There are seven children around the table. My youngest brother has yet to be born. When he is, he will bring the total to eight. But for now, there are seven children circled around the broad oak table in the kitchen. The dishwasher hummed and ratted and the counters were wiped clean. The floors are swept and all that remained of our breakfast of biscuits and gravy and milk was the white crust around my sister Ruthie’s mouth. She was four, with dark mischievous eyes and curly pigtails, which she would pull out the first chance she got. She sat next to Cathy, who was seven and had curly blonde pigtails. Cathy always left hers in. Then, there was Becky, nine, with a valance of blonde hair above her gray-green eyes. Zach and I sat next to each other, our freckles and our brown hair got us mistaken for twins. He was eleven, I was twelve. We had the same crooked smile. Caleb, the baby was sitting in the highchair. Finally Jessie, fourteen, with a tangle of curly hair and freckles sprinkled lightly across her nose. She was wearing makeup. While we were getting dressed I had asked her who she was putting it on for.
She told me, “It’s important for a young woman to look nice and perhaps you could learn something from my example.”
I wetted the cowlick on the back of my hair, combed it with my fingers and told her to “Shut up.”
She ran to tell mom that I said “shut up.” It’s a forbidden word, along with “get” “got” “thing” (because they are examples of lazy language) and “gee” “gosh” and “darn” (because they are too close to “Jesus” “God and “Damn.”) All of these words are also laminated and taped to the wall near the spoon that hangs above my mother’s head.
My mother is sitting at the head of the table. The Bible is open in front of her. Behind her, taped to the wall, are laminated pieces of paper. Some have Latin words. Others have Bible verses. In the middle of this patchwork of our education is the spoon. A large wooden spoon with the words, “Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them,” written in my mother’s careful handwriting on the bowl. There is a long crack that runs through the Proverb from where the spoon was broken on Jessie’s behind.
We bow our heads to pray. School has begun.
Every day our first and last lesson came from the Bible. First from our mother, who read to us at the head of the table and then, from my father, who read to us as we squeeze together on the couch, spilling over onto the salmon-colored carpet of our Texas ranch home.
That day, as we balanced on the squeaking wooden chairs with our notebooks, worn, torn and hand-me-down, in front of us, my mother read from Psalm 68. She read with her head tilted down as if in prayer.
She was trying to teach us to pray the words from the Bible.
She wanted us to “hide God’s word in our hearts.” And she told us stories about people persecuted, enslaved, and ruined; people who, in their misery, would recite God’s word out loud and find comfort. Many of the people she mentions are Jews, trapped in concentration camps.
“People who are in misery,” she said, her voice tense, “can call out on the name of the Lord and He will deliver them. Corrie Ten Boom, who served in a concentration camp for trying to save Jews in Nazi Germany found strength from the word of God that she had memorized and hidden in her heart. I too know the power of God’s comfort every morning when I have my quiet time.”
She closed her eyes and raised her hands.
“In God, whose word I praise,
in the Lord, whose word I praise—
in God I trust and am not afraid.
What can man do to me?”
We children sat on our hands listening to my mother’s voice cry out to God over the thunking of our ancient dishwasher: “God sets the lonely in families, he leads out the prisoners with singing; but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land.”
Baby Caleb began to applaud by banging his hands on his highchair. “Yay!” he cried. “Amen!”
We children giggled and our mother grimaced. The lesson was over.
“Time for Latin roots,” my mom said and we groaned. I groaned the loudest because I didn’t want anyone to know how much I loved the lesson.
Behind my mother, taped to the wall were the Latin roots we’d covered that year. Ante, acer, acid, acri, alli, allo, alter, alt(us), am, amor. Today’s word is anthrop: man.
My mom reviews them with us. She pointed to a card, “What words begin with ‘Ante-‘?”
“Antebellum.”
“Antemortem.”
“Antechamber.”
Next word. “What words begin with ‘acri-‘?”
“Acrimonious.”
“Acrid.”
I like these word puzzles. I try to listen and think of words I know with the roots in them. It’s like finding a secret door in an old familiar house.
