May is now in the past and I am feeling like I can breathe again. This happens most years because I find Mother’s Day very difficult. Even though I have my own children and we have figured out a way to make the day our own, I still struggle for weeks before and after.
I can’t remember the last time I wanted to talk to or visit my mom. I’m not sure that I ever have. Even when my ex walked out and my world collapsed, I didn’t call her. It was days before we spoke. As a matter of fact, I have no recollection of a welcoming loving feeling ever coming from our relationship. If anything, I have always felt unsafe with her. Always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
When I set out to raise my children, my driving thought was to not do it like my mother. I wanted a relationship with my kids. I wanted them to know that, even with all my flaws, I would support them. I wanted them to grow to love life and be confident in their skin. I managed to do that quite well on some levels despite myself.
When they were young, I prioritized creative play and physical affection. They had many hugs a day and snuggled next to me or sat in my lap hour after hour reading stories. I often asked if we really needed to read Good Night Moon ten times over before bedtime and the answer was always a resounding yes.
We had discussions as soon as they could talk, and we talked about anything they wanted – even sex. I simply started answering their questions and we discussed until they reached a point where they were no longer comfortable and stopped.
I remember my son, age eight, sitting on the other side of the kitchen island as I kneaded bread. I was listening to a preacher as I usually did, and he was listening along. The preacher made a claim about the meaning behind a scripture passage, and he said, “Mom, is that true?” And I didn’t say yes. Instead, I asked him to look it up and then asked what he thought. We discussed differences in Biblical interpretation and, when he tired of it, he walked away.
At times like this, I wanted my kids to know that they could ask anything without being ashamed or insulted or manipulated into a certain belief. And even now in his twenties my son will stand on the other side of a different kitchen island or pop into my bedroom at the end of the day to start a conversation – only now it may be me asking the questions.
My middle child started showing her love of art when she was only two or three years old. When I wasn’t paying attention, she would get out the washable markers or toddler crayons and create a masterpiece on the hallway wall. Never once did she feel shame. Instead, she would come to me and grab me by the hand and drag me to the spot to present her work with a flourish and a “ta-da!” I would assure her that it was amazing and that I was glad she liked to draw but, since the wall wasn’t the best place, we would have to clean it off. Then we would do just that – together.
Eventually, I realized that the huge white canvas was the draw, and I went out and bought a table sized roll of white paper. It served her well for several years.
When my youngest – the first to leave my nest – moved out last August, she immediately wanted to know how frequently I would come to visit her, and would we be able to talk on the phone? The two of us have always been chatty and she was my right-hand girl. We share similar anxieties. There is an empty void in my home with her and her sister gone, but I thrill that when we get together it is so much like the best of times when they lived under my roof.
My epic failings aside, we laugh together frequently with me as the brunt of their jokes. I provide them plenty of material due to my propensity for social faux pas and misspeaks. We have so many little inside jokes and interests that the four of us can carry on funny and meaningful conversations exclusively over social media. And, when we do get together, we pick up like we have never been apart with loud talking over each other and reminiscing. And even without me, they have a sound and caring relationship with each other.
Personal photo
Since I have been a single parent, I have tried to get away from the typical Mother’s Day traditions that are so triggering for me and that has helped greatly with my Mother’s Day discomfort. There is no brunch or mother & daughter tea at church. There is no obligation to sit through a cringey Mother’s Day sermon and follow it up with lunch. Instead, we take the day or one in proximity and go to an amusement park or zoo and just enjoy being together. For several years it involved riding rollercoasters until I was stumbling tired walking out the park gates. Every year, it makes me full in the best mothering way. To know that I have them and they have me and that, when that fails, they will have each other, is the best Mother’s Day gift.
Former Evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
Early in my journey of leaving the church, I was still a stay-at-home-mom. In those days I read an average of a book a week and preferred bound books and had several shelves full. After starting work full-time and commuting, I shifted to audio books and podcasts. Some of these were read with the full intent and desperate hope that they would resurrect something of my former faith. But that was long gone. Instead, I found intellectual peace unlike I had previously known along with a reassurance that I was on the right path and that I was not as alone as I felt.
The following is a list of books, podcasts, blogs, and social media outlets of a wide variety from fiction, self-help, and memoir to treatises on ethics, church and American history, human psychology, and politics. Nearly all of it will be information and understanding that evangelical and fundamentalist churches carefully exclude from their preaching and teaching in Christian and home school curriculums, colleges, and seminaries.
Books
The Sin of Certainty – Peter Enns Jesus and John Wayne – Kristen Munoz American Apocalypse – Matthew Henry Sutton Unsettling Truths – Charles and Rah Misquoting Jesus – Bart Ehrman Harvest of Hope – Juan Gonzalez Caste – Isabel Wilkerson Crazy for God – Frank Schaffer Losing My Religion – William Lobdell Why I Believed – Kenneth W. Daniels Trusting Doubt – Valerie Tarico Women Beyond Belief – Edited by Karen L. Garst Why I am Agnostic – Robert Ingersoll Man’s Search for Meaning – Vicktor Frankel Humankind – Rutger Bregman Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart – Bayer and Figdor How to Be Perfect – Michael Schur
The Body Keeps Score – Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD Healing from Hidden Abuse – Shannon Thomas, LCSW
Leaving the Fold – Marlene Winell, PhD Braving the Wilderness and I Thought It Was Just Me – Brene Brown Nine Parts of Desire – Geraldine Brooks Half the Sky – Kristof and WuDunn Good and Mad – Rebecca Traister Feminism is for Everybody – Bell Hooks I know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou Traveling Mercies and Bird by Bird – Anne Lamott Flight of the Sparrow – Amy Belding Brown
I have many vivid memories of my early years. Images of my dad’s banjo and how tan his arms looked against his white tee shirt when he played. The Datsun and laying down in the back seat as we went down the road with the 8-track playing the Bee Gees. I remember the garden out back of the tiny two-bedroom house we lived in and cleaning the sweet peas off the vine very early in the mornings before my parents caught me. I remember my little red, white, and blue bike with the training wheels and packing my little suitcase to run away when I was told that the training wheels would be removed. I remember the multicolored carpet made from carpet store samples laid down like tiles on our living room floor. And jumping from the diving board onto my swim instructor’s head at the Y downtown and, jumping on the bed in my cousin’s bedroom and screaming the lyrics
Hot blooded Chicken sea I got a fever of a dee dee dee.
Somethin’, somethin’ Hot blooded
I remember nights in my bedroom. I don’t remember what it looked like during the day, but how it looked and felt in the anxieties of falling asleep I clearly remember, along with the prayer and the chorus of the hymn my mom made me repeat right before she closed the door each night.
Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Trust and obey ‘Cause there’s no other way To be happy in Jesus But to trust and obey.
I remember the cat, Babe, named for my dead parakeet, Babe, who was named for my Grandfather. I remember when Babe the cat ate Babe the parakeet’s widow, Jenny. I remember going to the downtown Woolworths with my aunt to buy Jenny for my birthday present the year before Babe the cat ate her, and I remember that we got Babe at the airstrip at the Farm Show grounds. He had been a stray brought there as a kitten.
The Farm Show holds a huge place in my childhood memories. My Papa was on the board and was always involved in the planning and organization, so we never missed it. We often got to be on the grounds before the show opened and the day everyone was removing their exhibits and trailering their animals. The Farm Show was a staple of my summers, much like our family trips to the Jersey shore.
The Farm Show grounds were next to a small airstrip that was not too far from our little house and even closer to my paternal grandparents’ home. During Farm Show week they put up a booth and sold tickets for show goers to take a flight and get a bird’s eye view of the county. And one summer, before my mother moved us away from there, she worked at the booth at the airstrip, and I got to take a ride.
I don’t remember how I got onto the plane or who the pilot was, but I can’t imagine that I will ever forget the experience.
I got to fly.
How did it all work: the knobs and buttons and yoke? And when we lifted off the ground, I became fascinated and wondered at the magic of it. I wanted to fly the plane, which is no surprise since from a very young age I was known to my family as a back seat driver .
Rather quickly we were over my father’s parents’ home and circled their neighborhood and then the pilot flew back toward the Farm Show and turned to fly over my favorite road in the county.
Benbrook Road is a crazy combination of hills and bends and driving it feels about like riding a roller coaster. It was a childhood thrill to ride down Benbrook Road and it also made me sick every single time. I had a love/hate relationship with Benbrook Road.
Then we flew over old Mr. Henricks’ farm. I knew him from his friendship with my Papa. They bailed hay together, and I often saw Mr. Henricks on his tractor driving down my Papa’s driveway. I had been inside the cinder block butcher shop on Mr. Henrick’s place and seen just what happened to cattle when they left the farm in a trailer.
Then, we headed to Papa’s.
Aerial photo of Papa’s farm that hangs in the author’s home.
Papa’s farm was my favorite place. It was settled at the base of a hill with a spring fed pond and stream running along the front. The long sloping gravel driveway, edged with hay and corn fields, dipped down over the trickling stream to the large yard that surrounded the farmhouse. That long slope ended at a hedge of old-fashioned roses the scent of which was even more stunning than the height and length of the thing. If you turned and went a bit farther, you would come to the barn.
Like many Pennsylvania barns, Papa’s had two stories and was backed into a hill. The dusky lower level with its low ceiling held any and every ancient farm thing all coated in a layer of dust and cobwebs. A single pack of Papa’s cigarettes sat on a floor joist there. The upper level held larger items and old tractor implements, and near to the ceiling high stacks of hay where the farm cats liked to hide their kittens. That barn served as an escape: a castle, a small town, a wild outpost, a magnificent mansion, or whatever else I needed it to be. Even as a teen, when my imagination became filled with angst, the haystacks became a quiet place I could flee to whenever we visited.
In that barn, childhood wonders were stored. And the Cub lawn tractor – I spent many an imaginary summer mile driving – was displaced each fall when papa would press their apples and a barrel would go in the lawn tractor’s spot. The sweet and tang and spice of that cider, that foamed from the barrel tap straight into a jelly jar, has left me just slightly dissatisfied with all others.
That barn and the farm it sat on were a whole world to my small child mind. When I wasn’t there, I wanted to be.
From the sky that day the view was so different. The farm looked like a plastic toy set. As we circled above the tiny miniatures, I noticed my Papa in the garden and there was G’ma at the clothesline. They were even smaller – like little ants. And they must have known that we’d be coming because they waved. And as quickly as we arrived, we flew away again. And I watched it all disappear in the distance.
Former Evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
Last fall a reader asked me, “Why do you write? I mean, what is your purpose?”
And I had a couple of answers ready for them.
Because I have always wanted to.
Because, I have a story to tell and maybe one day it can be published, if I can just discipline myself to write regularly.
Both are genuine reasons and both are true. But they don’t touch on the answer. And anyone who writes, whether as a profession or just daily bits in their journal, knows what I am getting at here.
It is hard to describe the urge I have had since I was so very young. Like, the thrill I felt at age 12 when someone gave me a pack of stationary for my birthday and I imagined my pen running across it. Or, the joy I get over a new journal or notebook. Or, the way I collect random thoughts on Post-it® notes. Or, the comforting smell of the pages of a book. Or, the tears that flow when I read some Facebook poet’s latest ramblings. Or, even the way that I can listen to almost any genre of music because it is the lyrics that feed me.
For many years I wrote in journals and to an audience of one. It was just me and at times, I imagined, my god. It was just my heart and soul pouring out to nothingness.
At some points in my life others have said, “Hey, you could really reach people with your stories.” And I have wondered their purpose in saying that. What would their agenda be if they had my stories?
Quote from Toni Morrison during her Pulitzer Prize acceptance speech
As Toni Morrison so wisely said and I have so thoroughly felt, language may be the measure of my life. And I am of an age that I realize that I have more to lose than I have to gain if I do not put the words down in a way that is meaningful to me.
If I were asked that same question now, if the same reader asked, “Steph, why do you write?”, this is what I would say.
I have lived and lost and poured out and been broken and healed and laughed deeply and loved richly and dared greatly and hoped pointlessly, and learned incredibly. And, for whatever reason, words are what come to me. At any and every point words were and are there. And, even when I am sitting with a journal and an audience of one, I care how those words are crafted and what those words convey and how they roll on the tongue when read aloud. It all matters to me and is, to me, the measure of life.
Former Evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
Humans are admittedly a bit complicated. The same person can be hateful with some and the most loving individual with others. Some people have what could be called toxic traits: harmful behaviors that drive their personality and sometimes worsen over their lifetimes causing irreparable rifts with those around them. Others can be problematic to those around them for a short period of time and then through therapy or medication or some transformative experience they become someone much easier to relate to. On top of these relational complications, all of us are born into systems and cultures that build the world as we know it.
Evangelicalism was my world, and since leaving the church and the us versus them, good versus evil dichotomy built by it, I am learning to view the people in my life more clearly. One of those people was my Papa.
Because my mom estranged my sister and me from our dad, I barely knew my paternal Grandfather, but I had a special relationship with my maternal Papa. Papa, before I was old enough to know, was part of the traumatic events that took place when my mom outed my dad in the early 80s. That bothers me, but what I know of Papa is that he was a man of his time, his Presbyterian faith system, and he was known to fiercely defend his daughters and that gives me some perspective on his actions – if not approval.
