Homeschooling and College: My Experience

Leaders in the Homeschool Movement spend an exorbitant amount of time selling their rhetoric in words and in materials (books, videos, blog articles) sharing what they believe to be the ultimate role of women as homemaker: how to be respectful and submissive wives, how to cook, sew, how to raise children, etc.

If you are a young girl raised in this environment, your know your lot in life is: get married to your approved husband, have many children, teach your children at home, and hopefully, your children will do the same.

...The ultimate goal in the Homeschool Movement is to be fruitful and multiply and “take dominion” of the world. 

--"When Homeschooled Daughters are Trapped" by Julie Anne Smith, originally published on Spiritual Sounding Board. 

I remember the feeling of being trapped. I had been taught by Bill Gothard and Inge Cannon that college was both dangerous and unnecessary. I already knew it required a large investment of time and money, neither of which I believed I had. I had no job, and when I did get one much later, I was still dependent on my parents for transportation. In addition, I was always expected to help with both regular and irregular chores to keep the household and Dad's business running. Dad paid us to work for him, but the hours and the projects were subject to change according to what he needed. If he needed help, it wasn't presented as an optional job. Neither could I "turn down" a sewing project for Mom, even one she was offering to pay for.

Mary Pride, Vickie Farris, Elisabeth Elliot, and Nancy Campbell were certain my calling was to be a submissive wife and a full-time mother. Numerous writers were telling me that my dad should help select a future husband for me. But I was in my twenties now, and no young men were lining up for the privilege. I'd never even been asked out, never held hands with a boy, never talked to a guy my age on the phone. I was certainly raising babies, but they weren't mine.

At ATI conferences we would listen to "testimonies" of young adults who had left their college studies to return home and happily study the Bible with their younger siblings under the authority of their parents. We would expose ourselves to Satan's temptations if we left our parents' protection to live on a campus. We might even lose our faith. We would be corrupted by humanism and "vain philosophies". We might even succumb to "a dating spirit".

Besides, even without degrees we would have employers coming to us because of our excellent character, worth so much more than mere knowledge. Anything we needed to know, we could learn from masters through on-the-job apprenticeships. To a teenager whose primary outside contact was church on Sunday morning, it sounded so good in theory. I did some volunteer work, but no one came knocking in search of my great talents.

Years after I should have graduated from high school, Gothard's organization launched an alternative to college: a correspondence school by which one could study law from home. Loving the idea of having initials after my name, I was eager to apply to Oak Brook College of Law. But it turned out one had to have some college credits! Or, instead, they would accept a GED certificate and satisfactory CLEP scores in three subjects. So Dad got on the phone and made the arrangements. In January, I got my GED (at a facility for dropouts and delinquents) and sat for the necessary CLEP exams at the our community college.

In April 1995, the week before the Oklahoma City bombing, I spent a week at Gothard's Dallas Training Center doing "orientation". I remember being surprised that the young man picking me up at the airport was alone.(At nineteen years old, I'd never been alone in a vehicle with a single man before. Unspeakable things might happen!) The class was predominantly male, but there were a few other women. All the professors we met were male.

The dean, Roger Magnuson, kicked off the week by warning us of the spiritual perils of our course of study. He urged us to halt our studying if we sensed "our delight in spiritual things diminishing". I remember something about the school not being unaccredited "yet", but I had no idea what that meant. No one had ever explained regional accreditation to me, not even my dad who had a degree from Penn State. After all the introductions and preliminaries were over, I lugged my new books back to Michigan. For the next year and a half logged four hours of study a day, often falling asleep on my bed as I slogged through the heavy, sometimes bone-dry texts.

It was lonely as hell. I rarely got to converse with another student over the phone, and never talked to a professor. It would be two more years before we even got email access at home. I mailed in assignments, got grades back, and took my midterm and final exams at a proctor's house across town. Despite being a devout Catholic, she was an avid fan of Gothard ("He's the most Catholic man I know!") and did her best to spoil and encourage me when I came over. I was grateful to her, but it wasn't enough. All this time I continued to pull more than my weight helping around the house, tasked with keeping the bills paid, the dishes washed, diapers changed, the kitchen clean, and whatever else Mom needed me to do.

When my mother had a nervous breakdown two months after delivering her tenth baby, I was left in charge of the house, and meals, and seven younger siblings--for a week.  I kept assuring myself God would take care of everything, that he had things under control. But nothing was under control! And I was desperately trying to prepare for the state "Baby Bar" exam in San Francisco which would determine whether I could continue my studies or not.

When Mom returned home from a week discussing the Bible with a pastor in Indianapolis (the "counseling" she got at Gothard's training center), we all walked around on eggshells for weeks. There was The Knife incident. I was anxious and depressed and cried a lot in secret. I had trouble sleeping. I got sick. My appetite diminished. I felt like my whole life was in danger of crashing in pieces around me.

I feared Mom would fall apart again. I feared I would fail the exam and Dad's money, not to mention the last eighteen months of my life, would have been wasted. I feared turning into a steely woman lawyer in a boxy navy suit. I feared turning into a sexy female attorney in a fuchsia suit, wowing the judge with her perfume instead of her brains. I wished I had given up the notion of law school long ago!

I took the exam. Mom stabilized. While I waited for the test results, I sewed dresses for my little sisters and did a lot of thinking. My friends were starting to get married. In my terrible loneliness, rocking my infant sister, I longed for a man of my own, someone to embrace and love me. Was marriage in God's plan for me? Was I going to sew dresses for little girls of my own? Of what use would my studies be then?

I could not envision how a career in Constitutional Law could be compatible with marriage and homemaking. I had never actually met a female with a law degree. I had only observed them from a distance on visits to the county courthouse. It was understood in our circles that marriage meant choosing to be a homemaker.  Dad would never approve my marriage if he thought I intended to be a lousy wife!

By the time I heard that I'd passed the Baby Bar, I knew that I was done with Oak Brook College of Law. I did not have the emotional stamina to keep homeschooling myself through college for three more years! And even if I did finish, the school could not assure me that I would be qualified to practice law in any jurisdiction outside California. Since my home was in Michigan, and I had always lived with my parents, it was difficult to visualize a future forging a life for myself across the continent!

But I was soon sure I did not want to remain a stay-at-home daughter indefinitely. A year after taking the Baby Bar, I took the chance to work for Gothard's cult out-of-state. When that didn't work out and I found myself back home, I explored other options. I got an acceptable part-time job (I could wear modest skirts and the office manager agreed to keep the radio off on the days I worked) and started saving money--while still keeping up with chores and responsibilities at home. In a tentative act of independence, I applied for a temporary volunteer position with an evangelical missionary organization, telling them I was willing to go to Peru, Guatemala, or the Philippines.

And at age 24 I enrolled in a summer university linguistics program in North Dakota, taking real college courses for the very first time. Experiencing my first classroom (with real desks!) since first grade, I thrived! I reveled in the lectures, the labs, the camaraderie, the independent study, the collaboration with classmates, and the exams. Especially the exams. Like Anne of Green Gables, I loved the sweet taste of being at the head of a class instead of an isolated self-taught learner!

It would be another decade before I learned the difference between the ten "credits" I earned from Oak Brook College of Law and the ten credits I earned that summer from the University of North Dakota.

In the interim, a lot of life happened: marriage, babies, homeschooling. And eventually, enrolling in classes in community college. How strange to walk through those doors and sit elbow-to-elbow with kids nearly twenty years my junior. Every time I fill out a survey and select the "some college" option, I wonder, "What if I had spent my single adult years getting an education?"

As the oldest daughter, I was the guinea pig in many ways. Several of those now-grown baby sisters have sprinted past me in the race to an education. Yet, the last time I talked to my dad about the courses I was pursuing, his cool response was, "But I hope that being a wife and mother is still your main priority." It felt like a jab, a reminder that I was stepping outside the circle where I was supposed to stay and be happy. Perhaps he didn't mean it that way.