“What words have the root ‘anthrop’ in them?” My mother asks. Chairs squeak and the dishwasher thumps. “Think, children. Anthrop. Like anthropology, the study of man. Anthrop.”
“Philanthropy!” I shouted, a little too excited. “That must mean loving man or something. Right?”
In history we learned about Philadelphia, the city of love. And in the Bible we read about how Paul, the apostle talks to the Philippians. Our pastor has also told us how Paul spoke to them in brotherly love, a love we ought to have for one another. Putting all of these pieces together, I felt like Nancy Drew.
My sister rolled her eyes at me. My brother sighed.
“Good job!” My mother said. I’m proud, but when she asked for another word, I pretended I wasn’t thinking of misanthrope. Zach looked like he wanted to elbow me.
My mom orders us to write the Latin roots in our notebooks. Mine notebook is from last year and I struggle to find a clean page. Becky complained that she has no more room.
“Use the other side of the paper,” my mom snapped.
Caleb was fussing, so we moved to the living room. Caleb, Ruthie and Cathy were allowed to play, while my mother wrestled with the stereo and Jessie, Becky, Zach and I climbed onto the couch in the dark family room. The room had a brick floor and when we moved in there was an opening for a bar. My father put drywall in the opening and my mother hung one of her favorite quilts over it. The bar was turned into another pantry, where we stored 10-gallon buckets of flour, sugar, and wheat grain. The adjacent wall was lined with oak shelves and cupboards. It’s here where my mom keeps our schoolbooks, pens, pencils and paper. Despite being connected to the sunroom, the family room is dark and always cool.
Often, in the summer, when the Texas heat bore down on our home, my mother would frantically draw the blinds to all the windows. “Keep them closed!” She would yell at us. And for a few seconds, I would think, “This is it, it’s the rapture. We aren’t allowed to see outside because it’s raining blood and we haven’t gone up to see Jesus.”
But then, I would peek out the window and all I would see is the hot sun bouncing white off the crushed gravel driveway. It’s not the end of the world just yet. And, I feel relieved, but guilty, because we are all supposed to eagerly await Christ’s return. But I don’t.
It was the fall, so the shades are open and the morning sun is blocked by the oaks that marshal up from the creek behind our house. Mom pulled the stereo out from one of the cupboards. Zach groaned. It was time to listen to the tapes.
My mom found the tapes at a homeschool conference where she was looking for Christian textbooks. She came back with an armful of books that call evolution a hypothesis (“a theory must be proven”) and discuss the existence of dinosaurs (“it wasn’t long ago that man and dinosaur shared the earth”). She also carried a series of cassette tapes she purchased from a family that has 20 children.
My mom described the family in glowing terms. “They are kind and respectful to their parents,” she said, eyeing us over the rims of her glasses. “The girls wear skirts.” Another look, this time toward Jessie who has refused to wear the dresses my mother picks out for her.
“And the whole family built the house they live in.” She was rewinding the tape and we could hear it whir uneasily. I hope the stereo eats the tape. But there is the thunk, click—the tape stops. My mom hit Play. Zach elbowed me. I pinched him.
“Stop it!” Jessie yelled at us.
We were at the part of the tape where one of the daughters describes her temptations to flirt and to date. “But I know my parents are wise and Godly and they believe that courting is God’s plan for my life. My father will protect my purity, until I am blessed to marry a Godly man. Some people think courting sounds so old-fashioned. But who wouldn’t want the help and guidance of their parents, the people who love them the most next to God?”
As I listened to this girl, I pictured her, standing at a podium (we can hear an audience shuffling on the tapes). I imagined her white face framed by thick hair that is brushed into a ponytail, her long skirt falling to her calves. She is, of course, wearing long sleeves. She is speaking carefully, looking into the crowd and spotting the ones with the painted nails, the purple eyeliner and the thick rebellious lips and pleading with them.
“It’s hard to wait for God’s timing,” she continued. “But in that time of waiting devote yourself to learning God’s word, hide it in your heart, learn the skills to create a Godly household.”
