Shiny Happy People - Part 2 of my story: sounding the alarm

When we returned to our Asian mission field after having my first baby, I was looking forward to the fellowship I would enjoy with my women friends who were having babies, too. They had warmly congratulated me and I valued their friendship. One friend invited me to attend her home birth as one of her supporters. I got a shock when a few weeks later she informed me that her husband had told her to tell me that I could not attend the birth. I asked why. My friend responded, “It’s not my decision. I have to honor my husband. If I have to choose between you and my husband, of course I choose my husband.” Eventually she told me that “they” (meaning her husband and her brothers-in-law) were of the opinion that I was “too strong and had a feministic spirit”. She said all the wives had been told the same thing, that they could no longer associate with me. Some months later, the second wife in this group called me up and said she was sad because she missed me. She then informed me that she is no longer allowed to do anything with me. She is only allowed to say hello and goodbye when passing in the street. “I have to submit to my husband,” she said sadly. “If I have to choose between you and my husband, I choose my husband.” The phrase sounded similar to her sister-in-law’s words a few months earlier. The husbands assured us that they had not conferred together but had arrived at their decisions independently.

My husband tried to talk to the first husband. He came to our house alone. He explained that he wanted to get his wife to be more the way he felt she should be, by restricting her contact with the “wrong” kind of women and only allowing her to be influenced by the “proper” kind, because he is ‘responsible’ for his wife. He further explained that he was concerned that his wife’s friendship with me was developing too quickly and he felt he should slow it down. He eventually exploded with, “SHE’S TOO EMOTIONAL, SHE’S TOO OPINIONATED, SHE’S A STRONG-WILLED WOMAN AND SHE NEEDS TO LEARN HER PLACE! I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS BACK-LOG OF STUFF SHE ALWAYS WANTS TO TALK ABOUT!” His wife later apologetically explained that, “Well you see … the same things he doesn’t like about you are the same things he doesn’t like about me.” Eventually he cut off her right to have anything to do with me.

At first, this wife was apologetic and seemed torn. But after a few weeks her attitude became hostile towards me. 

“It’s black and white!” she yelled down the phone. “You SLANDERED your husband!”

My husband talked to both the husband and wife together and stated, “My wife did not slander me. I do not want you to say that about her again. If a wife cannot talk openly about such things without it being labeled “slander”, then that is too dangerous and too vulnerable a situation for a wife to be in.”

The wife sputtered back, “Well if I said things like that about MY husband, it would be slander!” 

They were referring to a earlier time when we'd all had dinner together and my husband and I sat on the couch together and shared our testimony of the healing God was doing in our marriage. We talked openly about our struggle to overcome workaholism and intimacy-avoidance and the roadblocks to intimacy we had uncovered in both of our lives – since we both came from troubled backgrounds. My husband still feels sheepish when we talk about the “bad old days” and I think the husband picked up on that sheepishness in my husband and felt his masculine pride was being humiliated. Actually, both of us were in agreement and had made a choice that we wanted to be transparent.

I felt such an attack of condemnation over all this. I was totally ostracized, alienated and shunned. It pressed all my rejection buttons from history. I sensed the hatred of the devil in isolating me as a young woman in my childbearing years while on the mission field, cutting me off from my only support network. I saw the devil was doing the same thing to my friends, and that their husbands were unwittingly going along with this demonic strategy due to their own insecurities. My husband did all he could to support me and mitigate the effects of all this. I felt the shame of the Bad Girl label – not fit to be accepted in ‘decent Christian society’. We stopped being invited to missionary get-togethers. I saw that these women traded a sense of counterfeit righteousness and godliness in exchange for their dignity and freedom. The wives still permitted in this exclusive “in” group looked oh so good and right. And I looked and felt so bad and wrong. I felt the sting of injustice. But I couldn’t do anything about their choice to shun me.

Once I confronted the wife directly. I said, "I am not slandering my husband. I am not a bad influence. I refute your and your husband's judgements against me. I silence the voice of the accuser of the brothers and sisters in Jesus' name." She fired back, "Well I silence YOUR voice!"

But then my preoccupation with my own hurt over this was eclipsed by the rising alarm and concern we felt as we saw what was happening to our former friends.

We watched in alarm as my friend was transformed from a vivacious, loquacious, extroverted young woman with strong convictions – into a haggard, timid, harassed, exhausted wife who acted like a scared rabbit when we approached her and would only answer in high-pitched monosyllables. We were witnessing the destruction of a human soul. At one point she told me, "You don't know what it's like to struggle so much with control!" Because her husband was telling her she was "too controlling".

At one point, she went alone to our pastor's wife for help – without her husband’s knowledge or permission.