My children see Chris and I working on college assignments week after week and they can't help but see that we value learning. Because as it turns out, Gothard and his friends were wrong--outside their fantasy land, having or not having a traditional college degree can make a world of difference.

Genesis and Education

I went out by myself on Sunday afternoon. I left the rest of the family playing Minecraft in the basement and headed over to a repurposed old church building to see Wichita Community Theater perform Inherit the Wind.

According to Wikipedia, the playwrights had McCarthyism in their sights when they wrote this fictionalized version of the Scopes "Monkey" Trial in 1955. Perhaps so, but here in Kansas it is progressive science pitted against religious fundamentalism that still speaks volumes. I tucked my copy of Evolving in Monkey Town into my purse on my way out the door so I could brush up on the facts of the historical case while waiting for the show to start.

Darrow (left) and Bryan (right) at the Scopes Trial, 1925

Many years ago, my dad rented the 1960 film version of Inherit the Wind. Perhaps that was the month we studied transcripts from the Scopes Trial in our Wisdom Booklets. It was clear to us then that Clarence Darrow's character (Henry Drummond in the play) was the villain while William Jennings Bryan's character was the unfortunate champion of truth who mistakenly followed Ussher's notes in Scofield's Bible.

None of us had ever heard of Chromosome 2 back then. We'd never seen photos from Hubble. When we took field trips to zoos, or state parks, or museum exhibits depicting the glaciers that covered Michigan during the Ice Age, we were instructed to disregard signage referencing "millions" or "billions" of years. Those numbers were lies Satan wanted us to believe, the better to trick us into thinking we didn't need Jesus to keep us out of hell. Ken Ham was still my hero then, and we had a timeline (courtesy of ATI) mounted in our front hallway that placed Noah's Ark around 4000 BC. I used to study it while waiting my turn for the bathroom.

Anyway, I've always been fascinated by courtroom drama, and this play was magnificently performed. Sometimes a bit too magnificently for my comfort zone--between the mid-calf dresses, the references to the heat, the sucking-up mayor, the old-time religion, and a big "honorary colonel" keeling over with a heart attack, I felt like I was in Knoxville all over again.

But this was Dayton, Tennessee (excuse me, the play calls it Hillsboro) in 1925, not 1995, though I could swear that navy and white dress from the closing scene played a part in my personal history. And this time, I found my tension so often relieved by the sneers and smart-ass remarks of H.L. Mencken's godless character, I wanted to hug him, watch-chain and all!

Some of the lines delighted me all over again: "Do you think about the things you do think about?" Drummond's line of questioning about the sun standing still for Joshua made me wonder how my younger self had refuted the scientific evidence offered by the irreverent trial lawyer.

The director made a point to state his belief that science and faith need not be contradictory. And churches had taken ad space in the program, no doubt hoping to attract searching souls.

But in the end, I don't think the Scopes Trial, or Kitzmiller v. Dover Board of Education (2005), or Ken Ham's debate with Bill Nye last night is about religious faith at all. It's about whether one generation has the right to restrict children's education to what makes the previous generation comfortable. 

"The Fall of Man" by Lucas Cranach the Elder. 

Do our children have the right to keep up with the advance of human understanding? What if we our religious faith states that are things "God doesn't want us to learn"?

Where are the limits? Can a homeschooling family who believes in "white pride" isolate their children from exposure to racial integration? Or teach them that the Holocaust was a fraud? What if parents want to keep their children from learning multiplication tables? Or tell them they don't need to know how to read? What makes the study of the sciences unique in this debate?

We fucked, we made children. How much authority does that now give us to regulate what data enters their minds?  Is it fair, after all these years of scientific exploration, to fence our children off from certain branches of the Tree of Knowledge ?

What are we afraid of? Of losing their souls? Or of losing control of their minds?

Socialization and Boundaries

Have I mentioned how much I learn by observing my children?

We live too close to our kids' schools for them to ride the bus yet too far for them to walk alone, which makes for a lot of driving! But I have to admit, I cherish the minutes we get to share each afternoon as they tell me the things about their day that were the most significant to them. Often, they surprise me with what makes the top of their list.

I hear a lot of names: the friend they spent recess with, the friend they sat with at lunch, the friend who made them laugh in class, the friend they shared an inside joke with, the friend who got hurt, the friend who doesn't celebrate Christmas, the "best" friend, the friend who surprised them with a little gift.

When I was young, I lived for company. I was constantly begging my mom to invite other families to dinner. We socialized as families, only rarely as peer groups. So if I met a nice girl at church, the only way to get to know her better was to invite her parents and siblings to coordinate schedules in order to spend an evening at our house. What if her dad didn't get along with my dad? (In the end, all our friends came from other homeschooling families with stay-at-home moms who wore denim jumpers and breastfed their babies.) As I got older, I realized that guests meant extra housecleaning and extra work in the kitchen. It was still fun, but it was also a lot of work. By then, there were ten...eleven...twelve...thirteen of us. Our social invitations were limited to potlucks and graduation "open houses"!

When I married and moved to a new city where I knew no one but my in-laws, I was again desperate for company. I was always trying to gather people around my table: contacts from church, neighbors, extended family, old acquaintances with connections to Bill Gothard's cult. My husband, raised without siblings, could never quite understand my craving for social interaction, for sharing meals with other humans. It took years for me to realize that I was happier with a few quality friendships, even long-distance ones, than with frequent interactions with people I wasn't really compatible with.

With my kids in school forming so many new relationships, I braced myself for requests for guests, for playdates, for birthday parties, for outings with friends. When no one brought them up, I started asking. Maybe the kids had been too timid to ask. Were there any friends from school they would like to invite over sometime? To play with on a Saturday? To share their birthday cake?

No, it turns out, my kids just have better boundaries than I do. Each of them has plenty of friends at school. They enjoy their peers, look forward to seeing them, get along well with them, play at the activities that are available to them at school. But then my children come home and they enjoy each other, they play the games our family enjoys; they spend time playing alone, or reading, or watching their favorite shows. Sometimes they visit with friends in our neighborhood--friends they don't see at school. They rebuild connections here, then go out the next day and start again!

My siblings and I traveled as a pack when we went to a playground. "Public" spaces didn't mean "shared" so much as "available for temporary claims". We would keep our eyes on a piece of equipment, wait till all the other kids left it vacant, then swarm around our new territory. If another kid or two tried to engage with us, we would usually ignore them until they left, or until we tired and moved on to something else. When my family went
to the beach, we would pack up and head back to the car when other swimmers arrived.

My kids, especially the youngest, are much more comfortable in public spaces. They will engage with other children, play together, combine forces, join conversations. At the pool, the playground, or the gym, they are usually willing to accept other children as playmates. B--- will readily describe such a temporary attachment as "my new friend". Should a child not prove trustworthy, my children will distance themselves, recognizing instinctively that respect can be both earned and lost.

I applaud public education for helping my children learn boundaries. They are already more differentiated than I was at twice their age! They know where others end and they begin. They are neither isolated nor lonely. They are surrounded by opportunities to learn what matters to them: Shared values? Common interests? Compatible personalities? Similar or diverse customs? They get practical experience in cultivating relationships--what builds them and what damages them. They are learning which friends, or teachers, can be relied on, and which ones simply drain other people's energy.

Our entire family benefits from the social support that students provide to each other. At the beginning of this school year, our older two would build up a lot of anxiety and stress each day. It took a lot of my energy to coach them and reassure them. But as the year goes on, they are building stronger bonds with their classmates. They endure the same pressures, but they don't feel alone. By the time they get home these days, the kids have worked through most of their stresses. They have already laughed with a friend about the grumpy substitute or shared a complaint about being treated unfairly at recess. I bring them back to the house and they are ready to move on to happier things.