Zach drew pictures of men with guns in his notebook. Jessie rested her head in her hands, elbows digging into the arm of the couch. My mom’s head tilted to the side. She looked at us, but in those moments she didn’t see us. The little kids were gone, a trail of toys left clues to their whereabouts—anywhere but here. The tapes were long.
“Give your heart to your father,” the girl said. In my mind she clutched the podium, two small spots of red on her cheeks. Perhaps she would say she was feeling the presence of the Lord, or that the Holy Spirit was laying this “on her heart” for the audience.
“He will protect you. God has given him to you to care for you. To guard your purity. Use your time of singleness for the Lord. Devote yourself to him and HE will give you the desires of your heart.”
I wondered if she would ever get married.
That spring, Jessie and I went to a conference with our church youth group. Joshua Harris, was the speaker and we all donned our best scrunchies for the event. Joshua Harris was the author of a magazine for evangelical homeschooled teens called New Attitude (Ed. note–Which I choose to believe he named in honor of the Patti LaBelle song), which ran articles on how popular culture was a godless influence alongside lighthearted features about how girls could wear fashion trends modestly. One article was written as a response to the Joan Osborne song, “What if God Was One of Us” and replied to every line of the song with a Bible verse.
Christians, the article argued, ought to avoid that song because we only ever thing on the things that are pure and hold. A few years later, Joshua Harris would shut down the magazine and publish I Kissed Dating Goodbye, a book that condemned dating as a sinful practice and argued instead for the return to courtship, where couples were matched by their parents and spent time together doing supervised and chaste activity.
This book led to national notoriety for Harris, who eventually became the pastor of the Covenant Life megachurch in Washington D.C. But even before then, when he was just 19, Joshua Harris was as close to a homeschooled celebrity as they came.
Consequently, in the eyes of the two thousand evangelical teenagers gathered in that Dallas megachurch, Joshua Harris was our holy heartthrob. It’s not like we had other options. Or holy options, that is. Like so many of our peers, my sister and I had been shielded from popular culture. Unless it was Sesame Street or Disney films, we were not allowed to turn on the TV. Of course we snuck peeks at “Petticoat Junction” reruns while mom was at Sam’s, and greedily watched Nickelodeon at the neighbor’s house, when we could, but despite our best efforts, our world was small.
Even the music we listened to was controlled. Our home was filled with Christian rock, the dulcet sounds of Michael W. Smith and Amy Grant’s inoffensive rhythmic pop-hymn hybrid. But my parents never played music more worldly than James Taylor and Carole King. And we were considered a liberal household. Once, a friend from our home school group was forbidden to play at our house, after her mother discovered that she’d listened to Amy Grant and danced around in my mom’s old bridesmaid dresses. I overheard my mother tell my dad that the girl’s mother believed the music “glorified romantic love over the love of Jesus.”
Of course, we tried to push the boundaries of our small world as best we could, my siblings and I often huddled over the radio in the garage, using cassette tapes to record the songs we liked from the Top 40 station, before we got caught, fighting in whispers about whether that really was a swear word in the Madonna song and if it was a sin to hear it. Yet, as hard as we pushed our margins, we couldn’t seem to move beyond them.
Consequently, Joshua Harris, was the god of our small world. He was everything the young men should be and everything the girls should marry. My sister and some other girls from the youth group, put on lip gloss and knotted their baggy shirts at their waists as soon as we arrived.
Joshua Harris was the main speaker at a conference for teens. A couple other youth pastors spoke in between sets of noisy bands, who played holier imitations of top 40 hits. Clusters of girls jumped up and down to the music, while the boys watched and occasionally tried to bump into them. The shy girls moshed in their little groups at the ends of the pews, denim skirts hooping around their ankles, white Keds and braids flying. The more brave girls, my sister among them, jumped in the middle of the pews, bouncing chastely against the boys from our church. These girls wore shorts and were the ones who snuck in lip gloss and knotted their t-shirts to emphasize their adolescent waists, flirting with that gray area between mainstream femininity and what they had been taught as modesty. We had to been taught to desire a husband and yet not act like it. Dress like a young woman, while being careful not to entice a young man into lust. It was a wicked tension, no more fraught than at church youth functions where holiness and hormones ran high. The sanctuary of the church smelled of musty books and lusty teens.
