicals and fundamentalists hold that sex is naturally and always much, much more than just a physical act - it is, and always will be, a highly intimate, emotional, and spiritual act that should only take place within the bonds of matrimony. And, they contend, this isn't a construct - it's simply the natural way of things as set up by God.

This is why I was taught that people who have casual sex will be scarred by it, and that people who have sex with other partners before marriage will live with guilt and shame for the rest of their lives. What I didn't realize is that this only happens if people act against the social constructions of sex that they have internalized. In other words, if someone who places great value on sex and sees it as something spiritual and intimate that should be saved for marriage has casual sex, they will only naturally be scarred by it. In contrast, if someone who doesn't think sex is different from any other physical act done to achieve pleasure has casual sex, there will be no scarring at all. The scarring and guilt comes not from the sex or lack of it, but from the disconnect between internal beliefs and outward actions.

This reminds me of two posts I've written, one some time ago and one recently. First, I wrote in Sexpectations about how shocked I was when my husband-to-be told me that my saving my virginity as a present for him meant nothing, and that he'd actually prefer that I wasn't a virgin if given the choice, and concluded that virginity is not naturally valuable. Second, in my recent post about Post Abortion Trauma, I wrote that women will face shame and guilt after their abortion if they believe they have killed a child, but will not face such feelings if they don't think abortion is murder. I suggested that things like holding signs with bloody pictures of fetuses and forcing women to watch ultrasounds is a way of trying to induce guilt in women who would not otherwise feel it by convincing them that they are murdering their children.

I think sometimes the same thing happens with sex: Those who practice casual sex will only feel guilt or shame if they are convinced that sex is something intimate and emotional and that losing their virginity somehow makes them worth less, and that is just what many sex education programs in high schools across the country are busily trying to convince young people of. If conservatives can convince high schoolers that sex is naturally something intimate and emotional, those young people will be less likely to have premaritial or casual sex, or at least more likely to feel guilty when they do. If they feel guilty for having premarital or casual sex, well, that plays into the conservative agenda as evidence that they are right: sex is something that is naturally intimate and emotional, and having premarital or casual sex does bring about negative consequences including low self esteem and depression. But those feelings are not the natural result of having premarital or casual sex, but rather an induced result brought about by the constant drum of the message that sex is naturally intimate and emotional.

One thing I have found most fascinating about studying society, history, and comparative religion is this idea of social construction. Sex, gender, marriage, and even the family itself are all social constructions. Their constructions have changed over time and vary between societies. The family today is completely different from the family in the colonial period, or the family in Ancient Rome, or the family in Ancient Israel, just as it is completely different from the family in Saudi Arabia or the family in Papau New Guinea. Our constructions of sex and marriage have changed over time and differ between societies just as drastically. I could study these things endlessly and never cease to be fascinated.

But fundamentalists and evangelicals cannot see it this way. For them, sex, gender, marriage, and the family are not social constructions but rather natural orders laid down by God. Sex is intimate, emotional, spiritual, and only for within marriage; men and women are created with different roles to play, the male as protector and provider and the woman as nurturer and homemaker; marriage is a voluntary partnership between a man and a woman in which the two share an intimate emotional bond and the man leads while the woman submits; and the family is composed of a husband, a wife, and children, and has a natural hierarchical order in which the parents train the children in God's truth and the children obey.

The really ironic thing is that the very social constructions fundamentalists and evangelicals argue are the natural order of sex, gender, marriage, and the family are themselves fairly new, and they are not laid out clearly in the Bible either, but rather read back into it. The Bible was written during a time when sex, gender, marriage, and the family were constructed quite differently from the way they are today, and also from the construction fundamentalists and evangelicals argue is natural. The companionate ideal of marriage, after all, is only about a hundred years old, and the idea that sex is an intimate and emotional thing is, unless I am very much mistaken, not much older. The nuclear ideal of the family is also new, a product of the last two hundred years. Even the idea that the man should provide while the woman should stay at home and nurture the children is only two hundred years old. Evangelicals and fundamentalists have grabbed onto these particular social constructions, constructions developed only in the past few hundred years, and declared them natural and god given.

To bring this post back full circle, if you see sex as especially intimate and emotional, that's fine. I'm not telling you to change that. What I am telling you is that that is a social construction rather than a natural order, and that you therefore should not expect everyone else to view sex the same way you do. Sex is a physical act that is imbued with meaning by individuals and societies. Now that sex has been uncoupled from reproduction, sex doesn't have to be different from a good back rub or a wrestle. The reason that, for most people, it is different is that they give it meaning that separates it from those other physical acts. That meaning is constructed, it changes over time, and it varies from person to person, from religion to religion, and from culture to culture. And personally, I find that fascinating.

Freedom

2012-02-01T08:46:00.000-05:00

What I love best about my life today is the absolute freedom I feel. I can believe what I want. I can do what I want. I can wear what I want. I can say what I want. I can be who I want. I cannot emphasize how revolutionary this all is.

When you stop trying to shove yourself into a box, everything suddenly changes. When you allow yourself to ask questions, a whole new world opens up. I so often feel like I'm standing in the middle of a meadow in the spring, whirling in circles and looking up at the sky, the birds singing, the crickets chirping, and the wind blowing in my hair. Freedom.

Now sure, I have responsibilities. I have to work, raise a kid, communicate with my husband. But those are responsibilities I have chosen to take on because I want to, not because I feel like I'm supposed to or because someone tells me I have to.

No one is telling me what I can or cannot do. No one is watching my hemline to make sure it falls to my knee, or monitoring my language to make sure I don't use words like "dang," or keeping track of whether I spend time reading the Bible or go to church.

No one expects some sort of ideological conformity from me. No one is watching for heresies in my beliefs or expecting me to agree with them. There are no repercussions if I disagree, believe something different, vote for someone different. There is no expectation of ideological purity.

My friendships are not contingent on ideological or lifestyle agreement. My friends don't care if I agree with them on science, politics, or religion. My friendships aren't built upon ideological agreement or limited to those who share my views.

I love being able to explore, to try out new ideas, to look beyond the borders of my understanding. I have a thirst to learn, and not to learn so that I can back up my preconceived ideas, but to learn so that I can better understand the world around me.

The only check on these feelings of absolute freedom is my parents and the friends I grew up with. I know that they are watching. I know that they are judging. When I am around them, which is not all that often, I generally hide my "heretical" views in a box for the sake of maintaining harmony. But my identity is no longer bound up in all of them. As time goes on, the less and less I worry about what they think of me. The more water passes under the bridge, the less of a hold they have on me.

I think I've drunk too deeply of the waters of freedom to find the idea of going back into the box they built for me anything but repulsive. I've seen the world outside. I've seen what it's like to be free to choose my own beliefs, wear what I like, and be who I want, and there is now no going back. Growing up, my parents talked about finding "freedom in Jesus," but when I look at their beliefs, their community, their church, I see more rules and emphasis on conformity than freedom.

No matter how hard my life gets, or what twists and turns my life takes me on, I will always have this freedom - freedom to believe, freedom to do, freedom to be. I wouldn't give it up for anything. Now that I've found freedom and no one can take from me, the future look amazing.

Last Child or Second of Many?

2012-01-31T10:36:00.000-05:00

"Do you know what you're having yet?"

"Yes, it's a boy."

"Perfect! One of each!"

The assumption, of course, is that I'm done. I can't tell you how often I get this. People find out I'm expecting, find out it's a boy and that I already have a girl in preschool, and they assume I'm done. Two kids, one of each, the perfect American family. It's not that I'm necessarily not done, it's just that having been raised in a family influenced by the ideals of the Quiverfull movement, it's hard to imagine actually thinking that way.

In a Quiverfull family, the second child is simply the second of many. The idea that it might be the last is laughable. That second child will be the second in a stair step line of children lined up to show off, the second in command when you leave the kids to run an errand, the second helper when new children arrive, and the second to use each homeschool textbook.

And indeed, true to form, my parents and friends from growing up assume something totally different from the "normal" people I know. When they find out I'm expecting my second, they say things like "congratulations, and my God bless you with many more!" Far from having my last child, the assume that I'm just getting started.

This dichotomy is so strange. One set of people assumes that having my second, and a boy at that, means I'm now done with child bearing. The other set of people assumes that this is just the start of a much larger family of five, seven, nine, or even a dozen children.

Does this mean that one group of people is more excited for me than the other? Not necessarily. What has struck me is simply how different the reactions are.

The other thing that's different is the realization that after this use I could simply pass the bassinet on rather than storing it because I may never need it again. The bouncer seat, the baby bath tub, and all the rest, even the baby clothes themselves. I grew up in a world where a woman could expect to need all of that baby paraphernalia almost continuously for fifteen or twenty years. Imagining a world where I could, in my mid-twenties, simply pass those things on and be done with them forever is . . . strange.

And I have to say, it's hard to get it into my own mind that this could very well be my last. In my mind, this is the second of many. In my mind, I'm just getting started. How could I already be finished? And yet, logically, I know I don't want a big family. I know there is a good likelihood that this will be my last. It's just hard when your brain has been wired one way to swap your way of thinking. I've made a lot of progress, but there may be times in the future when I mourn the children I have chosen not to have - not children dead or pregnancies terminated but rather children never conceived.

Realizing that this could well be my last pregnancy is also strange. After all, I watched my mother spend twenty years pregnant. How could I, in my mid-twenties, already be saying goodbye to pregnancy forever? I've been raised to see my collection of maternity clothes like an investment, something I'll use again and again and again. And now, I look at my little stock of maternity clothes and realize that I may never wear them again and wonder if I should even store them again afterwards.

Growing up with Quiverfull ideals and then leaving them behind and easing into the new world requires many adjustments, and watching people's reactions to my second pregnancy - and watching my own reactions - highlights one of the biggest.

A Double Legacy: Conform and Be Different

2012-01-30T09:36:00.000-05:00

I was recently talking to a friend who grew up in a family much like mine, and we identified something very interesting. We both feel that being homeschooled and raised the way we were left us a double legacy. Since leaving home, my friend has been involved in the Emerging Church and has even spent time on a Christian commune. Her parents have been less than pleased to see her question the traditional doctrines and lifestyle choices they raised her with. She feels this is ironic, because they also raised her to think and to question the mainstream culture, and she feels that what she is doing is merely a continuation of that. The legacy she and I received from our parents was a twofold message: Conform, and be different.

It's ironic, isn't it, that for so many homeschool parents a movement that started as radical and counter-cultural has turned into a way to force their children into a specific mold? But the cracks and fissures are there. "If you could be different," the child wonders, "if you could set out on a radical path and follow your conscience, why can't I?

Conform!

I have avoided commenting on an article written by Reb Bradley, a homeschool advocate, titled "Homeschool Blind Spots," because the article bothers me so much. The article starts like this:

In the last couple of years, I have heard from multitudes of troubled homeschool parents around the country, a good many of whom were leaders. These parents have graduated their first batch of kids, only to discover that their children didn't turn out the way they thought they would. Many of these children were model homeschoolers while growing up, but sometime after their 18th birthday they began to reveal that they didn’t hold to their parents’ values.

Some of these young people grew up and left home in defiance of their parents. Others got married against their parents' wishes, and still others got involved with drugs, alcohol, and immorality. I have even heard of several exemplary young men who no longer even believe in God. My own adult children have gone through struggles I never guessed they would have faced.

Most of these parents remain stunned by their children’s choices, because they were fully confident their approach to parenting was going to prevent any such rebellion. Some were especially confident, because as teens these kids were only obedient. Needless to say, the dreams of these homeschool parents have crashed, and many other parents want to know what they can do to prevent their own children from following the same course.

The author goes on to say that homeschool parents need to change their methods, allowing their children greater freedom and exposure, but he never changes his goal, and that is what bugs me. His goal is to raise children identical to their parents in doctrinal beliefs and lifestyle choices. He sees homeschooling as a process for forcing a child into a specific mold. Like Michael Pearl has stated explicitly, the goal here is to raise clones.

Now some readers may object here, arguing that it's natural for parents to teach their children their beliefs, especially if they believe that their eternal fate hangs in the balance. By way of responding to this critique, I want to quote an exchange I had with Hermana Linda when she mentioned this article on her excellent Why Not To Train A Child site.

Libby Anne: I was also both heartened and dissatisfied by his article (which I read several years ago). Young Mom points out that he is dissatisfied because he did not get the results and is therefore arguing for changing methods (not because the methods were intrinsically harmful), but I would add simply that he does not change the results he wants: children with identical belief systems and identical lifestyles to his. He wants to produce clones, and he DOES NOT change this desire. It’s this desire that’s the problem, not simply the methods, because if he changes to more loving methods and STILL does not produce clones of himself he will see himself and his children as a failure. Parents need to stop making it their goal to produce clones and realize that their children are individual human beings who need to grow up and live their own choices and choose their own beliefs. That, of course, was exactly what this article did NOT say.

Hermana Linda: I agree with you up to a point but I cannot agree that parents should not have a goal to produce Christian children. For a Christian, a lost child is a great tragedy. They will spend eternity in Heaven but their child will spend eternity suffering the torment of hell. Yes, the children are individual human beings who need to grow up and make their own choices, but it’s the parents’ job to guide them in making wise choices. The fact that controlling and micromanaging them often turns them away from the faith is enough proof that this method is wrong.

Libby Anne: Ah, but I did not say his goal is to create “Christians” but rather that his goal is to create “clones.” I don’t know how you define “Christian,” but I would assume you probably have a broader definition than either Bradley or my parents. I have known many people for whom being a Christian simply means the desire to follow Christ, and issues like creation or evolution, pretrib or midtrib, the exact type of discipline used, dating verses courtship, stay at home mom verses working mom, small family verses big family, skirts verses pants, homeschool verse public school, and on and on, are largely irrelevant to that desire because they are a matter of individual leading and not Christian dogma. These individuals expect their adult children to follow Jesus FOR THEMSELVES and place them in God’s hands and trust Him to know what is best and to work everything out for good. For people like Bradley and my parents it is different. For them, being a “Christian” means not being a Christ follower but rather sharing their beliefs to the exact minutia (seriously, questioning the wisdom of parent guided courtship, or rejecting spanking as a method of punishment is enough to show that you are damned or at least headed on a path straight to Satan’s lair). As soon as the child disagrees with this sort of parent on anything, no matter how small a point it may seem, that Child is seen as broken, ruined, no longer truly Christian – EVEN IF THEY SAY THEY LOVE JESUS MORE THAN ANYTHING. The thing to remember is that I did not become an atheist until years after having trouble with my parents. Actually, when I had trouble with my parents, my faith had never felt so vibrant. It was JESUS who told me it was okay to question my parents’ beliefs, that it was okay to make my own. The issue my parents had with me wasn’t me leaving faith, it was me making my faith my own. So I did not say that the problem was the desire to produce Christian children, but rather that the problem was the desire to produce clones.

Hermana Linda: Oh, I understand. Thanks for clarifying. In that case, I do agree. <3

I understand wanting your children to share your basic faith. What I do not think is healthy is wanting your children to be your clones, miming your beliefs and lifestyle in every detail. Someone once told me that they love what "wild cards" kids are. Kids grow up and make their own choices, and parents can't stop that - and shouldn't try to. I wish more parents understood that, but parents like Bradley clearly do not.

Be Different!

But what these homeschool parents don't see is that by homeschooling, by daring to step out of the mainstream and be different, they are giving their children another legacy altogether. My friend and I both saw the contradictions and grabbed hold of this second legacy. We both became nonconformists in every sense of the word, asking questions and watching as the whole world opened up. We moved beyond our parents' beliefs in an attempt to forge our own beliefs, just as our parents moved beyond their parents' beliefs to forge their own beliefs.

By choosing to homeschool, our parents challenged one of the most fundamental parts of American culture: the belief that children should be sent to school to study under teachers and learn to interact with their peers. That's revolutionary. Our parents dared to be very, very different. That sends a message.

Here's an interesting analogy. Many historians have argued that during the American Revolution the Founding Fathers saw a future nation in which well educated elite gentlemen would rule the country wisely, applying enlightenment philosophical ideas. The problem was that the common people took the Founding Fathers' rhetoric of rights and equality seriously, and after the Revolution old ideas of deference faded as the people demanded a truly participatory democracy. These historians have argued that the Constitutional Convention was an "attempt to put the democratic genie back in the bottle," but even that failed to stem the tide of popular democarcy, and many Founding Fathers died disillusioned, surrounded by a nation a far different from what they had hoped and dreamed of.

I think what you see with homeschooled young people like myself is similar. My parents had a vision for my future, but by homeschooling and daring to be different and question what most deemed common knowledge, they planted seeds in me that I took seriously, and once I was an adult I forged my own path and created a life very different from the one they had had planned for me. The Founding Fathers were disillusioned, wondering where their Revolution went wrong without realizing that they themselves planted the seeds for the people's "rebellion" through their own rhetoric; likewise, my parents are disillusioned, wondering where they went wrong in raising me without realizing that they themselves planted the seeds for my "rebellion" through their own actions. They never realized the revolutionary potential of their own example.

For more on this idea, see a previous post of mine, I Was Raised To Be A Skeptic.

Conclusion

It is true that many homeschooled children seem to come away with only the first message and not the latter. I am overwhelmed, sometimes, by the inability to think critically that I see in many homeschool graduates who were raised similarly to me. They seem to be unable to think outside of the box in which they grew up, to take everything their parents taught them as gospel truth without question.

It seems to me that homeschool families run a spectrum, secular unschoolers on the left focusing solely on "be different" and the most controlling conservative religious homeschoolers on the right focusing solely on "conform." My family was somewhere on the right side of the spectrum, but there are plenty of families even further to the right where the "conform" message is even louder. I think, though, that even as the "be different" message is smothered in those families, it is still there, beneath the surface, waiting for some child coming of age to see it and grab hold of it. The double legacy is alive and well.

Bombing Demons; Or, the Fear of Hell

2012-01-27T10:55:00.001-05:00

I recently received the following email:

Just wanted to preface that I've been following your blog "Love, Joy, Feminism" for a while. While I did not grow up quiverfull, I did grow up in a fairly conservative evangelical church. I left Christianity in college after an experience with abuse and domestic violence blasted my views apart. I've come to appreciate your writing as a good expression of what many of us experienced growing up as young women in the conservative movement.

Like most in that type of church, I was taught that all non-christians were going to hell - with Christianity of course being narrowly defined as agreeing with the church. While I of course no longer believe in heaven or hell, I still find myself afraid of it. I was talking to a friend recently - a liberal christian and a universalist - who revealed similar fears. This seems to be fairly common among those of us who grew up in that type of culture. My question is, did you have to deal with this fear of going to hell when you left Christianity? If so, how did you handle it?

Peace, Jese

To understand where this question comes from, you have to understand exactly what Jese and I were taught about hell. Many of my readers come from similar backgrounds and understand, but for those of you raised in liberal religious traditions or outside of religion entirely, I'll start by explaining.

Heaven, Hell, and Salvation

We were taught, first and foremost, that heaven and hell are very real places. Every person, when they die, will go to either heaven or hell (there is no purgatory or in-between place in this schema). Only those who have trusted Jesus for their salvation will go to heaven; all others, no matter how good or earnest, will go to hell. In heaven, souls spend eternity praising God and living in the city of gold and jewels he has built for them. In hell, souls spend eternity being tortured in a lake of fire.

I, and others raised similarly, was taught that the only way to be saved is to acknowledge that you are a sinner and cannot achieve heaven on your own but will always fall short, and then to trust that Jesus' death on the cross will pay for your sins, thus accepting God's gift of salvation. I have written before about salvation anxiety, because while this sounds simple and easy it really isn't. While salvation comes from the acknowledgement I mentioned below, as embodied in the "sinner's prayer," you have to actually mean it. If you have any pride in your own abilities or righteousness, the whole thing is negated. The result is that many (not all) young Christians, like me, pray the sinner's prayer again and again over the years, afraid that maybe they hadn't really meant it the first time.

If you don't pray the sinner's prayer, you will go to hell. It's as simple as that. And you can't pray the sinner's prayer unless you have heard of Jesus (See Romans 10:14-15), so everyone who never hears the gospel message will go to hell, as will anyone who hears and rejects it. It doesn't matter how good someone is, how loving or caring, if they haven't prayed the sinner's prayer - and meant it - they will go to hell. Ethical atheists, well-meaning liberal Christians, compassionate and loving Muslims, all will go to hell.

