The inaugural episode of Survivors Discuss with hosts Cait West, Clare Heath-McIvor, Shari A Smith is a conversation with our guest Tia Levings. Together we unpack the powerful documentary that examines life in the IBLP culture.
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Clare
Hello I’m kit Kennedy and it is my pleasure to welcome you to a very special podcast edition. Um ah of survivors discuss shining happy people now I’ve got 3 brilliant guests on with me today. 3 inspirational women that I’m so lucky to know. But before we start talking I just want to flag that there is a content warning with this episode. We will be talking about some pretty heavy issues which may touch on spousal abuse child abuse or other things like that. Please if you’re feeling distressed or if this raises things for you in Australia you can call lifeline on 1 3 1 1 one four and in america you can call 9 8 8 to get yourself some support as we know surviving fundamentalism is no small deal and once you’re out. It can be a long time before these wounds start stop stinging. But right now we’ve got something so important to discuss this brilliant documentary. That’s come out and because we’re only using audio I’m going to get Shari Cait and Tia to introduce themselves and tell me tell us a little bit about how they came to be in this face Shari over to you first.
Shari
Yeah, hi. Thanks for having me on here. I did not grow up in IBLP or ATI however I came from a background where I was homeschooled as a child. My community was kind of surrounded by it and I was also growing up in a family where, and this is where I really resonate with the documentary, where it was kind of like a closed system unto itself where my father was in charge. And he had all of the discernment and we just had to follow his lead. So um, yeah, yes, yes.
Clare
Yeah, very patriarchal, very familiar and currently Shari and I are actually sort of duking it out for which one of us is least IBLP people but we’ll get to that in the end and let you decide Cait – what about you.
Cait
Hi my name is Cait West and I’m a writer. I grew up being homeschooled and in a very strict Christian Home. When I was around ten years old, we got into the Christian patriarchy movement. We were very serious about it and very much influenced by Vision Forum which I believe is very influenced by Bill Gotthard and IBLP so had some of the similar teachings but not directly from Gothard.
Clare
Yes, and okay, that brings us to Tia. We’re probably ranking you as the most IBLP. How are you.
Tia
I am well. I am well. Yeah, I guess! I mean although I was never a formal member of IBLP. I started in a megachurch that had been influenced by IBLP members and I was recruited and proselytized into their program – mentored as a young mom and made it part of our family practice. We then joined this movement that happened in the 90s towards more reformed churches, so I overlapped into Vision Forum – into Doug Wilson’s federalist system in the covenant reformed. So, my story actually gets a lot darker after the IBLP which can be hard to imagine after if you’ve seen “Shiny Happy People” and like in a really dark moment in the documentary. It gets worse.
Clare
Oh goodness.
Tia
It gets worse later. So, that’s it’s like that’s the grain of salt that I toss like “tada.” So, I’m in Shiny Happy People. We’re very very proud of it. We made the homepage of Amazon today and we’re still at number 1 which is incredible for this documentary to be having this kind of reach. It’s what everybody’s talking about I’m really glad that we’re having an impact.
Clare
Yeah, it is and I was so proud of you to see you on that. I’ll admit that okay so I’m Australian as you can probably hear from my voice Australia is this little island away from everybody else. So and we think that we’re somewhat disconnected from the American influence, but we’re just not. I watched Shiny Happy People because I was like, “Oh Tia’s on it, this is going to be great, and Nineteen Kids and Counting, and oh them, those others.” I was really shocked, might I say triggered, to see how many ways in which Gothard and IBLP had actually sort of dovetailed with my life. I was homeschooled. I was one of five children, which hardly sounds quiverful but.
Tia
Yeah, but.
Clare
But I felt like I was sort of the Pseudo parent in a lot of ways because I’d help with the homeschooling. I’d help with the cooking and the cleaning. And there’s that whole complementarian thing of feminine submission, and all of the things that are expected that way and then that Umbrella graphic…
Tia
Ah, so there’s a really good reason, a really excellent reason, why you would feel that in Australia, and that’s because Australia and New Zealand were heavily proselytized by the IBLP they have they have their tentacles all through your countries and so of course your churches are every bit is infiltrated.
Clare
Really? I mean the mind boggles and yet I go, “Yeah, that tracks.” So, first question Tia, is what was it like for you being on that documentary? Um, just the process of going through it I have some insight, having been the 60 minutes kid over here last year but yeah what was that like for you?