While I am bothered by those thoughts, in my childhood my Papa was the closest thing I had to a hero and because of my Papa’s influence, I have spent an inordinate amount of time studying. Actually, studying is my only real hobby. And because of Papa, I have spent considerable time studying some very odd things for the average woman – like the history of tractors and cattle breeds. And that drive to study and learn is probably the thing that gave me a special relationship with Papa. We were very similar in that way.
He was a learner and teacher at heart and by profession. Papa taught life sciences – specifically horticulture and agriculture – in our county vo-tech school, and when he died the work he had done for his doctoral degree in those fields was still in a file cabinet in his farm office. He did the research, but never defended the dissertation. And he certainly didn’t need the title to earn the respect of those around him. When he died at the end of December, during my junior year of high school, his former students and coworkers lined up in the ice and snow to pay their respects.
When my chemistry teacher, Mr. Kolakowski, saw me looking sullen after the winter break that year, he pulled me aside. I told him then that my Papa had died, and he put two and two together. He waved me into the little closet area that had doors that linked the chemistry lab to the chemistry classroom.
“Was John Graham your Papa?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Tears flowed for both of us.
“You’re Pappy’s granddaughter!” he practically shouted at me with a grin on his face.
“Yes, I guess.”
“Pappy was my friend for years! Wait. Let me get something.”
Mr. Kolakowski then headed to his desk in the classroom side. I heard the old desk drawer slide open and then close again and he came back to the closet with an old black and white yearbook photo of Papa. He had recently found it in a storage room.
“Here you go, Pappy!” He handed me the photo and gave me a little hug.
Mr. Kolakowski called me “Pappy” every time he saw me from that day until I left the school. My Papa left a sweet memory in the minds of many – not just me.
Mingled with my adult confusion about the man, I have a bunch of loving thoughts of Papa. Papa, G’ma, and their farm were my refuge in childhood. I’m pretty sure that I spent more time with them than my siblings or my cousins did. Their love, care, and support were pillars to my life.
And there is one story that, to me, encompasses the whole of my relationship with Papa.
Annually, from the time I was five or six until my mother married my stepfather when I was thirteen, Papa and G’ma took us on vacation with them – usually to the Jersey shore. Each year we would pile into their Ford LTD with their tow-behind camper and travel across the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Usually an aunt came along – very often my fun Aunt Joy. We would stop and load up on the gorgeous produce available at the garden stands as we passed through New Jersey and then camp at a campground fairly close to the beach. During our week we would swim, visit one of the famous New Jersey boardwalks, go crabbing and steam fresh crabs, and eat loads of that fresh garden produce. I was a light sleeper and Papa a farmer, so we often got up early together and sometimes those early mornings included our own little adventures.
One year, Papa noticed a wild berry patch at the campground where we stayed. When I appeared from the camper one morning, he was sitting in a lawn chair under the awning drinking a cup of Folger’s Crystals. He had a small, plastic ice-cream pail with him. He greeted me with his low cheerful voice and told me to get ready to head out. We were going berry picking so that the others could have fresh berries for breakfast.
We had been at the patch a while and our pail was nearly full when I noticed the most beautiful caterpillar. He was smooth and green and majestic and very fat, and I don’t think I had ever before seen such an amazing creature. Papa immediately noticed my fascination and told me the scientific name and that the caterpillar would one day become a moth.
Then he said it, “He loves to eat tomatoes.”
Hornworm image by Pam Carter from Pixabay
My child mind flew into a tizzy then. We had a bunch of good tomatoes back at the camper. We could feed him his favorite food and then he could become a beautiful moth. I was going to keep him! And though any farmer worth his salt would never have kept a hornworm caterpillar and fed it, Papa did it for me.
He pulled out his little pocket-knife and cut off the branch the caterpillar was resting on and we carried it back to the camper with our pail full of berries.
When we got there, G’ma was up and setting out breakfast things. It didn’t take the master gardener long to recognize the pest on the branch that I was proudly carrying. She eyed Papa and I heard her familiar, “Jaaahn?” And Papa told her sweetly that I loved the beautiful caterpillar, and we were going to feed him so that he could become a beautiful moth.
When my mom appeared and saw the thing, she was indignant and wanted to get rid of it. Again, Papa told her that I was keeping it and I was going to feed it so that it could become a beautiful moth.
And so, I found the best container from our sand toys and set up a nice little home for the caterpillar and gave him a nice little tomato to munch on. And I diligently cared for him the rest of the week.
When we packed up to head home, the others thought that I would have to say goodbye to my little hornworm, but not Papa. He helped me to get it set up to safely survive the trip back across the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the big, beautiful farm garden that would be its next home.
And so we traveled all that day and reached Papa and G’ma’s farm sometime after dark. It was a beautiful night, and the lawn and garden could be clearly seen from just the light of the moon and stars.
As others unpacked, Papa took me and my beautiful caterpillar to the garden to his perfectly straight row of tomato plants. He allowed me to pick out the best plant with the biggest tomato and I said a sweet goodbye to my caterpillar there. Then, with a skip in my step, I headed to the lawn where Aunt Joy was sprawled out looking at the stars. We spent some time there discussing what I knew of constellations and then went inside with the others.
And I think we all know what Papa did with my little hornworm – may he rest in peace.
Former Evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
In retrospect, it really isn’t surprising that I fell for Gwen Shamblin’s Weigh Down Workshop diet. In my family of origin, thinness was next to godliness. The only thing my mother wanted to see more than a thin kid walking in the door of the church on Sunday morning was a kid who outperformed the pastor’s kids behavior wise. And she managed that easily by intimidation and controlling nearly every type of food, and the amount, that went into my mouth. Her instincts to control the food intake of her daughter were still going strong the last time I visited her home, when for breakfast she offered me and my three teenaged children exactly 4 thinly sliced pieces of banana bread and her usual weak tea with artificial sweetener. She then waxed eloquent as if she had laid out a banquet fit for a king. Anyone else witnessing it would have chalked it up to her aging mind, perhaps even called it a delusion, but that was just how she fed me. Always.
I remember hunger in my childhood about as much as I remember anything else. It seemed my stomach always growled. Extended family often teased me about being so skinny that I probably had worms. Given the chance at a family or church potluck, I would eat myself sick from the pure joy of tasty food. Watching skinny little me pile my plate high must have been entertaining for the onlookers because they always commented on my appetite. Our diet at home was somewhat limited by our income, but our food intake really wasn’t so much about the inability to get food – the cabinets were never totally bare – as it was about mom’s control of that food.
I think mom must have counted the cookies in the jar when she baked them, because if I ate even one beyond what she permitted each day, she would fly into a fit of rage. That rage and it’s sister, condescension, also showed up whenever she had to interact with someone who enjoyed tasty or indulgent foods. Like, the pastor’s “little brat” who was upset that mom had served her plain, air popped popcorn at a children’s event. Or the friends and family members who weighed more than she thought appropriate. It was very clear from her behavior that she considered the condition of being “fat” or even the potential of becoming “fat” to be moral failings. Though she hid it well in public, the conversation at home was always cruel and disrespectful toward those who couldn’t or wouldn’t maintain what she considered appropriate thinness.
Once in my teen years – and I only made the mistake once – I invited friends over for a movie night. The day before that event my mom announced that she would only serve plain, air popped popcorn and Kool-Aid (always made with half the sugar). I was sixteen and I was humiliated at the thought of my friends showing up and eating such boring, tasteless food, but I was determined to have a fun night and asked my friends to bring something to share. And they really came through! One brought their mom’s homemade caramel popcorn, another brought a couple two-liter bottles of soda, and my closest friend brought a couple of bags of chips. It was probably the only time up to that point in my life that all of those food items came into my home at the same time. It was shocking to see the dining room table covered with rich treats. Mom managed to keep her thoughts to herself until everyone left, but I heard for days afterward about the overindulgence.
For the entirety of my at-home life, mom portioned out dinner servings meticulously. At dinner, I might be served exactly one drumstick, one serving spoon of mashed potatoes, one serving spoon of steamed veg, and one slice of bread with a very thin smear of margarine. And I learned never to ask for more. So, when I went away to college and I could eat until full and eat indulgent things and have seconds at every meal, it did not take long for me to gain two times the typical freshman fifteen. And mom noticed.
Then, like a good Christian girl, I got married young and started having babies quickly. And I began to see myself as “fat”. That natural weight gain, meant to nourish a growing baby and provide it with milk after birth, became abhorrent to me and to my mom. And though she never called me “fat” she often expressed “concern” about my weight.
And then I found Gwen Shamblin’s starve yourself for Jesus book just before Shamblin entered her cult stage. I read it several times in a few months and applied her methods consistently. I think I lost over twenty pounds the first month alone. Then, I heard that she had denied the existence of the Trinity (a core Christian doctrine) and I threw the book in the trash.
But, though I had cast off Shamblin’s book and her heresy, I got marvelous results from her eating method: never eat without first feeling stomach growling hunger and stop eating as soon as you no longer have that feeling. And I was basking in my mother’s rare approval. As a matter of fact, my mom was so impressed with my weight loss and maintaining of thinness that she went out and bought Shamblin’s book even after she knew Shamblin was a heretic, and every visit to her home from that time on included at least one conversation comparing her waist to mine and her pants size to what it was when she was in high school.
I was still adhering to Weigh Down while I was pregnant with my second daughter. And at about six months along I ended up in the ER for monitoring because I felt like I was in labor. But I did not have contractions or Braxton Hicks. And though my blood pressure was a little low, they weren’t sure why. So, they did a blood test and hooked me up to an IV. Maybe an hour later, they returned with an IV bag and a large Styrofoam cup full of a milkshake drink that tasted like the inside of a banana peel.
The diagnosis? I was vitamin and mineral deficient. I was malnourished.
“Are you eating?” they asked.
“I eat every time I’m hungry,” I told them.
And it wasn’t a lie. But my stomach was always so empty-ish that my prenatal vitamins made me nauseous and so I only took one or two a week. They admonished me to take my vitamins daily and to eat just a bit more. And I did, but still not enough for a pregnant woman of my build and activity level.
After my daughter was born, I nursed her as I had my other two babies. Previously, I had always nursed my babies to that sweet, baby drunkenness at every feeding and usually had enough breast milk left to pump and freeze. I was a Holstein among women. Had I lived in medieval times, I would have been the neighborhood wet nurse.
But it was quite different with my second daughter. She never seemed satisfied and well before she was a year old, I was having to supplement her with formula and watery cereal after nursing. My milk was drying up without any attempt on my part and when my husband asked me to stop nursing her so that we could go to a ministry conference together, I did what he asked without so much as a little discomfort.
Then, when my daughter was about one year old, I had another episode that landed me in the ER. This time, I felt like I was having a heart attack. They monitored me again – nothing. They drew blood again and a brief time later returned with that familiar IV bag and Styrofoam cup of banana peel milkshake.
“Are you under stress?” they asked in concerned tones.
I was but I didn’t say that. I was a spiritual woman and a pastor’s wife at the biggest church in town. I could not say that something was fishy about my marriage. Especially with the pastor sitting there holding my hand attentively, because that ER was a place he frequented.
“Are you eating?” they wondered.
“Yes, every time I’m hungry,” I told them.
Again, that answer was not a lie. After I had finished the milkshake and the IV bag had emptied into my veins, I went home and changed nothing about my life. Weigh Down still had a hold on me.
Of course, I know now that the holy starvation, that The Weigh Down Workshop taught me, was an eating disorder. And I did not get out of its grip until three years later when I joined the *godly women make everything from scratch* movement and started baking all the time. Since then, I have not had one trip to a doctor or hospital because I was malnourished. I have also never again been a wispy waif of a woman. And my mom, right up until my last visit with her, always beat me in the waist size competition that she insisted on having.
And the last time I was at her home, she still had her copy of The Weigh DownWorkshop on her book shelf.
If you’re not familiar with Gwen Shamblin you can learn plenty through the HBO Max docuseries titled The Way Down. And just last weekend Lifetime released a movie based on her ministry. If you should ever happen across her book at your local Goodwill or yard sale, please do the world a favor and buy it, then pitch it in the nearest trash can.
Former Evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
My partner knows of my love for studying history and culture and looking into my family lineage, so for Christmas he bought me a 23andMe membership. I was already fairly certain of the geographical roots of my ancestors and had only one small surprise. What I wasn’t prepared for were some of the physical and behavioral characteristics the geneticists could predict through my genetic code: my misophonia for one.
Misophonia is a condition in which the hearing of normal sounds, often not even noticed by others, causes an emotional reaction in an individual. As a child and teen this was something particularly difficult for me: especially while having to listen to others chew. And, as children often do, I thought that everyone experienced what I experienced. So in an effort to be sure that no one else felt as miserable as I did when eating a meal, I tried to discipline myself to chew so silently that not even I could hear it. Of course this was impossible, but it didn’t stop my attempts. My misophonia worsened as a teen then tapered off in intensity as I aged. But, if I am in a room full of people eating together, my ear still picks out the food-slopper almost immediately.