I merely sat in between the groups, trying to look prayerful instead of bored. A college-student volunteer next to me patted my knee and called me a “serious girl.” I was secretly pleased and hoped that I looked mature enough to warrant Joshua Harris’ attention.
Joshua Harris took the stage to rousing applause. The lights behind him flashed cool blues and bright neon pink. He carried a Bible in his hand and opened in prayer. For the next hour, we listened rapt, to this man, not much older than us, describe to us in clear language precisely what we were feeling and how it was a sin.
“Young ladies,” he said, eliciting a ripple of nervous laughter, “you are created by God to be man’s helper and as such we look upon you as lovely.”
More laughter.
“There is no need to dress in a way that draws our eyes to you. God has made it so that we men always look at you. Don’t tempt us to fall by wearing immodest clothes.”
I tugged on the hemline of my shorts, feeling as though my five-inch inseam should be longer.
He went on, describing the visual nature of men and in turn, reassuring them that to look was natural, but to allow themselves to think about girls was sin. “Seek help and accountability from your parents,” he said as the boys in the audience suddenly grew still and wide eyed as they stared at their knees.
The talk culminated in the request that we pledge ourselves to remain pure. Pledge cards were passed around. Each card was printed with a cross on it and a ring, which symbolized our pledge to keep ourselves pure until marriage. There was perforated attached card that we could take off and share with our parents, so they could keep us accountable. The girls were encouraged to give our hearts to our fathers to keep us safe until we could give our hearts to our husbands. When, I wondered, were our hearts ever allowed to belong to us?
The boys were encouraged to be respectful of women.
After the final prayer, we were ushered into our 15-passenger vans and taken back to our churches, given pizza and soda and more prayers, prayers that we would not forget the lessons we had learned.
And until our parents came to pick us up, the boys played showy games of basketball in the church gym, while the more bold girls looked on and the meek girls cleaned up. I cleaned, but just because I wanted to look like the kind of girl I was supposed to be.
During his sermon, Joshua Harris had told us that men notice a holy woman, but despite my every effort that day, no one had noticed me. I saw a boy come talk to my sister, she laughed and the lip gloss shone on her lips.
I wondered if the girl on the cassette was like me. Trying so hard to be good and holy and going unnoticed. Perhaps, we were going about this wrong. Perhaps we too needed knotted shirts and lip gloss. After I thought that, I immediately asked God to forgive me.
Tags: abstinence, courtship, dating, evangelical christianity, homeschooling, joshua harris, lyz lenz, purity pledges, relationships
It’s amazing how modesty culture manages to be even more disempowering than standard secular sexist dating culture. Men are still the pursuers but women aren’t even allowed to do anything to encourage them or attract attention. You’re just supposed to be very still and quiet and hope somebody notices you…and then has a romantic talk with your father. It’s insane to expect somebody to be utterly passive in the pursuit of what they’re taught is their number one goal in life.
This is fascinating (and, of course, terrifyingly constraining). I’d love to hear more–what is your relationship to the church now?
Um. It’s complicated. That’s the short answer. The long answer is, well, it’s part of a book I’m working on and this is the first chapter. Is that evasive enough? GEEZE.
I really enjoyed reading this!!! Thank you so much. I want more too.
Thanks! Toast commenters are the smartest lot ever, so this means a lot.
Thanks a lot for sharing this!
Weirdly enough, I came from a pretty liberal Christian household and somehow found Josh Harris on my own and embraced his ideas and /I Kissed Dating Goodbye/ as a teenager. I still have no idea what I was thinking (he wrote that book at the age of 21! why was I taking dating advice from him?!), but it’s really fascinating to me to read accounts of people encountering Josh Harris more in context. Thanks so much for sharing!
One of my friends did the same. I’ve always wondered what precipitated it on her part. But she did hang out with a lot of the fundie Christian girls, and probably she got it from them? I’ll never forget her and her bf at the time, coming to visit me where I was living in sin with my boyfriend, and bringing their couples workbook from this guy along. They were maybe 20? It was a little bizarre.
