Some of
the elements of the belief system, that worldview's sacred cows, are
easy to give up. Some lead to our disillusionment. Some created
pain for us while living fully according to the worldview. Those are
easy to give up. We're usually relieved. When we learn about
thought reform and that the sacred cows that trampled over us like a
bull in a china shop, we feel validated. We might even feel
vindicated when we come to understand that we were forced to accept
and even laud these sacred cows because they were part of the sacred
science.
But the
ones we like? Sometimes we try to keep them.
The
Process of Letting Go
When I
left a “New Covenant” church, the Shepherding Discipleship
church, I wanted to get rid of every piece of literature that we had
with “covenant” written on it. My husband thought I was
overreacting. But he didn't have the same ill feelings that he'd
associated with the term.
Not
everything about a cultic or high demand group causes of pain, and
there were things about the movement that I liked. Some things
benefit us and create pleasure and a sense of personal power for us.
As I wrote
recently at Spiritual Sounding Board, I once loved old Victorian
era art. I collected pictures of angels – old lithographs and
silver paper prints. I loved the Pre-Raphaelite paintings that
homeschooling moms tend to love. I didn't like them because of the
movement. I think it was more of part of my growing up and the
popularity of certain styles of the day. I also had a small
collection of cameos from the 1928
brand, costume jewelry that I wore with blouses with leg-o-mutton
sleeves.
When I
started to see the same kind of art and jewelry used to market the
idyllic fantasy of the quiverfull package, I grew weary of them, but
it took much longer for me to move on from them. About ten years
after I left the movement, I saw how Doug Phillips perverted one of
those paintings. I took it the painting down off my wall. It also
took a very long time before I could enjoy that artist's work again.
When I gave up on the fantasy, it became easy to part with all of
those old prints and old pictures. In and of themselves, these
things were not wrong to have around, but they were part of the
package of the mindset that I had. Angels in particular were a
strong part of my own religious worldview as well, going back to when
I was a child. However, before I moved away from that life, I would
have never parted with them.
The same
is true of our ideology. Our belief systems change so dramatically
for us when we exit a group, I don't think that it's possible to work
through everything at once. We go through the stages of grief on
many levels. On top of beliefs that we invested in, we also have to
grieve the loss of the beloved friends that we leave behind because
they remain a part of the group. Then, we have the symbols of those
things that we must think about, too.
The
Analogy of Losing a Loved One
A couple
of years ago, I ended up talking with someone about how I could help
people move through the process to get all of the way out of high
demand homeschooling. I had an experience with someone who I
believed was on their way out of the high demand end of homeschooling
– someone who was associated with some of the same cultic groups
with which I'd been involved. But, one day, it happened. I kicked
over one of the sacred cows that this person wanted desperately to
keep. And then, I kicked over another. And another. It became too
much for them, and they withdrew. I saw it as a personal failure,
and I sought out some advice to put things into perspective. Many
people run at first to get away from the pain, but they begin to slow
down before they are fully out of their groups. Or I see them
clinging to ideas that they're just not ready to abandon.
I ended
up speaking with an experienced exit counselor who recently lost her
husband. As we talked, she smiled and said that in my desire to see
people get all the way out of the past to move forward, I had not
taken the power of grief into account. She used an analogy that was
bitter sweet for us both, and I marveled at how well she was healing
from her own personal loss. She asked me if I remembered the
sweaters that her husband always wore. I did quite well, and my
husband even said something to me about it when we met him the first
time. My husband often wore those same kinds of sweaters, and this
man seemed to share some common traits with him, too.
 |
| photo credit: knitting iris via photopin cc |
She told
me about how she felt when she set about the task of packing up her
late husband's clothing. She gathered everything up, going through
all of his things, figuring out what to do with each item. But then,
she talked about those sweaters. She did well with the other items,
but she found that she just could not part with everything. She
wasn't yet ready to get rid of those sweaters. She knew that she
would be in time, but that day had not arrived for her. Her husband
had been gone for almost three years at that point, and she told me
that she still had the sweaters, set aside and out of the way. She'd
just been thinking about parting with them, not long before we spoke
together.
Leaving
beliefs like this – the ones that were such an integral part of the
Christian worldview for a person in the homeschooling movement – is
a process. We must walk through grief, and many of us don't even
know how to grieve. We may never have been permitted to be sad or
angry – only ever happy as an “overcomer in Christ.” I
remember asking a family member how often they thought about someone
who was important to us both – someone who died the previous year.
This person said to me, “I get sad when I think about it, so I just
don't think about it.” She was silent when I said, that if you
love someone very much, you then have to grieve that much more for
them. As deep as your love goes, that is how deep your grief goes.
But in grieving, we are really celebrating that love and the person
we lost.
Not
everything about a high demand group is negative, and we may not want
to relinquish the elements that did not prove to be painful.
Getting
Stuck
Not
everyone makes it all of the way out of a group. Not everyone ends
up seeing all of the sacred cows as problematic. As Christians, we
are called to die daily to our sins, but we don't always mortify the
flesh like we should. It's painful. Sometimes, we cling to those
things that we like and resist letting them go. They feel good to
us, and they meet a need for us. Some people decide to keep a cow or
two. Some people continue to cling to many and have no intention of
giving them up. It becomes a problem when those elements still
demand the devotion and still remain a Sacred Science for that member
who is on the way out. I've heard some of these former devotees of
the patriarchy movement referred to as “patriarchy lite.” They
have one foot in and one foot out. And they stop moving forward.
Lewis
Wells recently wrote about this very phenomenon on his blog this week
in a post that he called The
Disease. (Actually,
he's written about this topic many times. He mentions some of them
in his post, but I recall two of them that he didn't mention. One
was about the Halfway
House, and another he
called The
Outhouse.) In his
latest post, he notes what happens for many who decide to stay
forever in these substations, giving up on the freedom that awaits
them on the outside of the belief system – a freedom that they
decide not to realize.
When you hear that last one [fear of losing their “freedoms”], well, you pretty much know what you're dealing with - people who purposefully confuse religion with education, and in reality their homeschooling choice is all about them (not their children) and their desire to breed and equip SuperChristians who share all of their personal thoughts, opinions, prejudices, and political leanings. It's their duty, don't ya know?
They're easy marks for those who peddle fear. Too easy. I'd dare say the next wave of godliness sharks are already sharpening the edges of the godliness formulas they'll peddle, and while their formulas won't look exactly like Patriarchy, Quiverfull, Courtship, the Purity Culture, et cetera, chances are they won't be all that different, either. They can't be, because the culture needs controlling and those things served to do so in various capacities. If they can't control the culture, the culture will dissolve, and they have too much invested in their cultural and political fears to just give it away so easily. They should let it dissolve. They'll likely just accept the same symptoms with new names instead.
[. . .]
Those two men [the patriarchy movement magnates Phillips and Gothard] are just symptoms.
The culture is the disease.
~ ~ ~
What
sacred cows have you kept from something that you sought to move out
of – either a relationship or a high demand group? What “vision”
did you serve, and are you holding on to parts of it that are
hindering your growth today? Hannah
Thomas has referred to these matters with me in my own life as “residue” of a toxic
time. Mine tend to be old habits that die
hard.
Do you
have any residue that you could clean up to help you make a place for
new and better things in your life? Are you stuck, or perhaps
happily stagnant, in an unhealthy place? Have decided that the Halfway House or perhaps the Outhouse seems like a pretty good place? Consider that you can
always take stock of where you are, and you can always begin to move
forward again.