More shocking to me was the genetic code that predicted my weight. They told me what a woman of my ancestory, height, and age would weigh on average. Then they told me that my genetic code indictates that I would naturally carry 8% more weight than that average.
I thought, “Nah!” They couldn’t predict that. So, I found the calculator on my smart phone and did the math.
Every year my weight fluctuates almost the same amount. In the summer, when I feel like I can live on melon, zucchini, and tomato sandwhiches, I generally weigh the average for my ancestory, height, and age. In the winter when hearty foods are staples, and melon and tomatoes are relatively tasteless, I generally fall into the eight percent above average range. Then I checked my Google Fit and the difference is exactly eight percent this year between July and January.
Eight percent above average weight is hard wired into my genetic code. My mother’s voice, the Weight Watchers of my youth, and Noom (decidedly better than WW) of my present have tried to tell me that it is my food choices or willpower or activity level or even my unhealthy emotional relationship with food.
But is isn’t!
It’s genetics.
And also seasons.
Summer heat and activity and produce produce a leaner me. Winter inactivity and seasonal starches produce a heartier me. And both of them are perfectly fine versions of me.
This could have been very helpful knowledge for me twenty-four years ago when I found Gwen Shamblin’s Weigh Down Workshop. It became one of the most physically and emotionally unhealthy times in my life as Ms. Shamblin taught what was essentially starvation for the sake of spirituality and managed to build a cult around it.
I got out before getting all the way to the cult part but not before I hurt myself and the baby I was carrying in the year 2000.
Former Evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
Recently there has been reporting that famed purity culture guru, Elisabeth Elliot, was less than honest in her writings about her relationship with her first husband, the missionary martyr, Jim Elliot. The information is not entirely new but is disturbing, nonetheless.
In another life, Elisabeth Elliot was one of my heroes. I suppose many women in my generation who were raised in fundamentalist or evangelical churches might say something similar. Then, many of us within the homeschool movement raised our own children on her writings and ideals.
I listened to her radio program daily through college and in my early marriage. As a matter of fact, everywhere I went I scanned the dial for Christian stations and often locked in on the one that ran her program. Even after she retired, I found a station that played old episodes of Gateway to Joy, rather than listening to Nancy Leigh Demoss after she slid into Elisabeth’s seat.
Elisabeth was very firm in her views of just how much skin a woman should show when in public and she became the public voice for Christian modesty and female sexuality for generations. I remember well one of her broadcasts when she was describing a lunch meeting that she had at a beach, and how she was unable to concentrate or enjoy her meal because of all the scantily clad people proudly “schlepping” by her table. She talked with open disgust and self-righteous assumptions, as if she knew the minds and intentions of those who had passed by.
Reading the new reporting stirred my memory and so yesterday, I pulled out an old journal and looked up some entries that I wrote while on vacation in Aruba in 2021. My writing had centered on how Elisabeth Elliot had influenced me.
Spending a week at a resort in the Caribbean after more than a year of pandemic turmoil was fantastic! But there was something consuming my mind while there. I noticed a big change in my thinking since leaving the church.
During my lifetime, I was surrounded by people who thought like Elisabeth. And my body was a near constant topic of derision in my family. As a child I was mocked for my skinniness. As a young teen I was mocked for my physical development. Then as a young adult, I was mocked because I was a curvier build than my mother. My bra size was a far too frequent topic of conversation. Growing up, my body was a source of confusion and shame to me.
And so, I was comfortable in college I first heard Elisabeth and her admonishments to cover up that body and, then later, easily adopted the views of the Christian homeschool movement on modesty and female sexuality. In my thirties, I refused to even wear swimwear for a handful of years and then, when I did choose to venture into the world of beaches and swimming pools again, I wore suits with substantial skirts and high necklines that were rather heavy in the water and took forever to dry. But I was fine with the annoyance and discomfort because I had become one of them through and through – obsessed more with how much skin was showing than with how I treated my neighbor.
But by 2021, after more than three years outside that system, my mind and whole body had relaxed, and I was able to enjoy the beach and water as I once had as a young child.
There is an ideal about resort life presented on TV, film, and in commercials in America, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect once I got to the real thing. But I didn’t see (at least enough to notice) that perfectly shaped woman with an even more perfect tan in her bikini and her perfectly tanned partner in his Tommy Bahamas. With Aruba’s significant European influence, the reality was quite different from our American Sandals Resorts image.
View from the bar on the beach, personal photo
Just outside the resort there was a great little open bar that served food at meals, and it became our spot. Almost every morning we took a leisurely walk to that bar and ordered a substantial breakfast and then watched the turquoise waters and the pelicans and Caribbean pigeons and the people walking by. I wondered at their variety: young, old, middle aged, Dutch, German, French, Carib, Canadian, American, and as I watched, I found myself able to view them without judgement.
As the equatorial sun toasted their skin, they walked, not schlepped: some with canes or strollers, others with toddlers on their hips or lovers on their arms. Resort guests with old joints slowing their movements or long limber limbs seemingly gliding along were headed to the beach, or breakfast, or just taking a morning stroll. Some were gorgeous specimens, and perhaps they knew it, but most of us were mediocre to downright unattractive and completely content with our lot.
On our last full day there we took a morning snorkeling cruise – something I recommend everyone try at least once. On board were a few Arubans and perhaps an equal number of Americans. Many were Dutch, German, and a couple from Brazil. It seemed all the Dutch women wore bikinis. It didn’t matter whether they were young or old, stout or trim, rolling or sculpted, shaved legs or hairy, and their partners sat beside them as if unfazed by it all.
Some sat demurely by themselves and others sprawling with a drink in their hand. A group of middle-aged women, bearing all the signs of their age and motherhood, perched on the netting at the bow discussing pandemic politics with their American counterparts.
We ate and drank and bumped fists and my partner made acquaintance with many. I donned the ugly snorkeling gear and eagerly jumped into the sea and spent a couple of hours swimming and bumping into others in the water with nothing but joy and peace and the excitement of a child who was watching the urchins creep along the bottom or imagining the lives of the people from the shipwreck beneath me.
Personal photo
As we gathered on the deck for the trip back to the dock, I realized that just four years prior to that event, I would not have been able to enjoy it. I would have been self-conscious, self-loathing, and, therefore, others-loathing. I would have been so concerned about what others were thinking and seeing that I wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on the real value – the people and the experience itself.
On the last morning, as we sat at breakfast, I watched a barrel-chested older gentleman in a speedo and his equally aged wife take a stroll on the beach. They appeared to be new arrivals and were vigorously discussing what they were seeing as they gestured toward the beautiful water. And I realized that my mind had totally shifted. I was able to view these two people as human beings enjoying what days they have on this planet. And I thought, why should the young not enjoy their youth and the pleasure of the warm sun and sparkling waters and ocean breezes? Why should the older ones not enjoy the same thing without the judgement of others? They have surely earned it.
What right did I ever have to think otherwise?
Former Evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
(Part 6. New readers can click here to start at the beginning of the story.)
Caleb gave me permission to share this story back in 2020. Obviously, I thought about it for quite some time. I wanted to handle it honestly and faithfully. There is so much more that I could share and perhaps will, but these six entries are what I thought were most important to express my experience of going from a fundamentalist, evangelical perspective to that of an affirming parent. My breaking away from that evangelical perspective before I faced Caleb’s coming out helped me to work through the experience – I know that for sure. I had a good foundation to build my clearer thinking on.
But I envy parents that never have that challenge. I envy parents who grow up progressively and affirming or completely secular. I envy those who might have attended a church or temple or synagogue that maintained a more simple, traditional faith system. But even then, the life of the parent of an LGBTQ+ kid isn’t simple because our kids’ lives aren’t simple.
Suicidal ideation and attempted suicide are higher among LGBTQ+ youth than the general population. Eating disorders and self-harm are higher among LGBTQ+ youth than the general population. The experience of depression and anxiety and body dysphoria are high among LGBTQ+ youth. Bigotry and anti-LGBTQ+ propaganda and the creation of oppressive laws is rampant across a broad spectrum of society. And, though inroads have been made in understanding and acceptance, our kids can still be in danger simply for existing. Even if our home environment is good for them, life in the world can be very difficult.
And then there are those kids who have no support. There are kids whose own parents kick them out or drive them off by their cruel behavior. Homelessness among LGBTQ+ youth is higher than among the general population and they are in great danger of trafficking, addiction, and disease.
As I have grown in my understanding, I have taken opportunities to change the way I respond to social issues, political movements, and in my work. I have been able to give to organizations that serve and protect LGBTQ+ youths and their parents. I have been able to train to help those I work with who are in the LGBTQ+ community. And I have learned how to identify myself quietly and subtly as a safe person because I live in a region where conservatism and the Christian Right dominate the culture.
Below, I have included some resource links. They are just a starting point for those who are willing to learn. Some are just safe havens for those who need a space to grow and be. I do not receive anything for promoting them.
If the story I have written in these entries might help someone you know, then please feel free to share.
You can follow me here on WordPress or on Facebook as I continue to write about my life and perspectives. If you want to get in touch, you can email me at snicklefritzchronicles@gmail.com.
Former Evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
(Part 5. New readers can click here to start at the beginning of the story.)
Caleb was gesturing and speaking with an urgency that made me immediately regret making him wait to tell me.
As I reached out to hug and reassure him, I wished that there was someone there to hug and reassure me. I knew there was no turning back from this and I no longer had the safety of pretending it was not so.
At some point in his frantic talking, I did something that experienced parents and therapists tell you not to do. I said, “I know, Caleb. I have always known.”
“You did?” He stared at me.
Of course, only Caleb could have known. What I had was maternal instinct, not knowing.
That night, as Caleb talked, I learned just what my parenting choices, my dedication to Dr. Nicolosi’s directives, evangelical dogma, and even my determination to keep my unhealthy marriage intact had done to my son.
A couple of years earlier, not long after my ex had left, Caleb sunk into a deep depression. It was something that I watched hopelessly because he was 18 going on 19 and man-sized and I had no control over his choices and behaviors. Our family was in turmoil. He was beginning to learn things about his father that I had protected him from for years, and he was watching it all eat away at me. The whole godly, Christian world he had been surrounded by up to this point was breaking apart.
As he told it, he was broken hearted over far more than the divorce. He was old enough to have memories of the past and some significant trauma from our many family upheavals. I had hoped that I had softened those things, maybe even hid them completely, but I was learning that isn’t how a family dynamic works.
And Caleb was hiding his sexuality, knowing it went against everything that he had been taught and everything that he knew I believed. Caleb was still attending church regularly and hearing our pastor’s frequent condemnations of the gay community. He knew that these people that he had known and loved and been taught to respect would never be willing to genuinely know and love and respect him. And Caleb had always been so dedicated to his friends in the faith, that he was the last member of our family to leave when the church finally pushed us from their midst.
I carried on as I watched him spiral. I tried to keep the lines of communication open, but I didn’t know what else I could do.
Then one day I got a panicked phone call from him. Caleb told me through tears that he had been having suicidal ideation and on his way to work had been contemplating driving off a long bridge that spanned a river now swollen with spring rain. That morning he had almost done it. He was afraid to get back in his car and drive home. I drove to his workplace, reassured him of my love, and told him our family would make it through the current difficulties. I had arranged for him to meet with our pastor to talk and so I followed his vehicle back to town as we talked on the phone and I parked in the church lot as he went inside to speak with the pastor.
It had not occurred to me that that kind of counseling would be bad for him. It was the only thing I knew to do at that time.
In conversation with a friend, I briefly mentioned the events of the week and they encouraged me to have Caleb chat with their husband who was trained and experienced in working with troubled youth.
Within a week, Caleb called me from work again. Again, I went to him, reassured him of my love, and followed him back to town as we talked over the phone. I intended to take him to speak with the pastor again, but he refused. Then, I called my friend and we drove to their house instead.
And so, Caleb began to get some sound advice and, even more, some genuine love and acceptance. It was just the support he needed. As he spent more time at their home over the months, he began to do much better, and when they moved later that year, he planned and took trips to visit them in their new town.
The night that Caleb came out to me, I learned that his suicidal ideation over those months was driven by his desire to protect me from more hurt. He thought that it would be easier for me to have a dead son than a gay son.
I wept.
I would love to tell you that his coming out and my growing understanding of the harm I had caused him made me change overnight, but it didn’t happen that quickly.
Though by this point my mind had already shifted, I was still driven by anxiety. I jumped almost immediately into protective mama bear mode. I wanted to keep the church from hurting him more than it had. I wanted to keep my family from hurting him and I wanted to keep his father’s family from hurting him. I wanted to protect him from the whole community I had chosen to raise him in. I wanted my son to stay at least semi closeted, and I laid in bed many nights worrying about what might happen to him if he didn’t.
I knew well the myths the church would continue to teach that would make many within their ranks imagine my loving son to be a predator – maybe even a pedophile – and it made me sick. I quickly came to understand just how horrid that kind of baseless propaganda is and how dangerous the “studies” done, in the kind of biased manner ministries and church organizations use, really are.