Just what is hell? Hell is not a very popular idea these days. Some fundamentalists and evangelicals, along with many in more liberal Christian traditions, define hell as simply "separation from God" in an attempt to downplay it. But in churches like the one in which I grew up, the "separation from God" line is never evoked alone. Hell may be separation from God, but it's also a physical place of eternal torture and fire. There are many Bible verses ready to confirm this.

Matthew 13:49-50 - It will be this way at the end of the age. Angels will come and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Mark 9:47-48 - It is better to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, where their worm never dies and the fire is never quenched.

Revelation 14:9-11 - A third angel followed the first two, declaring in a loud voice: “If anyone worships the beast and his image, and takes the mark on his forehead or his hand, that person will also drink of the wine of God’s anger that has been mixed undiluted in the cup of his wrath, and he will be tortured with fire and sulfur in front of the holy angels and in front of the Lamb. And the smoke from their torture will go up forever and ever, and those who worship the beast and his image will have no rest day or night, along with anyone who receives the mark of his name.”

Yes, I know there are Christians today who don't believe in hell, or at least don't believe hell is permanent or that it is a place of torture. My point is not to get in an argument over what the Bible does or does not say about hell, but rather to point out that there are a myriad of verses that seem to indicate that hell is a place of horrendous and eternal torture, and that many evangelicals and fundamentalists take these verses very seriously and many evangelical and fundamentalist children grow up with this understanding of hell.

This I and many others like me grew up believing that if I did not pray the sinner's prayer, and mean it, I would be tortured for eternity, with no end. This torture, I was taught, would only be what I deserved for being a sinner and not accepting God's gift of salvation through the death of his son on the cross.

The Fear of Hell Part 1: Losing My Faith

When I first started questioning the basic tenets of Christianity and even looking beyond religion itself, I was very, very afraid. I felt that no matter how much Christianity did not make sense to me, I had better stick with it than risk the eternal torture in hell. I knew Pascal's Wager well, and felt it was a wager I must make. I had to hold onto my faith, whatever it took, because I could not, would not risk eternal torture.

The problem was that I knew that faith had to be real, and I had precious little of that left. How could I affirm the credo of the sinner's prayer with sincerity when I was having serious doubts about every little part of Christianity? I knew that God could see through a fake confession. I realized that more and more when I affirmed the tenets of Christianity I was simply paying lip service to things I didn't really believe anymore. And so I stopped.

My growing atheism immediately helped to erode my fear of hell. If there was no God, there was no hell. As I became more and more sure that there was no God out there, and as I found more and more evidence that pointed toward a lack of God's existence, my fear of hell was able to dissipate. As an atheist, after all, I was now fairly certain that there was no God, no heaven, no hell. And yet. There was still a little bit of me that was afraid, afraid that maybe somehow I was wrong and hell as I was taught really did exist, in which case I would of course end up there and be tortured for all eternity. My fear of hell had lessened, but it had not disappeared.

The Fear of Hell Part 2: The Lessons of Logic

I had been taught that people went to hell after death not because God sent them there, but rather because, without Jesus' blood, they deserved it because of their sinfulness. But this all made less and less sense to me.

Why would God set it up so that his son's sacrifice only paid for those who happened to hear about it and believe in it, rather than for everyone? Why would God privilege belief over things like love, compassion, and ethical living? How was eternal torture a just punishment for any evil deed a human could carry out?

There are several counter arguments to all of this. The first is that God couldn't change the rules that he had to live by, and these were somehow the rules. He couldn't "set up the system" any other way, this was the way it had to be, as much as it grieved him. The second is that God may be merciful, but he is also just, and justice demands the eternal torture of those who do not repent of their sins. This does not negate God's love. The picture I was given growing up was almost one of God weeping as sinful people willfully consign themselves to hell.

But then I realized something. If I were told that if I had children, fifty percent of them would have a horrible nerve system condition that would result in them feeling excruciating pain for their entire lives, with no way to give them any sort of relief, I wouldn't have children. I realized that God had to be horribly sadistic to create mankind knowing what would happen, knowing of the eternal torture of billions of souls, just so that he could have the company of the ones who admitted they were sinners and bowed before his son. No matter how bound God was by whatever rules he was bound by, there was no excuse for this.

I also realized that eternal torture for finite sins is absolutely not just. If my cat scratched me several times in one day, would I be justified in cutting the tip of his tail off as a punishment, or in sticking pins in him as a punishment? If Sally began making destructive messes, throwing her toys all over and pulling books off the bookshelves even when I asked her to stop, would I be justified in tying her down and beating her? NO. The punishment is supposed to fit the crime, and eternal torture as a punishment for something that is part of human nature (because, as descendants of Adam, all humans supposedly have a sin nature) is sort of like using an atom bomb in response to someone stealing a stick of gum. Except worse, because eternal torture never ends.

I suddenly realized that, in the words of one of my readers, if this was God, I was more ethical than he was. I realized that if the God I had been taught existed actually did exist, if a hell of eternal torture awaited all who did not bow before him, he wasn't worth serving. He was an evil, cruel, malignant sadist worse even than Hitler. It was at this point that I formulated "Libby Anne's Wager."

The Fear of Hell Part 3: The Salvation War

Yet I knew that there technically could be an evil, sadistic God, however unlikely it was. I could say all I wanted that I wouldn't serve a God like that, but that didn't automatically mean that he did not exist, though I seriously, seriously doubted it. In other words, just a smidgen of my fear of hell survived all these questions and musings. And then I read The Salvation War. Yes yes, laugh, because it is ridiculous, but reading this book-length internet fan fiction killed the last bits of my fear of hell. The premise of the Salvation War is as follows:

The story follows an alt-universe story wherein heaven and hell are real, and heaven declares that, from now on, all humans who die will go to hell, and orders all humans to lie down and die. Satan consequently declares Earth a conquest; however, the surviving humans will not go under lightly and declare war on hell. The story explores themes of betrayal, self-reliance, and especially the dichotomy between inflexible dogmatic thinking and flexible scientific analysis.

Basically, it turns out that God and Satan are in league, that all humans are going to hell anyway, and that they offer an ultimatum ordering obedience. Many humans obey, laying down and dying and going straight to hell. Others, however, resist. They declare war - yes, war - on hell.

I know this sounds silly, but the moment the first B52 bombers blew up the first demon scouts - "Just what the hell are those?" - I felt liberated in a way that's hard to describe. The moment a seasoned female marine was killed in combat and found herself in hell, only to take up arms there and start a rebellion within hell itself, I felt something give inside of me as the last bit of my fear of hell took flight. The Salvation War is the story of ethical, compassionate, brave people waging literal war against an evil, backward, narcissistic, cruel God and his companion, Satan. And I don't want to give away the end, but let's just say it doesn't turn out so well for God.

Now, I know that this story is fiction, and I grew up being taught that demons are somehow in another dimension and couldn't be killed by B52 bombers. But somehow, reading The Salvation War spoke to something deep within me, reminding me that if there is such a God, we are greater than it, and maybe, just perhaps, if there was such a God we could, together, do something about it.

If your curiosity is piqued and you want to have a look at The Salvation War, you can read the whole thing here, but I'll warn you - it's long. Oh, and there's some profanity, and the people who wrote it are very into science and technical things, so there's some detail about weapons systems, etc. But it was food for my hell-fearing heart.

Conclusion

I have indeed dealt with the fear of hell, and I have overcome it. For me, it took both logically realizing that a God who would allow the existence of hell as we were taught is a sadistic bully, and reading literature that allowed me to see the defeat of just such a God at the hands of ethical and united human beings. Best wishes to you on your own journey, and I'd like to invite anyone else who has had similar fears to share how they have dealt with them.

A Fractured Church, Part 2

2012-01-26T10:25:00.002-05:00

I wrote yesterday about how fractured Christianity has always been. It almost seems like Christians have never been able to agree on, well, anything. Whether it's arguing over whether Judaic food laws are still in affect or the nature of Jesus' divinity or what happens at communion or whether Jesus would have been a Republican or a Democrat, the Christian church has always been, and continues to be, fractured. I wrote a bit yesterday also about the Emerging Church movement, made up of disaffected young people from a myriad of denominations and Christian traditions who want to bypass all of this fighting and pettiness, accept differences of opinion, and focus on the commonalities.

I have written before about how my atheism stems in large part for the fact that basic Christian doctrines simply no longer make sense to me. I can't make myself believe something if it just doesn't make sense. The fractured church, though, was another step on my path toward atheism. I wrote yesterday a post called "Jesus Can Lie" but then took it down, deciding it was too personal. In this post, I'm going to combine some of what I said there with more about the fractured church.

I started yesterday's post by mentioning a blog post by fellow blogger Darcy. I'm going to start this one with a quote from this post, in which she seeks to reassure her family and friends' fears about the state of her faith as she questions basic Christian doctrines:

I am not throwing away my faith. Not gonna happen. As much as I've been angry at God, have questioned Him and questioned my beliefs, one thing remains: I know Him. He is the constant in my life of insecurities and chaos.

At one point I would have said the same. I might question doctrines I'd been raised with like creationism or female submission, or even ask bigger questions about the Trinity or Christ's substitutionary atonement, but I would not, could not abandon God. Jesus had always been my best friend, and my relationship with him was so real. It was the one thing I had to hold onto amidst life's storms. This perspective would have made me a perfect candidate for the Emerging Church.

Even as basic Christian doctrines ceased to make sense, I still had my personal experiences with Jesus to fall back on. My experiences all told me Jesus was real, was there for me, cared for me deeply. My experiences told me I could trust Jesus, hold on to him, give my all to him. Even as I gained new knowledge, those experiences didn't just disappear, and so neither could my deep belief in God and my close relationship with Jesus.

What changed? Two things, actually. First, the fractured nature of the church, both in the past and present, started to appear more and more problematic to me. And second, I found that I could be convinced, thoroughly and totally convinced, that Jesus had told me something, and then find out that it was a lie. These realizations made me completely rethink my "relationship with Jesus."

The Protestant Reformation

I studied the Protestant Reformation in some depth in college, reading not the one-sided books celebrating the victory of the godly Protestants against the godless Catholics I had read as a child but rather actual works of history that took neither one side or the other. What I found was hard to understand. Both sides claimed to be hearing directly from God, both sides read the Bible and spent time in prayer, and both sides were equally devout. Both sides wanted God's will above all else, and both sides were convinced they had it. Compare Thomas More and Thomas Cranmer, for instance. And yet, not only could the two sides not agree on key doctrinal points, they disagreed so strongly - calling each other heretics and nonbelievers and even the antichrist - that they killed each other by the hundreds of thousands and even millions.

This confused me. If God is real - and I was thoroughly convinced that he was - why did he not communicate with these people? Why did he not tell them all the same thing? Why did he allow them to wonder in confusion, denouncing each other, persecuting each other, and even killing each other? All of these men claimed to be filled with the Holy Spirit, all spent hours in prayer. Was God unable to communicate with them?

Perhaps, I thought, God didn't care about the doctrinal points the Catholics and Protestants were arguing over. Perhaps he was the God of both, and each just misunderstood and thought God was telling them to defend their particular doctrinal points as the only true beliefs. But even that idea had a problem. Why would God not tell these men that he didn't care about what they believed about communion or the veneration of saints? Why would he allow these men, all equally devoted to following him, to kill each other over points that didn't really matter?

Perhaps God tried to tell them, I thought, but was unable to. I knew that God was supposed to be all powerful, but I also knew that God couldn't force people to listen to him. Yet the more I read about the devout men who led each side of the Reformation the more I was impressed with how hard these men tried to listen to God. God was everything to them, and they wanted nothing more than to serve him. If cultural baggage was getting in the way of their communication with God, preventing God's true message from getting through, God must be awfully hard to listen to, and what hope do any of us have of ever being sure we hear him?

My Parents and I Disagree

When I was going through issues with my parents during college, we were each convinced we heard Jesus speaking to us - but we each heard different things. I've written about this before, but I'm going to go ahead and recap it here.

My parents always told me that Christianity was to be a relationship, not a religion. All that mattered was our individual, personal relationships with Jesus. For that reason, we all spent time reading the Bible and in personal prayer each day. Jesus was my parents' best friend, their closest confidant. I saw my mother crying out to Jesus when times were hard, asking him for help and for him to teach her through her struggles. I saw my dad asking Jesus to help him lead the family well. I watched my parents read the Bible, sometimes in tears, and knew that what mattered most to them, more than anything in the world, was listening to and following Jesus.

I grew up emulating my parents in this. Jesus was my best friend. I told him everything, brought every care and trouble to him, and asked him to help me grow in faith and become a better person. I spent time reading the Bible and Jesus revealed himself to me more through those pages. I spent time in prayer, and my relationship with Jesus grew even stronger. Following Jesus mattered more to me than anything else in the world.

In college, some of the views my parents had taught me, such as young earth creationism and right-wing politics, were seriously challenged. I realized that I had in many ways simply adopted my parents' religious beliefs - the "add-ons" of capitalism, anti-environmentalism, anti-welfare, pro-spanking, and male headship - without seriously examining them for myself and looking at the different sides of each argument. And that, quite simply, was what I began to do.

As I sorted through my beliefs, Jesus was right there with me. My faith grew only more dynamic through this period, and I felt closer to Jesus than ever. When I began investigating Catholicism, I felt Jesus leading me in that direction and found that Catholicism only added further richness to my relationship with Jesus. Jesus gave me permission to ask big questions, and held my hand and encouraged me as I did. During all this exploration, I never stepped outside of his will for me.

My parents didn't see things this way, though. Jesus was, you see, telling my parents something different. Jesus was telling them that I was wandering from the faith, that I was in grave danger, that they needed to bring me back to the fold. My parents continued to spend time in prayer and Bible reading, listening to the Holy Spirit and letting Jesus speak to them, and what they heard was that my very salvation was being threatened.

This was confusing to me. How could Jesus be telling me one thing, and my parents another thing? He wasn't just telling us different things, he was telling us opposite things. I knew Jesus couldn't do that. I knew God's nature was to be consistent. That meant that one of us must be mishearing. The trouble was that I also knew we were both trying our hardest to listen to Jesus. If other things were getting in the way - for me, my new college experiences, or for my parents, their friends and the literature they read - that meant that listening to Jesus was no simple thing. Was Jesus not strong enough to make himself heard to each of us as we both sought to listen? Was it that easy to misunderstand what Jesus was saying? Could someone truly be seeking after Jesus with all their heart, and yet miss him entirely? We both wanted God's will above all else, and yet we came to such loggerheads over my religious journey that our relationship with each other disintegrated, replaced with anger and hurt.

I've been told by readers of this blog that my parents were simply not listening to Jesus right. They were not being "discerning" enough. They were listening instead to the literature of Christian Patriarchy, Quiverfull, and fundamentalist Christianity in general, not to God. I understand that if you think that was the case what I say here isn't going to change your mind, and you are free to think as you please. But I can only tell you that I know my parents, I grew up extremely close to them, and you really can't find someone who is trying to follow Jesus harder than they are. Jesus' will is all that matters to them. Their relationship with Jesus is more important to them than anything else in their lives. Given this, would it be so hard for Jesus to tell them that the literature they are reading, or the pastors they are listening to, are wrong? Is it so hard for Jesus to make himself heard that he cannot communicate even with people who want so desperately to do what he wants?

I was shaken by this experience just as I had been by my readings on the Protestant Reformation, but I still had one constant - I had my relationship with Jesus. As troubling as it was that Jesus could not handle the Catholic/Protestant divide five hundred years ago or speak clearly to my devoted parents today, I still had my own experiences. But then, one semester, even that was shaken.

In Which I Find Myself Misled by Jesus

At one point in college, I fell in with a group of evangelical friends and formed a sort of Bible study. One of our number was a pastor's daughter. She was especially knowledgeable of the Bible and Christian apologetics and had a very close relationship with Jesus, so she became our de facto leader. She always seemed to have a keen insight, an encouraging word, or a pertinent Bible verse, and that semester became one of whirlwind spiritual growth.

Over the course of the semester, we became convinced that the spiritual growth we were experiencing was the beginning of a campus-wide revival. It was easy to believe this, given the growth in our own relationships with God during this period. What we felt was not dissimilar from what had animated the First and Second Great Awakenings. The intensity of spiritual feeling that was poured out on us as we called on the Holy Spirit to guide us is hard to describe. We felt we could take on the world - and we truly believed that was what Jesus had planned for us. I have never felt so in the center of God's will as I did then.

As you will often find among people who emphasize the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, we also came under demonic attack that semester. We prayed demons out of our rooms, our dorms, our campus, and prayed hedges of spiritual protection around each other. Our de facto leader came under especial attack, and sometimes we had to hold her down while she was physically convulsed and pray way the demons who were tormenting her. As we spent time in prayer and engaged in spiritual warfare, we had never felt closer to Jesus. All of this spiritual intensity only confirmed for us what Jesus had spoken to our hearts - revival was coming. And we were ready.

But something went wrong. Our de facto spiritual leader started behaving more and more erratic. This is a hard story to tell, but the end result is that she was diagnosed as mentally ill and sent home for rest, rehabilitation, and medication. Suddenly, everything we had thought was coming came crashing down. The revival, the spiritual intensity - it all whimpered out.

Someone might say that the trouble was that we listened too much to what our de facto leader said, to her insights and encouragements. In the end, that is what we concluded as well - that it was all in our heads. The intensity, the things we heard from Jesus, all of that had been imagined. It was all started by one mentally ill individual who convinced us that God was moving, and moving with force. I held onto my faith, and life went on.

This episode planted some very troubling seeds in my head. You see, we did not believe revival was coming simply because our spiritual leader told us it was. Rather, it was something Jesus told all of us as well. We never listened to anything our friend told us unless Jesus confirmed it for us individually. The time we spent with her was vastly overshadowed by the time we spent in prayer and Bible reading. We poured out our hearts to God, we listened to Jesus as closely as we could, and we felt a sort of spiritual intensity that is hard to describe. We were listening to Jesus, and he was speaking to us, telling us of the coming revival, telling us of the importance of our part in it, telling us that our leader had an especially large role to play in God's plan. It taught me that I could think I was hearing from Jesus, and yet be wrong. It taught me that I could be listening to Jesus as hard as I could, and yet mishear.

Conclusion

Through all of these episodes, I was learning that "listening to Jesus" was not so simple as I had thought. Think, for example, of all the families in the Quiverfull/Christian Patriarchy movement who follow Bill Gothard. Think of my parents, who are devoted to the teachings of Michael Pearl. These individuals want above all else to do God's will. They don't listen to Gothard or Pearl simply because they think their teachings make sense, but rather because they believe that their teachings are confirmed by God. We may call it legalism, but they don't see it that way. They don't see it as following rules, but rather as following God - it just so happens that God has told them that there are rules. The early church fathers with their many disagreements, the Catholics and Protestants of the Reformation, and liberal and conservative Christians today - all have tried their hardest to listen to God, and all have come away with something different, even contradictory.

As I tried to figure out how people could hear such controversial things from Jesus, I weighed the options available to me:

1. Jesus honestly tells people contradictory things.

2. Some people are listening right and some people are listening wrong.

3. Only some of what people think they hear from Jesus is from him.

4. Jesus isn't speaking to people at all, it's all imagined.

Option one goes against the very nature of God; option two means that we can never be fully sure that we are listening to Jesus right, because, as I learned, it was all to easy to listen wrong (plus this is just cruel - why would Jesus not make it harder for devout people to mishear?); and option three means that we can never be completely sure what of we hear is from God and what is ephemeral (plus this is also just cruel - why would Jesus allow the Protestants and Catholics to kill each other over something they were sure was from God rather than setting them straight?). In the end, I concluded that option four was the only one that made sense.

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that the Christian church is fractured because it is so very, very human. Not simply human in that it is made up of humans but rather human in that religion is man made and what we hear from God is only in our own heads. What Christians think they hear from God is shaped by their surroundings, experiences, and even personalities.

And this is why, unlike Darcy, I reached the point where I could no longer say with confidence that I knew God. I could no longer say with confidence that my relationship with Jesus, which had always seemed so real to me, wasn't just something that I had made up in my head. This is why, when basic Christian doctrine ceased to make sense, I could let go. I was no legalist, following rules or an Old Testament God. I had a vibrant, dynamic relationship with Jesus. It's just that I've come to the conclusion that Jesus was simply my imaginary friend.