“I can’t say anything at all! He believes a woman should never say anything even slightly negative about her husband, not even gently, not even jokingly…” 

The pastor's wife (a pastor in her own right) tried to speak to the husband. He got quite upset and forbid his wife from doing anything like that behind his back again. She worked harder at submitting, and we saw more of her true self die off. Once, she tried to stand up to her husband and he threw her out of the house and locked her out. She was 8 months pregnant with their third child in 4 years at the time – she was raised in strong southern doctrine. In her words: a woman’s fertility is God showing that He wants us to have lots of babies. I knew what kind of doctrine she was influenced by. On her nightstand were "The Way Home" by Mary Pride; "Me? Obey Him?" by Elizabeth Handford; books by Elisabeth Elliot; "Fascinating Womanhood" by Helen Andelin and "To Train Up a Child" by the Pearls .... a book that ends with an exhortation to raise our daughters to be "hidden women", and Born in Zion by Carol Balizet, which instructed: "And if she won't submit to her husband, then refuse to be her midwife, because her birth won't go well".

They moved to a more remote mission outpost. She became more and more isolated. She probably thought all this was God’s dealings, to help her fully surrender and truly die to self.

The third wife in this group packed her bags, got on a plane, and returned to her home country. She is now divorced. She has custody of their children. We are sad. We miss her. She was a dear friend. But after seeing what is happening to the other wives, we can’t help but be relieved that she got out.

The other wife is just very ... silent. Once I talked to her as we passed each other on the street. “Do you know how hard this is for me? That’s my own husband doing these things …. We nearly split up over this …” She is naturally a shy, gentle person and she is very anxious about not rocking the boat, especially after seeing her sister-in-law up and leave – and after seeing me get ostracized.

I shared everything with our pastor's wife (that took a lot of courage for me, because I was afraid of more reproach). I even challenged my pastor's wife to please make an Esther-like bid to her husband, our senior pastor, on behalf of these young wives. My pastor's wife explained that her husband is against the oldest sister-in-law, the one who got divorced, because her ex-husband sends many emails to the pastor presenting things from his own point of view.

But our pastor's wife knows everything. She even read a copy of “Battered into Submission” that I gave her. Her husband is easily influenced and will go along with whatever story he is given without checking out the facts or the other side of the story. His wife is very discerning. This is a good example of how God puts two different people with different skills and gifts together to benefit each other. But my pastor's wife cannot offer her wisdom or discernment to her husband and he cannot benefit from it, because of the doctrine about women being easily deceived and the man being the ‘priest’ who should try hard not to let himself be influenced by his wife. So because of an on-going low-grade abusive dynamic between the senior pastor and his co-pastor wife, she cannot represent these women to her husband or speak up for them. She does not have that kind of access. She does not have that much power, or influence. And the three husbands know it.

Our pastor's wife (I always just call her "Pastor") described how she tried to intervene and provide counsel for the couple, and while the husband ranted, the young wife just sat there with tears pouring down her face.

I looked at my pastor's wife directly and said, “I am not against these people. I care about them very much and I am sad that they are hurting. But I want to stand in my generation and state for the record that I am AGAINST this doctrine, with its cut-and-paste theology and “Emperor’s New Clothes-style manipulation. I believe it is deception and that it leads people who mean well into bondage. They think they are on a road that is sign-posted “Holiness” but the road only leads to a religious counterfeit of it. It makes people strive harder at being righteous instead of leading them to the cross. It covers up abuse and sin. It actually instructs husbands and wives in how to be co-dependent and dysfunctional. It emphasizes rules and rigid roles instead of relationships and intimacy – with God, and with each other – which is the purpose for which we were created. The chain-of-command, male-headship, unilateral submission doctrine is not from God and its fruits are rotten. If God allowed all this to happen just so that I would finally come to my senses and accept the extreme submission doctrine, then I have to say, His advertising stinks! Why on earth would I want to sign up for what I see happening to my friends? But maybe God has allowed this to happen so that seeing this happen to my friends would prompt me to raise the alarm and, at the risk of being branded a heretic, speak out against this false doctrine and speak up for mutual submission and team marriage – and the authentic submission and surrender of both marriage partners being led by the Spirit.”

No one wanted to intervene. No one wanted to get involved. We spoke with another young couple who worked closely with them, who approached their own marriage on the basis of teamwork and equality. We said we were concerned that the wife was being ill-treated. The husband, a gentle soul, said, "Look, I have almost come to blows with him over the way he treats his wife. But he's my boss. I can't get involved!"

And we couldn't intervene directly. We couldn't get involved. Because we had been "excommunicated" on the basis of our opposition to the male headship doctrine, and my supposed "bad influence".  So all we could do was watch from a distance. And pray.