It took months and several very serious conversations for Caleb to talk me down from this protective stance. And then an online friend helped me to find a support group for moms of LGBTQ+ kids and I began to feel that sense of community and hope that I really needed.
The author with Caleb
Since studying and writing have consistently been the way I learn and work through my problems, I began a new learning journey. I started reading history and culture books, watching documentaries, and listening to podcasts. I found more online friends and support. And it all helped me out of that bubble of fear. I also began to find healthier ways to deal with my anxiety than those provided by a lifetime of fundamentalist and evangelical teaching.
The changes didn’t come quickly but eventually my fears leveled out to what might be normally expected for any mother when she thinks about her children.
And I watched my son begin to become so many of those things I had always hoped he would be – not because of the church and the faith system we left, but despite it.
Former Evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
(Part 4. New readers can click here to start at the beginning of the story.)
During Caleb’s high school years, I kept busy with homeschooling, Caleb’s vocal training, and my kids’ local theater involvement on top of my church volunteer work. But my mind was still churning because a bumper crop of national church and homeschool scandals grew up – some with seeds nearly as old as me that had been lying dormant for decades. And then the year Caleb graduated, the church began to rally around Donald Trump with the same sorry excuses I had seen them use throughout my life.
During that time, I began to do two things. First, I questioned my undying loyalty to the Republican Party. I began to investigate other options that I might be able to support wholeheartedly. Second, I started to research just how the church had come to be the way it was. I began to ask myself why I had undying loyalty to the church.
This kind of behavior on my part really bothered my husband. I will never forget his reaction one day when he brought the mail in and came to realize that I had paid twenty-five dollars for a subscription (in my name only) to a non-GOP political publication. His behavior was so unnerving that I chose not to mention that I had also cancelled several of my subscriptions to conservative homeschool publications after learning of abuses within their organizations.
I started tuning out my constant diet of conservative and Christian talk radio and teachings on CD and tuned in public broadcasts and some BBC. I also found some blogs online that were sharing the same concerns that I had about the church. I started realizing the problem with the church wasn’t just in my mind. It was universal and far worse than I had imagined.
The more I distanced myself from my near constant diet of bias confirming information, the more willing I became to tell the truth and to say aloud “No” and “I’m not comfortable with that” and “This is wrong”.
Those are all things that *good* Christian women don’t say – especially not to their husbands and church leaders.
These changes in me provided my husband with the perfect excuse to finally leave me. He went to our preacher before he left and told him that I was a strong woman, and said that he just couldn’t live with a strong woman. He knew this was the perfect cover and he was right. Initially, our preacher believed him completely. My husband told our children – because they knew better and were too old to fool – that we were splitting because we just couldn’t communicate any more. He told his other women that our split was mutual, and the divorce agreement was ready to sign. He told men within his circle of friends that I was a bitter and jealous woman out to ruin him. Some people he never told. The kids and I had to break the news that he was gone.
I spent two years cleaning up the social and legal mess and working even harder to understand the way I had gotten into that position. Counseling and a whole lot of reading and journaling put me on track to understand behavioral disorders like narcissism and characteristics of abusive relationships and my propensity to be sucked into them. And I began to see the striking similarities between my family relationships, my marriage, and the unhealthy behaviors of the church.
While I was having my eyes opened, my kids were too. They watched their father leave them much as he had left me. He didn’t make any attempt to seek shared custody or visitation or even mediation and only showed up to one hearing in family court. They watched as he treated the children of his other women better than he had treated them during their childhoods. This made them begin to ask questions and to understand injustice in a way they hadn’t previously.
When the church announced that they were disciplining my husband and removing him from membership, the pastor chose to speak neutrally to “protect” the family. This shocked my kids. They could not believe that it was being left to the imaginations of the congregation and that what their father had chosen to do was not spoken aloud. They were furious when we got home from the service that week. I was not happy, but I wasn’t surprised either and I explained how the church had chosen to “protect” us in the past.
Between their father’s gross hypocrisy and the increasingly gross behavior of the church, both toward our family and in society in general, my kids’ eyes were being opened.
Then, the events that I detailed in Why I Finally Left the Church occurred and became the impetus for our individual departures.
While I continued to study and communicate with others who had similar life experiences, each of my children adjusted and rebuilt in their own ways.
Caleb performing with some of his favorite people. Photo credit: Blakely Swanson of Images by Swanson Photography
This is when Caleb began to spread his wings and involve himself in new social circles and live honestly. His new friend network supported him wholeheartedly. This made him brave, and he eventually came out to his friend group and then to his sisters who supported him and kept his secret even though we all lived in the same home.
I noticed the changes in him. I noticed a joy for life that he hadn’t had since he was a small boy. But though I was becoming more settled in my thoughts, it still wasn’t easy. I still struggled against the decades of familial and church indoctrination. So, when he came to my room one night and told me that he had something important to tell me, I asked him if we could wait to have the conversation. My anxiety was high at the time, and I knew I wasn’t in a good place to deal with his news. I had to figure out how I would navigate it. I had to figure out how to deal with my fears.
He was the bigger person that night.
He was disappointed but he waited.
Perhaps a month later he came to me again and this time said that what he had to say couldn’t wait. And what I had known to be true since he was a toddler was finally said aloud.
Former Evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
This seems an appropriate time to share the tale of this church cover-up because eighteen years ago my world was turned upside down. And, as it is prone to do, the church prioritized its own reputation and protected and coddled the man responsible.
In 2001 my husband (now ex) was in ministry when he confessed to an “emotional affair” with his secretary. Despite this, he was ordained as his mistress and I watched. The men standing around him all believed that they had the gift of discernment and that god had spoken to them and guided them to bestow upon my husband the title Reverend. Somehow though, god never told them about the mistress looking on or the fact that the affair was far more than emotional.
The summer following his ordination we were commissioned to serve with our denomination and their relief and development arm in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. I could write a book about our two-year stint in Mongolia but for this story I will skip to the end.
After a long spell of suspicious behavior, my husband had a come to Jesus moment in September 2004. In reality, he was forced into a come to Jesus moment when he contracted an STD, and I figured it out. After over a week of denial, he took advantage of a visiting evangelist from the States who was calling people to repentance. That night I awoke to him sitting on our bed staring out the large window of our top floor apartment at the lights of the 50s era Soviet neighborhood that we called home. He sat there and confessed to the years long affair in the States, a more recent affair in Mongolia, and visits to the neighborhood *massage* parlors. Suddenly all the young girls who had shown up at our door, looking for the tall American, made sense. He also confessed to having stolen money from the Mongolian church and our cash emergency funds to pay off the mistress though he claimed it was because he was so “full of compassion” for her.
I was stunned. I was broken at the reality of what I was hearing. His ordination was invalid, our commissioning was invalid, the money spent to send and train us and to care for our family had been spent on deception. Though the fault was not mine, I felt a crushing guilt and shame. And then fear. What diseases had he shared with me? On that day I began operating in a cloud of anxiety and with a goal of holding my family together that overshadowed every choice I made for more than a decade after.
And he began a process that is rather common in evangelical and fundamentalist circles.
I’m talking an every day kind of common.
My husband confessed over the phone to our team leader. Then a denominational VP and the head of our development arm were on an Asian tour, so they stopped, and he gave a confession to them in the privacy of our home. I sat beside him like one of those wives of fallen preachers on TV: quiet, submissive, and always willing to forgive as tears trickle down her cheeks. You’ve seen it.
Then they required a private confession to our adult team members and so we packed our bags and traveled north where he confessed, again with me by his side, and everyone in the room extended forgiveness. Then we packed up our most basic belongings and returned to the States to a rural Wisconsin church that had pledged to support our team.
The church in Mongolia was not made aware of all the details. Neither was the church that had sent us.
I was shocked again when we arrived in Wisconsin because the members of that church had no idea why. They were told only that our family was facing “difficulty” and that we needed “healing”. The members of the congregation (having been deceived) donated an apartment where we lived for free for three months as we settled in, furniture, household items, groceries, cash donations, and odd jobs to help us as if we were returning heroes. Someone even offered to pay for our children to go to the private church school. Literally tens of thousands of dollars were offered. I protested repeatedly to the pastor but was assured that this was the way it was done to “protect” me and my kids. But I didn’t feel protected. Again, the clouds settled in thick and heavy. In this protection I had to keep secrets.
After we had been in Wisconsin for about a month, the final confession and discipline meeting was called. This would be the official confession. Records would be kept. Important men would be present. Consequences would be handed down.
But I decided that I could not handle hearing another confession. I would go to the church, but I would not sit in on that meeting.
On that day, we arrived at the church and I settled myself into a comfortable chair with a book to ride it out – until the discipline committee appeared. The senior pastor’s wife and the wife of the man who would serve as my husband’s accountability partner came directly to me to assure me that I had their support during the meeting, but I told them that I didn’t need it as I wouldn’t be attending. They did not like hearing that.
Didn’t I know that this meeting was for me? Didn’t I know how much I would be helped by seeing leadership hold my husband accountable? This was part of my “healing”. Didn’t I know that they needed to know everything so that they would know how to support me?
I still didn’t want to attend. My mind screamed at me to tell them no.
But what if I didn’t and that made us look bad? What if the denominational leadership didn’t like it? What if they thought I wasn’t being supportive?
I gave in to the manipulation and fear.
I took a seat next to my husband, put on my forgiving wife face, and listened yet again. Only, things he hadn’t yet shared were now admitted: things that crushed what was already broken in me. I wanted to stand up and run from the room but it was as if I was frozen in time. My body wouldn’t cooperate with my mind. And I wasn’t being addressed. I wasn’t being asked how I was, what I was feeling. My purpose was to act as a support for the very person who was repeatedly hurting me. I was doing what was required of a godly woman.
After the confession was considered satisfactory, the members of the group were allowed to share their disappointment and express their forgiveness. Then the terms of the “punishment” were laid out. My husband would be provided professional counseling at no cost and the therapist would report results to the leadership. Added to this would be a form of spiritual counseling that is the love child of defunct pop-psychology and exorcism. This would be performed by the senior pastor of the church. My husband would be required to meet regularly with his accountability partner, regularly attend church, and not involve himself in any questionable behavior. In other words, look and act like an exceptional Christian man. If he met the standards and lived two years in this manner, then his ordination would be restored, debts would be forgiven, and we would be returned to ministry. When they asked for our agreement, I nodded numbly.
And then the real reason for my presence became clear. The denominational VP who was present announced that we were never to speak of the details, never to speak of the reason for our family difficulties, and never share with anyone what had been shared in that room. And when the discipline was finished, the records of everything done would be erased and forgotten. The entire group was sworn to silence. In the middle of trauma responses that I didn’t understand, I was sworn to silence.
Even though I had lived through a previous cover-up and should have known better by this point, I remained in the church. Just as I accepted my place in the congregation (silent, submissive, and leaning on male leadership), I accepted my place in my home. I doubled down on any behaviors expected of godly, Biblical women. Where I had once been someone who would teach, I became someone who kept quiet and felt guilt at even answering a question in Sunday School. Where I had once been a pants wearer and liked my heels, I became hyper conscientious about modesty: wearing loose dresses and skirts and doing nothing that would draw the attention of a man. I took my husband’s lead and homeschooled our children: becoming an exclusive keeper at home and making everything possible from scratch because that is what godly women do. I submitted to dangerous philosophies for women and children that have taken years for my kids to recover from.
I did all of this with the assurance that if I had problems in my marriage, it must be my own fault. I must not have submitted enough or been modest enough or provided enough sexual attention. If I were to be like Christ and become nothing, then it would turn things around. That is what I was told. That is what I read – everywhere. Christian bookstore shelves are full of such nonsense.
My husband made it through the two years successfully. And again, he was treated as if a hero. He received congratulations from men in high positions and an offer for our family to go back, not just to ministry but, to Mongolia.
But something was broken in one of our children that I would only much later come to understand, and I knew far too many bitter missionary kids. I didn’t want that for my child. And trust had not been rebuilt with me. I wanted to see if my husband could be trusted when no one in authority was watching. So, I refused to return to ministry until I could be sure things were truly well in our home.
They never were.
Former evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
I imagine that there are as many ways for churches to cover up their corruption as there are churches. Though shame and intimidation are primary, pastors and church boards and denominational leadership can be quite creative with their methods.
I have a handful of church cover-up experiences that I could share. But there are two that I think best illustrate the patterns that most churches follow. This is one of them.
When I was a sophomore in high school, my church was looking for a new youth pastor. The main candidate was a major leader in our district youth movement, but he had made a bad name for himself among the female members of our youth group. During the previous summer, he had been leading our district during our national youth conference and had entered our girls’ dorm bathroom on multiple occasions as girls showered and got ready for bed. It made us very uneasy to see him after that and when our church began courting him for the youth ministry position, we made our concerns known to the leadership.
But during the interview process he made clear that his bad behavior was not intentional. He said that it was related only to that event and our bad behavior (we were going to bed late) and we could be sure it would never happen again. The church leadership really wanted him and the clout he brought to the position, so he apologized to us and then the church leadership told us that we were not to bring up the issue within the congregation. They called him to be our youth pastor and he moved with his wife and children to the small parsonage at the edge of the church property.