A Fractured Church, Part 1

2012-01-25T14:46:00.002-05:00

Fellow blogger Darcy recently wrote a post in which she chided her friends and family for their concern at her spiritual state because she's been reevaluating many of the core doctrines of Christianity. She assured her readers that just the fact that she believes the world is older than 6,000 years old does not mean that she no longer has a relationship with Jesus. And so on. This made me think once again about how extremely petty Christians can be. The sad thing is, it seems like, in an ideal world, it wouldn't have to be this way. Let me explain.

When I started having strife with my parents, it was over issues like evolution and abortion, not over whether or not Jesus had died for my sins or whether or not God loved mankind or anything like that. As I've said before, it seems to me that my parents had all sorts of add-ons to the core of Christianity. If you were a "Christian" you also had to hold specific beliefs about global warming, about spanking, about male headship, about economics, and on and on. If you held a "wrong" belief in one of these areas, even if you claimed to still be following Jesus, your very salvation was in question.

This is so not new, though, because while the add-ons of things like capitalist economics and global warming may be novel, the add-ons of specific doctrinal points is not. After the Reformation, Christians killed each other over just how salvation worked, over whether or not communion bread and wine actually became Jesus' body and blood, over when people should be baptized, and on and on and on. If you stepped outside of your parents' faith and joined an opposing Christian sect, you faced being disowned and losing all of your friends.

But even this was not new. The early Christians argued over whether or not Christ was divine, and if he was, in what way he was divine. This controversy went on for hundreds of years, with Christians denouncing each other as heretics, until the emperor of Rome called a church counsel to decide the issue. This wasn't the only issue early Christians argued over, either. The early church only became united behind one doctrinal position - the Nicene Creed - when Rome made Christianity the official religion of Rome and the emperors tired of Christian leaders squabbling and forced them to agree. The result was the Catholic Church. Those who still disagreed, both at the time and in the hundreds of years to follow - and there were many - were branded as heretics and persecuted.

But once again, the squabbles that tore the early church apart in the first few hundred years of Christianity were not new either. If you read the book of Acts, and portions of other New Testament books as well, you will find that even the apostles could not agree with each other. They denounced each other as heretics (though they didn't use that word yet) and squabbled over everything from circumcision to eating meat.

Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane that his followers would "be one" (John 17). That sure didn't last very long. In fact, it has essentially never been the case at all.

And so yesterday, I asked myself what the core, the very bottom core, of Christianity is. What is it that every Christian, liberal and conservative, Calvinist and Catholic, Trinitarian and Gnostic, Pauline or Petrine could agree on. The answer I came up with was this:

Something was amiss between God and mankind, so God sent Jesus to earth to mend it, and he succeeded in this mission. Those who follow God are to emulate Jesus and be known for their great love.

There. Two sentences. It took just two sentences! That, it seems to me, is the core of Christianity. That is something that every Christian, liberal and conservative alike, should be able to agree with.

So I have to wonder. Why all the fighting, squabbling, and strife over all the add-ons? Why can't Christians just "be one" like Jesus wanted, united behind this core and understanding of other differences?

It seems to me that the reason Christians disagree so strongly on so many points, linking them all to their religious beliefs, is that Christianity is in some sense unclear on those points. If the Bible and church history were 100% clear on the issue of communion, there would be no disagreement. If the Bible and church history were 100% clear on how the world came into being, there would be no disagreement. And so on. I wish that Christians could just accept that there is disagreement on these points, and that the Bible and church history are unclear, and leave it at that. Everyone could hold their own personal convictions on these issues without sacrificing the unity of Christianity.

I heard all the time that Christianity was about having a "relationship" with Jesus. It seems to me that if that was the core of Christianity I presented above should be all that is required. For most people, though, Christianity is much much more than a relationship with Jesus. Rather, it is a carefully structured and laid out belief system, and within Christianity there are many of these, each differing from the others. There is the Catholic belief system, the Orthodox belief system, the fundamentalist belief system, the reformed belief system, and so on. Some of these belief systems may share commonalities, but they also differ from each other on numerous points. One thing that happens with these belief systems is that they become ingrained in culture. In early Catholic immigrant cultures, rejecting Catholicism was synonymous with rejecting your community and family. The same was true for the earlier Puritans, and the same is true in most fundamentalist circles today. For all of these people, Christianity is most certainly not simply about a relationship with Jesus. Rather, it is about a common belief system and a common culture.

Some Christians, like Darcy, have a problem with that. They don't see Jesus as tied to any one economic system or any one political party or any one understanding of science. In fact, more and more Christians are expressing a dissatisfaction for the church as it currently exists. Darcy put it like this:

Can you listen to my heart, my friends, for a moment? I've lost faith in church as we know it. I'm disillusioned with American Christianity. I value relationship over religion and religion has been ruining relationships for me. I walk into a church and come out feeling like something is very wrong. Conservative churches are too uptight, too rigid, too fear and shame-based. Modern churches are very fake. I don't do fake. But within these church structures are good people, awesome people, and I'm trying to figure out how to be in relationship with these people without conforming to the insitution of "church". Because that institution is killing my soul. The church was always meant to be an organic body of people who are defined and recognized by their love for others. Not a building where we go to "do church". Not a mission statement or a deacon board or a congregational meeting or budgets or programs or membership classes or the perfect worship team. I walk into most churches and I see a business. I am not satisfied with that. If you are, great. That's where you're at and I'm glad you're happy. Don't judge me because I'm not.

I cannot tell you how many friends I have who grew up in evangelical or fundamentalist circles and are not satisfied. They see the pettiness and they are not okay with it. And what's fascinating is that they are not loners, but are rather part of a movement, often called the Emerging Church movement.

The emerging church is a Christian movement of the late 20th and early 21st century that crosses a number of theological boundaries. Proponents believe the movement transcends such "modernist" labels of "conservative" and "liberal," calling the movement a "conversation" to emphasize its developing and decentralized nature, its vast range of standpoints, and its commitment to dialogue. What those involved in the conversation mostly agree on is their disillusionment with the organized and institutional church and their support for the deconstruction of modern Christian worship, modern evangelism, and the nature of modern Christian community.

I am especially encouraged by this part:

Some Emerging Church Christians believe there are radically diverse perspectives within Christianity that are valuable for humanity to progress toward truth and a better resulting relationship with God, and that these different perspectives deserve Christian charity rather than condemnation.

If I were still a Christian, I would be a part of this movement. One of the things I found repelling about my parents' beliefs, and then the beliefs of other churches I tried, such as teh Catholic Church, was how stifling Christianity could be. More than anything else I hate dogma and I love questions and the ability to be open, and I appreciate this in the Christian friends I have who have moved in this direction. I don't know what will happen to the Emerging Church - it may devolve into pettiness like essentially every other Christian movement ever in existence has - but I do know I will be watching with interest. If every Christian could be as open as these, perhaps Jesus' vision of his followers united could at last come to pass - and perhaps Christians would have a better reputation.

I've said before that I'm an atheist because basic Christian doctrine ceased to make sense to me. This is true. Even the core of Christianity I described above does not make sense to me. Even the existence of God himself seems much more unlikely than likely. Even as I appreciate the rejection of dogma and acceptance of questions I see in some of the Christians around me, especially those in my own age group, I will not return to faith because I quite simply cannot.

In my next blog post I will explain how the very fracturing of the church itself contributed to my inability to believe.

On Abortion, Murder, and "Post-Abortion Trauma"

2012-01-24T09:44:00.001-05:00

Have you noticed the emphasis anti-abortion advocates place on the horrible after effects women supposedly suffer after having an abortion? Growing up in the anti-abortion movement, I heard stories of women who had had abortions who couldn't sleep for months, because they kept imagining they could hear a baby crying, their baby. I heard stories of women plummeting into depression and dropping out of school because they couldn't bear up under the knowledge that they had murdered their own children. This argument that abortion was not only taking an innocent life, but was actually likely to ruin the woman's life too, helps buttress the campaign to end legal abortion. But today I realized one eensy teensy problem with this line of reasoning.

I was reading this article about Rick Santorum's views on abortion, and this section struck me:

Asked by CNN's Piers Morgan what he would do if his own daughter approached him, begging for an abortion after having been raped, Santorum explained that he would counsel her to "accept this horribly created" baby, because it was still a gift from God, even if given in a "broken" way.

"Well, you can make the argument that if she doesn't have this baby, if she kills her child, that that, too, could ruin her life. And this is not an easy choice, I understand that. As horrible as the way that that son or daughter and son was created, it still is her child. And whether she has that child or she doesn't, it will always be her child, and she will always know that," Santorum said.

My parents always taught me the same thing, and for the longest time I believed it. Then in college I was reading Our Bodies, Ourselves, desperate to learn about my own anatomy and understand my own biology, and I came upon an article in it by a woman talking about how grateful she was that she had an abortion, and how having an abortion had allowed her to continue on her studies and toward a rich and fulfilling life. And then I realized something. This woman suffered literally none of the post-abortion trauma I'd always been told she would, and why? Because she honestly didn't believe the pregnancy she terminated involved murdering a person.

When does personhood begin?

The truth is, those after affects Santorum speaks of are only suffered if you've spent your life believing that personhood begins at conception. If you honestly don't believe a first trimester fetus is a person, then having an abortion won't bother you at all. No trauma. No depression. No ruined life through the constant rememberence of the "child" you killed. Nada. You didn't murder a human child, you simply ended a pregnancy that would have eventually resulted in the birth of a human child.

In the middle ages, even according to the church's official teaching, abortion was legal until the moment of quickening, which occurs between 15 and 17 weeks. Before quickening, the church taught and society believed, it wasn't a person at all. At quickening, it became a person, and after that you couldn't kill it. Throughout human existence, abortion has been a fairly common practice, and for most of that time, people haven't seen abortion during the early stages of pregnancy as problematic in the least. Women used a variety of methods - many of them dangerous - to "restore their monthly cycles," and didn't see that as out of the ordinary or problematic in the least. In fact, abortion was not made universally illegal in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century as part of a campaign to keep birth rates up.

Spreading the Trauma

What is my point in saying all this? My point is that this believe that even a first trimester abortion is "murder" is a relatively new one, as is the idea that personhood begins at conception which it is predicated on. It is also not an idea shared by most Americans today, or most Americans in the past. It is an idea, though, that the anti-abortion movement has worked hard to spread. And it is an idea that is necessary for all their talk of post-abortion trauma to prove true, for that trauma only occurs if a woman honestly believes she has committed murder.

And you know what? If they can get their message out loud and clear enough, maybe they can induce those women who don't believe first trimester abortion is murder at all to feel guilty. Their claims of "post abortion trauma" are vindicated if they can put pictures of bloody fetuses in front of women on their way into abortion clinics, force those women to watch ultrasounds as doctors describe the body parts of the fetus, and require the doctor to inform the woman that she is about to end a human life (an actual requirement in my state). Anti-abortion activists aren't stupid. They know that in order for their claim that abortion ruin women's lives to be true, they have to make it ruin women's lives. And that, quite simply, is what they are busily trying to do.

Why do I call it "personhood"?

First, I want to distinguish between saying something is "alive" and saying it is a "person." No one disputes that an embryo and a fetus are "alive." The thing is, so is cancer, so is bacteria, so are viruses, so is moss, and so on. Lots of things are alive that we don't have problems terminating. The question revolves not around whether an embryo or a fetus is "alive" but rather around whether or not an embryo or a fetus is a "person." This is the whole point behind the recent failed Mississippi personhood amendment attempt. If an embryo or a fetus is a "person," it is entitled to the same rights of every other "person" in the country - freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and of course, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The thing is, as I pointed out above, the point at which "personhood" begins has been disputed. Catholics in the middle ages believed it was at the moment of quickening, an idea shared by the Navajos. Jews have always believed that it's at the moment of birth (with the entering of the "breath of life"). Ancient Romans believed that it was at the moment when the father picked up the newborn infant laid at his feet, accepting it into the family (he could instead choose to have it left outside to die if he refused to accept it).

Anyway, the point is that the moment when "personhood" begins is disputed, and that rather than yelling about how "it has a beating heart" we should actually be discussing when personhood begins, not as a given but as an open question. Currently, legally, personhood begins at birth. And that, quite simply, is what the Personhood Amendment people want to change.

Ending "legal" abortion or ending abortion?

Second, anti-abortion policy today seems more aimed toward ending "legal" abortion than toward ending abortion itself. After all, that's what all the "personhood amendment" and "heartbeat bill" stuff would do. They add restrictions to how women can obtain abortions, wanting to make legal abortion as difficult as possible to get, with the final goal being making it illegal. The thing is, abortion was illegal in almost every state from the mid-nineteenth century until Roe v. Wade. And do you know what? It was still extremely widespread, though much more dangerous (thousands of women died - and still die in parts of the world where abortion is currently illegal - from unsafe abortions). The thing is, making abortion illegal doesn't end abortion, it just makes it illegal. Do you know what really brings the abortion rate down? Comprehensive sex education and widespread use of birth control, two things the anti-abortion movement is against. Trying to make abortion illegal is like treating the symptom - women wanting abortions - rather than the cause - unintended and unwanted pregnancies. And this, quite simply, is why I say that anti-abortion policy today seems to be aimed at ending legal abortion, not at ending abortion itself.

Conclusion

The real point of this post when I started it was that in order for Santorum's words to be true - in order for post abortion trauma to exist - the anti-abortion movement has to create it, either through raising its children to believe abortion is murder from the beginning or by convincing women who weren't raised that way and have just had abortions that they're murderers. This post abortion trauma stuff - this idea that having an abortion will ruin your life - is not simply the natural results of having an abortion. It is only the result of having an abortion if you believe that abortion is murder. And you know what? Most women throughout history, and most women today, don't believe that abortion, or more especially first trimester abortion, is murder. It's not about lying to yourself to justify murder. It's about honestly and truly not believing it to be murder.

When I was growing up in the anti-abortion movement, I didn't understand this. I thought that the idea that abortion was murder was natural - how could anyone not think abortion was murder? And so now, on the other side of the rabbit hole, I can look back down and say that yes, Santorum honestly means the words he says, and he honestly doesn't realize how crazy he sounds to those not on his side of the rabbit hole.

Note: I use the term "anti-abortion" rather than "pro-life" because I believe it better represents the views of the movement. After all, most supposedly "pro-life" advocates also strongly support the death penalty and are very supportive of the military. What they oppose is not any ending of life, but rather abortion. Hence my calling them "anti-abortion," which, quite simply, is what they are.

Dealing with Death as an Atheist

2012-01-22T21:32:00.000-05:00

I recently received the following email:

I have been reading your blog for a few months now and so much of what you write resonates with me. I didn't grow up Quiverful or quite as fundamentalist as you did, but still very conservative Christian. We went to a megachurch in the DC area, and I was very active in the youth group. Then I studied abroad. Seeing other cultures, especially visiting Muslim countries, I realized everyone believed in their religion just as devoutly and began to think that maybe every religion was a different version of the same basic thing. Eventually, that gave way to atheism, which is where I am today. I appreciate you and your blog so much - thank you for sharing as much as you do.

The purpose of this email is really to reach out and ask you about something that has been troubling me for about 6 months now. I am having an existential crisis. How do you deal with death - mentally and emotionally?
I ignored it for the most part, but one night I was gripped with the realization that everyone will die. Obviously I knew that before, but I had not really grasped it. I have two little children so I think that makes the feeling even more raw. Ever since that night, I think about it often and it is really frightening to me. I kind of have the sensation of being in a plane that is slowly crashing. It is so morbid! I've talked to a few people about it, but no one really gets it - they either always thought nothing happened to us after death, or have always believed in heaven. How do you handle the reality of death - and the fact that it is permanent - after believing in the existence of God and heaven? How do you cope? I think this is something I just need to work through, and back in my Christian days, I had mentors and Bible study small groups that I could turn to with these kinds of things.

If you don't have time for this, I understand. You are just the person that came to mind when I wondered who I would be able to talk to about this.

--Samantha

Just today my husband and I were watching a video of prominent atheist authors talking about their views, and ninety-five-year-old Diana Athill was asked how she handles the prospect of death as an atheist. Her response? "I'm never afraid to fall asleep, I don't know why I'd be afraid of dying, it's really not any different." As an atheist, death is simply nonexistence. I wasn't bothered by not existing before I existed, so why should I should I be afraid of not existing after I die? Honestly, it sounds rather peaceful.

But Samantha makes an interesting point. Like me, she grew up with the expectation of eternal life. To go from believing that you will live forever in eternal bliss to the realization that you will cease to exist after you die can be rather jarring. One thing I realized early on is that wishing I could live forever doesn't make it so. It's like leading your whole life believing that you're some sort of lost princess or the heir to an obscure billionaire, and one day you'll be "discovered" and live a life of privilege and wealth. It doesn't matter how much you wish that were true, if it's not true it's not true. I see the idea of eternal life after death in the same way - it's mere wishful thinking, and while I understand its powerful appeal (who wouldn't want to live forever) that appeal does not make it real.

How have I handled this whiplash understanding of what will happen to me after I die? One thing I do, as mentioned above, is to remind myself that wishful thinking doesn't make something true. Wishing you lived in a fairy tail doesn't make it reality. And wishing for something we don't have, and can't have, well, that just distracts from what we do have and promises to make us discontent and unhappy. I may wish I was a billionaire, but I'm not, and spending my life wishing I was would make me overlook the economic security, prosperity, and happiness that I do have.

That all sounds rather harsh, though, doesn't it? Saying "eternal life doesn't exist so stop wishing it did" doesn't fix things. But there's a pleasant underside to this idea: I find that knowing I have but one life to live makes me want to live this life I have to the fullest. What is the point in holding grudges or focusing on small annoyances? If this is all I've got, I want to enjoy it while I'm here. This makes every moment I have with my husband, daughter, family, and friends especially precious and especially fraught with meaning. It makes me all the more likely to tell my husband and daughter that I love them, and to show them my love for them by overlooking the little things and focusing on the good. Weirdly, realizing this is all I have makes me a much more pleasant wife and mother than I might otherwise be, and makes me seek fulfillment in every little moment I have.

Another idea that comforts me is that of the "circle of life." After I die my body will break down and be assimilated back into the world to become something else. This world, with its trees, oceans, and animal life, will keep going after I'm gone. It is what lasts even as our lives end. Sometimes I like to go out into nature, surrounded by trees and grass and birds, and just feel that. Compared to millions and billions of years and the diversity and ever changing nature of life, our individual lives are really very insignificant. But we aren't just individuals, we are part of something bigger - an ecosystem, a world, a universe - the circle of life. And to me, that feels empowering.

Samantha mentioned her two young children. I understand that. I would hate to think of losing Sally. A friend of mine from growing up recently had a miscarriage, and she wrote on facebook that she was comforted by the fact that she will someday see her baby in heaven. If I lost Sally, I wouldn't have that comfort. Sally would just be . . . gone. It would be the end.

I deal with this in several ways. First, I remember that after death strikes there is one person not mourning, not feeling the pain of loss, not wondering how to go on with life, and that person is the one in the coffin. If I lost Sally, I would be the one who would be sad, not Sally. I might think of everything Sally never lived to do, but this wouldn't bother Sally. Sally would simply not exist, and would experience her nonexistence the way we do a deep dreamless sleep, just without ever waking up. Sally wouldn't mind being dead, because she wouldn't be. It would be I who would mind Sally being dead. If I were to lose Sally, I'd like to think that that understanding - that Sally was suffering no pain or regret - would comfort me.

Next, I try to make Sally's every moment here on this earth pleasant and worthwhile, knowing that she, like I, has but one life. If I ever were to lose her, I wouldn't want anything to regret. This helps me to be especially kind to her, especially involved in playing with her, and especially grateful for every moment I have with her. After all, if I did ever lose Sally, all I would have is the memories of our life together, and I'd like those memories to be pleasant and without regret.

Finally, I remember what I said earlier about the circle of life. Death is simply a part of life, no matter how much we may wish it wasn't. People die, people are born, and life goes on. Sally is just a part of that larger cycle, and that is something I have to accept.