I can't help wondering how my life would be different if I had not been such a lonely child. What if church services and Vacation Bible School had not been my only contacts with peers? What if I had been surrounded with boys and girls my own age whose life experience was different from my own?

I learn so much from watching my children be human.

In Which the Pieces Come Together

At some point in my growing up, I realized that my family was dysfunctional. While outsiders saw us as picture-perfect and held us in regard as a model of the ideal Christian family, we knew our Sunday-best was an illusion or at best, just one facet of who and what we were. There were a lot of good times, certainly, but there was also tension. And no matter how much fun we were having, we never let our guard down.

I have spent the last year seriously unpacking what I've carried from my family of origin. In the process, I've gradually learned a new vocabulary describing the ways that dysfunction affected me:

• Panic/Anxiety
• Post-Traumatic Stress 
• Complex PTSD
• Emotional Incest
• Religious Trauma Syndrome
• and now... Developmental Trauma

According to a report on Developmental Trauma Disorder by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk,

When children are unable to achieve a sense of control and stability they become helpless. If they are unable to grasp what is going on and unable do anything about it to change it, they go immediately from (fearful) stimulus to (fight/flight/freeze) response without being able to learn from the experience. Subsequently, when exposed to reminders of a trauma (sensations, physiological states, images, sounds, situations) they tend to behave as if they were traumatized all over again – as a catastrophe. Many problems of traumatized children can be understood as efforts to minimize objective threat and to regulate their emotional distress. Unless caregivers understand the nature of such re-enactments they are liable to label the child as “oppositional”, ‘rebellious”, “unmotivated”, and “antisocial”.

...

When trauma emanates from within the family children experience a crisis of loyalty and organize their behavior to survive within their families. Being prevented from articulating what they observe and experience, traumatized children will organize their behavior around keeping the secret, deal with their helplessness with compliance or defiance, and accommodate in any way they can to entrapment in abusive or neglectful situations.

... 

These children... tend to communicate the nature of their traumatic past by repeating it in the form of interpersonal enactments, in their play and in their fantasy lives.

So many of Dr. van der Kolk's observations resonate with me. And in an odd way, I find it reassuring to discover that professionals can accurately describe the ways in which my siblings and I coped with our traumatic upbringing. We were not anomalies; we were not "broken"; we were not "messed up". As children, we responded understandably--even predictably--to unsettling circumstances beyond our control.

Our parents were told by Bill Gothard and Michael Farris and Mary Pride and Doug Phillips, by Raymond Moore and Gregg Harris and even James Dobson, that God had given them (parents) responsibility for their children's education and that by taking our education into their own hands, they could have the loving, God-fearing family they always wanted. Our parents accepted the challenge, choosing to raise us in an environment totally different from any they had known before. In a system totally different from their own experience. In a culture totally different from that of our peers. But in some cases, that system failed dismally.

My ten siblings and I are only a tiny representation of the thousands (millions?) of children who grew up in conservative religious homeschooling homes. Many of those homes were unhealthy, and socially isolated; many were abusive. And many of us are survivors. The symptoms we have dealt with along the way are not signs that we were rebellious or lazy or crazy or influenced by demons--they are simply signs that our young brains reacted normally to the challenges our parents created for us when we were vulnerable and doing the best we could to make sense of the strange and sometimes painful world in which we found ourselves.

Now that I have children trusting me to show them the world, I am finally able to feel empathy for my younger self. I see myself at my children's ages, and grieve the losses that little girl was not able to properly mourn at the time because she had to be strong and she had to be good. That little girl discovered early that it was safer to ally herself with her caregivers--who were bent on pleasing God--than with the rest of her culture--who were displeasing him every day. That little girl learned to cooperate with and even defend the very people who were traumatizing her, even when this only created more cognitive dissonance.

Now I find nurturing my children and tuning in to their specific needs to be healing to me. Observing them, I am better able to recognize my own likes and dislikes and fears, the things that make me feel supported, the things that make feel threatened, the things that make me feel brave.

I have carried a lot with me since leaving the home of my childhood. I felt I had to hang onto it to find out what exactly it was. Now that I am able to label the way I felt as a girl, it is easier to let those feelings go and move on with a better, healthier life.

Journal Excerpt: Learned Passivity

This is what my 14-year-old self had to say on a long ago New Year's Eve:

What I’ve learned most this year:  God will provide for my every need. All I need and ever will is Him. Since His love is SO great, He’s the only Being I’ll ever need to be content and joyful. He wants what’s best for me, knows what is best, and will supernaturally take care of it. I don’t have to do anything, trying to make my plans work out. If I trust Him, He’ll show His power.

Just a few years earlier, I was an active girl with dreams and goals and ideas for the future. Dad wrote on my 6th grade homeschool report card that my "interest in spiritual things" was limited to "just the facts".

Somewhere between ages 12 and 14, I learned that I was to be passive, that I was to wait, that I was to be guided, led, and provided for by a supernatural being. That I didn't know what was good for me. That I didn't have to do anything.

Science Controversies in Kansas

When a friend and I took our kids to the Dinosaurs Unearthed exhibit at Wichita's Exploration Place this summer, we were startled by this notice at the main entrance to the exhibit.

Considering that Wichita's Sedgwick County Zoo, the most popular tourist attraction in the state of Kansas, prides itself on not presenting visitors with any references to evolution, I shouldn't have been surprised. This zoo, 18th largest in the nation and sponsored by numerous corporation and local businesses, offers numerous educational programs. Their parking lot is often filled with school buses, and the zoo reimburses Title 1 schools for transportation costs. They also cater to homeschoolers, offering special presentations, discounted admission days, and educational resources available for nominal rental fees. As a homeschooling mom at one of these events, I was impressed at how well the zoo staff knew their audience: the presenter volunteered that the zoo is careful to avoid any mention of evolution or long time frames in any of their educational materials.  

By contrast, Botanica, Wichita's botanical gardens, quietly displays a subtle statement outside the butterfly garden. When I first visited the gardens as a young earth creationist, I noticed the little sign and it made me slightly uncomfortable, as if I'd encountered a thorn in the midst of Eden.

The Beil limestone at the base of the sign.

This month, we visited the Denver area. We spent a day at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, touched ancient fossils and dinosaur footprints at Dinosaur Ridge, and learned more about dating rocks at the Colorado School of Mines Geology Museum. The exhibits were all so matter-of-fact about simply presenting the evidence. No one was walking on eggshells or trying to skirt the issue of evolution.

Today, back in Kansas, there is fresh controversy over science standards. According to Kansas.com,

"The State Board of Education is asking Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt to defend it in a lawsuit over its decision to adopt new science standards. Board members met with their attorney in executive session this week about the federal lawsuit filed last month by an anti-evolution group called Citizens for Objective Public Education.
. . .
"The lawsuit names the board and individual members as defendants. It contends the new science standards promote atheism and violate the religious rights of students and parents.
"The standards were developed by Kansas, 25 other states and the National Research Council. They treat evolution and climate change as key scientific concepts to be taught from kindergarten through 12th grade.

These Next Generation Science Standards state that "science is a way of explaining the natural world." They go on to explain: "Indeed, the only consistent characteristic of scientific knowledge across the disciplines is that scientific knowledge itself is open to revision in light of new evidence."

But revision in light of of new evidence makes many people uneasy, so the controversy over how to educate our children will go on. My daughter's middle school teacher offered a disclaimer in case the video she showed on "origins" should conflict with what any student's traditions or beliefs. 

This sign, along a walking trail at the Wichita's Great Plains Nature Center, illustrates just how controversial the subject of geologic time continues to be in Kansas, and how strongly it stirs people's emotions. 

This interpretive sign was vandalized by a zealous visitor.