I remember being pretty miffed when his second book came out about how he actually got together with his wife, and it basically ended up being dating under the name of courting. No, seriously, Mr. Harris. It still counts as dating even if you’re not sleeping with each other. Dating does not actually mandate specific physical actions of any sort.
As for his appeal, the most appealing ideas that I remember getting out of his books were these:
(1) It is rather nice to date people because you care about them, and not because you feel you have to because everyone else is doing it.
(2) If you are a person of faith, you might want to consider what role you want your faith to play in your romantic relationships, or how your romantic relationships might affect your faith.
(3) Really, in general, it is not bad to think about whether or not a relationship fits with your life goals and who you want to be. (Especially if you are willing to admit the possibility that your life goals and who you want to be can change. But that part does not come from his books.)
Strangely enough, none of these ideas actually require not dating. But if someone is presenting the idea of not dating at all versus dating people because you are in high school and clearly you MUST have a boyfriend, maybe that explains why some of us who were not being heavily pressured into it felt his not-dating argument had merit?
On a similar note, it was entirely bizarre to me to realize in college that some of my very-much-not-religious-in-any-way friends were dating boys and sometimes sleeping in the same bed as boys and still not having sex with them because they just didn’t feel ready for that yet and didn’t want to. What?! People can make the choice not to have sex even if they are not being told that it is sinful and wrong? Quick, someone tell Josh Harris.
I think the appeal of fundamentalism (from the outside in) was a wholesome family culture. I know a lot of my friends who came from families that were distant, thought my family was warm and inviting. Of course, that’s just because we masked dysfunction better. But I remember being in High School and starting my rebellion and having a “secular” friend (OMG!) tell me that courting wasn’t so bad because it was chivalrous. And I was all, “Are you kidding me? Everyone who wants to court is a weirdo.” I’m not going anywhere with this anecdote. But in fundie circles we were the diet coke of fundies, which should scare the shit out of you.
I come from a similar background, and also kind of glommed on to the ideas of the book when I read it. I think it was because, for me, as a pretty shy and introverted kid, dating was something that seemed both intimidating and kind of uninteresting. So reading the book it was like, you mean I DON’T have to worry about dating? This is a legitimate choice I can make? AWESOME. SINGLENESS FOREVER!
This may not have been the intended effect.
Oh my goodness. THIS WAS ME! It was actually kind of nice to have an excuse to avoid ever talking to boys. I was going to do it anyway, so might as well pin it on the excuse of being a Super Christian. But I also totally remember secretly hoping that being shy, modest, smart and helpful would get me some action. Spoiler alert: It did not. High school boys do not notice character.
I’m gay and used the modesty/good wholesome girl thing as an excuse to not date boys. ‘But I’m A Cheerleader’ said it best: “it’s easy to be a prude when you’re not attracted to them.”
This piece just hit me in the gut so hard, especially being told that Good Girls (TM) didn’t attract boys, but then…. you know Good Girls (TM) couldn’t be attractive. It did not set me up for self-esteem success, and I didn’t even grow up fundamentalist.
ME TOO. At the time it was weirdly empowering, like, yeahhhhh my social awkwardness is actually godly and i am actually way better than all you worldly bitches! Also I got a lot of adult affirmation about it, so that was super reinforcing.
Aaaaand then I turned 16 and got more attractive and less awkward and immediately started dating, haha.
Was it a “True Love Waits” card? I sure signed a lot of those as a teenager.
Me tooooooo!
Your story is so similar to my experience that I spent a while trying to figure out if I knew you until I saw you mention Dallas (I was homeschooled in Houston). Really enjoyed reading this.
I love this, and also love that it led me to your blog, which is fantastic.
“We had to been taught to desire a husband and yet not act like it. Dress like a young woman, while being careful not to entice a young man into lust.”
My family is in no way fundamentalist, and I wasn’t home-schooled, but boy did that part sound scarily familiar. Possibly related: I went to school in the South.
It is scary to me how many non fundie people sympathize with this sentiment.