But the fear we feel of death, or of losing someone we love, often isn't something that can be reasoned with. It's not necessarily a rational thing, it's a gut-level emotional thing. And so, Samantha, realize that what I've said here is simply how I try to understand and rationalize death. It may help your "existential crisis," and it may not. Sharing my thoughts is all I can do.

One thing that makes this sort of thing especially difficult for people like you and I is that, like I said before, we were raised to believe we would live forever. If we'd never been told those things, accepting that life is limited and will end would almost certainly be easier. It's sort of like the moment a child realizes Santa isn't real, except that the idea of eternal life is a whole not bigger than Santa. But just as in that case, holding onto the idea of Santa won't do any good. We have to grow up, accept reality, and move on. But saying that is easier than doing it.

I'd like to finish by offering some links with other atheists' points of view, and also by soliciting my atheist readers to offer their own suggestions and their own answers to Samantha's question.

How Atheists Deal with Death and Loss

An Atheist's Approach to Death

Grief Beyond Belief

Kids, Commercials, and Focus on the Family

2012-01-19T21:10:00.000-05:00

I wrote the other day about the problems of using children as political pawns. The Friendly Atheist spotted another example of this that I thought I would point out, namely Focus on the Family's commercial during the football game last weekend, which consisted of children reciting John 3:16 Click the link to see the video and an analysis of how this sort of thing comes across to a non-believer. Here are the two best points:

When you don't have logic and evidence on your side, just go for an emotional appeal. It might get through to the gullible viewers.

Can you imagine the uproar that would've ensued if the children of Muslims read a verse from the Koran in the same way? Hell, Focus on the Family probably would've called it indoctrination themselves.

Disclaimer: Yes, I know, everyone uses children like this to some extent, going for the emotional appeal. Heck, this is why politicians kiss babies. That doesn't make it right, or a good thing, and I think it's something we should think about and evaluate.

Quiverfull: Outbreeding the World

2012-01-19T09:52:00.002-05:00

Yes, the Quiverfull movement really wants to out breed the rest of the world. That's kind of the idea. You hear all the time in families influenced by Quiverfull ideas the travesty of the average Western family only having two children, and how that presents an opportunity for those true Christian families that have many more than that average, and about how if we don't do something the Muslims with their huge families will take over the world. I got these messages loud and clear growing up. I was taught that I was to change the world with my uterus.

Today, I came upon a Quiverfull article illustrating exactly the ideas I'm talking about here, and thought I would post it in whole for those readers who may not have had exposure to the ideas I did growing up. I have put the parts I think especially important in bold.

The Population Bust An Opportunity

By David Crank

The predicted population explosion has not occurred. In most countries around the world, birth rates are reported to be at or below the replacement rate (2.1 births per woman). Worldwide the birth rate in 2000 was estimated at 2.9 per woman, as compared to 5.4 in 1970. In the U.S. the rate has been near the replacement rate (reported to be 2.01 births per woman in 2002). Virtually all population growth in the U.S. is resulting from immigration. A number of countries are seeing a reduction in population that is of great concern, and are now trying to encourage couples to have more children – with little effect.

The population bust creates a very real opportunity for segments of the population willing to move counter to this trend. As American Christians, most of us would like to see our society and government change in many ways. We would like to see an end to legalized abortion, we would like to see strong Christian influences and witnesses throughout our society, we would like to see major reductions in pornography, immorality, gambling, misuse of drugs and alcohol, homosexuality, and a host of other evils that have been growing in our culture. What can we do about these things?

We can work to change laws, to influence our neighbors, to teach and preach and write about these things, etc. However, all of these efforts would be much more effective if there were many more of us working towards these ends. We need more Christians, and not just ones who make a one time profession and then continue living much as before! We need to make many more disciples and teach them to observe all that Jesus commanded (Matt 28:18-20).

We all know this, but sometimes we overlook one of the most effective ways to achieve this over the longer term. With each child born into our families we have an incredible opportunity to present the gospel to them and disciple them thoroughly over a period of perhaps 20 years. The more children we are able to have and raise for the Lord, the greater our long-term impact on our culture. In a period when the general population is barely producing enough children to replace themselves, the potential impact of a high birth strategy is greatly amplified.

The Impact of Your Family Alone

Just how much impact can just you and your spouse have on the future world merely by birthing and raising children for the Lord? Assuming all of your descendants are able to find godly mates outside of your family and, on average, reproduce at the same rate you do, and these descendants are all faithful to follow in the same footsteps …

If 6 children per couple:
Generation #1: 6 children
Generation #2: 36 children
Generation #3: 216 children
Generation #4: 1,296 children

Total direct descendants: 1,554

If 8 children per couple:
Generation #1: 8 children
Generation #2: 64 children
Generation #3: 512 children
Generation #4: 4,096 children
Total direct descendants: 4,680

If 10 children per couple:
Generation #1: 10 children
Generation #2: 100 children
Generation #3: 1,000 children
Generation #4: 10,000 children

Total direct descendants: 11,110

Compare these numbers with four generations of 2 children per couple:

30 total direct descendants.

Population Numbers

What percentage of the U.S. population is truly Christian? And what percentage of these are truly seeking to live for the Lord and to evaluate everything by the standard of the Bible?

Suppose, for example’s sake, that 10% of the U.S. population was truly Christian and serious about their Christianity, and were willing to have a few more children that the typical unbelievers (say 4 children instead of 2). Then suppose 1/5 of these, or 2% of the total population, were willing to seriously diverge from the norm of our society by not using birth control and being willing to accept as many children as God would bless them with (suppose an average of 8 children per family). Then suppose succeeding generations were convinced to do the same, while 90% of the population continued to average 2 children per family.

Given this scenario, how might the population mix change over a few generations? (Assume a population of 100 million for simplicity and that all spouses are taken from within the same group).

Generation #0

90% Unbelievers & Nominal Christians (avg. 2 children)
(90 Million)

8% Serious Christians (avg. 4 children)
(8 Million)
2% "Quiver Full" Christians (avg. 8 children)
(2 Million )

Generation #1

79% Unbelievers & Nominal Christians (avg. 2 children)
(90 Million)

14% Serious Christians (avg. 4 children)
(16 Million)
7% "Quiver Full" Christians (avg. 8 children)
(8 Million)

Generation #2

58% Unbelievers & Nominal Christians (avg. 2 children)
(90 Million)

21% Serious Christians (avg. 4 children)
(32 Million)
21% "Quiver Full" Christians (avg. 8 children)
(32 Million)

Generation #3

32% Unbelievers & Nominal Christians (avg. 2 children)
(90 Million)

23% Serious Christians (avg. 4 children)
(64 Million)
45% "Quiver Full" Christians (avg. 8 children)
(128 Million)

The Outcome. Isn’t it amazing how fast a small difference in birth rates can change the makeup of a population? In two generations – that would be the grandchildren of a young couple starting out right now, a 10% population segment of Christians could almost overtake the unbelievers and nominal Christians – and that’s without counting any conversions resulting from evangelism outside your immediate family! By the 3^rd generation, that original 10% could represent 68% of the whole!

Of course it is really a bit more complicated than this. These numbers just look at each generation separately, in actuality about 3 generations are living at the same time and young children do not have a great influence until they grow up. So it might take one more generation to change the actual voting majority. There are also other factors which would impact the final numbers, but probably not a great deal.

Essential Conditions. There is however one other necessary requirement for reaching this end. The Christian parents averaging 4 or 8 children must also successfully raise their children to similarly follow the Lord and to also marry and reproduce accordingly. Many children straying from the faith or following the world in averaging only 2 children per family, and things do work out nearly so well.

Is This Truly Feasible? What I see when exhibiting at homeschool conferences is encouraging. Particularly among those Christians who have been home schooling for longer periods, larger families are very common. I would guess that the average number of children among Christian home schoolers is around four and going higher. We meet a good number of such families with 8, 10, or 12 children! Though there will always be some unable to have children at all, and others blessed with only one or two, I would still expect an average of 7 or 8 children per family among those not using birth control. Doing a little genealogy research on various branches of our family, I found the average number of living children in the 1700 and 1800s to be in that range or higher – in spite of higher mortality among infants and small children.

And is it feasible for Christian parents to on average lose less than 10% of their children to the world? Statistics have been published indicating that as much as 80% of the children from Christian families are turning away from the church as young adults. However, this is clearly not happening among most home schooling families. Some young people from fine Christian homeschooling families are lost, but I would estimate the number as well below 20% at present (from those families who homeschool through high school).

So yes, I think such a change is very feasible and could be driven heavily by the homeschool movement – IF – we would (1) be diligent in speaking out against the world’s view of children as burdens; and (2) strongly encourage one another and others to trust God in this area; and (3) truly welcome more children into our own families, if God would provide.

Notice the assumption that if you raise your children properly they will grow up to be your ideological clones and copy your exact lifestyle. Of everything I read in articles like this, this is the part I find most destructive. It's not just about raising children who love Jesus, it's about raising "true" Christians (aka ones who agree with you on every minute point of theology, morality, and politics) who will have six, eight, or ten children like you. Raising Christians who "stray from the faith" (aka questioning even a single doctrinal point, such as young earth creationism or anti-gay rights) or "average only two children like the world" represents failure.

"Some young people from fine homeschooling families are lost," the article says. I am one of those "lost" young people. So are those whose blogs are listed under my "Links" tab. And let me tell you, for those "lost" young people this kind of thinking wrecks havoc with familial relations.

Also, it really does seem that this strategy represents an abandoning of the original Christian strategy of evangelicalism. Rather than making Christians by giving birth to them, why not make Christians by converting them? Has conversion failed? If the only way you can get others to share your religious beliefs is by birthing and indoctrinating them, you have a serious problem.

Oh and also, apparently infertility doesn't fit in this model either.

A Little Child Shall Lobby Them

2012-01-18T17:51:00.000-05:00

This little girl was one of dozens of children brought to the Ohio statehouse last week to speak on behalf of the "heartbeat bill" that, if passed, will ban abortion past six weeks (to put the time frame into perspective, the day you miss your period you are technically already four weeks pregnant). These children also passed out teddy bears that play the sound of a fetal heartbeat to each Ohio congressman. This could have been me. No wait, strike that, this was me.

I began marching the political campaign trail before I can even remember. From when I was a very young girl, barely in grade school, I went door to door, worked the polls, attended rallies, marched in parades, and manned the phone banks. Political activism was a normal part of my life, just as it is for many other young people in conservative Christian homeschool families, especially through organizations like Generation Joshua and TeenPact.

I think political activism is a great thing to teach kids. However, there is a major problem with the approach taken by my parents and other like-minded parents throughout the country.

I wish I could just say "children are too young to have informed political opinions" and leave it at that. However, I think the reality is more nuanced. When presented with a variety of issues and facts, a seven-year-old may be able to take a semi-informed position. Some kids are surprisingly astute. However, regardless of his or her maturity a seven-year-old will almost certainly not be able to completely grasp the gravity of adult concerns issues. In contrast, by the teenage years a child can most certainly form informed political opinions.

The problem is this: The girl in the picture above is not forming her own political opinions. She merely serves as the parrot of her parents' views.

My parents never laid out all the facts and sides and arguments on issues like abortion. Instead, when I was quite small they simply told me that abortion was "killing babies before they are born." They showed me (not quite accurate) pictures of what fetuses look like, told me they have fingers and brains and hearts just like me, and told me that abortion was murder. They told me that women who have abortions are selfish and cold, and that abortion doctors kill babies for money and participate in "a holocaust of murdered babies."

Small children don't have the ability to completely grasp political issues, but to the extent that they can they need even explanations of the facts and arguments, not propaganda.

My parents took pride in how young we children were able to express ourselves politically. They smiled to hear a child of five or seven or nine explain that property taxes were slavery, that abortion was murdering babies, or that gay marriage is wrong because every child needs a mommy and a daddy. They spoke of how politically aware we were, how confident and intelligent we were. Did they realize, I wonder, that we were merely parroting their own views, and not actually forming views of our own?

I would like to say that this changed once I became a teen, but it did not. The simplistic understandings my parents gave us as young children were never amended. At thirteen, fifteen, and seventeen I had still not heard any political side but that fed me by my parents and the resources they used to educate and inform me. Every political magazine, every economics book, every Bible study, it all gave me a completely one-sided picture of every issue. Abortion was still about "murdering babies" and I continued to parrot my parents' views, uncontaminated by any other source of information or perspective.

My parents took us children along with them to score political points. They openly talked about how powerful it was to have a three-year-old hold an "I'm A Child, Not A Choice" sign while participating in the annual Life Chain, or to have a young teenager be the one to speak to reporters at (traditional) marriage rallies. They would intentionally push us forward to answer questions or spout out our formulated positions, smiling proudly as we performed.

What my parents didn't realize was that this sort of behavior actually turns some people off. Here are two quotes from Ohio state senators:

"I'm not at all supportive of the bill, and I'm not supportive of them sending kids into my office with a teddy bear that mimics a heartbeat, either. I thought that was a very cheap exploitation of kids. I would rather them come in my office and ask to sit down and talk about it, rather than send a kid into my office."

"It is an emotional kind of tactic, bringing young children in and having them bring teddy bears. I think that's a little low."

As I read these quotes today, I couldn't help but think of my own childhood experiences. I was that child, trotted at age ten into my state senator's office to tell her how much I loved being homeschooled and how important it was for homeschooling to remain legal. I wonder, now, what my state senator thought.

Today, I do think this sort of political use is exploitative. First, you should not use your children to make a political statement. Why not, like one of the state senators above suggested, just go to your senators or representatives and make your case? Injecting kids into the issue is nothing but an emotional appeal and it allows parents to step back and let their inexperienced child do the talking for them instead of doing it themselves. Second, you should not turn your children into politically propagandized robots. Sure, you can tell your children where you stand on an issue, but whatever happened to letting children and adolescents explore and make up their own minds? A small child does not have enough experience or understanding to put together mature political positions, and should not be expected to. A teen is quickly gaining the necessary maturity, but should be allowed to explore all sides unhindered and to form his or her own political opinions.

A child of any age who only receives one side of an issue, that of his or her parents, and then echoes that, however vehemently, is not mature or politically savvy.

There is another thing, too. If I had suddenly endorsed liberal political positions, or even moderate ones, I would have faced consequences within my family. My parents would have been angry, would have treated me as an erring and rebellious child. They would have begun a one-sided information campaign to bring me back to their views, and resorted to emotional manipulation until I did. It was not just that I didn't have access to other political information or arguments, but rather that my parents' home was not a safe place emotionally in which to explore alternate viewpoints or experiment politically. And this is not healthy.

Sally is not a Democrat or a Republican. She is not pro-life or pro-choice. She is not liberal or conservative. Sally is a child, she is not old enough to understand the world of politics, and I don't expect her too. As Sally grows, I want her to understand the arguments for each side of an issue, because no matter what all it is, one thing politics is not is simple. I want her to understand that these are complex issues. I will absolutely not tell Sally that one political position is "right" and all the others are "wrong." As she grows into her teenage years, I want Sally to be able to form her own political views, and to feel like our home is a safe place to do so. If Sally comes home from school someday and tells me she's a libertarian, that's fine.

I don't expect Sally's political views to be a mirror image of mine, and I don't expect her political views at the immature age of seven to be the same as at the more mature age of fifteen or at the more seasoned age of twenty-three.

I don't intend to stake my success as a parent on what political views she adopts. You have to understand that that for parents influenced by the ideas of the Quiverfull movement part of the rationale for having large numbers of children is to raise a (rhetorical) army to "retake the country for Christ." The idea is to gain a larger voting block, to raise conservative politicians, campaigners, volunteers, and interns. I kid you not, that is the whole point. That's also a large part of why they homeschool - to remove their children from influences that might teach them other ideas and instead train them up in "Truth" with a capital T. If a child raised in a Quiverfull family turns away from this "Truth" and become moderate, liberal, progressive, or politically apathetic, that child is seen as a failure.

Personally, I don't stake my success as a parent on Sally adopting any one political view, let alone mine. I don't stake my success on Sally echoing my religious beliefs, or lack of them, either. Sally's mind, after all, does not belong to me. It belongs to her. I do care whether Sally grows up to be fulfilled person, and I care whether Sally grows up to be a loving and caring person. But I do not intend to stand over her as an ideological policeman, judging whether or not her beliefs are acceptable.

I have to confess, I did take Sally with me to a rally for Planned Parenthood once. I worried that this was using her as a political tool, but then I realized that I was bringing her there to say something about me, not to use her as an emotional weapon. Namely, I wanted to make the statement that being pro-choice does not mean being anti-child. I wanted to smash the image that feminists are all childless single women who "selfishly" flee the attachment of children. I would never have pushed Sally forward to make some sort of canned statement, because it wasn't about Sally, it was about me, and why I was, and why I was there. There was another woman there with a baby, and she told a reporter that she was there because she wanted her daughter to grow up to have access to the same reproductive resources she had. I don't think that's the same as simply using your child as an emotional tool either. I mean, if that's all the parents at the Ohio statehouse were saying - say, that they didn't want their young daughters to grow up to have access to abortion - I wouldn't have had a problem with that either.

As Sally grows, I do want to teach her the importance of political activism. However, I will not push her forward to spout off formulated positions, I will not feed her my political views boiled down to simplistic formulas that fail to capture the complexity of political issues, and I will not put labels on her. If a reporter or politician comments on her presence, I will say that I think it's important for her to learn about the political process, not that she's a good little [insert here]-in-training. And more than that, Sally will know that her political decisions are her own to make. As she grows, if she does not want to come to a rally or a parade or whatever it is I'm participating in because of my political views, I won't make her.

Sally is not my tool. Sally is a wonderful little person yet to form her own beliefs. Rather than try to make her bloom into the species of flower I want her to be, I intend to let her bloom without hindrance. I will always be there to hold her hand or answer her questions, but I will not use her as a political shield or as my political mouthpiece.

From Homophobe to Gay Rights Advocate

2012-01-16T11:30:00.000-05:00

I didn't meet a gay person growing up. "Homosexuals" were talked about in tones of disgust and sorrow, and we children knew that it was wrong for "men to kiss men" and "women to kiss women," and that the Bible condemned homosexuality, but it was all in the abstract. It was about those depraved people who were out there trying to ruin marriage and subvert youth, not about any actual people we knew.

This is the story of how I met gay people, heard their stories, realized that they were human, and changed my position on homosexuality.

I met my first gay person in college. I didn't know he was gay when I met him. Bobby was just the clean-cut, fun-loving guy who hung out in the dorm lounge and cheered everyone up with his words of encouragement. Bobby was smart, compassionate, and encouraging, he was there for everyone and everyone loved him. He came from a good family and was extremely successful in school, headed toward a career in computers. Halfway through freshman year Bobby came out as gay. This was completely unexpected.

Growing up, the most important things my parents and church had emphasized about homosexuality was that it was a choice, and that it was a horrible, ruinous, depraved lifestyle. Bobby challenged the later of these two teachings, for I could not understand how this wonderful, loving, compassionate young man could be holding such depravity inside. I had expected every gay person I met to be sporting piercings, tattoos, outlandish clothing, foul language, hedonism, depression, and likely several incurable diseases leading him to his grave. Bobby challenged this expectation because he did not fit it, not in the least.

Later in college I met a biology graduate student, Eric, who was openly gay. Like Bobby, Eric was clean-cut and respectable. I enjoyed talking to him about evolution, global warming, and other science-related issues. Because I knew him only ephemerally, I felt comfortable enough to ask him how he first figured out that he was gay. He explained to me that when he was nine or ten a friend of his showed him a playboy magazine he had found, and that was when he first realized he was different, because that magazine was doing something for his friend that it didn't do for him. As he went through adolescence, he was never sexually attracted to females. Instead, he was sexually attracted to other males. This was not, he explained, something he had chosen, and it was not something he could change. After all, being gay had cost him his entire family, which had rejected him when he came out.

Eric thus challenged the second thing I had been taught about homosexuality, that it was a choice. Eric explained most emphatically that being gay was not something he had chosen and not something he could change, not anymore than I could change being sexually attracted to males.

In graduate school, I had a gay coworker, Doug. His background was similar to mine, growing up in a conservative religious family very involved in the church. Doug explained that being gay was never something he asked for, and that as a teen he prayed that it would disappear. He heard the teachings of his church about the evils of homosexuality, and he came to despise himself, to wish that he were dead, to feel that he and his family would be better off if he were dead. Finally, halfway through high school, he attempted suicide by swallowing a bottle full of pills. This left him violently ill, vomiting blood, but did not kill him. In college, after years of hiding it, he finally came out as gay, and for the first time the depression lifted and he felt that he could truly be himself. For the first time, he was truly at peace, truly happy, truly fulfilled.