Voiceless Women: Lives of the Wesley Sisters (Part 2)

The following are the stories of the lives of Susanna Wesley's seven daughters. For further reading, see Part 1, Voiceless Women: Susanna Wesley's Daughters.

Emilia, "Emily"

Emilia Wesley was a good scholar, talented and smart, well-read and capable. John, who became a university professor, said she was the best expert on Milton he ever heard.

Emilia was five or six when the family moved to Epworth. As the oldest sister, she was typically responsible and her parents depended on her; she lived at home well into her twenties. Emilia cared for her mother and baby Kezzy after the Fire, managed the parsonage when her mother was ill (with meager resources), tended the clock and locked up the house at night, took leave from her teaching job to nurse her married sister Sukey through an illness. She was fond of her mother, and had strong maternal feelings for John, who arrived when she was eleven. Though she was a dutiful daughter, she was also the most critical of her father, especially of his financial irresponsibility, describing the family’s circumstances as those of “intolerable want and affliction”.

She fell in love with one of John’s friends from his student days at Oxford. The romance lasted three years before her brother Sam apparently interfered, insisting that they break up. Emily was heartbroken. She coped by concluding that Leybourne had not really loved her and they would not have been happy together; however, she never really got over her disappointment.

Emily was nearing forty when she felt compelled to support herself and took a teaching job in London. However, her employer did not treat her well or compensate her properly. After corresponding with her brothers and receiving some encouragement and a loan, she gave her employer notice and started her own school in Gainsborough, which she operated until at least 1735. Back home, her mother missed her dependable companion considerably.

There was another romance in Emilia’s life, but her brother John meddled this time. His disapproval was partly because the man in question was a Quaker, though Emilia described him as “a faithful friend, a unique companion, and a keen lover”.

Emily was 44 when she eventually married Robert Harper, the Epworth apothecary, but she was even poorer with him than she had been with her father. Emilia even had to sell some of her clothes to buy food. Politically, they were strong opposites, which only added to the friction between them. They had a daughter, Tetty, but she apparently died in childhood.

Harper disappeared, leaving his wife penniless, after which Emilia (and her favorite maid, to whom she was much attached) was supported by her brothers, residing in London at the Preachers’ house adjoining a Methodist chapel. Towards the end of her life, dementia softened her memory and sweetened her temper.

Susanna “Sukey”

A good girl, a bit romantic, and very pretty. She and Hetty were very close. Disappointed regarding the prospect of financial aid from an uncle, Sukey impulsively married Richard Ellison, Esq. a local landowner who farmed his own estate. But though she bore him several children, their union was far from happy.

Richard was too “uncultivated” and “morose” for his strong, smart, and vivacious wife. He was also physically abusive, reportedly even when they lived with her parents while she was pregnant. Her mother described him as “little inferior to the apostate angels in wickedness” and blamed Uncle Matthew for Sukey’s throwing herself away on this man who was only a “plague” to her and an “affliction to the family”.

When the Ellison’s home was destroyed in a fire, Sukey called it quits. It must have stirred traumatic flashbacks from her childhood. Like her own family years before, the Ellisons separated to live with relations for a time. Sukey never lived with her husband again, but hid in London with her children, refusing to see Ellison or answer his letters. A master manipulator, he tried to flush her out of hiding by publishing a report of his death in the paper. She immediately went down to Lincolnshire to pay her last respects to the dead, but turned around when she encountered her living husband and realized the ruse.

The two were never reconciled; Sukey lived with her children, and accepted financial aid from her brother John. Ellison later found himself in financial straits after his land flooded, drowning his animals and ruining his crops, and cast himself on the mercy of his brothers-in-law, whom he found more inclined to generosity than was his wife.

Mary "Molly"

Molly was crippled by a childhood injury, thought to be due to her nurse’s carelessness. She was good-tempered, in spite of her disability. Hetty adored her. During the Rectory Fire, someone broke out the parlor window and threw her and Hetty out to safety.

One of Rev. Samuel Wesley’s former students, a John Romley, was given supervision of a charity pupil, John Whitelamb. Romley introduced Whitelamb to his former instructor, who then taught the studious boy Greek in a matter of months. Wesley warmed to Johnny Whitelamb, taking him into his home as his amanuensis and putting him to work designing and engraving plates for Dissertations on the Book of Job. Wesley then sponsored Johnny’s education at university, where John Wesley was by now a Fellow. Susanna called him “poor starveling Johnny”; he could not even afford a gown for his ordination. After his ordination, Rev. Sam Wesley made Johnny his curate in Wroote.

Molly and John Whitelamb were married in December, 1733. Molly died in childbirth within a year. The family rather forgot Johnny after that. Years later, after hearing John Wesley preach in his town, Whitelamb wrote to him and expressed how deeply he felt his debt to the entire Wesley family, how highly he esteemed them, and how he had felt ignored by

The cold shoulder may have been due in part to the Wesleys not knowing how to accept changes in Whitelamb’s religious views. Sometime after his ordination, and probably after the loss of his wife, Whitelamb’s faith was undermined by doubts and he became a deist. When John heard of Whitelamb’s passing in 1769, he said “O, why did he not die forty years ago, while he knew in whom he had believed!”

Mehetabel "Hetty" 

Smart, a poetic genius, educated in language, witty, funny, pretty, and popular with suitors. She was a favorite of her Uncle Matthew, neither of them being as religious as the rest of the Wesley family. It was she who roused the family the night of the Rectory Fire, a piece of the roof falling onto her bed and burning her feet. (Samuel Wesley had actually heard cries of “Fire” coming from the street, but ignored them, not realizing they meant his house!)

Her superior education suiting her well for teaching, Hetty went away to work as a governess. From there, her story reads like a Jane Austen novel. Through her employer, she met a young lawyer to whom she developed a strong attachment. Her father interfered, strongly opposing the match based on information which caused him to believe the gentleman was “unprincipled”. This did not dissuade Hetty, or her boyfriend.

At 27, Hetty attempted to elope, twice, apparently with the lawyer. The latter adventure involved her spending a night with her boyfriend, only to discover that he was not serious about marrying her. When she returned to her parents’ home several months pregnant, she was disgraced and her father forbid her to set foot in the house. He quickly married her off to a journeyman plumber, William Wright, in October of 1725. Only her sister Mary took her side and attempted to dissuade their father from forcing the match. Her sisters were not allowed to attend the wedding, two weeks after being bridesmaids at Nancy’s wedding.

Unwelcome at the rectory, Hetty stayed with her sisters when she visited from out of town and remained estranged her from her father for many years. When Susanna went to visit the Wrights at Anne’s place in Wroote a year later, she requested to speak to Hetty in private. Hetty was unenthusiastic and reserved. Susanna told her daughter she forgave Hetty’s offenses against her; Hetty failed to see how she was in need in her mother’s pardon, but kept her thoughts to herself. Her mother proposed a reconciliatory meeting with her father, but Hetty was not optimistic, foreseeing only more unbearable reproach (her mother thought a father’s rebuke ought not be called reproach, especially since he was a pastor and had a duty to call people out). Hetty repeated that she had no wish for reconciliation with her father and had no interest in ever seeing him again.

Susanna wrote to Hetty’s little brother John after the interview and said if Hetty were truly penitent, she would submit herself to her father. She pointed out to John that Sam did not “restrain” the other girls from spending time with Hetty as they pleased. John later wrote to their brother Sam that their parents and some of the sisters believed Hetty had faked penitence earlier. With this family scenario in mind, John had written a sermon for his parents’ benefit, attempting to explain that even if this were the case, Hetty still deserved to be treated with “some tenderness”.