Within a year he was showing clear signs that dropping into the girls’ bathroom during events was a habit and he began to get very nasty with his wife and some of the female members of the youth group. During that year he also began to plan events that were targeted almost exclusively to the female members of the group. Small groups of us would plan to go to these events and, since the groups were so small, he would invite us to meet at his home and drive us in his personal vehicle rather than in the church van with a group of sponsors. On the last occasion that I remember, I showed up on his porch and knocked on the door. He answered the door wearing only a robe and obviously having just exited the shower. His mullet was still dripping. Another girl was already there in his living room and his wife and children weren’t home. As I entered, he went down the hall and called to me to follow him. As I got to the door of his bedroom, he invited me in and began to pull clothing from his closet as he asked me what he should wear. I paused. I don’t remember what I said, if anything, because all I wanted to do was get out of there. I excused myself and went back out to the living room and sat with the other girl. At 16 years old, I knew it wasn’t ok, but I didn’t have words to put to what had happened.
I couldn’t shake the creepiness of the event and his increasing nastiness in general. He would yell at his wife – insult her appearance and criticize her parenting skills – in front of the whole youth group. He would target certain girls and make fun of them.
I wasn’t the only girl in the group getting the creeps and a few of us discussed amongst ourselves how to handle the situation especially because we had been told very clearly that we could never talk about the subject of his entering bathrooms. I was already a student of the Bible at that point, so I looked and found Matthew 18 where it says that if your brother sins against you, then you should confront him. If he denies it, then you should take witnesses. If he denies it a second time, then you should take him before the church. I naively thought that applied to all believers within the church, but I still had a lot to learn about the difference between how men and women are valued in the faith.
We decided that I would speak to him first since the bathroom incidents were off limits and the bathrobe incident had happened to me. I asked to speak with him after youth group one night. We stepped into the stairwell for privacy, and I felt that creepy feeling all over. I kept my distance and I told him how uncomfortable the incident and his nasty comments were making me. I asked him to stop. Like I said, I was naive.
His response was less than accommodating. He questioned me, turned the tables on me, and told me that I was being unforgiving and bringing up the past. I hadn’t. I had been very careful not to, but of course his behavior had nothing to do with the past and everything to do with DARVO.
Deny Attack Reverse Victim and Offender
It would be nearly 30 years and several more cover-ups before I learned that acronym.
Since my youth pastor didn’t respond well to me, the group of girls agreed that we would all go together and try. We would obey the Bible. It is amazing how bad that idea always turns out for women.
As you may have guessed at this point, he didn’t respond any better to all of us as a group. We decided to keep quiet about it and go to our parents and ask them what to do. We all used that Matthew 18 passage. We wouldn’t gossip. We would be *Biblical*. This was the way problems were to be dealt with in the church. We were being as good as we knew how to be.
Some of the parents didn’t want trouble and their daughters left the group. But three of us (if I remember correctly) remained and the senior pastor agreed to hold a meeting between those of us who remained, our parents, and the youth pastor. We were told a day and time to attend – Sunday evening after the service on the following week.
Suddenly, I started getting ugly looks from people at school. Two guys asked me straight out why I was trying to “take down” the youth pastor. I couldn’t believe they even knew something was going on. Who told them? That Sunday, those of us in the group were treated like outcasts. There were whispers everywhere.
That Sunday evening, I remember praying. I was still naive. I honestly believed the spirit of god would reveal truth like he was supposed to, and we would all sing Kumbaya while holding hands.
Along with our parents, the girls gathered outside the room where we were supposed to meet the pastors . Then we opened the doors to walk in as a group. But there weren’t just two pastors there. Instead, there was a semi-circle of chairs set up. On the far left were seated the elders of the church, then the senior pastor, the youth pastor and his wife (holding hands), a couple of youth sponsors, and then on the far right a crowd of parents. It wasn’t a meeting as we had been told. It was a crucifixion. The church had already decided to take us down.
They let us speak for a short time. Each time one of the girls talked we were challenged, or our character was attacked by one of those present. When I brought up the bathrobe incident, it was denied. When we said that we were offended by how he treated his wife, she denied it had ever happened. When we mentioned the bathroom incidents had continued, we were called liars and told that we were being unforgiving and bringing up the past. It seemed there were arguments and remarks prepared for everything we had to say.
It ended with rebukes. Not for the man of god who had more than crossed the line in his behavior, but for us. We were told that our behavior would not be tolerated. We were scolded for being gossips, though we had not. We were told in no uncertain terms that we were never to bring up the incidents again. There was prayer and an offering of reconciliation if we could behave ourselves.
I didn’t go to youth group later that week and when the next Sunday rolled around it became clear that we were now pariahs. Some people even physically turned their backs on us. Eventually, all the families involved left the congregation and the youth pastor continued his ministry until approximately one year later when he was caught with his pants down. He was put on a hush-hush discipline. His family stayed on in the parsonage and he was later restored to ministry in another location though that did not last. He and his wife eventually divorced.
For almost eight years no one said a thing and there was a distance between me and most all the old youth group members. One of the girls left the church permanently then, but I would not take that step for more than two decades.
I later foolishly returned to that congregation and most of the people acted as if nothing had ever happened. Just one man, an old friend of my Papa, came to me and apologized. He gently touched my shoulder one Sunday after the service and said, “We should have listened to you, Stephanie. I’m sorry that we didn’t.” Then he walked away. That was all that was ever said.
I have personally seen this pattern repeated many times in my years in the church. And I have heard even more stories from other women, and the occasional man, who have faced much the same thing. It is as common as churches themselves.
This should have been my first and my last church cover-up experience, but I proved to be a glutton for punishment.
Former evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
(Part 3. New readers can click here to start at the beginning of the story.)
Cognitive dissonance is “the mental conflict that occurs when beliefs or assumptions are contradicted by new information.”
britania.com/science/cognitive-dissonance
I mention cognitive dissonance frequently when I write because it is what best describes my mind, and therefore my actions, for most of my life. Much like the dissonance found in music, dissonance in the mind is unsettling – it can subtly stir in the background keeping things just a tad off for an extended time, but there must eventually be resolution. As music critic Anthony Tommasini describes in this New York Times video, musical dissonance is used to set “the senses on edge.” In my personal experience, cognitive dissonance tickled at the back of my mind and even moved into glaring intellectual and emotional pain that demanded resolution.
For decades, I lived with that tickling. In my faith, questions and inconsistencies always churned but I chose to believe that those questions were “lies of Satan.” In my family of origin, the lack of health and genuine love stood out strongly even as I desperately tried to believe otherwise. In my marriage, I fended off that tickle in the back of my mind every time evidence of new infidelity arose. And with my son…? With my son, the force of that dissonance kept me awake at night reminding me that my son was born as he was and, contrary to church doctrine, accepting him was the right thing to do. My mind was on edge. For more than a decade, I was on edge.
From his youngest days I thought of my son as the kindest person I knew. He was always a kid full of smiles and cooperation and could not figure out why people just couldn’t get along. When I became too harsh with him as a parent and asked him to forgive me, his response was always, “Mommy, I already did.” He was nice to everyone and never got into altercations, though occasionally another boy would think that his kindness was weakness. Those boys learned a hard lesson when they realized that he was incredibly strong.
This super nice, super tender, super sweet nature mingled with his other differences and interests made him a near constant target of derision from men and boys in our conservative Christian circles. He often mentioned mean or rude things said to him, or the over-the-top men’s social events and behaviors that are the unspoken requirements to prove your masculinity within the church. In his younger years he didn’t understand the meanness and why he had to be defined in a certain way to be accepted, and he didn’t know how to voice it. Then, with encouragement from me, he stuffed it down. But in stuffing those feelings and pretending it was healthy, he hurt deeply. And, once he became a teen, that hurt mingled with his growing certainty that he was not normal and definitely not acceptable to most everyone around him. Our pastor, who had perfectly accurate gay-dar, picked him out of the boys in the youth group and said that he was concerned. He invited me to meet with him and I sat and added his concern to my already heavy mind. That concern showed up in their interactions as my son never seemed to meet the standards that other young men did.
From approximately age four to age eighteen I nudged my son into patterns of conservative Christian social compliance. I watched as his family, church, and friends pushed him to the outside. Sometimes this was done with conscious knowledge but most often not. It is just what conservative Christian people do. It is what their cultural system, built on their theology and doctrine, creates. And I was both observer and participant: parenting in ways that common sense and my maternal instincts told me not to because I valued that cultural system, the acceptance of my extended family, and my own self more than my child. You have perhaps heard the phrase “there is no hate like Christian love.” I have learned the harsh truth of those words. But first, I was those words.
But that isn’t something my mind settled on easily. As I mentioned, I lived constantly with dissonance. Afterall, I watched my son almost every day of his life. I sang to him at night. I heard his prayers. I listened to him discuss everything from his latest history lesson to the clouds he loved to watch to the arias he practiced. I watched him take responsibility for his actions and beliefs from childhood – even sitting in front of the TV or radio to listen to political debates so that he could make informed decisions before he was even of age. And I, more than anyone, had repeatedly received his kindhearted forgiveness. I had been with him since birth. No, I had been with him since before birth. Nothing evil had overcome him. He hadn’t been caught up in some sin or deviance as a small child. These things I knew in the depths of me.
But the belief, I had once been force fed and then consumed willingly, drove me to override those maternal instincts. I continued to push Dr. Nicolosi’s treatment directives. And, as I pushed those behavioral changes, my pastor, church, community, and family continuously pushed what can only be called bigotry. And my son sank deeper into depression and anxiety.
I despaired often – mostly because of this dissonance. And at this point I was still clinging to my faith beliefs despite the church showing me its true nature so often. I regularly spoke to my son as if a future as a straight man was his. As if saying it would cast a spell over him. Some Christians would call it prophecy or speaking a blessing. It should be called manipulation, and it was ineffective.
Pexels
One Sunday after church, we sat around the table eating our simple Sunday lunch and discussing something mentioned in the sermon. It was something to do with the LGBTQ+ community. This was normal since our pastor so frequently added something political to his sermons. That day my son said, “You never know mom. I could be gay.” He admits now that he was testing the waters. He was fifteen.
A wave of anxiety flooded me at that moment though I did not know at the time what it was. “Why would you say such a thing?” I asked with some indignation. We had a bookshelf next to our little dining table and I usually set my purse on top. I stood, grabbed my purse, and turned in what felt like one motion. The urge to run swept over me. Fear overwhelmed me. I walked out the door, got in the car, and drove off.
My thoughts raced as I drove far too fast down our dirt road. There were several bridges near our home. I could drive off one. I prayed but my prayer seemed to echo off the ceiling of the car.
I thought of my children.
I thought of my son.
I must have been a bad mother. He wouldn’t be the way he was if I had done a better job. Maybe they would all be better off without me. The fear and anxiety chasing me, I headed for the one bridge that was under construction. The road was blocked – permanently blocked. I pulled up to the barriers and did a three-point turn. I sat on that old country road and wept.
I thought of my son.
I thought of my children.
I imagined them dealing with my death and I couldn’t bear that image. I spent maybe ten minutes gathering my composure before I returned home where my husband was having a conversation with my son upstairs in his room. Later he came downstairs and assured me that “our son is not gay”. It didn’t work to comfort me. A mother knows.
Our family made an unspoken pact that day, perhaps for my sake. For years we continued to pretend that the obvious wasn’t the obvious. And my son carried the weight of that burden alone until it wore away at his soul.
Former evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
(Part 2. New readers can click here to start at the beginning of the story.)
Since I was a serious kid, I held tightly to the church and, as someone riddled with anxieties, held tightly to the assurances the church gave me. It is funny to me now that I recognize just how many of those anxieties were produced by the teachings of the church who then, like a snake oil salesman, offered a cure that only they could provide.
As a teen, I was already studying doctrine and my only social outlet outside of school was the church. So, by the time I graduated high school I had internalized all the myths the church tells about the LGBTQ+ community. Though, at that time the discussion was only about “the gays”. Gay men were said to be mentally unstable, had absent fathers and overbearing mothers, were potential pedophiles always hunting young boys to take advantage of, and they were cursed by God himself with the judgement of HIV. An acquaintance from my Christian college days even wrote his seminary thesis *proving* from scripture that HIV was God’s end-times judgement on gay men (that passes for academics in our country).
According to the church, gays, and by extension all members of the LGBTQ+ community, were the other: a group of people who needed to get saved and become straight but should never be trusted, socialized with, or loved in any genuine sense of the word. God was going to judge us because of them.
But, perhaps because of my dad, I had significant cognitive dissonance. The ideas promoted by the church never sat right with me. Often my empathy won out over the indoctrination, but I could never let such weak, ungodly thoughts linger. The type of faith system I was raised in – the kind with constant talk of judgement and altar calls to “get right” with God – had taught me to police myself. Every time my mind strayed in its judgement, I would head to the kneeling altar to repent. It seems so strange to me now that not judging others and choosing to love my neighbor at one time made me feel guilty.