Meeting gay people thus threw into question the things I had been taught about homosexuality as a child: that it was a choice and that it was a depraved, hideous lifestyle. Yet even with this, I had been taught that the Bible condemned homosexuality. I knew that if this was the case then whether or not homosexuality was a choice and regardless of how nice or loving or normal-seeming gay people might be, it was wrong. Yet it was during these same years that I realized that I could not take the Bible literally, and and that I must understand it in its proper cultural and historical context. I soon learned that the Bible's condemnation of homosexuality is not at all as clear cut as I had been raised to believe it, and I did not see how a God of love could create people with homosexual attractions and then condemn them for it. As I began to see God's love as more important than his judgement, and his ways as less black and white than our narrow understandings, I reevaluated my theological position on this issue. A few years later I became an atheist, which made what the Bible says or does not say about homosexuality irrelevant.

Today, I feel completely comfortable around the gay people I meet and befriend. They are people just like me, with their own hopes, dreams, and interests. They are not defined by their homosexuality any more than I was by my heterosexuality. Today at long last I can accept gay people without any remnant of my earlier inside squeamishness or disgust.

Furthermore, stories like Doug's have turned me into a big of a gay rights activist. Something like 30-40% of gay youth attempt suicide just like he did, not because being gay gives them depression but because the homophobic messages they receive from their families, churches, and communities make death seem more attractive than life. Last week on NPR I heard the story of a gay young man whose mother suspected he was gay when he was only ten, and took him out into the woods, pointed a loaded gun at him, and told him that this was the place she would shoot him through the head if he ever became a "faggot." There is also the story of my bisexual friend who was rejected from her religious community when she came out as bisexual, even though she had been raised in that community from infancy.

There is also the fact that if Bobby, or Eric, or Doug wanted to marry their partners (two of the three are in long-term relationships), in the states where they currently live they could not. They would not be allowed to visit each other in the hospital or make medical decisions, they could not file joint tax refunds or have any of the other benefits that go to married couples. I hear people like twice-divorced Newt Gingrich condemning gay marriage as a threat to the institution of marriage, and I become angry inside. Bobby, Eric, Doug, and the other gay people I have befriended are not bad people. In fact, they are some of the most loving, accepting people I know. They deserve to have the right to marry the person they love just as much as I, or Newt Gingrich, or any heterosexual person can.

I understand where people like Newt Gingrich are coming from. I understand that they believe God has condemned homosexuality and that they harbor a veritable library of destructive myths and stereotypes about gay people. They are my parents. They are the church I grew up in. I get it. It's just that I no longer agree with them. Today, I believe in equality.

The "Christianity Makes People Good" Myth

2012-01-14T14:54:00.000-05:00

Recently, a Christian friend bubbled to me about her new job at a Christian business, and how wonderful it was to be working in a Christian workplace that even has Christian weekend retreats for its employers and prayer groups, etc. "I think everyone, regardless of their beliefs, would be better off working in a Christian workplace!" she told me excitedly. She knows I am an atheist, but when I told her I disagreed she was honestly surprised.

Growing up, "Christian" was synonymous with "good person." "Non-Christian" was synonymous with "bad person." Anytime I learned that someone I had just met was a Christian, I felt an immediate kinship, felt that I could trust that person completely. So it's really not surprising that my friend would think that "Christian workplace" means "good workplace" and "Christian coworkers" means "kind and loving coworkers." What surprised me was that she thought that I, an atheist, would agree with her assessment, that it would be obvious to me that Christians are good people and that a Christian workplace would be the best ever. It's not.

There are good and bad Christians, and good and bad non-Christians

I met a lot of different people in college, and that was when I realized that religious beliefs are often irrelevant to whether or not someone is a good person. I met (conservative Protestant) Christians who were wonderful people and (conservative Protestant) Christians who were self-righteous back stabbers. I met Wiccans, Catholics, Episcopalians, and atheists, and just as with conservative Christians some of them were wonderful people while others were petty or cold. I actually think that, on average, the gay friends I have show more love and kindness and radiate more happiness than do the Christians I know.

"Christian" does not automatically mean "good person." Christians are no different from any other group - some of them are loving and some of them are hateful, and plenty of them are each in different doses or in different circumstances and at different times. For all their talk of throwing off their sin nature through Christ's sacrifice and letting Jesus' supernatural love shine through, Christians are simply human like everyone else.

The "in group, out group" phenomena

In my experience, Christianity itself also tends to creates a an "in group" and "out group" phenomenon, where you are either fully accepted and loved or condemned as lost and a sinner. As an example, here's an excerpt from a post from last week:

I know a girl who was rejected from her loving faith community when she came out to a mentor as bisexual. All of the women who had loved her and mentored her, the women she had grown up with and admired, suddenly turned on her and rejected her. I know a man who is about to be fired as pastor of his church because he has started wearing his hair long and has pierced one of his ears. He teaches the same doctrine and provides his parishioners with the same love and care he always has, but they have turned against him, holding secret meetings and talking behind his back.

Non-religious groups do the same thing, but religion makes it worse. My bisexual friend's religious community rejected her because of what they believe their religious book says and my pastor friend found himself rejected because of his church's ideas of proper religious standards of conduct. Religion adds an air of certainty and an unwillingness to even consider compromise, and that this amplifies the "in group, out group" phenomenon.

Character and morality

I've heard people say that young children should be taken to church to give them proper moral standards, or that prayer should be restored to schools in order to help children develop character. This is bullshit. A sixteen-year-old atheist girl named Jessica Ahlquist recently won a lawsuit to remove an explicitly Christian prayer banner from her public school as an unconstitutional endorsement of religion (which it clearly was). How have her Christian peers, taken to church and daily exposed to this prayer, responded? Like this (note: these were facebook and twitter updates, not anonymous) (warning: language):

“U little brainless idiot, hope u will be punished, you have not win sh..t! Stupid little brainless skunk!”

“Fuck Jessica alquist I’ll drop anchor on her face”

“definetly laying it down on this athiest tommorow anyone else?”

“Let’s all jump that girl who did the banner #fuckthatho”

“literally that bitch is insane. and the best part is she already transferred schools because shes knows someone will jump her #ahaha”

“”But for real somebody should jump this girl” lmao let’s do it!”

“Hmm jess is in my bio class, she’s gonna get some shit thrown at her”

“I want to punch the girl in the face that made west take down the school prayer… #Honestly”

“hail Mary full of grace @jessicaahlquist is gonna get punched in the face”

“When I take over the world I’m going to do a holocaust to all the atheists”

“gods going to fuck your ass with that banner you scumbag”

“if I wasn’t 18 and wouldn’t go to jail I’d beat the shit out of her idk how she got away with not getting beat up yet”

“lol I wanna stick that bitch lol”

“nail her to a cross”

“We can make so many jokes about this dumb bitch, but who cares #thatbitchisgointohell and Satan is gonna rape her.”

Did you know that a higher percentage of Christians are in jail in this country than of atheists? Did you know that the most secular countries in the world also have the lowest jail rates? Am I saying that being a Christian makes someone a bad person? No. I'm simply saying that being a Christian does not mean a person will necessarily have good ethics, character, or morals.

Interestingly, the Ancient Greeks saw "ethics" and "religion" as two distinctly separate things. Ethics involved your views of right and wrong, value, and proper activity while religion involved you beliefs about and duties toward the gods. I like this distinction, because it holds true in my own life. "Atheism" describes my beliefs about the supernatural, but it says nothing about my ethics. Rather, "humanism" is the ethical and moral standard I live by. It's for this reason that I don't find it surprising that those who believe in the trinity and the virgin birth, etc, might live by a variety of different ethical and moral standards.

Conclusion

Being a Christian does not make someone a good person. It just doesn't. If it did, Christian history wouldn't be littered with crusades and the burning of heretics. If it did, Hitler wouldn't have had millions slaughtered. Being Christian doesn't make someone a bad person either. If it did, Christian history wouldn't be littered with saints who started ministries to the poor and reformers who sought to better people's lives. The fact is that Christians are simply human, just like anyone else.

I do understand why people like my friend think the way they do, of course. They believe that Christianity fundamentally transforms people, allowing them to cast off their "sin natures" and let the love of Christ shine through them. If you believe this, you almost have to believe that Christians on average are better people than non-Christians on average, and in fact, if you find that this is no the case it throws into question your entire belief system. As an atheist, though, I do not believe there is anything supernatural about any religion or its ability to transform people. As an atheist, I do not see Christians as any different from anyone else. But somehow, I don't think my Christian friend can understand that.

How Creationism Drove Me out of the Church

2012-01-12T16:30:00.004-05:00

To be more specific, creationism led me to a crisis of faith that ultimately, through some twists and turns, drove me out of the Christianity. My parents did not realize that in teaching me that literal young earth creationism was the foundation of Christianity they did not simply fortify my faith but rather gave my faith an Achilles heel. And apparently, I am not alone. Really, really not alone.

My parents taught me that Christianity was about being filled with the Holy Spirit and having a personal relationship with Jesus. They taught me that Christianity was about love and service, not rules and regulations. I really wish they had stopped there. Instead, they added and added and added.

Growing up, Christianity was a package deal. Blogger Fred Clark argues that the borders of evangelicalism are defined by the "big four" issues: Abortion is murder, homosexuality is sin, evolution is nonsense, and environmentalism is a farce. This was certainly true for me. I was essentially taught that you could not be a Christian and believe otherwise on these issues. In other words, these issues were so tied into Christianity that they became an essential part of it. I would add a few more issues as well, namely anti-feminism, capitalism, spanking children as divinely mandated, and parental control over their children's education through homeschooling. These issues were made into essential Christian doctrines.

I have sometimes described the faith my parents constructed for me as a sort of crystalline structure.

Everything my parents taught me fit together. It was a cohesive whole. The problem, though, was that if you took one piece out, the whole thing would fall down. My parents taught me young earth creationism alongside the virgin birth, anti-environmentalism alongside the trinity, and anti-abortionism alongside the divinity of Christ. Everything fit together into an integrated whole, but it was a whole that was dependent on all of its parts holding true.

These other beliefs - creationism, anti-abortionism, anti-environmentalism, anti-gay rights, anti-feminism, capitalism, the importance of spanking children, and homeschooling as commanded by God - became so entwined with conventional Christian beliefs such as Christ's atonement on the cross that they became almost indistinguishable. They were Christianity. Anyone who didn't share these beliefs was not Christian, was misled, was walking down the path toward damnation. Christianity, then, became dependent on the truth of these other beliefs, most especially creationism.

My parents taught me that we could know our faith was true because of the scientific truth of creation. Science pointed to a literal six day creation six thousand years ago, they taught me, and "liberal, atheistic" scientists who supported evolution were either misled or intentionally misleading. We could know our faith was true, my parents taught me, because the Bible was true, and we knew the Bible was true because creation was true. My parents intentionally, purposefully taught me to make young earth creationism the foundation of my faith. And, they taught me, if I ever gave up young earth creationism and became an "evolutionist," I would have to give up my faith. Christianity and evolution were simply incompatible.

If a young person has had issues such as creationism, anti-abortionism, or anti-gay rights integrated into his or her faith and then finds those beliefs in question, it triggers a crisis of faith. If that belief, taught as gospel truth alongside such doctrines as the trinity, was not true, then what was true? If my parents and church were wrong about that, the young person wonders, what else were they wrong about? The reality is that elevating creationism or anti-abortionism or anti-feminism to gospel truth means that if one of those beliefs is called into question so too is the gospel.

It could have started with anything. It could have started with having a gay friend who caused me to rethink my anti-gay rights stance, or with feelings of the injustice of female submission. For me, though, it started with creationism. The answer, I think, is simple. Being anti-gay rights or anti-abortion were, for me, theological positions. I might emotionally question them if, for example, I had a college friend faced with an unexpected pregnancy, but that would probably not be enough to make me rethink them. It had to be creationism, I think, because it was something that could be examined scientifically, not just theologically or emotionally.

I never had any college science professors tell me what I could and could not believe. There was no "indoctrination." What happened was that college opened me to a new array of facts and arguments about evolution and creation, facts and arguments conspicuously missing from the creationist science textbooks I studied from in high school. This was my first exposure to real science. I soon found that I had a problem. I had to choose between rejecting facts and evidence and going with the literal interpretation of Genesis I had been taught was the only acceptable Christian position, or accepting facts and evidence and becoming a dreaded "evolutionist" on my way to damnation.

I was forced to choose between reality and faith.

I'm a very honest person and a very logical person. I simply could not reject the evidence I saw before me (and believe me, I struggled over this for a long time, trying desperately to disprove it, using my creationist resources, and yet coming up short again and again). And so, I accepted the scientific reality of the theory of evolution. But as I did so, the crystalline structure that was my faith began to crumble. I desperately tried to hold it together and pin it up, but I could not. I had been taught to integrate young earth creationism into my faith in such a way that I was not sure my faith could survive without it.

Most of all, I was terribly, completely confused. If my parents had been wrong about creationism, I realized that they could be wrong about anything, or even everything. I could no longer implicitly trust what they had taught me as I had before. Instead, everything they had taught me was suddenly suspect, potentially untrue. I had to rethink all of it and figure out what should be kept and what must be thrown out.

I know I'm being repetitive here, but by holding the truth of creationism up as high as that of the trinity, my parents created a very problematic situation for me, and for my faith. They created a situation where my faith depended on creationism being true, a situation where learning that scientific evidence actually points to evolution would lead me into a crisis of faith and throw their every teaching into question.

When the makings of my faith tumbled, though, I was left with one thing, and that was my relationship with Jesus. Jesus had always been my best friend, my confidant, my constant companion. I cried out to Jesus, I told him I was scared, that I did not understand, that I felt my life was crumbling around me. I found comfort and solace in Jesus, and the permission to rethink the beliefs my parents had taught me. I rethought my anti-environmentalism, my anti-gay rights and anti-abortionism, my unblinking faith in capitalism and my anti-feminism. Eventually, I even rethought my belief in spanking and homeschooling. And, little by little, I reconstructed my life and put my faith back together, making it truly mine. My faith felt more real, more exciting, and more beautiful. I felt energized and more in love with Jesus than ever. My faith was an adventure, and suddenly I could ask anything, consider anything, and truly explore, with Jesus and Jesus alone at my side.

My parents reaction was, not surprisingly, extremely negative. They could not see that I felt closer to Jesus than I had ever been. All they saw was that I had rejected my faith, for that was what rejecting such things as creationism meant. They treated me as a fallen, rebellious daughter. In their actions, they made themselves unavailable to me and pushed me away, all because they had made creationism, capitalism, and anti-feminism core tenets of their faith. They had so integrated beliefs like anti-environmentalism and the godliness and necessity of spanking into the essence of their faith that they could not comprehend what was happening to me. And when I was with them, they worked their hardest to push me back into the box-like beliefs in which they had raised me. It was stifling and belittling, and having tasted the freedom of being able to ask questions and come to my own beliefs, I refused to go back into their box.

Stung by my parents rejection but basking in Jesus' love and my freedom I explored other faith traditions, especially Catholicism. In them I found much to be admired, but I found something even more important. I found a faith that was not tied to capitalism or anti-environmentalism. I found people who did not integrate creationism or anti-feminism into the very structure of their faith. I found diversity, richness, and beauty. I found a faith that truly placed love and service, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, at the top, and relegated other issues to secondary positions. I found faith that did not come with its own built in politics, faith that transcended politics, nation, and differences of opinion.

But. The removal of creationism from the structure of my faith created a nagging problem I was never able to solve. Because creationism had been elevated to the same level of importance as core doctrines like the trinity, I could never see those core doctrines as above question. Just as I had questioned anti-feminism, unthinking capitalism, and anti-environmentalism, even so I found myself questioning the trinity, substitutionary atonement, and even the divinity of Christ. After what happened with creationism, I could no longer take these doctrines for granted. And as I questioned, thought, and explored, many of them stopped making sense. I was afraid, and I once again grabbed at my faith desperately, trying to hold onto it and not let it slip through my fingers. I wanted the trinity to make sense, wanted God to make sense, wanted Jesus to be real. But wanting it could not make it so.

I was afraid as I looked the possibility of losing my faith in the face, but I was also upheld by the same energetic buoyancy that had supported me before. There was something invigorating about considering new ideas, questioning everything, and asking hard questions rather than simply accepting pat answers. There was something intoxicating about finally really and truly being free and, for the first time, truly forming my own beliefs. My questions took me in directions I never thought I would go, and I found myself moving in the direction of universalism, pantheism, skepticism, agnosticism, and, eventually, atheism. The excitement of having the freedom to ask questions and form my own beliefs never left me. The world still seemed a beautiful and wondrous place, the birds still sang, and life was still an adventure filled with purpose. Only this time, it was adventure and purpose I created for myself.

What of Jesus? He was there for me when I needed him in the emotional turmoil of those early days of questions, but the more comfortable I became in being able to stand on my own two feet, the less I needed him. For a while, as I questioned my faith itself, I was desperately afraid of losing him. But by that time, truth mattered more to me than comfort. I realized that Jesus might be nothing more than an imaginary friend that I could lean on or confide in, and that truth and reality mattered more than my desire to keep an imaginary friend. In the midst of all my questions, I actually became so distraught that I had to take a break, and so for a month, I took a break from the questions and a break from faith. At the end of that month, I realized that my faith had gone, and that Jesus had slipped away like the imaginary friend he was. Strange as it may sound, I will always be glad I had an imaginary friend to support me in the turmoil of those early years. But that in itself does not make him real.

I have been an atheist for several years now, and life has gone on. I still have hope and purpose, I still see beauty and wonder. I have a wonderful, fulfilling life and am not bitter about the past. I honestly think I am a kinder and more loving person today than I was growing up, even without religion instructing my life. But then, that may be because I have replaced religion with humanism. I don't believe in nothing, you see. I believe in human potential, human value, and human worth. I no longer see children as full of sin and I no longer classify people as saved ("good") and unsaved ("bad"). Atheism is what I do not believe, and humanism I do believe.

I want to bring this post full circle and address its main point once again. If my parents had not elevated creationism to the same importance as the virgin birth, I would never have had my crisis of faith. Doing so gave my faith an Achilles heel. I'm not saying this happens to everyone raised to equate creationism with Christianity - it doesn't. What I am saying is that elevating things like capitalism and spanking to the same level of truth as the trinity creates a Christianity in a box. It shuts off questions and exploration. It closes the door to differences of opinion. It creates a situation where you are either in, or out. And, more importantly, it creates a situation where questioning something as simple as capitalism means rejection and changing your mind on something as little as anti-gay rights means potentially throwing everything from the trinity to the divinity of Jesus into question.

I recently came across this blog. The author is a self-described young evangelical Christian who does not equate things like capitalism and anti-gay rights with Christianity. The Christianity he lives is one that is open to questions, differences of opinion, and diversity of belief united only by core beliefs in things like Jesus, love, and service. I cannot help but think that if my parents had raised me like this, emphasizing core ideas like love and letting issues like capitalism or environmentalism be peripheral and individual I might have kept my faith. I would have had room to explore without rejection, room to question without judgement, and room to form my own beliefs without ostracism. If the core tenets had truly been love and service instead of anti-feminism and anti-abortionism, I would probably never have felt stifled by Christianity in the way that I did. I might have still left, but I might not have.

I am glad that my faith journey led me to skepticism and beyond. I wouldn't undo it. I am happy where I am and I am a certain as I can be that there is no God and that religions are invented. I am happy to be joined in this by others who have similar journeys. But I don't value atheism for itself. I value questions, freedom, and people's ability to form their own beliefs. I know Christians, especially in the blogging world, who do this, thinking outside of the box and asking hard questions, valuing love, acceptance, tolerance, and service above conformity, and yet still maintaining their faith. I don't necessarily want a world where everyone is an atheist, but rather a world where everyone is allowed to ask questions and think outside of the box, where everyone is allowed to form their own beliefs, and where love and service and acceptance matter more than judgement or boundaries.