Hetty tried running a school the next year, but after that failed, the mismatched couple moved to London. Hetty was extremely unhappy in her marriage, in her words “a living death”, and wished she could have given one of her eyes to her father to avoid being compelled to marry Wright. The pair were not equals in any way; he was uneducated, ill-tempered and inconsiderate while she was both brilliant and depressed. He was considered an honest workman in the town, but he spent his evenings away carousing, which wounded his wife. Their several children died young; Hetty believed this was due to her husband’s lead works, which also harmed his own health and probably Hetty’s, as well.

A brilliant, bitter and sometimes biting poet, Hetty had some of her work published in magazines. Other pieces she burned. She and her father eventually resumed correspondence. She also nursed her Uncle Matthew at the end of his life and he left her a generous bequest in his will.

Later in life, Hetty looked for solace in religion and told a neighbor she looked forward to death because “we, the Methodists, always die in transports of joy!”

In 1903, an English literature professor at Cambridge turned Hetty’s story into a historical novel.

Anne "Nancy"

Comparatively little is known about Anne. She was born around the time of the first rectory fire.

She married John Lambert, a land surveyor, shortly after Hetty’s abrupt marriage in 1725. They rented a red house not far from her family and made it “very pretty and comfortable”. Later, they moved to London. Despite John’s slight drinking problem and some financial challenges at times, Anne is thought to have had the happiest marriage of the Wesley sisters. No record remains of any Lambert children.

Martha "Patty", "Pat"

Her sisters and Charles believed she was Susanna’s favorite. Patty enjoyed her mother’s company and listening to her teach. She was calm and serious like her brother John, less playful and mischievous than the rest of her siblings, less inclined to the sharp satire on which they thrived. Patty was sensitive, compassionate, and shared her brother’s strong tendency toward self-denial.

Patty was living with her Uncle Matthew in London when she met Wesley Hall, an Anglican minister like her father and one of her brother’s students at Oxford, and they were secretly engaged. When he later visited Epworth with her brothers and met Kezzia, he was smitten and began openly courting her with the family’s blessing. They were engaged and nearly married before his conscience drove him to break up with Kezzy and return to Martha. Too embarrassed to confess the truth, he told the family God had given him a revelation that he was to marry Martha, not Kezzia. Loyal to their baby sister Kezzy, the Wesley brothers took Hall’s change of plans very badly and Charles even sent Patty a lengthy and nasty poem accusing her of incest (by taking her sister’s husband).

Patty eventually sent her mother a full account of the business, Susanna understood and said it was all fine if Uncle Matthew had given his permission, and Kezzy relinquished any claim on Mr. Hall. The Wesley brothers did not hear the whole story and nursed a grudge on Kezzy’s behalf for years afterward. When the tale was told, however, even Charles had to acknowledge that Patty was completely justified.

After the marriage, Kezzy moved in with Patty and Mr. Hall. It was there she met and was courted by a gentleman, but he died before they could be wed. Kezzy’s health was delicate, and she passed away, still living in her sister’s home, in 1741.

The Rev. Hall turned out to be, no surprise, fickle and shallow, a man of impulse rather than intellect, “one of the worst and most unkind of husbands”. He was inconsiderate, deceitful, violent and abusive. He had an affair with Patty’s seamstress, which Patty only discovered when the girl went into labor in their home. Patty ordered the servants to call a doctor, but they refused, under the circumstances. Patty ended up going herself for a midwife and paying for the girl’s care, before traveling to London to calmly confront her husband. Another time, Hall brought home an infant he had sired elsewhere and ordered Patty to care for it until he could arrange for another situation.

Patty bore Hall ten children, nine of which were buried as infants. Their only surviving child, his father’s namesake, died of smallpox at 14 years of age. By then, his uncles John and Charles were sponsoring his education and he was living away from home. His illness may have been exacerbated by the neglect of those at the house where he boarded. His mother was called, but did not arrive in time to say goodbye to her last son.

Many affairs later, Mr. Hall abandoned his wife and moved to Ireland “with one of his mistresses” and Patty never saw him again, though their marriage officially lasted forty years, until Hall’s death. Deserted by her husband, Patty was financially dependent on her brothers’ generosity. In later years, the talented and Patty was a favorite of Dr. Samuel Johnson and kept company with other literary figures in his circle.

It excited her surprise that women should dispute the authority which God gave the husband over the wife. "It is," said she, "so clearly expressed in Scripture, that one would suppose such wives had never read their Bible." But she allowed that this authority was only given after the fall, not before : but " the woman," said she, "who contests this authority should not marry."  

                                                                (Adam Clarke's Memoirs of the Wesley Family)

Kezzia "Kezzy"

Born a month after the Rectory Fire. Kezzy went with her eldest sister to work at Mrs. Taylor's school for a while. Her health was always fragile, however, and stress made her ill. She longed for more education, but was frustrated by lack of time (when she was working) or money (when living at home).

After her short-lived love affair with Wesley Hall, she forgave him and relinquished all claim on him to her sister Patty. Kezzy lived with Patty and Mr. Hall for five or six years until her death. Charles blamed Hall for her early death (he suspected a broken heart). Kezzia did have a boyfriend later on, but he died before they could marry.

An Open Letter to my Mother

Mom,

I know you worked hard to be the kind of woman, the kind of mother, you thought you should be. What you accomplished under grueling circumstances is truly amazing, and I daily use many of the skills I learned from you.

I have no desire to pain you by dredging up previous difficulties in our relationship or by making accusations or asking for apologies. However, I can now admit that when we visit I often feel nervous, fearful of offending you or of being punished. I feel obligated to accommodate your expectations and guilty if I cannot. I do not feel this way around anyone else. In recent years, this stress has even manifested as physical pain which not only takes a toll on myself but negatively impacts other relationships that are important to me.

I know our history is complicated. Over the last months, I have attempted to preserve a cordial, if limited, relationship. Frankly, I do not want you in my personal space. I do not trust you. I am not comfortable sharing my emotions with you. I feel I have to be a buffer to shield my children from being hurt by you. When I get a note from you, I have to wait until I am relaxed enough to open it. Maybe someday I will be strong enough to hear from you without having a panic attack, but for now intimacy is not worth the psychological trauma it creates. Even reading the words “I love you” in your handwriting makes my stomach drop. My brain instantly recalls the things you did because you loved us, and it scares the hell out of me.

In the future, if you want to show kindness to me, I beg you to pay for my sisters’ college educations, no strings attached. No conditions about whom they date, where they live, what they wear, what they study, where they work. They are all bright and motivated women, these sisters whose cries I heard often from behind closed doors, punctuated with thwacks from a wooden rod pounding their soft flesh to drive out foolishness and break their self-will. The girls whose dresses I sewed, whose diapers I changed, whose hair I washed and brushed and braided. I pureed their baby food, checked their schoolwork, kissed their bumps and scrapes, and tucked them in at night. I saw their bruised bottoms when I helped them in the damp, mildew-laden bathroom. I hung out their laundry in the yard rank with the smell of the cattle next door; I dressed them in snowsuits and fished their thumbs into mittens; I entertained them while doing my chores. I read to them, sang to them, fed them, took their photographs, saved their drawings, and tried to set them a good example.

Twice I cared for your children for a week so you and Dad could get counseling help. You went to people who claimed to have answers but could only point you to the same concepts that created the problems. While you were gone, we fixed the faucet so there would be two showers available to the eleven people in the house. I worried that you would be angry with us when you returned, for changing things. I worried that you might not return at all, but you did, all smiles because God had shown Dad that he was proud and because you had a new necklace.

I am safe now. I am secure, well-cared for, loved and supported, as independent as I choose to be. I am overcoming the hurdles in my way and creating a safe space for my children to grow into independent adults. Won’t you equip the rest of your daughters with the financial resources to educate themselves, and then step aside and let them achieve their goals? You can still give them a chance at the autonomy you never got to experience.