Tia
Ah, yeah, it was kind of a culmination of a lot of work, a lot of knowing inside of myself that I wanted to tell it on a big stage. I wanted to tell my story on a big stage. I feel very called to not be silent because what happened to me is also happening to this country and worldwide. I am one of the survivors and I’m a rare survivor in that I’ve come out of something very extreme, and I can talk about it without re-traumatizing myself.
And so I had been putting a lot of energy towards telling it every way that I could. I was cross-medium – I was on Instagram, I started making reels during the Josh Duggar trial and that got the attention of somebody on the cast, and they said, “hey you need to be part of this documentary.” I was actually in whole foods on the day before Thanksgiving in Alabama and I got this call from this slight celebrity who is in the cast and I was like, “Why is this person calling me? Why is this coming up on my phone?” and it was Amy Dugger.
Shari
Wow.
Tia
Amy Dugger was like, “Just filling you in on this documentary – you have to be on it. I Love your reels you talk about my family in a way that I can’t talk about them” and I really don’t know if she wanted that line public. But I mean it’s I think now everything’s out there. So it doesn’t matter the way it once did.
Clare
Wow. Yeah.
Tia
Basically she enjoyed my content and knew that it would resonate with the producers, and so she put us in touch. Then just a few days later I had an interview with Olivia Krist which was so – it’s hard to put into language how right it felt. I didn’t know very much about the project itself. I didn’t know what their angle was. I knew that they’d made Lulu Rich, and I appreciated the way they handled that project. And I just felt it was right, like this was my in
By February of 2022, they had booked a day in Savannah for me to come and film. I spent 8 hours telling my entire story from start to finish in 1 big, enormous, very stressful swoop. It’s amazing to me that people have given me the feedback that I come across very calm, and with a lot of gravitas in the documentary because I was that was an exhausting day. It was sensory overload. I had cameras in my face. I wasn’t wild about the angle they were using I’m still not wild about the angle that they used. I’m like – that’s not flattering. Don’t film it there, like lot of things on my mind, and then all of a sudden when it felt like we were done and I went outside and it was dark but it had been the lightest day inside because they had the house tented and lit and it looked like2 in the afternoon all day long. So time had not passed, and then I step outside, and it’s dark and everything’s closed for dinner, and like I just wanted a bourbon so badly. And then we had a year, I didn’t know who else was in it. I didn’t know what footage was going to be used what clips would be used how my story would be told. In that time I sold my book and being in the documentary definitely helped. So that’s kind of a big compact nutshell of what the experience itself was like.
Clare
Yeah, so not to talk about myself too much, but I did 60 Minutes Australia last year as my real name – Clare Heath-McIvor – because of dominionists and you know, church religious abuse stuff. So that happened last year, and it was months of background with this journalist before I even agreed to be on screen or to go on record with him and then it was months after that. I kind of make jokes about things to try to deflect from the seriousness of what’s happened in my life, and I talk about other stories about being worse than mine. But then when I was across from arguably Australia’s, well he’s definitely Australia’s most decorated investigative journalist, for two and a half hours and he won’t let you tell anybody else’s story but your own it was draining. Like you, leaving the room, because we’d been in a hotel room that they’d kind of styled and there’s all the lights and cameras and a producer and a journalist and then another the journalist that’s interviewing you – you lose sort of perspective on what the day is. I left the hotel and I knew exactly where I wanted to go I was going to a friend’s house to have a glass of red wine and just decompress. And I just went a kilometre and a half in the wrong direction. It was like I just was not in my body, like you go “I’m so far past this and yet the trauma does actually live on in a very somatic way.” So that was that was a lot.
Tia
Yes, yes.
Clare
So observations Cait, what was this like for you watching this documentary and seeing so many synchronicities with your own life? What was it like for you, watching that doco for the first time?