You see, I have noticed something about way too many faith communities: they will say it's all about loving Jesus and then they make that a lie with their actions. My parents reacted negatively to me not because I had rejected Jesus but because I had rejected creationism. Overnight, I went from golden girl to pariah. I know a girl who was rejected from her loving faith community when she came out to a mentor as bisexual. All of the women who had loved her and mentored her, the women she had grown up with and admired, suddenly turned on her and rejected her. I know a man who is about to be fired as pastor of his church because he has started wearing his hair long and has pierced one of his ears. He teaches the same doctrine and provides his parishioners with the same love and care he always has, but they have turned against him, holding secret meetings and talking behind his back.

Growing up, I was told that Christianity was about love and acceptance, but I have to be honest, I really don't see a lot of that. Instead, I see an emphasis on conformity and a turning on anyone who doesn't fit the box. The problem is that this emphasis on conformity and demonization of questions or a diversity of opinion on more peripheral matters risks driving away anyone who steps across the (often invisible) boundaries of what is acceptable. By responding as they did when I questioned creationism, my parents pushed me away rather than giving me room to breathe, room to be different. My friend who came out as bisexual was so jaded by her treatment at the hands of supposedly "Christian" women that she is now an atheist. My friend who is in the process of being fired is also jaded by his experience, and is toying with agnosticism. By creating a sort of Christianity in a box, bordered by issues as mundane as capitalism or proper disciplinary practices, you create a situation that drives away those on the borders. It closes up instead of reaching out, pushes away instead of attracting, rejects instead of loving.

I'm going to take a moment here to offer advice to Christian parents. As I said above, I don't have some secret agenda to turn your children into atheists. Instead, my hope for your children is that they be allowed the freedom to form their own beliefs, the room to ask questions, and love and acceptance on their faith journeys. In this light, I would suggest that you not make things like creationism and anti-gay rights as central and fundamental to your children's faith as my parents did to me. Leave room for exploration and room for differences of opinion. Make faith more dynamic than stultifying. Allow your children room to explore, and the ability to form their own beliefs. You may disagree with your newly socialist daughter or your ear-piercing son, but are those issues really as important to you as Christ's substitutionary atonement or God's love? Is the length of your son's hair or your daughter's sexuality really more important than Christ's command to love and serve others? Does the age of the earth matter more than a heart sold out for God?

I ask you, Christian parents, please throw out your boxes and any narrow preconceptions you may have inherited from Christian leaders like those who taught my parents. Your children deserve better. If you make creationism or unbridled capitalism core tenets of your children's faith, you only set your children up for potential problems. Your children deserve freedom and the ability to form their own thoughts and opinions rather than being simply forced into yours. If you deprive them of that freedom you risk suffocating them and losing them. You risk driving them away, and I speak from experience on that.

"A Religious, Authoritarian Culture"

2012-01-11T15:23:00.002-05:00

I just came upon an article called "Are you raising your children in a religious, authoritarian culture?" and I thought you all might find it interesting. The author, Janet Heimlich, has written a book called Breaking Their Will on religious child abuse. She has also written an article on Michael Pearl.

What I found most interesting about this particular article, though, was that Heimlich gives a list of ten beliefs held by "religious, authoritarian cultures." I thought I'd use this article to go through those ten and compare them to my own experiences.

#1: Children must honor you unconditionally.

Yes, absolutely. "Honor" and "obey" were very closely related growing up, and were essentially used to mean the same exact thing. Honoring your parents meant obeying them, and yes, it must be unconditional, whether the parent has acted in such a way as to deserve honor and obedience or not, whether the request is reasonable or not, etc.

#2: The Bible requires that you spank your kids.

100% Yes. Following the Pearls, my parents believed that if you don't spank your kids, your kids will be ruined. The Bible says to spank your kids, and it is therefore mandatory.

#3: Females must always be “pure”.

Yes, female sexual, emotional, and mental purity was considered extremely, extremely important. I will say, though, that in my family of origin my parents held males to the same standard as well, expecting them to also remain pure.

#4: Children are sinful.

Yes. Absolutely and completely yes. My mother used to talk about how babies may look adorable but they are actually "full of sin."

#5: Abuse victims should forgive their perpetrators.

Yes, I believe, though I can't be fully sure because I never saw my parents or the religious culture that surrounded them deal with "abuse victims." I do know, though, that forgiveness was held paramount (whether the offender had repented or not) and that the Pearls urge wives whose husband has molested their children to urge those children to forgive their father (but also, so as not to give the wrong impression of the Pearls here, to report the husband so that he serves jail time).

#6: Religious leaders can do no wrong.

No. My parents were burned by the televangelist scandals of the 1980s and they never trusted religious leaders. For this reason, they used to talk about having us start a house church, but they ultimately never did. We attended a large church that was by virtue of its numbers relatively impersonal, so we never really had any direct contact at all with the pastor, and the pastor certainly didn't exercise any oversight or control over our family. Although I have to say, when Lydia Schatz died my mom's response was that Michael Pearl was a godly man and that he was being attacked because his message was truth.

#7: The faithful must avoid scandal at all costs.

Hm. I'm not sure how to judge this. I'm thinking the answer is a yes/maybe, because my parents did emphasize the importance of being a good witness and having a godly reputation. However, I'm not sure if that would lead them to cover up something really bad. Hence the "maybe."

#8: Marriage/sex between a man and a virgin/underage girl is a form of piety.

This question sounds like it's oriented towards fundamentalist Mormons, but if you take the first part and say "marriage between a man and a virgin is a form of piety," then I would probably say yes. Though again, to point out, virginity was emphasized for both females and males.

#9: God wants you to have many children.

YES. That's sort of the definition of "Quiverfull."

#10: Faith healing is superior to medical care.

Yes and no. My parents believed in faith healing, but they also took us for medical treatment if it was something serious. They sort of combined modern medical treatment with intense prayer for healing.

So that's 7 yeses, 2 maybes, and 1 no. Now I feel like I should check out Heimlich's book...after all, the title, "Breaking Their Will" is the buzzword of both the Pearls and my parents.

And...I guess there wasn't really a main point to this post. Except, I suppose, that the beliefs of Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull, and especially the teachings of Michael Pearl, tend to create a religious, authoritarian culture. But then, I think we already knew that.

Child Rearing: From Cog to Individual

2012-01-09T09:34:00.002-05:00

When I got married, I had left behind my parents' fundamentalism and evangelicalism, but I did not realize how many of their other beliefs, especially related to Quiverfull, I still retained. I believed that women should be allowed to choose their own beliefs and their husbands, but I had not yet fully embraced feminism. I could not fathom the idea of having a career and still planned to have eight or so children. I still saw daycare and public school as evils and planned to homeschool. I still believed that if I did not follow the Pearls' parenting advice my children would be ruined and that I should not "do" teenagers.

When I got pregnant a few months after my marriage, I desperately hoped it would be a girl. An oldest daughter could help around the house, care for small children, cook meals, and babysit. An oldest daughter would be my right hand, a second mother to my many children. An oldest son, in contrast, would be next to useless. And so, I hoped for a girl and saw my baby as the first of many children to come. To an unhealthy extent, I saw my daughter as a cog rather than an individual.

My change of heart actually started with the Pearls. As I have narrated, I started out following the Pearls' child rearing advice but realized when Sally was just shy of a year that there was something very wrong. I did some research on various child rearing methods, read some critiques of the Pearls, and read about attachment parenting and gentle discipline. I have to admit, this was life changing for me. I no longer saw myself as Sally's absolute authority and no longer saw expecting absolute obedience from Sally as a worthy goal.

Rejecting the Pearls changed my life. When I consigned their advice to the trash can I was able to see my daughter as an individual rather than a cog. I was able to see my daughter as a person rather than simply clay to be shaped. Sally was no longer a rebellious child waiting to be pushed into a box of expectations; rather, she was a beautiful bud ready and waiting to bloom. As the way I viewed children - and my role as parent - changed, other things changed as well.

First, I was able to see having only two or three children, rather than the 8+ I had always imagined, as worthy and fulfilling. Rather than planning to have a flock of eight or ten children who would be molded to share my views and goals, who would be raised to be clones, I saw the value of having only a few children and investing in them as individuals and allowing them to develop as individuals and choose their own beliefs and life paths.

Second, I was able to see my children interacting with their peers away from my watchful eye and studying under teachers other than myself in public schools as beneficial rather than inherently problematic and dangerous. I no longer felt the need to completely control my children's interactions and education.

In this way, seeing my daughter as a person rather than a potential clone and seeing myself as a guide rather than a dictator fundamentally changed not only how I parented but also allowed me to open myself to the idea of having a smaller number of children and sending them to public school. I am not saying that everyone who views parenting as I now do has only two or three children and sends them to public school, but rather that until my view of children and parenting changed I was not even able to consider these options. In other words, I wrote off a normal-sized family and public schooling without consideration because of how I had been taught to view children and parenting.

Finally and most importantly, as my perspectives changed the way I viewed my daughter was transformed. She became a little individual before my eyes, and I was surprised by the absolute beauty and joy I found. I no longer saw her as a potential homemaking and child rearing helper but rather as a person with her own needs, desires, and wants. Suddenly, parenting became an adventure rather than an epic contest between parent and child. I wouldn't change what I have now for the world.

I don't know if my mother or other mothers influenced by Quiverfull beliefs think of their children the way I did. Maybe I was alone in seeing my daughter as a potential helper and child raiser rather than simply as a little individual to be nurtured and guided. What I do know that in my case seeing my daughter as some sort of potential servant got in the way of seeing her as an individual. I am so thankful that I have left that all behind.

A (Late) Christmas Rant

2012-01-08T20:28:00.002-05:00

A while back I saw a church sign that said "I Miss Hearing 'Merry Christmas.'" You know what, Mr. Christian? If you miss hearing "Merry Christmas" how about you say it more often? You can't control anyone else, and you shouldn't want to. If it floats someone else's boat to say "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings," what is it to you? We have this thing called "freedom" in this country, and that means people don't have to celebrate the holidays in any one specific way, even in the way you want them to. So hows about you celebrate the holidays your way and let everyone else do it their way?

As we saw in one of Rick Perry's television ads, there's this idea among a segment of fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity that there's a "war on Christmas." There's this idea that Christmas has been secularized and robbed of its religious meaning. And I used to believe it. I don't any longer, and the reason is simple.

We don't enforce any one way to celebrate holidays. There is no "war on Christmas" because there's no one stopping evangelical or fundamentalist Christians from celebrating Christmas however they like. If there's a "war on Christmas," it's that fundamentalists and evangelicals are not allowed to force their way of celebrating Christmas on everyone else - and that's generally called "freedom," not a "oppression."

Have you noticed the men wearing black uniforms who go around taking away families' nativity sets? Have you noticed how Christians have to sneak to church on Christmas Eve in secret so that they won't be fined or imprisoned? Have you noticed that Christians must speak to each other of Jesus' birth in secret, so that no one will report them? No? Yeah, me neither.

The beauty of this country's emphasis on freedom, religious and otherwise, is that every family may celebrate holidays as they choose to. Jews can celebrate their Jewish holidays, Muslims can celebrate their Muslim holidays, and so on. No one is stopping Christians from celebrating their religious holidays, most primarily Christmas and Easter. If a Christian family wants to center Christmas around Jesus' birth, and relate every aspect of their Christmas celebration to their religious beliefs, they can have at it and no one will stop them.

One argument I've heard made, including in Perry's ad, is that there's a "war on Christmas" because Christmas can't be celebrated in public schools and nativity scenes can't be placed on official government property. The problem with this argument is that we don't celebrate Ramadan in schools either, or Purim, or any other religion's religious holidays. Schools aren't the place for celebrating religious holidays, they're a place for learning - celebrating religious holidays should be left up to houses of worship and individual families. The only sort of holidays that should be allowed to be celebrated in schools are those that are cultural rather than religious. Or, conversely, we could celebrate all religious holidays in school, but I'm pretty sure evangelicals and fundamentalists wouldn't like that either. As for nativity scenes, we don't put religious symbols on courthouse lawns for Ramadan or Purim, and until we do I see no reason why religious symbols should be placed on courthouse yards for Christmas either. This isn't an issue of religious persecution. It's an issue of religious freedom.

Something I've noticed over the last three years is that when evangelical and fundamentalist Christians cry "persecution!" what they really mean is that their beliefs are not being held up as the establishment and enforced on others. The "war on Christmas" means "everyone else isn't celebrating Christmas OUR way!" or "we're not allowed to have OUR way of celebrating Christmas publicly endorsed by the government!" The war on traditional marriage means "everyone else isn't doing marriage OUR way!" The war on Biblical morality means "everyone else isn't following OUR morals!"

You know what? Christians are free to celebrate Christmas as they like, carry out their marriages as they like, and follow the morals they find in the Bible. What they are not free to do is force others to do the same. And that is not called persecution of Christians. It's called freedom.

So yeah. That whole "war on Christmas" thing? Baloney.

Gentle Parenting around the Relatives

2012-01-04T09:21:00.002-05:00

I have to say, the #1 hardest time to gentle parent is when I'm around Pearl-following relatives. It's actually one of the things I dread about visiting my parents house, because I know they will be watching my daughter for any error and chalking it up to the failure of my gentle parenting methods.

The problem is that the things they interpret as failure I interpret as success. They believe that immediate obedience and complete submission should be expected from children of all ages, and that training for this begins before the child can walk and should be basically complete in a child Sally's age. The thing is, if Sally practiced immediate obedience and always submitted completely to my will, I would wonder what was wrong with her, where her fast developing mind and her desire to understand or find a compromise rather than to simply obey had disappeared to. And this difference means that no matter how successful I feel gentle parenting is being, my parents will always - always - see my parenting as a failure.

I've had people express skepticism that my parents could really be that upset that I've decided not to spank. In my experience, most adults I know who have been or are parents think spanking is okay but should be used sparingly - only on a particularly intransigent child or perhaps to teach a child to stay away from roads, etc. Most people see spanking as just one tool available to parents, and one that should be used infrequently. If my parents were like most people, they might not understand my belief that spanking is wrong but they wouldn't have a problem with my decision not to spank. Not so my parents.

Michael Pearl has many followers, and by far his most central issue involves the discipline of children. Under his child training views, children must be spanked for any act of disobedience, and spanked until they show submission. They must be expected to obey immediately and without question, and must be forced to submit their wills to their parents. Pearl explicitly teaches that children's wills must be broken, and that if they are not, those children will grow up to be rebellious, unruly, miserable, and hateful. The key to successfully raising children is to break their wills in early childhood, and spanking, even beginning before a child can walk, is key to this process.

Because my parents are Pearl followers, I can say "I'm not going to spank Sally, I'm going to use gentle parenting" and what they hear is "I'm going to ruin Sally, causing her to grow up into a miserable, destructive, hateful person." Is it any wonder, then, that they are so upset and concerned that I am not spanking?

The things Pearl tells his followers are lies, but I think they reason they can take root so firmly in people like my parents is that there are some parents who eschew training and teaching their children altogether and simple let them become selfish and self-centered. Think of the Dursleys in the first Harry Potter book. Dudley is given everything he wants, and pampered and petted by his over-indulgent parents, but he is still ungrateful, angry towards his parents, and completely unhappy. This sort of family has become a stereotype, a cultural meme, and for my parents this sort of permissiveness embodies all that is wrong with society. The Pearls, then, convince parents that anyone not using Pearl methods - spanking and breaking their children's will - will end up with children who are ungrateful, screaming, unhappy brats.

I sometimes think that parenting is a continuum between two poles. Obviously this is simplistic, but on the one side you have the parents' needs and the parents' desires held as most important and the child's needs and child's desires deemed irrelevant while on the other side you have the parents' needs and the parents' desires held as irrelevant while the child's needs and the child's desires are most important. Thus Pearl parents run roughshod over their children, requiring immediate obedience to parental commands and not allowing questions or objections, and the overly-permissive parents on the other side of the spectrum let their children run roughshod over the parents' needs and desires, making life only and always about what the children want. Gentle parenting inhabits a middle ground on this spectrum, where the parents' needs and desires and the children's needs and desires are balanced. Gentle parenting is built on mutual respect and compromise. It means both parties need to give, both need to come to the middle and seek to understand what the other is saying.

At home, the sort of compromise and mutual respect I aim to achieve works fairly well. Sally doesn't always get what she wants, but we don't always get what we want either, and both sides listen to each other and try to understand. For example, a few weeks ago Sally wanted to take her hot chocolate upstairs. I told her no, because I was afraid she would spill it on the way upstairs. Her response? "How about mommy carry hot chocolate upstairs." And I was proud of her. Sally is still very young, but already she knows to take my concerns into account and understands how to compromise. When we are at my parents' house, though, this sort of compromise appears to be me accepting defeat. I said no, that should have meant no. What Sally did when she suggested a compromise my parents see as outright manipulation.

When I communicate with my daughter, trying to understand her concerns and find an acceptable compromise, my parents see me letting her rule me instead of insisting on her immediate obedience to my commands. While I see an occasional temper tantrum as natural for her age (and experts agree), my parents see any amount of fuss on my daughter's part as a result of my failure to break her will. While I see Sally making suggestions and attempting to find a middle ground as a good thing, as her exercising her mind and thinking, taking my concerns into account and looking for a mutually acceptable compromise, my parents see it as my daughter manipulating me. I simply can't win.

In the end, I know that what they think of my parenting doesn't matter, and I find so much joy in gentle parenting - the joy of turning parenting into a journey of mutual understanding rather than a battle of my will against my daughter's - that my parents disapproval quickly fades into the background. It's just unfortunate to feel like the people who should be my biggest cheerleaders as I embark on the adventure of raising a child simply, well, aren't.

I think that a large part of why my parents' parenting views differ from mine stems from what they value. For fundamentalist Christians who believe in the importance of absolute obedience to God and upholding the patriarchal order, blind obedience and submission are actually upheld as values. In contrast, I value mutual understanding, an ability find compromise, and independent and critical thinking. It's no wonder we look for different things in our children.

I still remember the moment, a few years ago, when I suddenly realized that blind obedience was actually a bad thing, not a good thing. My parents taught me growing up that obedience was a virtue. It's not. Obedience for obedience' sake means nothing. Why do I obey the law? Because I understand why the law exists and I know the consequences I would face if I did not. Why do I obey my husband? Oh wait. I don't. Instead, we communicate, cooperate, and compromise. Why does an employee obey her boss? Because it's in her job description, its necessary to run the company, and if she didn't she'd get fired - oh, and sometimes she shouldn't obey her boss, such as when her boss asks for her to do something unethical. There is nothing - nothing - valuable about obedience for its own sake. When I realized this, it was mind blowing.

And so, when I go to my parents house, I have to be aware of what I'm walking into, and prepared for it. I have to brace myself for the looks and the unspoken disapproval. Rather than simply enjoying their granddaughter, I have to be aware that my parents will be scrutinizing her every move, looking for something to disapprove of, something to prove that their parenting methods are right and mine are a failure, and since they value such different things than I do, they will find what they are looking for. I'd like to bring them this darling little girl of mine and simply see pride in their eyes, but I need to realize that that will not, cannot, happen, and there's nothing I can do to change it.

Homeschooling and Indoctrination

2012-01-03T10:08:00.005-05:00

Those of you who read this blog regularly know I'm not a big fan of homeschooling. It's not that I'm not aware that it can be done without isolating or indoctrinating kids, it's not that I don't know it can produce well-educated and confident kids, it's just that I've seen the problems, the huge problems, it can cause, the problematic ideologies it can shelter.

Over the holidays, I spent some time at my parents' home and I looked around the curriculum my siblings are using, curious to remember what I had studied growing up. As I looked at my siblings' textbooks, I was reminded of how often, how very often, homeschooling is used to indoctrinate rather than to educate.

Their science curriculum is young earth creationist (creationism literally comes into every chapter) and teaches a straw man version of evolution only to show how it's wrong.

Their history curriculum was created by pseudohistorian David Barton, who has no academic training in history whatsoever.

Their economics and government textbook proclaims explicitly - explicitly - that God is a Republican.

Their literature curriculum was authored by Douglas Wilson, a slavery-apologist and giant of the Christian Patriarchy movement.

I understand the importance of freedom. I understand the importance of allowing for dissent and differences in belief. But the problem is that homeschooling - at least when unregulated, as in the state where I grew up - allows parents to teach their children whatever they see fit. There are no checks and balances, no quality controls or requirements, and to many children are robbed of an accurate education at the hands of their parents' "freedom."