You used to pray that we would be “mighty in spirit”. You should be proud of all your children: we have your determination. We are passionate. We love what is beautiful and true. We fight against abuse and speak out against beliefs or practices that hurt people. We love to learn and to teach and we work hard to take care of ourselves and contribute to our communities.

While you and I have never been close, I need even more physical and emotional distance between us for now. One day I hope to be strong enough to again maintain my equilibrium when we have contact, to gracefully manage the emotional flashbacks or not to have them at all. Until then, I hope you will be kind to all my sisters and treat them with the gentleness and respect they deserve.

David Barton: Homespun History

History was my favorite subject as a kid.

I devoured the Little House on the Prairie series, was enchanted by Ben and Me, and giggled through Jean Fritz's junior biographies of King George III, Samuel Adams, and Patrick Henry. I would slip away into "the study" to read and re-read the fourth grade A Beka textbook on the American colonists, the lives of the presidents in our 1968 World Book, or tales of Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus.

Later, our bookshelves bulged with biographies of Lincoln, Anabaptist stories of the Reformation, and thick volumes from Bob Jones University Press skimming across the centuries from ancient Greece to World War II. Once, Dad brought me home a copy of Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. And I could recite most of the dialogue from "A More Perfect Union", Brigham Young University's dramatic film about the Constitutional Convention.

When Bill Gothard first distributed David Barton "America's Godly Heritage" to homeschooling families in his Advanced Training Institute, I was entranced. We listened to that first cassette together and marveled at Barton's rapid-fire diction. After that, I would follow along with the tapes with my notebook and pencil and try desperately to copy out the quotations from the Founders as Barton galloped from one to the next at rodeo speed. Protected as I was from secular influences and celebrity worship, Barton was the equivalent of a rock star in my world. I collected Barton's numerous books and a stack of cassettes. I copied out and memorized my favorite lines. When he addressed the national ATI conferences in Tennessee, I was giddy with excitement. I wished the audience would quit applauding so he could fit in more of his speech!

Besides Barton's books on American history, I even purchased his obscure 31-page booklet How to Have Success With God, published in 1984:

"To God, obedience is better than anything."
"The more you do of what you hear from God, the more you will hear from God what to do!"
"Be a Christian who enjoys obeying God and you will enjoy being a Christian!"

Today, "David Barton is a former Vice Chairman of the Republican Party of Texas and a political consultant for the Republican National Committee. He is also a bestselling author and political activist who has worked diligently to arouse true patriotism and restore America to her Biblical foundation."

But back then, Barton and his organization Wallbuilders had not yet gained notoriety outside Texas. In time he would get chummy with Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, U.S. Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri, and the chairman of Gothard's Board of Directors, Congressman Sam Johnson of Texas. Brownback would say of Barton, "His research provides the philosophical underpinning for a lot of the Republican effort in the country today -- bringing God back into the public square." And that was a mission I supported wholeheartedly.

When my worldview began to unravel, however, I revisited the Wallbuilders' website, curious for answers that would settle some of my doubts. For the first time I realized that David Barton has no credentials as an historian or an archivist. He holds a B.A. in religious education from Oral Roberts University and has been both a [math and science] teacher and a principal at a private Christian school in his hometown of Aledo, Texas.

As a homeschooled student myself with limited exposure to the ways of academia, I could sympathize with Barton's ignorance of correct protocol for citing sources. But I was flummoxed to learn that he lacks primary sources for some of his quotations. Including some of my favorite quotations--lines I used to recite glibly at candidates who brought up the spurious "separation of church and state". Now this was unsettling. 

I hadn't heard David Barton for well over a decade when he appeared as a guest on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart". Well, here was a blast from my past! I settled in to listen to the Texan's familiar too-rapid drawl and was surprised. Before, I had only heard Barton lecture to sponge-like crowds. His material seemed much less concrete in an interview before a skeptical audience. (And this incredible exchange with Glenn Beck puts Barton much closer to "unintentional comedian" than "educator.")

Disillusioned with Barton, and with those who unquestioningly accept his version of the past, I discarded the remaining Wallbuilders publications on my bookshelf and set out to round out my re-education on American history and the variegated experiences and ideals of the brilliant yet flawed men who penned our founding documents. Thus did they launch these United States on her voyage into their future, hoping that we would prove equal to the task of sailing her, of maintaining her trim and keeping her prow pointed forward.

Even if we were to concede that America was intended to be a "Christian" nation (in spite of plain evidence to the contrary), even if we acknowledge that weather patterns were divine intervention on behalf of the Continental Army and that the Holy Spirit inspired the writing of the Constitution, even if we were to accept Barton's version of the past, how would that enlighten our present conversation? It does not therefore follow that George Washington would now use his influence in favor of creationism in science textbooks. It would be presumptive to assume that John Adams would cast his vote today for pointless transvaginal ultrasounds or that James Madison would oppose national healthcare. We could not even conclude that Thomas Jefferson would want his children reciting a pledge to a flag, much less to a nation "under God".

Mike Huckabee thinks our country would be improved we the people were all forced "at gunpoint, no less" to listen to David Barton's spin on our history. But I cannot help wondering how our Founding Fathers would respond today if they could hear Barton's appeal to an unrecognizable tradition. These men jettisoned the heavy time-worn design in favor of a revolutionary new ship of state they believed capable of carrying "we the people" through the vicissitudes of history. They were open-minded scientists, philosophers, and inventors, eagerly seeking and adopting new information and technological advances. Certainly, our nations' founders looked to the past for guidance as they plotted a new course. But to David Barton, history and tradition are anchors with which to slow progress and avoid forward-thinking.

When my daughter was very young, she used to protest when we explained disagreeable facts. "I don't want that to be true!", she would cry. Perhaps Barton is ignorant of the way he misleads and misinterprets evidence in order to achieve his political agenda.

Or perhaps he just doesn't want history to be true.

Bill Gothard on Education

My parents began homeschooling me in third grade, and enrolled in Gothard's Advanced Training Institute, a curriculum exclusively for alumni of his Advanced Seminar, before I started seventh grade. Our family was part of ATI until I reached my mid-twenties.

The following statements are the main points from a session of Bill Gothard's Advanced Seminar. They can be found on pages 88-91 of the accompanying workbook and on his website. Looking back, these "principles" explain so much of my educational experience.

Advanced Seminar Session 16: Successful Education

(Bill Gothard)

• The ultimate goal of education is not to produce a degree, but to produce many godly generations. 

• God charges parents and grandparents, not teachers, with the responsibility to train their sons and daughters.

• God established the home, not the school, as the primary learning center; the school and church must be recognized as extensions of it.

• The most destructive force in school is peer dependence, and parents must constantly work to protect their children from it.

• God wants the priorities of every family to be built around daily engrafting of Scripture, rather than accumulating man's knowledge.

• The ability of sons and daughters to stand alone is the result not of rules, but of principles that assure a superior way of life.

• When knowledge is learned before godly character, it produces pride and arrogance.

• Parents who teach sons and daughters at home must be accountable to a local church (Christian school and the government).

• Sons and daughters thrive with appropriate responsibility, and it is God's goal that they be mature in their youth.

• God gave boys and girls differing aptitudes; when children are taught together, boys are programmed for failure.

• When schools group children by ages, older examples are cut off and rebels usually rise to leadership.

• When the Bible is separated from courses, the contents come under the control of human reasoning.

• True socializing takes place not in the arbitrary groupings of school, but in the real world of children-to-adult relationships.

• Valuable learning time is lost in school; two hours of home teaching is equivalent to six hours of school teaching.

• The key to effective education is not just a trained teacher and a professional curriculum, but a concerned parent and a motivated child.

• God has set a limitation on learning; thus, academic freedom is no justification for studying the details of evil.

As an ATI student, I attended numerous conferences that became pep rallies for volunteerism with the Institute or urged us to study our favorite topics from the safety of our homes. (I even spent eighteen months enrolled in IBLP's unaccredited correspondence law school!)