Cait
I was a little anxious to watch it because I knew what was going to be in it. I mean I knew, I don’t think anything that was in the documentary was something that I hadn’t known before after writing about this and researching more beyond my own story. I knew what was going to the story was going to be um and I was hoping that I would be able to just like watch it calmly and get through it. But of course, anytime you’re faced with something that reminds me reminds you of your own trauma I think your body reacts. No matter how many therapy sessions I’ve been to I think your body remembers. It’s not going to forget what that was like. So especially watching the children having no autonomy or no agency in their own lives and being Dugger Children being filmed. There’s no real consent there. I feel like they were being exploited. It felt like watching a story of my own family in a sense. We didn’t have that many children but so many of the rules and the teachings were the same and especially as the girls got older and they were kept home. They’re still kept home, the ones who haven’t left before they’re married, and so that was my life until I was 25. It reminded me so much of what I’d been through that I felt really sick the whole time watching it. But I knew I wanted to get through it. I wanted to witness. I feel like they interviewed so many survivors and I wanted to be there for them in a sense, witness their stories, and I think that was important and it was difficult though because of how similar those teachings are to my own upbringing.
Clare
Yeah, so Vision Forum is something is a point on which both you and Tia Dovetail, so just tell me a little bit about what Vision Forum is for people in Australia and New Zealand. I don’t know the words but I know that the experience sounds familiar.
Cait
Vision Forum was a quote-unquote ministry. It was also a catalogue where they sold products and it was very much focused on gender roles. Doug Phillips was the man who started it and he had like this family with all these children – very quiverful. Same kinds of teachings as Bill Gothard, but kind of like the next generation, and a lot of the focus was on keeping girls and boys in their specific gender boxes. Only giving them toys that were for that gender, and then teaching them to be to fill a certain role as they became adults. So women would only become wives and mothers. Men would grow up to be the leaders and Vision Forum really emphasized men being leaders in government in their homes and churches. Women were always the servants and supporting them in their vision. So yeah, very similar to IBLP but it started in the 90s and fizzled out…I want to say less than ten years ago after a sexual abuse scandal that Doug Phillips did so yeah, so very similar.
Clare
Ah, yeah, okay, wow that’s a big one but let’s warm up to that one. So vision Forum Homeschool stuff. So good time to ask you, Shari, what was it like for you watching it?
Shari
I actually watched it a couple of times to just kind of let it sink in, and the first time through I think I was someone in a dissociative state, like it was kind of like I was just watching it. I knew some of these things were familiar to me but I didn’t really sink in the same way it did the second time. The second time, I could actually feel these things in my body. Like there’s this scene with Bill Gothard trying to show his audience how to spank a child and I immediately connected to that. I could feel that in my body I could feel the terror. Um this stuff like that like it was it just kind of came out of nowhere for me like I wasn’t expecting to feel that so viscerally.
Clare
Yeah, that scene hit me between the eyes as well because as a pastor’s kid it’s quite familiar to be used as an example and to know that your reaction is very much on display, and how you react in that moment is not just a reflection on you as a person but on your parents and on their ministry and feel not only the eyes of everyone there but also the the weight of that.
Shari
You can, yeah.
Clare
Not just to mention. It’s really creepy. It’s just creepy that that hit me between the eyes as well. Now you’ve made a really good observation in the chat box here that I’d love Tia’s thoughts on here.
Shari you said that there’s only 1 person of colour that you noticed in the series. Tia, how white is this movement?
Tia
So white. It’s so white, and it’s on purpose.
Clare
What I’m curious about is how does it link with white Christian nationalism.
Tia
Okay, so it’s important on this one to look at the big picture and widen it. Pull it back to the roots of homeschooling, and why parents were pulling their children out of school in the first place with desegregation of schools and trying to have more control over what was happening. Take them out in public schools in the very beginning, which was like eighties and seventies, like you know in that era and the rise of IBLP, these were white Christian families that didn’t want to Mix. And that atmosphere pervades through the decades and then you have this like injection of white Saviorism. So, it would became really popular to adopt black children, and every once in a while, you would have a black family and they would be very token It’s a very icky smarmy kind of feeling, especially looking back. I mean at the time, we were saturated in our sameness, in so many ways that I don’t know that I picked up on it because everything was the same. Our clothes were the same everything we were doing was the same. It made sense to me that our skin colour was the same and that it would be regional. And you know that. We would see colour where colour was regional. But looking back I’m seeing I see the starkness of it, and it’s alarming. My ex-husband was a holocaust denier and he believes that the mixing of the races is mongrelisation. And then he’s not alone in that. They talk about this and the way they talk about the civil war, and it’s the war, like the way they talk about reconstruction. It’s in the fibre, in the fabric of the movement that it’s almost impossible to pull apart. I don’t think racism is separable from all of it. I don’t think the documentary made a huge point of it, but you can definitely see it because it’s so white. There’s o person of colour in four episodes.