Homeschool parents in states like the one where I grew up could teach their children that the world began two hundred years ago and all history textbooks lie, or that the earth is flat, or that 2 plus 2 equals five, and no one would stop them.

Now sure, my parents could send my siblings to public school while at home still teaching them creationism, David Barton's pseudohistory, or that God is a Republican, but in that case my siblings would also have access to other perspectives and other information. If my siblings were sent to public school but still taught creationism at home, at least they would still be exposed to an accurate representation of the theory of evolution, and the same with being exposed to an accurate view of history, a comparatively balanced understanding of government and economics, etc. Homeschooling, in contrast, allows my parents to completely control my siblings' education and the information they receive.

I think what you see here is a point of conflict between parents' rights and children's rights. Do parents have the right to teach their children whatever they see fit, completely controlling their education, or do children have the right to an accurate education?

If you believe that parents should be able to completely control everything about their children's lives until they are 18, teaching and training and disciplining them however they see fit, then unregulated homeschooling is no problem. In contrast, if you believe that children do have rights and that parents' ability to do whatever they like with their children should be curtailed in order to protect those rights, then unregulated homeschooling is a problem.

I honestly think that it's this divide that makes any discussion of homeschool regulation so difficult. Those who believe that parents have complete rights over their children and those who believe that children have rights that require placing some limits on parental rights will simply never see eye to eye. In fact, they often can't even seem to communicate because they have such different starting points.

Conservative Christian homeschool organizations like the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) avidly oppose the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and ardently and constantly trumpet the importance of parents' rights. In fact, HSLDA is one of the organizations pushing for a parents' rights amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Similarly, HSLDA opposes any homeschool regulation whatsoever. When you have a perspective like HSLDA's - believing that parents' right to control their children's education is absolute and total - it's hard to ever compromise or find middle ground.

I don't think it's practical to ban homeschooling and I don't think our public school system is high quality enough to justify doing so. I do, however, think that homeschooling needs to be regulated in at least some fashion because I believe that children have the right to an accurate and decent education. Compulsory education laws were passed a hundred years ago to guarantee every child a good education. States that allow homeschooling without regulation have effectively undone those laws.

I don't pretend to have the answers. I don't know what kind of homeschool regulation would be best or even if better regulation would actually ensure that every homeschooled child received an accurate and decent education. All I know that it is really hard to watch my siblings being taught pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and pseudogovernment, and pseudoeconomics, to watch my parents teaching my siblings ideology rather than simply educating them.

The Problem with "Gender Roles"

2011-12-23T10:53:00.001-05:00

Here is an excerpt from a comment recently posted by a reader going by the name JW. Since he asks his question honestly and politely, I thought I’d respond with a post in kind.

“In the articles I have read of various feminists I always tend to read some kind of grudge within. It is as if the world is terrible because it seems to 'demean' women and deprive with of inequality. Yet, yes, there is inequality in this world and it is the right thing to do to fight for them but with feminism this delves into such areas as roles in 'family' units. For me, I understand that there should be roles within the family unit because there is a nature state there. Women, usually, naturally gravitate to child rearing and even things around the home whereas the male usually gravitates toward construction projects around the home. Just as I did today in installing a wooden fence to replace the junkyard of one that just somehow hung there even through hurricanes.

In my readings I get the feeling that feminists see this as inequality when I see it as a nature role of gender in society. Men and women are different inside and that differences usually becomes a kind of synergy when male and female come together in marriage.”

If I read his comment correctly, JW suggests that there are natural gender roles, and that feminists just need to accept this rather than fighting it. In response I would make four points.

First, JW and others who refer to the idea that there are natural gender roles often operate under the assumption that these different roles are somehow equal. Men and women should play different roles, they hold, but both roles are important and necessary and therefore somehow equal. The problem with this is that it simply isn’t true.

JW suggests that women “gravitate to child rearing” and “things around the home” while men gravitate toward “construction projects.” While JW didn’t go further than this, this kind of thinking generally leads to the idea that women should remain at home and raise children, because that is what they are especially suited for, while men should enter the workforce and earn money, because that is what they are especially suited for. This of course leads to a situation where women do the cooking, cleaning, and sewing while men rule the world. Suddenly this sounds a whole lot less equal, doesn’t it?

Second, a significant number of people do not fit within these supposedly “natural” gender roles. I know plenty of women who feel more comfortable under the hood of a car than they holding a baby. The comments that followed JW’s comment make this point clear. There are many families where the man prefers cooking and the woman prefers yard work. There are families where the mother would rather work and the father would rather stay at home with the new baby. The reality is that people are incredibly diverse. For every "naturally" nurturing woman, there is a woman who finds the idea of having children foreign and frightening. For every man who loves to fix things, there is a man who would prefer to take his car to the shop or call a plumber. I know so many people who absolutely do not fit within these "natural" gender roles that it begins to make the idea of natural gender roles seem absurd, or at the very least way too simplistic and highly problematic.

The reality is that this idea that there are “natural” gender roles pushes people into specific boxes whether they want to be there or not. I have female friends who aspire to be historians, judges, and scientists. Should they be told that they aren't suited for these positions because they are female, and that the should instead start having babies and stay at home, because that is what they're suited for? The idea that there are natural gender roles creates a situation that is extremely limiting for anyone who doesn't fit, and this is a large part of why most feminists see the idea of "gender roles" as a problem.

Third, JW suggests that these gender roles are “natural.” I actually see no evidence for this at all. I have studied history, and I know that gender roles differ across regions and across time period. For example, some Native American societies were ruled by women, not men. In addition, the idea that women should inhabit the private sphere of the home while the man should inhabit the public sphere of the workforce, for instance, was literally invented in America – and in Europe as well - in the early 1800s. In the colonial period, women were just as engaged in the marketplace as were men and men assumed the primary responsibility for the religious and moral upbringing of their children. The gender roles so many people consider “natural” today are in fact socially constructed. Simply put, there are no “natural” gender roles.

Take, for example, the long-held idea that boys are simply better than boys at science and math. As a corollary, it is sometimes said that women are better at the humanities or are more nurturing, almost as an attempt to make things somehow equal. So we get the idea that boys should be engineers and scientists while women should be elementary education teachers and nurses. The problem with this is that it’s flat out wrong. Study after study has shown that girls are just as good at math as boys are, if, that is, you stop telling them they’re bad at it. In other words, girls are not worse than boys at science and math. Why, then, have they traditionally scored worse than boys at science and math in the U.S.? Because girls have long been socialized into thinking they’re not good at math. If you’re told something long enough, and you see it reinforced by teachers (who are more likely to call on boys than girls) or popular culture (see, for example, these shirts), you start to believe it.

Here’s another example. I know nothing about cars. I couldn’t fix one if my life depended on it. I seem to play into the “girls aren’t good at mechanical things” stereotype, right? This misses the question of why I’m not good at cars. As a child and a teen, I saw mechanics, cars, and construction projects as boy things, so I never tried to learn anything about them. In fact, because those were boy things and I was a girl, I actively avoided learning about those things. I am not ignorant of cars because I have two X chromosomes. I’m ignorant of cars because I bought into cultural stereotypes about what women can and can’t do.

One more point. Girls are supposedly more nurturing and cooperative while boys are more individualistic and exhibit more leadership qualities. The problem with taking this as an assumption is not just the exceptions to this (see point 2) but also the fact that girls are actively socialized to be nurturing and cooperative from birth while boys are actively socialized to be individualistic and leaders. Girls are given dolls and tea sets. Boys are given sling shots and books about explorers. What if you did the opposite? If we stopped socializing children into distinct gender roles, I’m convinced that gender roles would disappear. Gender roles, you see, are not natural. They’re socially constructed.

Fourth and finally, I would point out that feminists believe in eliminating gender roles completely rather than simply in pushing people into different boxes. In other words, feminists want a society in which people are allowed to be individuals with their own strengths and talents rather than being pushed toward any prescribed role. If a wife prefers to cook and a husband prefers to fix things around the house or do yard work, that's fine. But what about the husband who prefers cooking and child rearing and the wife with the fulfilling high-level career? Those who believe in specific gender roles would see this couple as an abnormal, or even as problemic. It’s not feminists who try to tell people what to do: feminists are about people having options and not being limited or forced to be something they're not. It’s those who believe in natural gender roles who try to tell people what to do, what roles they should or should not play. Feminists are for opening things up and allowing choice. They’re for eliminating the boxes, not for creating new ones.

And that, quite simply, is why feminists general have a problem with the idea of "natural: gender roles.

Children Spanking Children

2011-12-21T16:42:00.001-05:00

Do you ever have those moments where you wonder if you're crazy, and then you receive confirmation that you most definitely are not? I had one of those today while reading an article by Michael Pearl's daughter Shalom, called Training a Child to Come. The article starts out with this:

Everyone calls me the “soft-hearted Pearl”, and knowing this to be truth, I knew that I would have to train my children so well that I would not have to rely on spanking.

The Pearls have been trying especially hard lately to de-emphasize hitting and instead emphasize things like "tying heart strings." Sometimes I wonder if the emphasis on absolute obedience without question that I grew up with was an aberration. Sometimes I wonder if the Pearls are, as they claim, misinterpreted. This article made me wonder that - at least until I got to the end, and then the bile rose in my throat.

You need to be creative in breaking this “well-trained” habit. You must create a new mindset. Get your husband or one of your other children to help. Have your helper play with your toddler to get him distracted, then call for him to come. Have your helper immediately take the child’s hand and lead him to you while telling the child, “Mama said, come.” Do this simple training exercise several times over the next few days until your baby begins to respond on cue. Most toddlers will respond correctly, but if he balks when your helper takes the little one’s hand, then have the helper spat the child’s legs to reinforce the command.

The "soft-hearted Pearl" suggests that you enlist the help of your older children in hitting your toddler if he or she won't come at your command. Yes yes, the first part sounds fine - making a game out of learning to come, with your older children showing your younger ones how to respond when being called - but the enlisting of your older children in hitting the younger ones - and she describes doing this with her four or five year old as a helper with her one year old nephew - is absolutely, completely, totally, without question, WRONG.

It's how I grew up, though. I was the older child hitting the younger ones, sometimes in my parents' presence and sometimes when I was left in charge in another room or while they were away. I grew up in a family where children as young as five were enlisted in hitting the youngest ones. And let me tell you, this leads to nothing but heartache. It leads to pitting child against child and setting up an older sibling as authority figure and disciplinarian rather than simply as an admired or idolized big brother or sister. Here's an excerpt from my earlier post:

Why was I made to be an authority figure to my siblings instead of a sister? My heart breaks because I inflicted pain on them. It hurts worse that I never questioned these things, never asked why, never said no. But what did I, at ten, twelve, or fourteen, know? What did I understand? I had never seen anything different from what my parents taught and modeled at home. My parents handed me the rod and told me to spank. And I regret it with all my heart. And now, all I can say is I am so so sorry.

I used to wonder if my parents' practice of having the older children hit the younger ones, and requiring the younger children to return the same absolute obedience to the older ones as to the parent, was perhaps simply my parents' interpretation rather than an actual Pearl teaching. I used to wonder if maybe my parents turned to this not because of the Pearls so much as because they had so many children that they found it necessary to outsource some of the discipline. I now have my answer.

That the self-described "soft-hearted" Pearl can speak of having older children hit the younger ones as if it's just a matter of course, well, that only shows just how off the Pearls are when it comes to discipline. I am so glad that I threw the Pearls out before I turned one. I am so glad my relationship with my daughter can be based on love and understanding, not authority and hitting.

Note: For why I say "hit" instead of "spank," see the end of this post.

You're a sinner, you're a sinner, you're a SINNER!

2011-12-21T15:49:00.008-05:00

I just read this article about how fundamentalist Christian boarding schools are luring in Chinese exchange students with promises of sound economics and repaying them with religious indoctrination. This quote from one such student struck me:

“Before, what I believed, what Chinese people believe, is that people are innately good,” she said. “I realized that I was sinful. I was lying, not loving. Those are as bad as killing someone. There’s no difference between me and a murderer.”

Warning: You are about to embark on a rant. It may or may not be coherent or orderly. And it certainly won't be "nice."

I've said this before: Christianity offers a solution to a self-created problem. Evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity is only good news once you're convinced that you are no better than a murderer and deserve to die and suffer in hell. Only then can Christianity offer its good news.

What's more, they know this. A common fundamentalist and evangelical proselytizing method is called "The Romans Road." Here are the first three steps:

Romans 3:23 "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."

We all have sin in our hearts. We all were born with sin.

We were born under the power of sin's control.

- Admit that you are a sinner.

Romans 6:23a "...The wages of sin is death..."

Sin has an ending. It results in death. We all face physical death, which is a result of sin. But a worse death is spiritual death that alienates us from God, and will last for all eternity. The Bible teaches that there is a place called the Lake of Fire where lost people will be in torment forever. It is the place where people who are spiritually dead will remain.

- Understand that you deserve death for your sin.

Romans 6:23b "...But the gift of God is eternal

life through Jesus Christ our Lord."

Salvation is a free gift from God to you! You can't

earn this gift, but you must reach out and receive it.

- Ask God to forgive you and save you.

Do you see what's going on here? Step one, you're a sinner. Step two, you deserve death. Step three, God can save you. The first step is always to convince the potential convert that he or she is a sinner and deserves to die.

This is what I grew up with. I was taught that the first step is understanding that you're a sinner, and that in bringing in converts your first step was convincing them of that as well. I was convinced that I was worthless, sinful, and completely evil. I was convinced that my only worth came from being "saved" from the punishment I "deserved." It was only in God, only in Jesus, that I had any merit or value. But attaining this new sense of worth meant viewing myself as completely worthless outside of it. And that is what the teachers at the Christian school attended by the Chinese girl quoted at the beginning of this post set out to convince her of as well.

Now if you're a Christian, or specifically a conservative Christian, there doesn't appear to be anything wrong with this. After all, conservative Christians believe that all people are sinners and therefore honestly, truly, and justly deserve to spend eternity being tortured in hell. But here's how ridiculous this idea sounds to an atheist:

Imagine you are strolling down the sidewalk and a man excitedly calls you over to his front porch to share some “great news,”

The man’s got a gruesome torture chamber in his basement, Barker said, but you don’t have to go down there. Instead, you can come over, hug the man’s son, say you love him and you can all move in together in the attic and tell them how great they are forever.

Or to but it another way: "You're a sinner, just as bad as a murderer or a child rapist. God has declared that you deserve to be tortured for eternity. But guess what? He's found a way so that he doesn't have to send you to hell to be tortured for eternity! If you just make your life his, and do whatever he wants, you can instead go to heaven and spend eternity praising him! Isn't that great?"

Um. No. Just no. It's like telling your three-year-old that because she's been bad, you need whip her and then shut her up in a dark closet for three days, and then expecting her to be grateful when you decide that you won't do it after all.

Some will justify it by saying that God made everyone, so he can do what he wants with us. But I'm sorry, I'm not big on humans being owned. We call that slavery, and we don't smile on that. Besides, saying that God can do what he wants with us because he made us is removing him from any ethical restraint. Why? Because God defines what is just. If he says torturing people for eternity because they weren't his standard of perfect is just, then it's just. But the thing is, that's complete bullshit. We humans have done a much better job of coming up with ethics and morality on our own.

We outlawed slavery, not God. We condemned genocide, not God. We have outlawed, not God. We condemn rape, not God. You'd think if the Bible was supposed to be the greatest book of morality and ethics, it would have prohibited these things. You'd think the ten commandments would perhaps address them. But no. The Ten Commandments are more interested in jealously commanding people to worship God or else to even touch on issues like child abuse or rape. So personally, I'm happy to leave God completely out of morality and ethics, and I actually think the two are way better off without him.

Anyway, that's the rabbit trail reading that article, and especially that one passage, took me down. Sometimes, living in a world where I see people as valuable and full of potential, it's painful to take this walk back to the past and remember what I used to believe. In some ways, it's like Alice fallen down the rabbit hole - and remembering that that is where she used to live.

Note: Moderate or liberal Christians generally follow different proselytizing techniques. Most often they believe that they should just lead their lives and be an example for others - that if someone notices they are especially joyful or especially fulfilled, that someone will ask questions. Moderate and liberal Christians generally don't believe that non-Christians will not be automatically tortured for eternity. However, their proselytizing tactics are rendered rather invisible compared to those of more conservative Christians and without the ability to threaten hellfire and brimstone they have a decreased number of tools to use to convince a non-Christian person that he or she should become Christian. The plus side, though, is the focus on the positive (the offer of community) rather than on the negative (the threat of torture).

Patriarchy in Question: This Is Encouraging

2011-12-19T17:21:00.002-05:00

I've said before that I grew up in a family influenced by the Christian Patriarchy movement, which teaches male headship and female submission, not only between the husband and wife but also between the father and daughter. In Christian Patriarchy, women must always be under male authority, and this includes not just some sort of nebulous "spiritual headship" but actual obedience and "protection." The existence of this movement will take many by surprise, but its influence is widespread in the Christian homeschool movement. In fact, this movement can sometimes influence families little by little without them even realizing it. But what is encouraging is that more and more people are realizing what is going on and speaking out about it, not just about their experiences growing up in families influenced by it (like me) but also directly against its teachings and doctrines. This is a very positive step.

So I thought I'd take a moment to highlight some of what I see as the most important resources combating the Christian Patriarchy movement.

Vision Forum, with its Tenets of Biblical Patriarchy, is one of the premier supporters of Christian Patriarchy. Its influence can be extremely insidious because it gets its foot in the door through its catalogs filled with attractive pictures, loads of (gendered) toys for kids, and promises a perfect family life. Rethinking Vision Forum is an excellent website seeking to pull together information critical of Vision Forum from across the internet.

Michael and Debi Pearl of No Greater Joy ministries are critical to the Christian Patriarchy movement in two ways: First, their books on marriage forward a relationship in which the male is to be the leader and the wife a follower, to the extreme; Second, their influential books on child rearing and discipline endorse an authoritarian style of parenting in which children are literally beaten into submission. Why Not To Train A Child responds directly to the Pearls and is an excellent, extremely helpful resource.

Bill Gothard's Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP) runs conferences and correspondence programs, attracting a large audience of homeschoolers over the years. Gothard promises a perfect family if you will only follow his methods, and endorses the idea of the "umbrella of authority" in which children must remain safely under their parents' authority, and wives under their husbands authority. Recovering Grace is a website run by young adults who grew up in IBLP and chronicle the ways in which it damaged their faith, their relationships, and their families.

There are other excellent resources as well:

No Longer Quivering is a platform for women who have lived the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull lifestyle.

Under Much Grace addresses the problems of Christian Patriarchy, especially as experienced by women.

Overcoming Botkin Syndrome examines the pitfalls and problems with the teachings of Geoffrey Botkin and his daughters on father/daughter relationships.

Quivering Daughters reaches out to daughters who grew up in the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements.

The Commandments of Men speaks out against Christian Patriarchy in whatever form.

Today, when people google terms like "Bill Gothard" or "Tenets of Biblical Patriarchy," they now cannot help but find sites and articles critical of Christian Patriarchy. At the very least, this may lead families being pulled in by the movement's promises and pretty pictures to reconsider or at least think twice. It will also help those who are starting to have doubts about the movement and are looking for help or resources. And to me, this is encouraging.

Note: See my FAQ for info on Quiverfull and its relationship to Christian Patriarchy

Fearing a Supernatural Boogeyman

2011-12-16T11:58:00.001-05:00

I'll resume my Christmas series on Monday, but I wanted to take a moment to look at another issue. Those Christians who hear that I am an atheist often ask "but how can you live without God?" A few months ago I realized an important response: Being an atheist isn't just about living without God, it's also about living without Satan. I've mentioned this before, but wanted to take a moment to expound upon it further.

As a Christian, I believed that God was all-powerful and that Jesus had conquered sin and death. I don't want anyone to think that my faith was one of constant fear - it wasn't. I believed that Christians would ultimately be victorious, and that I would go to heaven for eternity. However, Christianity comes with its own built in boogeyman, and the fact that that boogeyman is destined for defeat doesn't change that he exists.