My years in one of our denominational colleges only solidified my childhood training and surrounded me with external reinforcements. During that time, I became a regular listener to our college radio station and I seldom missed an episode of Focus on the Family and listened to quite a few other broadcasts. As a child of divorce with a gay dad, I figured that I needed all the godly wisdom I could receive to get the Christian family thing right. I didn’t want my children to live a childhood like I had. So, I started taking personal steps to make myself the kind of godly woman who would be a good wife and mother. I left no stone unturned. I even got a minor in Family Ministries.
While in college and until I was in my thirties, I was fully convinced of the Christian Right’s so called pro-family cultural belief system. And I lived it. And just to be sure I was covering all the bases, I chose to be ecumenical in my reading and studied from the writings of the Catholic church, Mennonites, various Baptists, and reformed faiths along with my own denomination’s authors. I prayed over my children in the womb and lovingly sang hymns and worship songs to them when they nursed. They were each “dedicated to the Lord” in infancy as was our church custom. And because my husband and I were involved in professional ministry, we were in church regularly for much of their younger years. When we started homeschooling, the exposure to conservative Christian teaching only increased. I left no stone unturned in my attempts to please God, the church, and my husband. Rearing my children right and living a godly life were my only goals.
So, when my son was around age four and I began to realize that he was not like other boys his age, I became very concerned. I had noticed things before that point, but by age four he was socializing much more, and the differences became more apparent. That happened to coincide with the release of Dr. James Dobson’s bookBringing Up Boys. I was busy with three children under age five, so I borrowed the audio copy from our church library so that I could listen as I worked around the house.
The day that I listened to chapter nine, The Origins of Homosexuality, my whole godly family dream fell to pieces. The child Dr. Dobson described – the one struggling with “pre-homosexuality” – was my son. It was glaringly obvious to the mother who had spent nearly every moment with him since he grew in her womb. And I panicked. I panicked because Dr. Dobson regularly described how our country was bound for hell and needed to repent and the gay community was so often at the top of his list for being a destructive force. The fears and anxieties built, it seemed, at the speed of light. There were more than a few nights that I didn’t sleep.
What kind of person would my son be?
What about my family? What would they do?
What about the church? What would they think?
We were to serve the church overseas. What would this mean?
What had I done wrong?
Family photo of the author holding Caleb
I shared my concerns with my husband who had a rather flippant response. He wasn’t home much, and he didn’t see what I did. He was also having an affair at the time, so his focus wasn’t on our home even when he was there. But Dr. Dobson had written about a doctor somewhere who was certain about the origins of homosexuality and knew the cure. My husband agreed that I could call the Focus on the Family hotline and find out more information. I think he agreed just so that I would calm down, but I was hopeful, nonetheless.
The next day I called and spoke with a phone counselor who shared the doctor’s phone number with me. And this is how I ended up on my first phone appointment with Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, a notorious reparative therapy practitioner and author of the booklet, A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. Reparative therapy is a subset of conversion therapy that is now illegal in many places (as it should be).
Dr. Nicolosi had a calming voice and he seemed kind. I think that is common among those in his profession. As I sat on my bed, heart racing in my chest, I described my son’s daily habits and common behaviors. I also described his interactions with me and my husband. Dr. Nicolosi then told me his theory of how children developed homosexual “tendencies” and how his methods of guiding behavior would remove any such tendencies. He assured me that we were early to catch it and would therefore have no problem fixing it. When I told him that we were moving overseas, he said that he could give us guidance to use in day-to-day life. He asked me to make another appointment during which my husband would also be on the phone, so that he could discuss the necessary steps with both of us. I did and later that week the three of us had a long phone conference.
Dr. Nicolosi’s prescribed advice could be summarized as follows:
Center the father in your son’s life. Mother should be less affectionate and more distant and direct son to his father as often as possible.
Father should accept generous affection from your son and return that affection generously.
Any effeminate behavior or play with girl centered toys should be ignored. The air in the room should be neither condemnation nor praise – just indifference.
Specifically masculine centered play, dress, behavior, and social events should be praised and take priority in your son’s life.
And so, it began. For the next 13 years I was as obedient to Dr. Nicolosi’s prescription as possible. And, as any good Christian parents would, we attended services nearly every time the doors of the church were open, listened to Christian radio, and surrounded our family with every Christian thing possible which meant that our children had a near constant diet of anti-gay teaching. And, as my son grew, I watched him with constant anxiety as he never shook those tendencies and the light faded from his eyes.
Former evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
“We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.” – Christof, The Truman Show
I think the foundational doctrine of Christian parenting is what most evangelical and fundamentalist churches refer to as original sin. Parents are taught that every child is born sinful by virtue of being descended from Adam. They are taught that their child is born prone to evil and that, without strict child training and consistent doctrine from the church, their child will be stuck in their sin and bound for an eternity of torment in a burning hell (some declare that happens only after the mysterious age of accountability). And there is an entire Christian industry that profits from and gains social and political power through this fear-based belief system.
Though there are teachers who are very reasonable in their parenting advice, it would not be difficult for you to find books, magazines, blogs, podcasts, and Christian ministries that promote ideas such as: your baby is manipulating you from birth and taking a switch to their chubby legs is completely acceptable or spanking isn’t just an appropriate action to take against normal developmental struggles and other childish explorations, it is essential. Blanket training – tempting your infant to “sin” by rolling off the blanket you put them on, punishment by limiting feedings, and extreme sleep training are also promoted strongly. One friend of mine describes how their fundamentalist pastor took a small rag doll into the pulpit on Sunday mornings to demonstrate how parents should spank their toddlers. This isn’t just promoted by churches and ministries. It is commanded in the Scriptures. It isn’t just commanded but, in many fundamentalist and evangelical circles, parents are reassured through verses like Proverbs 20:30 and 23:13-14 that even the bruises they leave on their child are an act of love that will purge the child’s soul of evil.
Many conscientious Christians know these admonitions well. And those of us who either participated in the homeschool movement or were raised in it recognize these teachings and could name the promoters. And this isn’t a denominational issue. A reformed Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, Southern Baptist, and Pentecostal may all be following the same parenting instruction, though they would disagree with each other on many other points of doctrine.
If parents want to surround their child exclusively with Christian art, music, books, toys, TV, and a vast array of digital material, then it is completely possible. If a parent wants to keep their child in Christian school from preschool through college, that too is possible. Want to go over the top and make sure that your child never hears anything that you don’t believe to be true? They have home school, home church, restrictive groups, online Christian college, and even “camps” where your young adult children can meet other appropriate young adults to court rather than date. Have a problem child? You can send them to a Christian training center, conversion camp, or disciplinary rehab like the ones Josh Duggar attended. Or, perhaps one like this.
Many young people who have been raised in this manner are bearing the bitter fruit.
The media industry that feeds this cultural system is extensive. In my young adulthood the standard bearer was Dr. James Dobson and his Focus on the Family radio ministry but there were many others who tried to build on that parenting brand. And through this branding the church has created a parallel culture. I was raised during the early development of this system and raised my own children at what might be considered its height.
Parents in this system feel immense pressure to have perfect marriages and compliant children who behave like good little Christian boys and girls. My family was no different, but we had a big problem. My parents divorced in the early 80s (a big no-no) and my dad is gay (an even bigger no-no). My mother was by all appearances a godly woman and made sure that the external image that our little family projected was a godly image with her as the central victim figure.
Family photo of her dad holding the author in the summer of 1974
After my parents’ divorce was finalized, my mom moved my sister and me three hours away from where my dad lived on the pretense that the only work she could find was in a tiny, depressed Appalachian village rather than in the suburban area of the city nearest us. For the next couple of years, she regularly told me that my dad did not care about us or want to see us, and on the rare occasion that a visit was arranged, she complained endlessly about his “friend” and how awful his family was. She even complained about the presents they sent me for birthdays and Christmas – telling me that they were trying to buy my love. Eventually, my sister and I adapted ourselves to her version of things and with her encouragement, told our dad that we didn’t want to see him anymore. I saw my father’s face and heard his voice only once between age 8 and age 26.
At age 26, when I took steps to reconcile with my dad, my mother became very nervous and warned me not to believe the things he told me. It was nearly another two decades before my dad and I had enough honest communication for me to understand why mom was so scared.
My mom had outed my dad in the early eighties in our small, conservative Pennsylvania community. She outed him to his entire family. She outed him to her family. And the natural result of a bunch of *godly* church women praying was him being outed to everyone else. She and my maternal grandpa also wanted to have him institutionalized for treatment and only his loving uncle stood in the gap for him. That is what preceded the divorce and while he was recovering from the exposure and loss of everything, my mom was actively working to estrange us from him. And I am sure she had more than a few Christians supporting her.
And so, even though my dad is gay, my childhood ended up being very evangelical and, as a natural consequence, anti-gay. The church provided me with the doctrine that allowed me to view my dad as less than and my mom provided me a solid base of shame, disrespect, and assumptions.
It wasn’t until I was turning 12 that my dad’s sexuality was revealed to me. My mom made a production of the event. She orchestrated it to occur when my aunt (who suffered from serious mental illness) was visiting us. She sat us down at the dining room table in our apartment and proceeded to tell us all the dirty little secrets that had been stowed away in the deep dark family closet. She asked my aunt to tell us about her illness, out of wedlock baby, and broken engagement. When my aunt was done speaking, my mom told us of our uncle’s many sordid affairs with local women, then, as the icing on the cake, she told us about our dad. Mom neglected to reveal her own dirty secrets, though she certainly had them. She then said that she had done this because we were moving back to the area where my dad and his family lived, and she wanted us prepared to deal with it.
We moved that summer and just over a year later my mom married my stepfather and pushed very hard for him to adopt us. She pressured me repeatedly to become his daughter and erase my past because my dad didn’t care about me. But I instinctively resisted.
And so began my teen years. While many of my peers avoided extremes and feel that they had completely normal childhoods in this evangelical environment, I didn’t. Not only did my family life leave much to be desired, but cultivating spirituality, including everything the church said about family life, became my past-time. And eventually, it became my everything.
Former evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
I reflect lots and on just about everything. It can be heavy at times and revealing at others. I keep journals and notebooks and scraps of paper and Post-its and flash drives at home and work and, at times, in my car.
Occasionally, I stop and look around at my stacks and scraps – like the box I currently have sitting on my living room floor – and realize that it is time for me to sort things out. I weed through it all.
Does this receipt have that can’t forget quote on it?
Did I jot down my thoughts from last week’s headlines in this notebook or that journal?
Where is that folded up scrap that I wrote that journal prompt on during lunch?
I used to view this as some sort of fatal flaw – as proof that I wasn’t a good enough helpmeet in that godly Christian marriage type of way. That mindset stymied me even after I was divorced and not living that life anymore.
Now though, I accept this as part of my process. It’s a behavior that benefits me emotionally and intellectually. I think best through writing. It helps me to see my own train of thought and identify my emotions. It especially helps me to connect the dots from past to present and present to potential future. Writing helps me to link my knowledge of one thing to another so much so that copying my class and study notes from one notebook to another has always been my go-to method of studying.
All of that reflecting through writing has given me a window on my own life. And because my life has had some significant struggles, the process is often painful before it is enlightening. Yet, when I have written it down, I can also let it go to some extent. Experiences never really leave, and traumas linger. But when I write, I own my stories. They don’t own me.
Contrary to how it may seem, I do not live in a continual state of melancholy or morbidity or grievance. In fact, I spend a great deal of my time in silliness and laughter. My partner could show you the pictures. My kids could tell you the stories.
Perhaps it is that ability – that willingness – to take myself lightly and recognize the absurdities of our human experience that has ultimately kept me balanced in the turmoil. One reader recently told me that they are surprised that I never had a breakdown. Me too, Reader. Me too.
That comment got me reflecting. What has been the key to maintaining some semblance of calm and clarity during my life?
Putting pen to paper frequently – sometimes multiple times a day.
Adding generous doses of laughter to my daily existence.
The relentless search for truth and clarity in my reasoning – even when it takes me to places that I would rather not go. Even when it turns my world on its head.
Former evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
Though I was once ardently anti-abortion, my views have shifted. As I dared to step outside of evangelical dogma, I allowed myself to study things I would have never studied while still under the gaze of authoritarian preachers. When a person does that, they quickly learn that their preachers and teachers are not always completely honest. And I learned that abortion is one of those issues that evangelical leaders have not been completely honest about. I also lived long enough within the movement to observe that their drive to shut down all abortion has much less to do with their faith and ethic than it does with their considerable obsession with political power. The history of that has been detailed by researchers.
Through my 40 years in the evangelical movement, I have known those who are genuinely pro-life. They put their money where their mouth is. I have known good, honest, incredibly caring individuals who have adopted and been foster parents. But these people are very rare. Far more frequent in the church are those who might save their pocket change to support anti-abortion ministries or get on their soapbox and post to Facebook, but look down their noses at young single moms and complain (it would seem incessantly at times) about their tax dollars being used for SNAP, TNAF, WIC, Medicaid, “Obamacare”, public housing, and public education. In fact, I don’t know if I have been part of a church where condemnation of government social care wasn’t commonplace and often straight from the pulpit.