Clare
That was a really good observation, Shari. I mean, my pet peeve is dominionism, because that’s the movement that I came out of. And its just gotten- well actually my sister into parliament and there’s all of these kinds of undertones of other things happening and I don’t see good fruits of dominionism. We’ve seen Roe V Wade be overturned in the states and the wide-reaching issues with that and now we see the right-wing going after no-fault divorce, and the people that disadvantages are the women who are facing abuse and can’t prove the abuse. I mean this would have been you if …
Tia
I would be dead. The no-fault divorce thing terrifies me more than almost any other law because of the way domestic abuse works and the way you can’t prove it. You can’t, you don’t. I’m so glad the documentary made the point about the cry-out. If you don’t cry out during an attack then you’re part of it, because that does so much to silence someone and you’re dissociating through an assault – that was my body’s go-to. I can’t cry out and it wouldn’t have mattered if I cried out, I went to my church and my church said what was happening to me was okay, that this was God’s design for marriage. So, the whole thing is so bogus. But if you take away the legal secular outlet for divorce, you have dead women. There’s no way that we’re going to get around that just the same way with Roe V Wade means we’re having dead women, its infections happening.
Clare
Yeah, it drops your stomach, doesn’t it? Because this is sort the pinnacle, I think, of the dominionist dream – to have this sort of influence on laws and yet it is dropping us into a place where women are at risk and where queer people and people who are gender nonconforming. They’re at risk as well. Ah, Cait your observation about the queer erasure from the narrative in the in the documentary tell me more about that.
Cait
I think in IBLP and Christian patriarchy in general, there’s this very strong binary of “there’s men and then there’s women and if you don’t conform to the patriarchal idea of what those genders are then you don’t exist.” Basically, so if you’re a queer kid growing up there, you have to blend in the best you can just to survive, because I don’t think they talked too much about it. They mentioned training camps and when Josh Dugger went off to whatever kind of camp that was. They also – in the states – they’ve had camps to send your gay kids to go do conversion therapy. So, it’s related because they see it as a sickness something to cure or something even more than sickness. They think of it as sin. So you don’t even exist as a queer person in this ideology. You’re just – you don’t fit into the ideal. So they have to fit you in somehow.
Clare
Yeah, yeah, and mean this is something that touches very close to home as listeners from Unchurchable who will all know my ex-husband who is definitely my best friend and biggest supporter is a conversion practices survivor and helped get the ban passed in the state of Victoria where I live. But that was a moment, because we had to define conversion practices as broader than conversion therapy because any counsellor worth their salt will know that this has been disproven by research, the UN calls it torture. It doesn’t work. 36 randomised control trials have been done. 35 of them say it absolutely doesn’t work and does immeasurable damage and the one that said it totally works was all of Christian married men who had something to lose if they were honest on that response form. So to me that’s bunk. But it was defined as broader than therapy proper because we needed to talk about Weaponized Prophecy and Weaponized Prayer. We needed to talk about Arranging relationships. We needed to talk about these other things. Ah so yeah, so that was a little bit of an interesting one for me. Tia, what was your experience of Homophobia and Transphobia within the IBLP?
Tia
It hits really close to home. My best friend growing up was gay, and we were Baptist at the time. So we knew, I think he knew, that he could not both be gay and go to church and he eventually in adulthood chose himself and his happiness. That lasted (our friendship) at that time. We made it through until the time I met my ex-husband who absolutely would not tolerate a Co-ed friendship let alone gay. So it was a big loss for me to part, personally to not have Michael. We have since [reconnected]. He helped save my life and he’s still my best friend and so Michael is my favourite character in the book. He’s everything, but at the time it was a very dear loss to me. It was very catastrophic and it was reflected all around me. Like Cait was saying the gender roles are absolutely rigid and there’s no room for any anything else. Boys are, I think, more than girls are – punished if they show any femininity or softness or weakness. Girls are forced to conform. But I didn’t witness a lot of punitive action if they were tomboys you know for example until they were children. You know, young ladies. But girls have to wear dresses and boys have to look like little seminary students and there’s just no existence outside of those 2 very, very, very distinct polarities.
