Leaving a Patriarchal Family-Run Church...

I got out of a family that wasn’t mine.

I got out of a power dynamic that preyed on my desperate need for connection and acceptance. That preyed on my need to please others and show myself approved. My need for meaning and order and stability and love. And I think, weirdly, my need for the approval of powerful men. A patriarchy.

Why would a woman raised by strong women in a matriarchal family have wanted that? Why would a woman who went to feminist music festivals and believed my grandmother was the wisest and strongest person on earth and chose a women’s college want or need that?

I got out when I stubbornly refused, again and again, to give over my mind. I was willing to betray my own family, to reshape my belongings and speech and clothing. But when asked to deny what I knew to be true, to call red blue or high low, I simply could not do it. So, I banged up against them, again and again. Saying I’ll be a girl for you, I’ll be a servant for you, I’ll be a good soldier for you, but I can’t lie about what I know. Please acknowledge the truth, you must acknowledge the truth, or you are showing yourself to be lying. And if you are lying about patently true things, then all your insights and wisdom and council and connectedness are also false, and I can’t rest in them anymore.

What were those moments? Can I call them up? Well, you said that women were different, that we were less sexual and were sexually aroused by love and care, not by visual images. That wasn’t true, I knew that. You said that people outside of the community were bad faith actors, unable to be ethical, fallen, but I knew my mother was the most moral, empathetic person in the entire world. You said that Rush Limbaugh’s book, denying global warming, was good, but I knew it was bad. What else did you say that I knew to be false? That evolution of species didn’t happen. I knew that was false. That the earth was young, that the Bible was inerrant. I knew all that to be obviously false. And that’s something interesting about me, isn’t it? That I will give over my agency and identity but not my intellectual mind. Because I was okay with faith being believing and even submitting to what is unseen. But it just could not be denying what was seen.

And it was also my emotional wisdom. I knew that abuse was abuse. Even as a teenager, I saw it and couldn’t not know it. I knew grown men shouldn’t ask young girls about their sexual sins and make them confess in public. I knew that going to college was good and being asked to drop out and get married or give up my love and my community was wrong. Maybe that was the moment. The moment I sat with [R] alone. I think in a room in his house, his study. Maybe 19 or 20 years old. And he told me to drop out of [S] and get married to [T] or to break up with him and not come back to the group. And I got emotional, a little loud I think, a little unhinged. I can talk fast and intensely. And I did. I think I told him about my mother’s sacrifice and our poverty and my years of hard work. And how I got in on the strength of my own accomplishments. And how my college was beautiful and old and good and intellectually challenging. And that it would be insane and a betrayal of myself and devastating to my mother for me to drop out and get married at 20 years old just because I had had sex, after a full year of dating without having sex. I had sex with [T] and my punishment was supposed to go beyond public shaming, beyond their coercing him to denounce me in front of everyone I knew, beyond their pressure on him to leave me. My full punishment was to give up myself, give away myself, and get in line as nothing more than a fallen woman and abashed new wife. A wife to a man who would betray me to a community of prurient adults, listening in. A wife to a man who hadn’t finished college himself and had no prospects. That’s it, that was the moment that I left. I took the consequences and left the community and left [T]. And then I won him back because I’m really, really, persuasive and I wanted him. And then I lived with it, with T’s being in a community that hated me. With a broken faith. With a years-long negotiation with my enemies, T’s relatives by marriage and community by choice.

And now I spend my life pursing answers.

Trying to wrestle it all into a namable classifiable shape. I got a PhD in [X]. I fought hard for a liberal, progressive faith until I couldn’t. I trusted my mind and my senses enough to accept the hole in my heart created by the absolute undeniable reality of materialism and atheism. I stayed so, so true to my mind and followed the evidence wherever it led me.

But I don’t know what to do with the shame. The shame that while I stayed in college, I did marry [T]. Knowing his ties to my enemies, his willingness to shame me, to denounce me, I married him anyway. The shame that I let it all happen to me and participated in something I knew was abusive. I sat through exiles of members. I sat through crying teenage girls’ public confessions and stigmatized pregnancies. Why did I do that? What did I need so badly? Why did I marry someone who wouldn’t let me escape my past? Who defended my abusers? I don’t understand why.

And now I still have these tender regions, these places where if I’m poked, I hurt way too much. This scar tissue and land-mined areas in my marriage. And I still feel blocked. Where is my voice? How can I be whole?

~Sasha