With the publicity of the recent SCOTUS ruling, public conversations about abortion and just what it entails have been more frequent and some may be questioning just what they helped put into play by behaving as single-issue voters. I know that I have been full of regret for my part after spending the first two decades of my adult life voting only for the GOP and only for candidates who vowed to do everything in their power to end abortion.
The recent publicity has also brought to the surface memories of women who have had abortions, miscarriage, and traumatic pregnancies of all varieties. The medical term for miscarriage is “spontaneous abortion” and it is believed that between ten and fifteen percent of known pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion. The percentage would be higher if it included those that occur among women who do not realize they are pregnant until later in term. Spontaneous abortion is traumatizing enough without the new stress that necessary medical procedures to treat it may not be available to all women or may require extraordinary and expensive travel to receive.
I have been reliving my own miscarriage during this time. Then, I didn’t realize that everything surrounding that event had the potential to be controlled by someone with no knowledge of me or my family or my health. It is unthinkable to me that anyone other than myself, my husband, or my doctor might have been able to direct the services I received while going through something that was heartbreaking, excruciatingly painful, and even life threatening. But my daughters will be in that position. Someone else may get to write the rules about how much their lives do or don’t matter and what is the exact point when a doctor will be allowed to treat them. If they’re allowed at all.
During my first pregnancy, somewhere between ten and twelve weeks, I began passing small blood clots and I knew in my whole being that I was miscarrying. I was young, married just about a year, and so excited to be having a baby. The pregnancy had been unplanned but that didn’t matter. Children were a blessing and only a blessing and I was excited.
That evening my husband came home from work and took me to the ER where they examined me and declared that I couldn’t be passing clots because my cervix was intact. That they couldn’t detect a heartbeat didn’t seem to concern them. They sent me home with suggestions that maybe I was exaggerating my symptoms. But early the next morning the cramps and bleeding began in earnest, and we returned to the ER where I was diagnosed with spontaneous abortion. After the nurse counseled me about having a heavy period and following up with my ob-gyn, we were sent home.
What happened as the day progressed was full labor that was comparable to the deliveries of my three children. Having no concept of what was happening to me, being unmedicated, and alone except for my husband, I went through excruciating pain (passing out at one point) and early on Sunday morning passed a fully formed fetus in the amniotic sack. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.
It was approximately the size of the plastic fetus models anti-abortion protestors hand out. We put it in a sandwich baggie and placed it in the fridge. I had been advised to follow up with my doctor on Monday and to take any tissue with me. I now know that was because they would be checking to see if I was at risk for infection. My husband then called several friends to let them know that we wouldn’t be at church to teach our youth class and why.
The friends stopped by to visit on their way home. I was in and out of sleep on the sofa and so weak from the previous day’s ordeal that I couldn’t sit up let alone make myself presentable for guests. I was greeted with downcast faces and meek apologies and then the guests paraded past me to the kitchen where they looked at the fetus in the sandwich baggie like it was a museum exhibit. That is where the care and concern ended.
For the next couple of weeks, I received a few sympathetic comments but what I heard repeatedly from all the women I knew in the church was that miscarriage was their god’s way of taking care of those babies who shouldn’t be on earth because of their problems.
Did they realize that they were promoting their god as the great abortionist in the sky? I don’t think so. Instead, I think they viewed their comments as sound and compassionate explanations for why spontaneous abortion takes place. After all, it is so common that many women observe a twelve-week rule during which they tell no one they are pregnant because they may not be in short order. And because they believe life begins at conception, evangelical Christians need an explanation for why their loving god would allow such a thing to happen.
When I explained to commenters that I didn’t pass tissue but rather delivered a fetus, they attempted to comfort me with explanations that my body didn’t know what to do with a baby. However good their intentions, they were saying the problem was me and that always ran through my mind during my proceeding pregnancies.
Evangelicals usually believe that the Bible clearly speaks on abortion. And likewise, that it speaks of life beginning at conception. But, Christian friends, the Bible does not say what you think it does.
Is a heartbeat at six weeks gestation a heart beating and circulating blood through a viable living being, or is it stem cells that have differentiated into cardiac cells and begun to form a heart doing exactly what your cardiac cells would do if we scraped them from your beating heart and put them in a petri dish? Is the woman who carries a fetus with significant physical defects, that will keep it from surviving outside the womb, a murderer for choosing induction abortion at 36 weeks rather than carrying to term and waiting for natural contractions? Either way the delivery results in death. The exact same death. Is the woman burdened with miscarriage really to spend those hellish days of heartache and pain also fearing that she may develop infection and have to wait for her body to reach a sufficient stage of danger so that she can have the necessary medical care? Is the child who has been raped really to carry the fetus to term because your god wills it? Is the woman with an ectopic pregnancy really to chance death or irreversible internal scarring and sterility as my one time mentor did? Should the mother of four, who is diagnosed with cancer at 8 weeks gestation, really sacrifice herself to give birth and then die rather than abort and receive treatment for the disease? Are these things not heartless cruelty by every definition of the words? Are these actions just?
The evangelical church most often tells believers that abortion is about free sex and irresponsible people doing whatever they want and then “killing the babies” to avoid the consequences of their *sin*. They repeat that it is just the hatefulness of angry feminists who want freedom from men like their sister Eve. They discuss medical and biological things but most often with bias and too frequently without the clarity of truth. They claim it is all about god and ignore the history of the GOP and their political maneuverings. In other words, the church doesn’t tell the truth.
As someone who has walked both paths, I cannot tell you the mental torment I have suffered as I weighed just what the truth is. It has not been easy and is not something everyone has the time and desire for. So perhaps our best choice is to trust. To trust the pregnant person and their doctor as we would hope to be trusted with our own bodies and our own families. To take our feelings and opinions out of their decisions. Isn’t that the loving choice?
Does loving my neighbor as myself in this way make me apostate?
Former evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
In my past, I often looked down on those who were nominal in their faith. Nominal means in name only and fundamentalists and evangelicals tend to refer to most Roman Catholics, mainline protestants, and many of their own as nominal. In their world, it is a spiritual insult to call a Christian nominal and often whispered as a prayer concern shared about someone who needs *saved*.
As a natural result of my rearing, I thought little of Roman Catholics who only attended mass on holidays, weddings, and funerals; mainline protestants who obviously didn’t understand the *real* message of salvation and didn’t desire holiness; and evangelicals who weren’t in the church every time the doors opened. They obviously weren’t serious in the faith if they even had any. Don’t you know that all those nominal Christians vote Democrat and evangelicals and fundamentalists *know* that people who vote Democrat aren’t real Christians.
What I didn’t realize then, I see clearly now. Perhaps nominal Christians know a thing or two about priorities and balancing their lives and faith. And those referred to as nominal are usually less invested. It is easier for them to miss the dirty underbelly of the church and just enjoy the traditional comforts. They are often less aware of what the Bible teaches – settling themselves on passages of scripture that are universally familiar and don’t cause too many questions. Had I been raised to be nominal, I would likely still be in the church.
But I was raised in a system that prioritized holiness with guilt laden altar calls that took place at both Sunday services. It was riddled with constant talk of death, judgement, and the end of the world. One of our four foundational doctrines was Jesus as the coming king who would save us all from the judgement of earth through the rapture. I can’t tell you how many times I got saved as my anxious child mind could never be certain if my sinful soul was genuine the last time I got saved. I didn’t want to be left behind. And just to be extra sure, I got baptized twice: once as an infant in my grandparent’s Presbyterian church and once again when I was a teen and was told that believer’s baptism by immersion was the way *real* Christians did it.
In my teen years, I was already doing daily devotional Bible study and was *called* to the ministry. Instead of going to a state university to study communications like my high school instructors encouraged, I spent more than twice the amount to attend a denominational college where I earned a degree that has been a hindrance to professional growth. While there, I not only studied for ministry, but I also began the habit of reading the Bible through annually and listening only to Christian radio – two things that greatly influenced the next two decades of my life.
That Bible reading continued for close to 25 years. I have read the Bible cover to cover over twenty times. During three of those years, I was also studying the Bible through verse by verse from Genesis 1:1 to Revelation 22:21. I took a notebook full of notes and created my own cross references using a Strong’s Concordance, a Vine’s Expository Dictionary, and a Halley’s Bible Handbook. I have read the King James Version, New American Standard Bible, New King James Version, New International Version, and the English Standard Version.
I have worked to arrange church programs, sat on committees, assisted preachers, taught Sunday School and children’s church, and have even been offered the pulpit on occasion, though only under the authority and in the presence of a male preacher and never to actually preach (of course).
My choices about the church and faith have not come from lack of knowledge or effort or faith. As a matter of fact, I was so all in that one of the last things my last pastor said to me was, “You know too much to stay away, Steph”. But as others who have walked a similar path have said, I have seen behind the curtain and once you see behind the curtain you can’t unsee.
Rather than knowing too much to stay away, I know far too much to return because there was nothing nominal about me.
Former evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
The day I went to lunch with two men – neither my significant other and one of them married – felt to me like a day that warranted a gold medal. That may sound a bit hyperbolic to some but hear me out.
As a former evangelical, I spent most of my life in very conservative churches. From childhood, I was taught what pretty much every American evangelical or fundamentalist woman is taught: my body was dirty, and I should hide it from men and boys; if a man looked and liked what he saw, it was my fault; if a girl got pregnant, then she was slutty; if a man cheated on his wife, then the wife must not have been satisfying him or a Jezebel lured him. I was also taught that to be alone in a room with a man who was not your spouse or a relative would be an impossible temptation – a cause for expulsion on my college campus; inappropriate advances made by men were my fault; I could not be friends with men; and work lunches between the sexes would become affairs. If you think this sounds a bit like what you hear oppressed Muslim women are told, you’d be right. If you think this sounds like victim blaming, you’d be right again.
Because I have always been very conscientious and a tad anxious and I was raised in that environment, by the time I was a full-grown woman I was continuously worried that I was a potential adulteress. For years I wore a minimum of neck to knee clothing and never a swimsuit. It didn’t matter that I am a homebody who has no interest in luring men in general. It didn’t matter that, practically speaking, I did not see any of this behavior play out in my life as I related to my own friends. It didn’t matter that I stayed faithful to a serial cheater even at my loneliest points in our marriage. I still viewed myself this way. The church taught me to, and I believed the church.
Now, I hear the “but…but…but”. Yes, affairs can develop in many of these scenarios. Let me be clear, I know cheating happens but when it happens, it happens first in the mind when both people make a conscious choice to do it. It isn’t a magical, irresistible force that happens when a man and a woman stand in the same room together – no matter what Billy Graham thought.
Now, back to that day.
Imagine my nervousness when the group of trainees I had been meeting with were going out to lunch together and it dwindled down to just three – me and two men. To say I was anxious is a very big understatement and I almost made an excuse about needing to run an errand so I could leave. But I had been working on not responding to the intrusive messages that my brain sends to me. And I knew I was going to have to adjust to life in a secular, professional environment. So, I messaged my significant other and told him that I was going to go out to lunch with two men. I did it because I try to be honest with him and because I knew he would totally understand just how big of a step this was for me.
The three of us agreed to walk to the deli across the street and after ordering, we sat down with the two of them on one side of the table and me on the other. And thus began a meal that I just might remember for the rest of my life, not because the food or conversation were particularly great, but for the battle that went on in my mind.
Here’s a small sample.
Brain: Oh, he mentioned his plans with his wife this weekend. He’s married. You might make him *stumble*.
Me: Ridiculous. I’m doing nothing to make him stumble. If he has an issue, it will be his own to deal with.
Brain: Did you button up the top button on your blouse?
Me: I’m dressed professionally.
Brain: But you could have an *affair*! Shame!
Me: Ridiculous. I love my partner.
Brain: But what about…
Me: Go away, thoughts! I’m in control here.
I slayed a giant that day and somehow, as that battle went on in my mind, I kept up with the conversation. We were professional; shared about our families and interests; explained our job history and responsibilities to each other; and built a little bit of healthy workplace camaraderie.
And wonder of wonders, there have been no suggestive glances from either of them even as we have continued to work together. I have not sought them out to lead them astray. All our clothing has always remained on when we’re in a room together. There have been only completely professional coworkers behaving completely professionally. Which is, I am learning, normal in the workplace though contrary to the images offered by my leaders over the years. We have never shared another meal, though I am sure that I could again with the exact same results.
I am a different woman today – at least usually. Occasionally, those nagging little devils of evangelical dogma rear their ugly heads. But I know how to handle them and myself now.
Former evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
My experiences in Girl Scouts are some of the best memories of my childhood. And Girl Scout Camp was one of my favorite times of the year.
Our camp was primitive for anyone older than the Brownies. We had canvas tents, pit toilets and a cold-water communal sink as a bathhouse, and we cooked over an open fire that we built ourselves. Older campers didn’t even have the bathhouse.
And unlike the nearby Boy Scout camp – that we heard was bordering on luxury – we didn’t have a pool. We had a lake in the woods with a small dock, roped off swim area, lots of canoes, and newts. It was more like a big pond, but from my childish perspective it was a lake. I loved that lake.