Inge Cannon was one familiar conference speaker. Cannon holds a master's degree in education and helped Gothard develop the ATI curriculum in the early 1980's. She later directed the National Center for Home Education, a division of HSLDA.

At an opening session of the 1990 ATI training conference held at the University of Tennesee in Knoxville, Inge Cannon warned us against the dangerous "High Places" of education. As she talked, I took careful and enthusiastic notes. I was just fourteen, and excited about this chance to sit with the adults.

In the Bible, God repeatedly told the ancient Israelites to tear down the idolatrous "high places". Cannon thus defined a high place as:

"any goal or objective so commonly accepted that it is validated and esteemed as good, even though it violates the will and word of God".

According to Cannon, the following "high places" are educational myths for home-educating parents to avoid.

The High Places of Education

(Inge Cannon--June 23, 1990)

• Comparison--i.e., SAT tests and bell-shaped curves, parents should not base their curriculum on these; also pluralism that pressures those with strong beliefs to "give in to those who believe nothing"

• Grading--earning a teacher's certificate, for example, merely means one has passed the right courses, not that one is "qualified to produce results"

• Completion--filling in all the blanks or answering all the questions or taking the final exam does not mean the educational task is complete; the object is to "know" the material, not merely to "cover" it

• Equivalency--"believing that a curriculum is proper and right when it matches the academic sequence and requirements of traditional, formal education"

• Tangibility--"believing only what I can see or touch is real, thereby de-emphasizing those elements that require faith or minister to the spirit of my child"

• Self-expression--"believing that the arts are too personal to be governed by absolute standards"; the arts can never be amoral

• Methodology--"believing there is only one right way to teach a lesson"

• Socialization--"Children don't learn anything good from one another!"

• Exposure--exposing children to all kinds of knowledge is unnecessary for a well-rounded education; children should be ignorant of evil, they shouldn't understand dirty jokes, they shouldn't study false religions; "There are some things God doesn't want us to know."

• Statistical Verification--believing [the Bible] "needs to be verified  by scientific measurements before choosing to obey its instructions"

During my time in ATI, I was just one of thousands of young people who were told that we didn't need college credits, that college would corrupt our minds with "vain philosophies" and threaten our faith, that there are some things "God doesn't want us to know", and that employers would come looking for us because of our diligence, obedience, and virtue. So, many of us dutifully eschewed degrees in favor of home-based study.

Gothard, incidentally, later changed his mind and now even touts the Ph.D. degree Lousiana Baptist University conferred on him in 2004, much to the chagrin of those of us for whom the new dispensation came too late. Hundreds of former ATI students live today with the socioeconomic consequences of what we were taught, even as we struggle to catch up to our college-educated peers.

Obsessive Confusion

I am reading through a journal I kept when I was fourteen. Some entries make me smile; others just make me shake my head. I have posted here about how isolated I was as a homeschooled adolescent, but some memories shock me even now. I'm glad my daughter will never be able to relate to my teenage self:

"You know, I’m kinda strange. It’s been over a year since I've talked directly and individually with a teenage guy, excepting the time I found out Greg S----’s name."

The result, of course, was that I obsessed for weeks anytime a boy at church smiled a greeting in the hall or said "good night" before heading to the parking lot.

I would go home and study passages about "holiness" and make lists of things I thought God wanted me to do to remain "pure", such as:

• keep my knees covered
• wear only necklaces with short chains
• wear sleeves to my elbows
• "use lace sparingly"

Then I would weep the next week because I saw a guy from the youth group wearing an earring. 

I was so lonely.

So confused.

And so obsessed with not acknowledging my sexuality, even to myself.

Chapter 2: Musical Chairs

Continued from Chapter 1: The Composition of Anxiety.

The anxiety didn't cease when I got my Walkman back--oh, no. That was just the beginning.

Now that I was "on board", it was as if my parents and I became accountable to one another to hold up the new standard. I had heard them complaining about rock music in the church before, but ignorance had been bliss. I had puzzled over what they were talking about, but all I knew was that we sometimes sang songs like, "Blessed be the Rock, and let the God of my salvation be exalted." Now I knew exactly what they didn't approve of. My newest favorite songs about Christianity. Christian contemporary music. Steve Green, Sandi Patty, and maybe even Michael Card.

Mind you, the most secular songs I'd heard up to this point were "If I Had a Hammer" and "Frosty the Snowman". A band called Guns N' Roses just sounded dangerous; I could easily assume their songs were Satanic in some way. And for the life of me I couldn't figure out what a group like Stryper was doing in the religious book store. So I figured there really must be something morally corrupting about drums.

It took a while, but I developed a taste for the albums in my parents' collection that I had hitherto despised: choral hymn arrangements and orchestral soundtracks approved by the Gothard organization. I was proud of my new appreciation. It was most likely a maturing awareness of chords, but I chalked it up to God working in my heart and giving me a "hunger and thirst for righteousness".

There was a downside, however. One of my mom's homeschooling friends couldn't conceive of the late Keith Green's music being anything but holy--he was practically a missionary, for God's sake! She and my mom quarreled, the friendship cooled, and I didn't see her daughters anymore, which was sad because they were two of my dearest friends. Their house had been like my second home. They had introduced me to Twila Paris, and cut my bangs. I had tried to defend my mom's position against Keith Green, but her argument did seem weak and I missed my girlfriends, right or not. There were probably other factors I wasn't aware of, but it seemed like music was a divisive issue, even among the godly.

We were attending a Baptist church. Their service format typically included a vocal solo performance immediately preceding the sermon. Sometimes the soloist was accompanied on the piano, but more and more frequently he or she would opt to use a recorded accompaniment track. The Christian music accompaniment tracks followed a predictable pattern: a simple, melodious first verse with the faintest beat entering during the chorus; a richer second verse with the beat building for the chorus; then [usually a key change and] the stops came out with a strong beat, loud backup vocals, and stirring chord progressions leading either to a climactic cadence or a hypnotic fadeout with the music continuing after the singer had lowered the microphone and dropped her head.

The first part of the song was not a problem. But when the demonic backbeat showed up, we had to make a choice. We could "sympathetically vibrate" with it, opening our souls to mysterious evil influences (a typical example of Gothard's poor exegesis), or we could resist the devil by resisting his music. And so Sunday services became a spiritual minefield.

I'd check the bulletin first thing to find out who was singing. Some individuals were more likely to utilize the piano. If I couldn't tell, there was nothing to do but wait. We sang, greeted each other across the backs of the pews, bowed our heads for prayer, heard the scriptures read. At last the sanctuary would go silent, the soloist would step to the podium, and I'd hold my breath.

If she (it was almost invariably a she--would we have walked out on a man?) looked to the pianist, we were safe. If she looked to the back of the room to cue the guys in the sound booth, we were doomed. But I'd wait, hoping that this time it would be okay. First verse, no problem. As she went into the refrain for the second time, the drums would strengthen. My pulse would quicken, my muscles would tighten. With pounding heart, I would scoot to the front edge of the pew and watch Dad. When he glanced back at me, it was time.

We would stand up, all seven of us plus the baby who didn't walk yet. We would file quietly out of the pew and out through the doors in the back of the sanctuary to the lobby. There we would stand around waiting till the song was over when we would file back into our vacant pew as silently as a family that size can manage. Week after week. We started dreading church, sitting in the back row, arriving late to miss the music. And then stay late to socialize after the service. It was horrible.

Small wonder I didn't make any real friends at that church. We were the largest family, the homeschoolers, the only females who didn't even own a pair of jeans. We didn't attend Sunday School or youth group. We didn't approve of the Christian concerts the youth attended, sponsored by WLJN, which was sponsored by the church. The WLJN station manager was one of the deacons!