Clare
Which is which is distressing, I think, if you were LGBT and closeted growing up in this system -extraordinarily distressing.
Tia
Oh yeah.
Clare
And it might sound like we kind of touched on nationalism and dominionism, and then we came away from it. But I’m actually wanting to paint a picture that they’re not separate. So March eighteenth in my state of Victoria a woman by the name of Posey Parker – she’s an anti-trans campaigner – she came out from the UK to do like a road trip of trans hate. And it was my observation that this anti-trans hatred is aggressive. It is really, aggressive. And this journalist who did my story, he’s part Jewish and he’d done this documentary on neo-nazis in Australia. So he and I had had this brief conversation where we’d said what is the extreme right? versus what is the far right? and to him far right? To him it was nazis and I was like well no these right-wing churches. They aren’t that different.
I kind of felt vindicated in the worst possible way on March eighteenth when Posey Parker made it to Melbourne, and a Christian Member of Parliament who had just been elected and it seems she’s a single-issue MP. Basically, she’s just hateful trans people and she really campaigns hard against them. She took the microphone to speak at this rally and behind her There was a group of young men from the National Socialist Network which is a neo-nazi group. And they were there. They gave the nazi salute and to me this was the venn diagram of these right-wing churches and this extreme right-wing ideology that is genocidal in its hatred they were overlapping at that point.
As this MP tried to rehabilitate her image and tried to stay in the liberal party, which is the party she’d been elected with she was saying “I’m not a nazi I’m not a nazi sympathizer” well no one’s saying that she is. But if you’re there in front of nazis who are there to support your cause, then you must have to scrutinise how far this hatred connects and just how easy it is to go from one idea to one that’s just adjacent to it to one that’s just adjacent to it and to get down this continuum of hatred.
I’m curious about your observations, Shari. Last time we spoke you didn’t have your American citizenship so you didn’t want to talk about dominionism all that much. But I’m really keen to get your thoughts on it now that you are Married to an American and you’ve got your green card.
Shari
Right I got thoughts.
Yeah, well I’ve got my green card. I will get my citizenship eventually but green card for now. So it’s really interesting – the world that I grew up in Canada, I’ve since discovered is very fringe but at the time is all I knew. All of evangelicalism, because that’s all I knew, it was very deeply steeped in white supremacy, anti gay, Anti-trans narratives and dominionism, was I think, the thing that kind of tied everything together. Like I remember there was a bible conference I used to be involved with my family and for one of the sessions this pastor from the US had decided to play this video for us which was entirely centered around white supremacy. The entire message was white people, we have to have more babies. We have to have as many babies as we possibly can because look at all of these brown people and all of these Muslim people they’re going to out. He laid it all our for us “and then what will we do…” and I just remember sitting there, my jaw dropped and I just felt like this burning fire in my chest going “This is wrong. How is everybody just sitting here calmly? And I ended up walking out at one point because I just couldn’t take it. But I came back at the end, and we started talking to this pastor and he just could not understand what the issue was. He thought it was a biblical thing. So just to kind of tie that in, is like that’s so normative in that world but the same people – they are also the ones saying you have to vote for this conservative Politician because Christians vote conservative, or you know whatever is in your country.
And I’ve had church leaders email me telling me I have to vote this way in the next election and I’m just like no, you don’t actually get to say on who I vote for that is not okay, that’s crossing a massive line but it is so normal. Um, and I just to see it. Right across the Us right now like it kind of feels like it followed me from Canada like it just kind of exploded with the Trump presidency and it’s just everywhere right now. Um, and it just it’s it is it. It kind of feels like a nightmare honestly because…
Cait
It’s mainstream.
Shari
Yeah…and Christians the great commission was never “Take over the world. Take over your countries.” It was “Go love your neighbour” and you can’t do that while you’re also trying to take over the world.
Clare
And not to mention the great commission – wasn’t it given first to people of brown skin colour in the middle east? I mean, yeah that and the mainstreamness of this.
Shari
Right? Yeah.
That really deeply concerned me. Cait, growing up homeschooled, astay home daughter – were you sort of bathed in the normalness of racism? What was that like for you?