From age 5 or so I took swim lessons. Before my parents’ divorce, at the Y and, after my mom moved us to a small Appalachian town, at the community pool where I completed all the levels before lifeguard training by age 12.
I loved the water and swimming. Once I was brave enough to put my head under, I became good rather quickly. The water seemed to make the awkwardness I felt on land magically melt away. I swam so well by high school that the swim team and synchronized swimming coaches tried to recruit me but by then I was way too self-conscious to practice with or perform in front of guys.
But at Girl Scout Camp I was not encumbered by self-consciousness around my body. And we did way more than swim and splash in that lake. We trained most days for water and boat safety. We swam long distances, practiced floating and treading water for long periods, and purposefully paddled our canoes to the middle of the lake and flipped them. Then we would pop up in the air space underneath to use the canoe as a float or flip it back over, bail it out as well as possible, and paddle back to shore. As we sat around the fire after a day on the lake, we felt invincible. When we crawled into our canvas tents at night and tied the flaps shut, we just knew that we were tougher than the boys.
When girls reached the older camp, they also trained us in one special water survival skill so that if we ever found ourselves in the water without the proper gear we would know what to do. We would put shirt, pants, shoes, and socks on over our suits and jump off the end of the dock where no one could touch bottom.
When you jump into water fully clothed, you don’t slide in. You plunk and almost immediately your clothes begin soaking it in: filling pockets, shoes, and gaps and clinging and grasping to drag you under. It can be a battle to stay afloat.
We were taught to tread water as we peeled off our clothing, trying to keep both it and us from sinking to the bottom in the process. At the end, we had to choose either pants or shirt and attempt to blow them up to use as a float. By the time we had successfully finished that last step, we were thoroughly exhausted.
When I was done, I would take a deep breath, let myself sink down into the sliminess of the bottom, then blow the air out pushing myself up to pop out of the water in a cool gush. Then I would float for as long as they would let me. I can still feel the tired satisfaction of floating in the coolness of that lake after proving my ability to my leaders.
The first four decades of my life felt a lot like that water survival exercise. I seemed so often to be flailing about, trying desperately to peel off what was dragging me under. And I was never very successful until a few years ago, when I was better able to recognize what I was fighting against and, waves and storms aside, it feels like I have been floating ever since.
Former evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
Breezeway at Duke University Chapel. Photo credit: Stephanie Logan
The Southern Baptist Convention is the latest in an extensive line of churches and ministries to have their scandalous behavior revealed to the public. As someone who is well acquainted with the misogyny and corruption that goes on behind the doors of pastoral studies and in church boardrooms, I can honestly say that I am not in the least surprised by what I have read and heard. The church is the church and I expect the type of leadership the SBC has produced and tolerated for decades.
Former Southern Baptist Convention leader and thinker, Russell Moore, was interviewed on NPR the Monday after the SBC’s independent report was released. During the interview he characterized the SBC leadership as “inhumane” and even “criminal”. Unfortunately, what he described isn’t just characteristic of the SBC. All over the country there are other denominations, independent churches, parachurch ministries, and Christian colleges that have many of the same patterns of operation. The problem isn’t specific to Southern Baptists or Roman Catholics or (as history has shown) the Christian & Missionary Alliance – the denomination I once worked for. The problem is, as Moore said that morning, “cultural.” And that is why it will be nearly impossible to remove from conservative forms of American Christianity.
I originally wrote the content of this post on the morning of Uvalde, then put it aside when the country spiraled again into grief.
In March, Relevant Magazine revealed that Rev. John McArthur had protected and supported a convicted pedophile, though MacArthur put the man’s wife out of the church for not submitting to him. Then it was reported that a second woman came forward claiming MacArthur had protected her pedophile father. And just this past week the Washington Post reported a significant abuse of power by the Rev. Franklin Graham of Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Graham attempted to bully and manipulate a woman into returning to her abuser and disparaged her when she refused. He suggested she had been an unfaithful wife and called her deceitful and a disappointment.
With these latest revelations I am reminded again of what finally drove me out the doors of the church. It was the straw the broke the camel’s back. Since I was a teenager, I had recognized that the church often treats women and children abusively and I had personally witnessed three church scandal cover-ups. I had watched the church protect vile men over and over. And, no matter what I witnessed, even watching the church bow to Trump, I kept on attending, giving, and serving until a fateful day late in 2017.
But for you to understand that day, I must back up a little.
In 2016 one of my daughters began dating a friend. Though he and his family were long term members of another church, he had been attending ours. I never quite understood their relationship because my daughter was always sullen and withdrawn – especially after their dates.
Then, late in April 2017, she came to me one night after her siblings had gone to bed. What she described going on between the two of them was a textbook escalation of abuse. As she detailed their relationship, she cried that she was afraid he would hurt himself if she broke up with him. Nevertheless, we discussed her need to do that and planned for the next day. She would call him, and I would stand next to her during the conversation just in case it turned bad. And it did.
After she told her boyfriend that she didn’t want to date him anymore and asked him to just be friends, he went into a fit of rage. His cruelty and insistence that they would marry were clearly irrational and though she tried to placate him, he did not relent. Finally, I told her to hang up and he followed with a barrage of texts. I called and had our carrier block his number. Then we talked about our hope that the few weeks he had at school before the semester ended would be enough for him to cool off.
But that didn’t happen. Things escalated, and we began to get messages from mutual friends about his behavior. We learned that he had claimed to be waiting down the road from our house for her to come home at night, he had talked of getting my daughters into a car and driving it into a tree, and he said that if he couldn’t have her, then no one could. One night, he threw a violent fit in the presence of another parent. They contacted me and urged me to get protection for my daughter.
At the time I was in the middle of a divorce, so at one of my appointments with my attorney I mentioned the topic and she told me to call the sheriff’s deputy who advised with domestic violence issues. I called the deputy from my car before I even left the parking lot. I was only several sentences into describing the circumstances when the deputy stopped me. He suggested that I get my daughter to the local magistrate as soon as possible for a temporary order of protection and then advised on what to do if that move didn’t work to bring the young man to his senses.
Later that same week I received two calls. The first came from our youth pastor because the young man had asked him to broker a reconciliation. When I explained the situation, he said that he would deal with the issue alone. He then spoke with our senior pastor who called me next.
Now, I had a bit of experience with this pastor. He had shown me on several occasions that he didn’t respect the privacy of his office. And previously, he had consulted an attorney on my behalf without my knowledge. I did not want that to happen again, so I told him that I did not want him involved. But he insisted that as head of the church he had to protect the flock and therefore, he was responsible for me and my daughter. When I realized that he was going to ignore my request, I limited the amount of information that I gave him about the situation.
Within a day or two he called me back and told me that he had consulted an attorney on my behalf (again) and that I should get my daughter to the magistrate. I bit my tongue and let him know that I had already managed it and we would be going to the magistrate the next time they were in town. He said that he would ask the young man not to attend services and would tell the ushers not to admit him if he showed up.
Perhaps, I thought, a pastor would do the right thing. Perhaps.
On the day the magistrate was in town, I picked my daughter up from her job and drove her to the courthouse complex. On the same day I learned that the pastor met with the young man and his father. He got ahead of the sheriff’s department and the temporary order of protection and alerted them that it was coming. And, because I hadn’t given him the whole story, he had described things in a way that made it appear as if we were making up charges. When he told me these things he also advocated for the young man, suggesting there was a “misunderstanding” that we should sit down and discuss. Again, I bit my tongue. By now, I knew that my talking would do no good. I was exhausted and hoped that it would all go away.
The young man spent the summer gathering support from our community of friends while my daughter hid away. But at least his threats and outbursts stopped. When he returned to school, my daughter felt some relief, but I knew she wasn’t doing well. She was visibly unsettled every time we passed a car that resembled his and for months she only went to church and her best friend’s house.
Then came that fateful day late in 2017 when my pastor invited me to his office. This was not unusual since I had volunteered in several ministry positions. I assumed he was asking me there to discuss my children’s church preparations and, since I had everything ready for the new year, I took my plans with me.
But that wasn’t the purpose of the meeting. After I took a seat in his study, my pastor reminded me that he was a sensitive man and that he had the spiritual gift of discernment. He then asked how my daughter was. This shocked me, because she was in church in the front row every week and she was nineteen years old. I thought, but didn’t say, “this is a meeting you should be having with her.”
What followed his cursory inquiry into my daughter’s condition was a lecture. It was the same essential message I had heard repeatedly in my past – almost as if pastors practiced it in seminary.
He said that he had “prayed about it” and god, through the Holy Spirit of course, had told him to meet the young man to discern his condition. So, they had shared a meal together and, during that single meal, god showed my pastor that the young man had reformed, and he had invited him back to church. Though I had some reliable information to the contrary, I had learned by this point in my life that a woman being lectured in this manner does not question a pastor’s perceived discernment.
I sunk into my chair from the weight of it and I shook my head in disappointment. Then that last straw.
My pastor clucked his tongue, shook his head, scribbled a few notes, then started to lecture me on forgiveness and restoration and his duty before God to care for the soul of the young man. The young man who was not a member and who had attended his church for only a brief time became the priority. My daughter, who had attended his church for nearly a decade, was pushed aside and not even asked about how she might feel worshipping beside someone who had threatened her life and attempted to ruin her reputation. I – a woman trained for ministry, well-studied, a member for nearly a decade who made sure a tithe was in the offering plate every week and who had volunteered countless hours for his church – was lectured as if I was a child. I knew instantaneously that it would be the last time I ever submitted myself to a lecture from a man of god.
Unlike my previous encounters of this nature, this time I chose self-respect. I chose to speak rather than silently submit to the misogynistic nonsense.
On the spot, I told him that I was stepping down from volunteer ministry and would not be renewing my church membership in the coming year.
He showed immediate concern and told me that women who had been through what I had been through (he knew some of my past) were “easily misled” and prone to become “wild”. He told me that his church was the only place in a county full of churches where I would find the gospel preached correctly. He suggested that we needed to discuss my concerns together. He invited me to make some appointments to “have discussions” with him. Unwilling to submit to more of his nonsense and manipulation, I refused his offer and told him I was capable of finding answers to my questions and mentioned a few authors I had been reading.
Then he stooped even lower as he suggested that I had always been so spiritually serious that I had never really had a teenage rebellion and maybe it was time for me to have one now.
Reader, you have just received a crash course in Evangelical Pastoral Ministry 101: Shame the Woman.
I didn’t immediately leave the church because the church was my life. It was my only regular social interaction and the place my kids were every Sunday, so I continued to attend occasionally, though I never dropped another cent in the offering plate. When I was there, I stood for worship but I didn’t sing. I would not play the hypocrite and join in communal worship with a man I could no longer even pretend to respect or whatever god it was that he was worshipping. And since I hadn’t allowed my pastor to discuss things with me, he made sure those “discussions” happened from the pulpit. During the following months, he seemingly benignly brought up in his sermons the things I hadn’t allowed him to discuss. He even mentioned some of the authors I had told him I was reading before he warned the congregation not to be deceived by them. It was shortly after Easter 2018 and one of those sermon comments targeted at me that I walked out the doors and never returned.
Because my children were all on the cusp of adulthood, I didn’t make any decisions for them about church. Still, they left one by one over a period of 6 months. The first because they had spent enough time with non-evangelical types to recognize that the pastor’s endless harping on liberal politics and the so-called “gay agenda” wasn’t particularly Christian. They walked out the door without so much as a glance back. No regrets. The next became tired of being the target of the pastor’s criticisms. As they said to me, “It seems like every week he has something to tell me about what I am doing wrong.” This was behavior the pastor never dared when I was still attending. The last finally left because the pastor was tone deaf to their concerns, instead he constantly placed responsibility on them for others’ actions.
I have no doubt that when my pastor saw that he was unsuccessful at shaming me into submission, his next best bet was to begin shaming my kids. But it backfired. And I allowed my kids what I had never in my life felt free to do. As they chose to walk away, I praised their good judgement and encouraged them to never submit themselves to a similar church or pastor again. I also apologized for my part in raising them in that environment.
In the years since, I have studied the history of theology, the history of American evangelicalism, and church abuse across the broad spectrum of American Christianity. For part of that time, I was in a chat group for abused Christian women. It was full of the wives of pastors, elders, and church members who were being actively cheated on and/or abused behind the scenes. I eventually had to leave it because my participation was causing me to relive too much of my own past. Looking back, I sometimes think that I could have spent that time on more beneficial things but at least I can say, with complete assurance, that I came to my conclusions about the church only after considerable thought and heartache. There was no flippancy or rebellion about it. It was vast personal experience, basic human decency, and reason meeting together to give me all the confidence I needed to stand – even if it was alone.
The biggest lesson I have learned, from this particular episode and far too many others, is that the misogyny, corruption, and political partisanship I have repeatedly witnessed are primary characteristics of evangelical churches. It is, as Russell Moore said, cultural and unlikely to change. I would add that it is poison. Pure poison.
Former evangelical homeschool mom and one-time missionary and pastor’s wife, Stephanie Logan, aka Snicklefritz, writes from her life story and four decades of experience in the evangelical movement. Her views and stories are her own.
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