I tried to carry my head high. I was making a bold stand because of my superior commitment to Jesus and following the direction of my God-given authorities. But oh, it was agony. My heart would pound, my breaths would get short and shallow, I'd sweat through my church dress. And then it was over. Till next service, anyway.


Read Chapter 3: Discord

Chapter 1: The Composition of Anxiety

"When all the people heard the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and all kinds of musick, all the people, the nations, and the languages, fell down and worshipped the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar the king had set up."                                                                                                                                                                   Daniel 3:7

On a chilly autumn day in 1989, a little country girl turned fourteen. She blew out the candles on her apple-spice cake and eagerly took her birthday money to Kmart to buy a flannel-lined denim jacket with pleated sleeve caps. She had been eyeing the latest portable cassette player/radios behind the counter at the drug store, but her mother was not keen on a teenager listening to who-knows-what under her headphones.

The girl's uncle knew what she really wanted, however, and he mailed her a birthday surprise: a Sony Walkman.

The girl was so excited!

The next day she wore the new jacket to a sleepover at her best friend's house, accompanied by the new Walkman, of course. The two girls talked about prayer and boys and periods and their mothers and listened to [religious] music together till six in the morning.

Days later the birthday girl's mother confiscated the Walkman.


* * * * * * * *

Despite being a small town, Traverse City boasted its own Moody-affiliated Christian radio station, WLJN. Since we had gotten rid of our television, we took great pleasure in listening to the children's shows on Saturday mornings and dramatized history or adventure stories at night. We grew familiar with all the actors' voices from MBI in Chicago and it was a great treat to attend a live Children's Bible Hour rally in Grand Rapids, or when their tour reached our part of the state. During the day, Mom liked to listen to "Unshackled" and "Focus on the Family", and I would listen along with her. The tale of faith, forgiveness, diligence, and kindness overcoming abuse, injustice, and bad luck always thrilled me.

When the weather was right, we could sometimes tune the car radio to Christian station from farther away. One spring they were broadcasting a dramatization of the Easter story throughout Passion Week (still winter in northern Michigan). Dad would help us bundle up in our coats and then we all sat together in his car in the driveway while he carefully adjusted the tuner so we could hear every episode.

Moody Church
Photo by David DeJong

As I grew out of the single digits, I began to appreciate music as well as stories and gradually grew to appreciate adult vocalists over Sunday school marches. I would crank up Carey Landry's Catholic folk or an acapella Mennonite quartet covering Amy Grant on a beat-up boombox while I roller skated for hours in our basement workshop. My chore list lengthened as I hit my teen; I would tune in to WLJN while working at solitary, time-consuming tasks like ironing or sewing. The Moody Broadcasting Network played a mix of boring old choral pieces and current new solo artists on Saturday afternoons. The "Friday Night Sing" was a live concert from Chicago's historic Moody Church. The featured musicians were the popular "easy listening" Christian singers my parents' friends listened to: Steve Green, Steve & Annie Chapman, Annie Herring, Christine Wyrtzen, Larnelle Harris, Michael Card. Sometimes I would listen to my parents' record collection: mostly the evangelical Swedish sweetheart Evie.

By then my girlfriends (all from strict religious homes) had introduced me to Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, and Petra. I knew those performers were too "hard" for my parents' taste so it seemed prudent not to mention them at home. And then--my very own Walkman, so I could listen to whatever I chose, "clandestinely", my uncle wrote in the card. Since I was the firstborn, I should have expected this step toward independence would make my mother anxious.

I was listening to WLJN on the Saturday after Mom took my Walkman when this song came on. Mom objected to the sound and made me shut it off. I was quiet, but vented my exasperation in my journal later. On Monday, I heard from my penpal--our parents had been Bible study friends when we were babies. Rach wrote about the musicians she enjoyed, including Amy Grant. Mom was very concerned. She announced that in order to get my Walkman back, I would have to go through a "music evaluation course" she and Dad had purchased from IBLP.

"Striving for Excellence: How to Evaluate Music", consisted of two audio cassettes and a booklet. No author's name appears on the booklet but the audio material is presented by Inge & Ron Cannon. (ATI families are encouraged to use this course as an education resource, along with Frank Garlock's book Music in the Balance, formerly available from Bob Jones University Press.) So, after tucking the the younger kids into bed, my parents and I settled into the sofa in front of the cassette player. Inge Pohl Cannon, enunciated her lines of the script with clipped precision while her husband read alternating sections in his soft, lazy Southern drawl.

The Cannons began with some music theory that was way over our heads. I looked at my parents and raised my eyebrows. They shrugged back and we returned to following along in the booklet. Then there were some odd bits and pieces about rhythms causing riots or neural damage in mice and a Wichita newspaper article from 1977 that quoted a kinesiologist denouncing the rock beat as the "most serious form of pollution we have". We didn't really know what kinesiology was, but with a name like Dr. Diamond it must be legit, right? (Diamond's website was unavailable at the time of this writing.)

Another doctor translated DNA into musical scores. (Don't ask me how.) He described how cancer genes sounded different from enzymes and antibodies and compared the scores to the music of his favorite classical composers. That was followed by a titillating paragraph by Frank Zappa (whom I'd never heard of). He said the Beatles didn't just want to hold your hand and compared Jimi Hendrix' musical sounds to "orgasmic grunts, tortured squeals, lascivious moans..." I had no idea whom or what he was talking about, but I felt very grown up just reading all those fascinating phrases!

Now we came to the heart of the argument: rock music, the very beat itself, was equated with rebellion and unbridled sensuality. It would make listeners want to take drugs and have sex. (Yes, I shared this handy fact with my daughter this morning and she looked at me like I'd lost my mind.)

Ron & Inge Cannon

And if we still weren't convinced, the Cannons explained that rock songs were imbalanced, like asymmetrical architecture. The best forms of art or music were those from the Age of Classicism: a definite beginning, a climax point, and a satisfying conclusion. With echoes of David Noebel's publications against rock music, this one deprecated Impressionism and Cubism while celebrating the Baroque and the Classical periods. "Rock isn't music, it's sound....Rock coarsens all it touches," they intoned gravely, oblivious to the fact that those words were penned by a humor columnist and entertainment critic with his tongue in his cheek.

We were then warned about an unseen danger that could have mysterious evil effects: "Undiscernible [sic] to the conscious mind, this technique, called backmasking, is able to influence a person through subliminal persuasion. The only way to determine the content of such messages is to play the recordings in reverse, a practice not recommended because of its ability to open a person's spirit to demonic oppression."

And the world of Christian music was no safe haven. Backbeat or not, there could be other hidden dangers lurking in the songs, what with the deceptively humanistic lyrics, treating the Lord with the familiarity of a friend, all while breathing seductively into the microphone. They played audio excerpts of popular "sacred" artists to illustrate these corruptions: I recognized Sandi Patti, and Michael Card. We enjoyed cassettes by each of them in our home: a Christmas album, and a collection of gentle lullabies. We had certainly never before linked their music to the [supposedly] blasphemous film The Last Temptation of Christ!

The course concluded with a prayer of commitment:

"Heavenly Father, I desire to excel for You and Your Kingdom, and thus, I yield to You my rights to music. I purpose now to cleanse my life and home of any music which violates Your principles and replace it with music which is consistent with the "new song" You want to develop in my life. I ask for Your blessing on my life as I obey You. In Jesus' Name, Amen." 

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The girl sat in the cozy living room and listened quietly to the "Striving for Excellence" audio presentation, keeping most of her thoughts to herself. When the cassette player clicked off, she took a pen and scrawled her teenage signature on the commitment line at the end of the booklet, under the prayer. Her cooperation was rewarded: she went to bed that night restored to parental favor and with her Walkman back in her possession.

And the brainwashing went on.


Read Chapter 2: Musical Chairs