I love this. I was raised evangelical, and this took me right back to every modesty lecture I heard growing up. It’s such a destructive way of thinking – girls, all you are is a potential “stumbling block” for the boys. Nothing in your own right.
I find this stumbling block thing baffling. A few years ago, when there was that silly shortlived craze of women posting their bra colors without explanation on Facebook, someone I know kicked up a HUGE fuss about how seeing women post ‘black’ and ‘beige’ and ‘hot pink polka dots’ was such a big stumbling block for men and how women should be more considerate of their brothers in Christ. She got a lot of supportive comments from both men and women alike.
How can men be happy to tell people that they’re so mindless, they can’t handle seeing something as simple as a color name without melting down into a puddle of uncontrollable lust? I obviously can’t understand this particular mindset, but it seems to me like you wouldn’t want people to know that you were that out of control (if you assume that thinking lustful thoughts is a bad thing that signals a lack of control anyway).
I went to a Southern Baptist church as a teenager and they had their fair share of destructive ideas going on, but this weird modesty/stumbling block thing wasn’t (explicitly) part of it, so I find it exceptionally odd.
Ugh. I wish I could go back and time and yell at all the 30 year old male youth pastors and 40 year old male teachers at my evangelical school and tell them to stop telling tween girls they are inciting lust. It still infuriates me.
My northeast Catholic upbringing shared a lot of cultural similarities, especially regarding modesty training. I vividly remember a couple giving a speech during Assembly about how our brains “release an imprinting chemical” immediately during our first sexual encounter, forcing us to forever, FOREVER, associate sexual acts with the first person we slept with.
Imprinting! Like ducklings mistaking a dog for their mother! We would be damning ourselves to flash back uncontrollably to our first encounters and may God help us if those encounters were not with our husbands.
THANK GOD that isn’t true.
Oh, wow. I forgot about this, but my youth pastor told us the same thing. I was around 14 or so and hadn’t so much as kissed a boy – I remember being terrified and talking to my mom about it. Thankfully that wonderful woman said with scorn to spare, “That is a lie; don’t you ever believe that.” Oh, and my youth pastor was my uncle. Nothing like a good family rift, eh?
This is simply fantastic and should be a series of articles! Having grown up in a very similar household, I often wonder how on earth we ended up as relatively normal human beings.
Did you ever attend the Silver Ring Thing? The two-hour live event where they play “bootylicious” really loud in a gym, have everyone scream “Sex is Great!!……..in the confines of marriage” and describe how condoms aren’t safe at all and basically mesh through which ones seed with flow?? Please tell me someone else attended this.
Whaaat? Tell me more. That’s crazeballs
Yes, it apparently still exists – http://www.silverringthing.com/ (!!)
Funny that the main highlights I remember from 11+ years ago is the Bootylicious song and screaming “Sex is great!” (Full disclosure – since I was not allowed to listen to secular music, I only realized what the song was when one of my public school youth group friends pointed it out.) The whole experience was awful and we all got a silver ring with scripture engraved on it and had to make a public promise. I think it turned my hand green…
Thank you for writing this. As a homeschooled boy I never had a clue that it was possible that girls wanted to be sexual too. It still blows my mind that women can be interested in men and not just vice versa.
I’m curious; what, if anything, were you taught about female sexuality? Was there any kind of sex ed, like after the courtship comes marriage and then….? I agree that this should be a series of articles and I’m also genuinely interested in hearing from a male perspective.
WHAT
Oh wow, I’m so curious now, as I read this piece I kept wondering “wow, I wonder what the boys are thinking?”
Oh Lyz,
I love your writing. This brought back so many memories of growing up. I hate this whole “purity” thing. It completely fucked up my thinking, and I am so glad that I grew up and realize how terrible it all is.
The whole “purity” obsession kind of amazes and baffles me. The idea that the worst thing that can happen to a girl is losing her virginity before marriage sets up a whole culture of obfuscation, cover-ups and untruths about relationships and sex. It’s also probably even worse than mainstream culture in recognizing and penalizing child abuse.
The idea of girls being ex-communicated for teenage pregnancies also makes me sad. So much for Jesus and the forgiveness of sin.