Once, just once, I saw my friend in the street. This feisty woman, who used to lecture and scold me in high dudgeon, was a shadow of her former self. I snuck up to her, sat beside her - straight away she frantically looked to the left and right as if concerned her husband - or someone - might see her. Or me. Quickly I said, "This whole thing is BOGUS and we love you and we care about you -" I hugged her quickly and then left. As I walked away, I wondered, will I ever see her again?

It’s a long and sad story. I could give you several other stories of how this doctrine regarding the roles of women have caused unbelievable misery for missionary wives and brought shipwreck to missionary couples. In the isolation of the mission field, this doctrine can be even more dangerous and destructive. One of the missionary wives recently came up to me and said, “You’re amazing  – you’ve still got so much LIFE left in you!” – like that was a rare and unusual thing. This was an Asian woman with an advanced university degree in economics, married to an American raised in fundamentalist doctrine. He assumed control over their finances and lost their accumulated wealth in dodgy business deals. She was allowed no say whatsoever in any of his business transactions or travel schedule. If she tried to offer any input, he would bark down the phone, “Do you submit? Do you submit?” She lived in abject poverty, trying to homeschool her 6 children, while he travelled extensively. We felt so sorry for her we would try to visit her. While walking with them the eldest son spat out a rebuke to one of his young sisters. He turned to us and loudly stated, “My Dad says the world is over-populated with girls and women!” The contempt in his voice startled us so much we were speechless. This boy was barely 13 years old.

Two things that helped my husband and I in our journey out of legalism have been Living Waters through the Vineyard Church, and Christians for Biblical Equality. The Living Waters material on gender wholeness and gender reconciliation was so healing. CBE have helped us feel less alone, like we are not the only ones.

For years I had a recurring dream with an escape theme. Escaping through the barbed wire, scrambling up the rocky scree, throat burning, crashing through the under-scrub, dodging and fleeing, panic and desperation ….

We feel like we just made it out of the ‘prison camp’ but are still dressed in our dirty, bloodied prison garb, still startling at every loud noise, still with a hunted expression in our eyes. Having made it out ourselves, we feel concerned for our friends still imprisoned. Like Harriet Tubman, we want to go back and get them out. Tubman once said, “I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if they had only known they were slaves.” Maybe our friends who have totally cut us off will never listen to us and maybe we will never reach them, but after seeing what is happening to them, we are committed to speaking out as a voice of truth and liberty, justice and freedom, to whoever Jesus brings to our door. These words have been echoing in my heart: “I will not keep silent, NO, I will not keep silent anymore …”

Then I read J. Lee Grady’s book, “10 Lies the Church Tells Women.” Grady wrote: “Woman of God: You have come into the Kingdom for such a time as this (just what the Lord spoke to my heart when He prompted me to speak to my pastor – and what I then challenged her with). You must intervene. You must intercede (Written by hand in my Bible in the margin of Isaiah 59:16 – “to intercede is to intervene”) You must speak out. You must obey the call of the Holy Spirit. Do not listen to the religious voices …”

But this is not the end of the story ....

The missionary wife in this story? The one who was told she couldn't have me at her homebirth? The one who wasn't allowed to associate with me because of my alleged "feministic spirit"? Guess what. After discovering her husband (the one who said she was too "controlling" and too like me!) was having affairs and using porn, she divorced him. She returned to her home country, became a midwife, wrote a public letter to James Dobson excoriating him for endorsing Donald Trump - and declared herself A FEMINIST!!! And now, she is doing amazing. I am incredibly proud of her. Yes, she is still a midwife. Yes, she is still a devout Christian and genuine lover of Jesus. Yes, she is still conservative. But no ... she will not have a bar of fundamentalism, patriarchy or the hijacking of Christianity towards Christian Nationalism. Kind of like - ME!

Her story, and mine, are echoed in the recent documentary, "Shiny Happy People - Duggar Family Secrets". She was brought up in in Gothard's IBLP (Institute of Basic Life Principles) and ATI (Advanced Training Institute) style home-schooling and wrote about it here

She, and I, along with countless others, have been warning about the errors of Christian patriarchy, male authority hierarchy and the abuses it has led to, long before Trump, the pandemic, Qanon, Christian Nationalism, J6. This documentary encapsulates our stories and brings to a wider audience that holy roar of dissent that we have been part of for decades.

 

 

 

 

Don't just watch the documentary.

Listen to the voices of survivors.

Not just mine.

Not just my friends who were similarly harmed.

It's a groundswell, and we've been talking, speaking up, warning and trying to persuade the evangelical church to get back on track with Jesus, for literally decades now.

Recovering Grace - a Bill Gothard generation shines light on the teachings of IBLP & ATI

 

Missionary Tales - I witnessed how they really treated their wives