Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions
Cami Ostman, Susan Tive
Language: English
Pages: 328
ISBN: 1580054420
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Covering a wide range of religious communities—including Evangelical, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim, Calvinist, Moonie, and Jehovah’s Witness—and containing contributions from authors like Julia Scheeres (Jesus Land), the stories in Beyond Belief reveal how these women became involved, what their lives were like, and why they came to the decision to eventually abandon their faiths. The authors shed a bright light on the rigid expectations and misogyny so often built into religious orthodoxy, yet they also explain the lure—why so many women are attracted to these lifestyles, what they find that’s beautiful about living a religious life, and why leaving can be not only very difficult but also bittersweet.
never know which mood he’ll be in when we talk, and I alter my moods accordingly. “Sarcasm,” he calls his meanness in a half-assed attempt to soften the verbal blows he regularly delivers. Steve is intimidated by Brock’s strong personality. And maybe he’s jealous too, I’m not sure, but I can feel Steve slowly slipping away as Brock becomes more central in my life. “People don’t understand me,” Brock grumbles one day during a particularly animated rant. “I put hundreds of hours into helping you
partly precipitated by grief. Three horrific events brought my faith to its proverbial knees. First, a drunk driver hit our friend’s car as she was driving her children to school. Her eight-year-old daughter sustained a severe spinal injury and was left in a coma. Next, a newly married couple from our Sabbath School class was camping in Yosemite when a fellow camper picked a fight and slugged the man in the chest. Due to a genetic anomaly, our young parishioner became instantly paralyzed on
walking home in silence. Suddenly—and he doesn’t stop or look up or anything—Dennis blurts out, “So, are we getting married or what?” The next day, I confirmed that he had, in fact, asked me to marry him. You would think I’d remember what happened after that. But the next thing I know, it’s Halloween. I’m married for the second time. My ex-boyfriend Leo spent money to see a therapist because he was sexually molested as a child. He was my second boyfriend, Dennis was my third—and is my second
like that. But I had stopped doing exactly that when I was eighteen years old, when I’d wrapped myself in a cocoon of scripture and sermons and tattered hymnals. I had spent a lifetime bending knee to that which I could not see, and I wasn’t ready to say that was a waste or a tragedy or anything of the sort, but now I wanted to praise the threescore and ten, the running water and poplar trees, that singular ride from the airport through Istanbul leaning into the side of a man I loved, his lips
also joined forces with other Escuela Caribe alumni to create a website warning parents away from the so-called Christian therapeutic boarding school, and convinced dozens of former students to complete surveys about their experiences. They wrote about the Christian staff slamming them into walls, whipping them with a leather strap until their skin broke, and molesting them while they slept. As a result of our activism, enrollment dropped, and the school, which had been operating for forty years,