Seriously. And it always baffled me, because does it mean that married women are impure? I always thought of sin as very individual — married or not, an impure thought is an impure thought, right? So I always thought purity was kind of the same, an impure woman is an impure woman, if purity is just a state of being.
I had a very similar upbringing. Although I wasn’t home schooled, for three awful years I was sent to a small, fundamental private school where I “excelled” in my studies only to find when I transferred to a public middle school that I was more than a year behind in math and science. I received swats without parental consent for carving my name in a desk and was made fun of by my teachers (in front of my peers) often enough for my attitude and temper that I finally just grew to accept it. A preacher once told me to guard my soul, as Satan wanted me for a witch. Yeah… Luckily, my parents left the church when I was 17 and we have never looked back, never regretted that choice.
Like you, my relationship with that denomination is complicated. Different people need different things spiritually and not everyone has walked my path. But I have a hard time with the way the leadership preys on the congregation and the way their rules become a substitute for morality. I get depressed if I think about it for too long.
Our True Love Waits series was the same thing as the Silver Ring Thing. We did the whole study about how to not be a stumbling block, how to look forward to sex, but not too much dear or you’ll have sinful thoughts, etc ad nauseum… And at the end our dads gave us the silver TLW ring to wear on our left ring finger in a little ceremony.
We were all told a surely made up story about how one of our leader’s “friends” wore her TLW ring until the day she got married, and then her husband took it off to place her wedding ring on. We all felt like if we didn’t follow that exact formula, we were… well, lacking. (Though now I am ashamed at how I didn’t recognize the obvious symbolic transfer of ownership from your dad to your husband.)
Anybody else a victim of “Passion and Purity?” “Lady in Waiting?” “Captivating?”
I was an Elisabeth Elliot groupie. I wrote in the Rebecca St. James “Wait For Me” journal. I WORKED AT THE FAMILY CHRISTIAN BOOKSTORE.
Somehow I survived.
Sweet Lord.
I HAAAAAATED “Passion and Purity”.
And “Lady” AND “Captivating”.
Seriously, women were not created to simply wait out their lives in the service of men.
Captivating! Uuuuuuugh! Fortunately, the strain of fundamentalism I was most exposed to was totally against pop culture, so having all those movies quoted as support for their thesis just made me give it all the side eye even more. It’s such a weird book though, because the beginning seems almost women’s lib, the way it acknowledges that churches put women on the back burner and such, but then the solution is … be a pretty prop in some man’s adventure? WTF?
This was really good. Really good. I’m so glad you’re writing about all this. I think I was so sure I was doing everything wrong that by the time I got to my teenage years 90% of this stuff fell on deaf ears. I was too exhausted to give a crap what Joshua Harris or anyone else thought. Also, thankfully, my parents didn’t buy into some of the more stringent rules. I think after my mom’s brush with Mormonism in her early 20’s she knew what she could and couldn’t handle. Thank god.
Lyz, this was really compelling and insightful. Thanks for sharing.
WHAT
I was an Elisabeth Elliot groupie. I wrote in the Rebecca St. James "Wait For Me" journal. I WORKED AT THE FAMILY CHRISTIAN BOOKSTORE.
Somehow I survived.
Holy balls, my parents are pulling that stunt now, too!
…Their politics and religion are as conservative as ever, but it's like they've conveniently forgotten that they grounded me for SIX MONTHS for talking to a boy, and that my sister and I weren't allowed to see movies over PG, or that my mother made me late for school because my eyeliner made me look "easy".
Families. What the holy fuck.
I finally found a church that I love about seven years ago (I purposely left the church for about a year and a half, just to see where my faith actually lay, and what was pure habit). My pastor teaches Southeast Asian studies at UCLA, his wife and most of my fellow congregants are Phillipino, and they have the best balance of love and encouragement towards being Christ-like that I have ever experienced.
I honestly don't know if I would be attending church now if I weren't a part of this one. I understand the complicated relationship to faith, particularly when you've come out of a crazy background. Love to you, and thank you for writing this. It's good to know we are not alone.