It is only since becoming an atheist that I have been able to sleep in a room alone without being afraid. Nighttime was always the worst as a child, and even in college, because it was then that the idea that demons could appear before me at any time became most real. Even in college I was afraid of them. Any noise in the night could be that of a demon. I would close my eyes tight and will the night away, pray for sleep, and wish my roommate were in so that I would feel safer.

Today, I no longer fear hearing or seeing demons in the night. Sure, when I'm the only one in the house I sometimes fear buglers, but I don't fear that imaginary beings will jump out and get me, because I don't believe such beings exist. It's really amazing what a difference this makes.

No longer believing in the supernatural means not fearing supernatural bad guys are out to get me. This is a critically important point. As a Christian, I believed that demons were out to get me. Ever read C. S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters? Ever listened to Focus on the Family Radio Theatre's Father Gilbert mystery series? Ever read This Present Darkness? Try reading or listening to these believing that while fiction they are very much representations of reality, and then try going to sleep at night. Sure, I believed God had ultimate power, but I also believed that he allows Satan and his minions power on earth in the present and this meant living with the very real possibility of being attacked, spiritually, mentally, or even physically, by a supernatural bad guy.

Someone pointed out on a previous thread that she was afraid of wolves at night as a child, and that all little children will be scared of something. Well sure. I was also scared of wolves. We used to hear them at night and I would imagine them climbing the house to my second story window and breaking in. The thing is, my parents assured me that this was impossible. I knew that this was my imagination run a muck, and could NOT really happen, and that helped keep the fear under control. Not so with demons. My parents assured me that they were real and could actually seek to lead me astray or even appear to me. I absolutely believed that they were real, and this gave me no way to check my overactive imagination. And the result was fear.

Everyone fears something. It's just that today my fears are of things in the natural world, not the supernatural. Today I'm fear things it makes sense to fear, like buglers or rapists, and even then I'm aware that the chances of running into them are low and that they have only human powers and abilities. I'm no longer afraid of supernatural bad guys who can teleport, defy the laws of nature, and read my thoughts. And I have to be honest: that makes my life a whole lot less scary.

Romney, founding father worship, and gay marriage

2011-12-12T15:52:00.000-05:00

Today I read this Romney quote on Blag Hag:

"At the time the Constitution was written marriage was between a man and a woman and I don’t believe the Supreme Court has changed that.”

Ah, the whole original intent argument. I grew up on that. Any constitutional question should be referred to the "original intent" of the founding fathers, who wrote it in the first place. I mean, that kind of makes sense, right? Well, not really, actually.

Sure the founding fathers never intended for there to be gay marriage. They held that marriage between a man and a woman in which the woman legally ceases to exist and becomes the literal property of her husband. Funny how people like Romney never complete that statement, huh?

Side note: I get annoyed anytime anyone uses the term "traditional marriage" for just this reason. Traditional marriage has essentially always meant that the husband essentially owns his wife, and that daughters are transferred from fathers to husbands. Furthermore, traditional marriage has always been based on economic necessity and social times between families. This thing we have today, where two people marry for love and companionship, this is new. This is not traditional. At all. And to add to that, traditional marriage has often included husbands taking multiple wives and husbands sleeping with prostitutes or women captured in war. So enough of this whole "traditional marriage" bit!

Back on topic, here's the thing: Just because the founding fathers thought something does not make it right or true. The founding fathers were just men, sure, smart men, but not magically infallible men.

Exhibit A: The founding fathers were, by and large, perfectly fine with slavery. Many of them owned slaves. I don't know of anyone today defending slavery, but if you're going to hold the founding fathers and their intent up as infallible, you sort of have to.

I wonder sometimes about the relationship between believing in the importance of the original intent of the Constitution and believing that the Bible is inerrant and literal. After all, if you view the Bible as an unchanging document and any attempt to say anything was cultural as spitting upon God's Word, it shouldn't be that hard to transfer that sort of thinking to the Constitution. It's an interesting thought, anyway.

So please, Romney, and every other politician, stop trying to defeat gay marriage because at the time the Constitution was written marriage was between a man and a woman. It's a good think that kind of logic didn't win out when the civil rights movement and second wave feminism were taking place, or this country would be a very different place. Can we stop caring what a bunch of old dead white guys thought and instead start talking about basic human rights and social justice?

Rick Perry's Latest Ad

2011-12-08T12:20:00.000-05:00

Commentary to follow, but first, the transcript:

I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian, but you don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.

As President, I'll end Obama's war on religion. And I'll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage.

Faith made America strong. It can make her strong again.

I'm Rick Perry and I approve this message.

Rick Perry is talking to his base here. He's talking to people like my parents, who view being gay as a sin and see the removal of official prayers from the public school as the beginning of the end for this country. I remember when I saw issues like this as the number one thing to vote on. What mattered was what a candidate thought of abortion and gay marriage, and nothing else.

The thing is, he's only talking to his base. To those who don't see anything wrong with having gays in the military or with not having official school prayer (no one is stopping kids from praying in school, it just can't be teacher led or endorsed by the school), this ad makes no sense at all.

See, I could list a lot of things that are wrong with our country, and allowing gays in the military and removing official prayer from the schools wouldn't appear on that list at all. Our country isn't suffering from a lack of faith - it's suffering from a lack of social and economic justice. I'd like to think that most Americans agree with me.

In the book What's the Matter with Kansas, the author argues that Republicans have used social issues like abortion and gay marriage to con voters into voting against their very own economic best interests. He looks specifically at what has happened to Kansas as outsourcing and deregulation and other things born straight out of Republicans' free market agenda have stripped people of their jobs and livelihoods even as they have continued to vote for Republicans because of the issues of abortion and gay marriage.

When I read the book, I thought it had some hyperbole. I'm starting to think not, though. When issues like gay rights and school prayer trump basic economic concerns, there's a problem. Of course, someone like Perry might say they're related - that we're in this economic mess because we turned away from God and are facing his judgment. In this twisted way of viewing the world, the best way to fix our economy is to ban abortion and ban homosexuality. Only then can we achieve economic prosperity.

To add one point to the very upside down nature of how Perry sees the world, note that allowing everyone in the military regardless of their personal life and not having official prayers in school is suddenly a "war on religion." Um...since when is not being able to establish your religion as the rule of the land (through prayers and discriminating against those your religion holds to be leading sinful lives) a "war on religion?" I find this very often with the whole "Christians are discriminated against" thing. Ask how, and what you get is things like this. "Christians not being able to establish their views as the official view" is seen as "Christians being discriminated against." Except, in the real world, that's not how it works.

And as a side note: We're blaming the lack of official school prayer on Obama now? Talk about rewriting history: it was the Supreme Court in 1962 and 1963 that banned official school prayers, Obama has nothing to do about it.

Personally, I prefer a president who lives in the world of reality, where things like equal rights and social justice still matter.

The Purity Myth

2011-12-07T13:15:00.000-05:00

This is beautiful. For a full transcript, see here. I think the very best part comes at the end: "The purity myth is the lie that women’s sexuality has some bearing on who we are and how good we are, because really I think we all know that young women are so much more than whether or not they have sex. We really should be teaching our daughters that their ability to be good people should be based on their intelligence, on their compassion, their kindness, not what they do with their bodies." This is what I've been saying all along! The idolization of virginity makes what women do with their vaginas more important than how they treat other people or their skills and abilities. All that matters is what is between their legs. And seriously, how much sense does that make?

Feminism Explained

2011-12-05T22:17:00.002-05:00

Growing up, I equated feminism with selfishness, child abandonment, and a desire to destroy the family. I believed that feminism was destroying the country by elevating women at the expense of men, leaving men emasculated and the family in shambles. Feminists were, I thought, man haters who mocked motherhood and the family, pursuing instead their own selfish dreams of worldly fulfillment. It wasn't until college that I learned what feminism actually is. According to Wikipedia,

Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women.

That's it. Feminism is simply the desire for female equality, politically, economically, and socially.
With the bogeyman stripped away, feminism doesn't seem so scary. There's nothing in there about hating men, or about not wanting children, or about being selfish. It's simply a call for equality, not raising women above men. Put this way, the development of second wave feminism four decades ago makes sense. Just as the civil rights movement demanded equality for blacks, the women's rights movement demanded equality for women. Who could be against this?

Today, the vast, vast majority of American women - and American men - are feminists, whether they claim the term or not. Ask nearly any college-aged woman (or man) whether she (or he) thinks women should have political, economic, and social equality, and the answer will almost inevitably be "yes, of course!" Today, feminism has made incredible inroads in American society to the extent that the core tenets of feminism are held so universally that they seem obvious and beyond need of stating.

Furthermore, feminism transcends religious boundaries, finding its place both within Christianity and outside of it. Today there are even Muslim feminists who are also calling for equal rights for women. Feminism is not anti-religion, and it's not anti-family. Feminism is a universal to which any human being who believes in true equality can lay claim. Feminism is something to which men should, and do, lay claim alongside women.

Two questions arise from this discussion. First, why do we still need feminism if most people are feminist? Second, why are there anti-feminists?

Most Americans today believe in racial equality, but that doesn't mean that actual racial equality has yet been reached. It's the same with feminism. Just as there is structural racism, even so there is structural sexism. For example, women still suffer from income inequality. Part of the reason is that women enter who enter stereotypically female jobs (teacher, secretary) are paid less because, well, jobs that have been historically held by females pay less. But it's more than that. There is still inequality of pay between men and women working the same jobs. Why? An excellent blog post explains by quoting an article:

The reason they don't keep up, from where I sit, is simple. Often, a woman will enter the salary negotiation phase and I'll tell them a number will be sent to them in a couple days. Usually we start around $45k for an entry level position. 50% to 60% of the women I interview simply take this offer. It's insane, I already know I can get authorization for more if you simply refuse. Inversely, almost 90% of the men I interview immediately ask for more upon getting the offer.

Some might say that this is the women's fault; they should just learn to negotiate! First, though, I'd point out that women are socialized NOT to negotiate but rather to compromise in order to ensure tranquility. But there's more than that, too, as the blogger points out, quoting a study:

Their study...found that women's reluctance [to negotiate] was based on an entirely reasonable and accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did...."What we found across all the studies is men were always less willing to work with a woman who had attempted to negotiate than with a woman who did not," Bowles said. "They always preferred to work with a woman who stayed mum. But it made no difference to the men whether a guy had chosen to negotiate or not."

Thus today, sexism is largely off the books, ingrained in culture rather than enshrined in the law or in employment handbooks. Thus while the vast majority of Americans believe in equality for women, it has yet to be achieved.

There is another reason full equality has yet to be achieved. Women have for the past two hundred years been the primary caretakers of children, and even with the increasing involvement of fathers in the last two generations, women still bare the brunt of the childrearing. Unlike Western European countries, there are very few social structures to support motherhood and parenting. We don't have paid maternity leave or subsidized daycare, for example. The result is that mothers who work have to play a balancing act that fathers who work simply don't have to play. What we need is greater parenting equality and more support systems for working parents. This is another area where feminism still has work to do.

There's more too, of course. Women still face a sexual double standard and have to worry about rape. Women's reproductive rights (which while I am pro-choice, I see as starting not with abortion but rather with birth control) are continually under attack, and without being able to control their reproduction, women cannot achieve full equality.

But enough about why feminism is still needed even though most Americans are feminists. It's time to move on to the second question: If the man-hating feminist is a stereotype and feminism is merely a belief in female equality, why are there anti-feminists?

First, there are still misogynist pricks who makes rape jokes and think it's funny to talk about women's place being the kitchen. I seriously don't understand what's wrong with these people.

Second, there are women who should identify as feminists but don't because of misinformation. They don't understand that feminism is about equality and think it is about man hating or about sexual promiscuity or about abortion (again, I think the starting point and rallying cry of feminists at a fundamental level is, or at least should be, about birth control - the ability to control reproduction - not abortion). If these women understood what feminism actually was - a belief in women's economic, political, and social equality - they would surely identify as feminism; after all, we're talking about women who already completely agree with these core tenets of feminism, they just don't recognize it by that name! What we have here is misinformation, but also, I think, a failure on the part of those who identify as feminists to properly articulate the feminist message. And it's unfortunate, because it robs the movement of those who should be allies.

Third, and this is where I have most of my experience, are those anti0feminists who actually disagree with the core feminist goals, and for religious reasons. Put quite simply, religious anti-feminists don't believe that women should have equal rights with men. They believe that men should be in charge, and women should follow, and that this is the natural order of society as ordained by God. I said earlier that feminists are not anti-family. They're not, but they are against the patriarchal family. Feminists envision a family built on mutual cooperation and equality; religious anti-feminists envision a family built on a divine hierarchical order that prizes authority and obedience. I said earlier that feminists are not anti-religion. They're not, but they are opposed to any religion that teaches that women are to be subordinent to men. Feminists in the conservative religious traditions that teach this sort of hierarchical gender order usually either jump ship (generally for a more liberal religious tradition) or work to reform that religious tradition by advocating for equality within it.

For religious anti-feminists, feminism does quite literally does mean the dissolution of the (patriarchal) family and the undermining of the divine (hierarchical) social order. Religious anti-feminists believe that women's role is in the home, as wives and mothers, not outside of it, and that men's role is in the workplace, as protector and provider for his family. Any change to this family order is a threat to their view of the family and the divine order of society. In this sense, feminism is a threat to the very core of their beliefs about the world and how it is meant to work. It's important to remember that these religious anti-feminists would never say that women are less than men, but rather simply that men and women have different roles to play. These roles, they say, are different but equal. But since one of the roles is to be beneath the other role, I call bullshit on the supposed equality. My point is simply that they don't advocate "oppressing women" or "keeping women down," but rather "adhering to the God-given family order with everyone fulfilling their proper roles."

Furthermore, religious anti-feminists believe that they can point to feminists destroying the family before their very eyes. Feminists are often charged with causing high divorce rates, and to some extent this is true. What happened was that in the past, before women had the measure of equality gained through the second wave feminist movement, women in abusive or unhappy marriages had no choice but to stay trapped in them. They had no other options because they were financially dependent on their spouses and divorce would have meant social suicide. Once these abused and unhappy women had other options, many of them chose divorce, and understandably so. Recent statistics show, though, that divorce rates are on the decline, perhaps in part because marriages founded on equality from the beginning are more likely to be happy and fulfilling.

It's really no wonder religious anti-feminists are so concerned about feminism. Feminism quite literally does undermine everything they believe in. The stereotypes of feminism I grew up with were wrong, but even if I had understood what feminism actually was, I would likely still have opposed it. When you believe that women are always to be under male authority, endorsing female equality isn't exactly a priority.

I wonder, though, if the women of Christian Patriarchy would be quite so happy to lead lives as submissive "helpmeets" if they were forced to do so rather than doing so by choice. After all, two hundred years ago the law stated that women had to obey their husbands, and that if they didn't, their husbands were legally free to beat them into submission. My guess is that choosing to be submissive is much more pleasing than being forced to be submissive. In this way, perhaps Christian Patriarchy has a symbiotic relationship with feminism, because without feminism it would not exist as it does today, with its leagues of women happy to voluntarily embrace their own submission because, they believe, through their choice they are serving God.

So there you have it: feminism, the reason it's still needed, and the source of its religious opposition, all in one post.

Disclaimer: This is just a collection of my thoughts as a feminist, I don't claim to speak for feminism as a whole or that every feminist would agree with me on every point of my analysis.

Authoritarian Parenting and Adult Children

2011-12-03T14:58:00.001-05:00

Writing on this blog is like watching synapses in my brain suddenly connect. I love the Ah ha! moments and I've just had another one, thanks to a comment on my last post:

I find it hard to love my mother after such a type of chilhood... I think fear doesn't dissipate so easily.

I have long wondered why my transition to adulthood has been so difficult. I want to be able to stand by my parents adult to adult, equal to equal - which is, of course, what we now are. But the truth is, I'm scared of my parents. I approach my every interaction with them with fear and trepidation, knowing that it shouldn't be this way and faking the confidence and assurance I find so difficult to muster. I've always connected this to the painful psychological and emotional manipulation I endured from them when questioning their beliefs, but now I think it's more than that. I think it has to do with authoritarian parenting. And that, quite simply, was my Ah ha! moment.

After being taught absolute obedience all the way up through high school and punished for disrespect or the delayed or incomplete obedience, how am I supposed to switch from a hierarchical relationship backed up by a fear of punishment to an adult-adult relationship of equals? Part of the reason I fear my parents is that this fear - fear of consequences or punishment - was used to govern my behavior all through childhood and adolescence. Sure, they wanted me to obey them out of love or an acceptance that what they said was right, but when it came down to it their commands were backed up with the threat of punishment, or even simply stern disapproval, which could be just as bad. And now, even though they can no longer punish me, well, those psychological pathways don't disappear over night.

I think a quote from Michael Pearl will illustrate what I'm talking about:

Never reward delayed obedience by reversing the sentence. And, unless all else fails, don’t drag him to the place of cleansing. Part of his training is to come submissively. However, if you are just beginning to institute training on an already rebellious child, who runs from discipline and is too incoherent to listen, then use whatever force is necessary to bring him to bay. If you have to sit on him to spank him then do not hesitate. And hold him there until he is surrendered. Prove that you are bigger, tougher, more patiently enduring and are unmoved by his wailing. Defeat him totally. Accept no conditions for surrender. No compromise. You are to rule over him as a benevolent sovereign. Your word is final.

This is how my parents disciplined. Their word was final. Obedience had to be immediate, complete, and cheerful. Anything less was unacceptable. While I wasn't spanked past age ten or twelve, there were still punishments for disobedience. Their word was still final. Now here's the thing: I was actually rarely punished once I reached high school. The reason was, quite simply, I never disobeyed. I made sure to do everything my parents wanted me to do. Their word was my law, and I followed it closely. But even though I rarely experienced punishment, I knew that if I disobeyed I would.

I recently read a very good post on the Friendly Atheist about this. The author says the following:

Instead of being able to explore right from wrong and discern it for themselves, scores of Christian children are being subtly taught that obedience to authority means avoiding punishment — not that it’s morally correct to avoid the behavior in question. Like so many others, I was obedient in order to avoid physical punishments (and, later, removal of privileges), which led me to focus more on finding the right path through the punishment maze rather than sorting out what I actually believed for myself.

The punishment maze she discusses is very real. For the parents who follow the child training methods of Michael Pearl, James Dobson, and others, the most important thing is that children obey parental authority, and an intricate punishment maze is set up to ensure that they do.

And then I grew up. And you know what? That feeling that if I displeased my parents I would be punished didn't go away. That fear of disobeying them didn't evaporate when I turned 18. My entire relationship with them had been built on authority and obedience. How was I supposed to change 18 years of habit overnight? I couldn't. I've been working on it for years now, and it's getting better, but I still have to smother my underlying thought patterns and underlying emotional reactions.

Melissa at Permission to Live wrote about how she and her brand new husband faced this same problem in her conclusion to her courtship story:

We had never been allowed to be our own persons, and old habits died very hard. We would consult our parents and make decisions (trivial or important) based on what they told us. Eventually we progressed to where we would make our own decisions and fret about how to tell our parents what we had decided. It took four years to get to the point that we made decisions and didn’t bother to tell them at all!

There is something very wrong with privileging obedience to parental authority over developing independence and autonomy. There is something very wrong with seeing obedience as more important than maturity. The result is an infantilizing of even adolescent children and a parent-child relationship built on authority-obedience and reward-punishment.

And it's not just me who struggles. My parents have trouble navigating their relationship with me, and for the exact same reason. After so many years of being able to expect immediate obedience from me, after so many years of their word being my law, they don't know what our relationship is supposed to look like now either. When I first started asking questions, their response was to treat me just like I was still a child, and the reason for this is simple: my parents believed that parental authority (or more specifically, the authority of the father) over a daughter does not end whens he turns 18, but rather with marriage. So for them, the relationship built on authority and obedience was still in force, and I had to fight tooth and nail to get out. I've married since, so they no longer expect me to obey as they did before, but they're still trying to figure out what our relationship is supposed to be like, because for them just as for me, old thought patterns and habits die hard.

The take away here is simple. Parents should not emphasize parental authority and absolute obedience over developing autonomy and growing maturity. Parents should not create an elaborate punishment maze for their children or create a situation where children are afraid to disagree or assert their own wills for fear of punishment. Creating this sort of parent-child relationship is problematic not only when the children are children, but also when they grow up.