Cait
I grew up as a kid in Pennsylvania and we would go take trips to the Gettysburg Battlefields, and there’s a lot of battlefields in that area. Half my family is from the south half of my family’s from the north and so my ancestors fought both sides but I was taught that we are “Southern sympathizers” is the word that was used – because it wasn’t about slavery. It was about states’ rights and all they wanted to do is like make choices for themselves. It’s very much like “the states have the right basically to enslave people”. So that was in my family but it was also in the curriculum you know. We used Christian curriculum. It wasn’t IBLP. It was more mainstream Christian curriculum but they you know I have screenshots of different pages saying that slaves benefited from being enslaved because they became Christians, because they were fed. You know all these lies – and then they barely touched on anything about how colonization affected indigenous people. Ah the genocide – I didn’t learn about that till I got out. Um, so yeah.
Clare
Yeah, and we heard Kanye West rant about it. I was like what in the fresh hell is this? And I just this week, because Hillsong is a dumpster fire at the moment, but I heard Lucinda Dooley who was the wife of Phil Dooley, I heard her preach and she was talking about “this land is mine. This land is mine.” This revelation that God had given her that this land is mine. She’s referring to south Africans as Africans and I was like “What in the fresh hell is this? Are we learning nothing from the progress of society?” And for me it does come back the brainwashing aspect of it which I always thought, you know, didn’t happen and now that I’ve looked into the psychology of it as a free woman, you go “Oh brainwashing actually happens quite easily if the right circumstances are given.” So there’s that, but there’s also dressing up really toxic arguments in really pretty ways so that we can entrap people. And people say to me a lot of the time, “Oh whatever, consenting adults do within an organisation is fine,” but my argument is if you’re in a high-control Religion, you don’t have free will. You have coercive control. You’ve got systems of control that are around you. You’ve got brainwashing and often (and it’s especially women and other genders) you don’t have the freedom to act in a way that they would choose many times.
I want to ask you Tia (and please feel free to say no Clare I don’t want to talk about this today). You said your story got quite a bit darker after the scope of the documentary and it was pretty dark at that point, you’re talking marital rape, talking high-control. You’re talking not having support to ensure your safety. You’re talking being rescued by your best friend who had been exiled from the community due to his sexuality. How can this get darker and how did you get out?
Tia
Well, so some of it is in the documentary because I shared my character arc and they pulled my escape as the way that I got out at the end. But I had been out of the IBLP’s influence at that point I certainly wasn’t using any of their materials.
And we weren’t involved with IBLP people at that point. What happened with my IBLPinfluence is that my third daughter died and it changed me it unlocked me.
Clare
Wow.
Tia
All of the paradigms and promises and the platitudes that they promote – I couldn’t abide by them anymore because I couldn’t make sense of them in my grief. I couldn’t bypass her like there was this great pressure to just bypass what my experience was and have the next baby and I could not.
Clare
Wow.
Tia
Yeah, my brain wouldn’t do it anymore. My husband was a theology buff and so he was always looking for the next thing to solve for God. So the IBLP is a structure that you kind of swim in and stay in. But if you’re hungry for the next thing, the IBLP gets very stale very quickly. It’s ugly. It’s ugly materials. Nothing’s attractive about it. It’s meant to be kind of like very insular so Vision Forum comes on the scene and it’s glossy full bleeds. The catalogues are gorgeous. The toys are gorgeous. Doug Phillips has the Titanic society like the reformed movement moved towards study and being serious. They could drink wine and they could feast. It was so attractive and in a way, it was shinier than what we saw on Shiny Happy People I mean the Duggers are fine but they don’t drink. They eat tater-tot casserole. They wear denim dresses. Vision Forum is like full colour. When you’re in that, you’re in IBLP, and then you go to Vision Forum it’s like stepping through into Oz because it’s so attractive and you feel like you’re just in this experience with God and holy living and the zeal for life and yet all of the throughlines were still present. All of the same attitudes the gender roles, the rules, the structure, the marital complementarianism. It was all still there.
I get one point you said – it’s a continuum. The authors all lead to one another. So, if you’re reading, if you start with one, and you’re reading what everyone else is reading. You know, you move to Michael Pearl, and then you move to Doug Phillips, and you move to the Johns – John Piper and John Macarthur – and you have all these other theology writers. You’re all kind of swimming in the same ideas and it’s intensifying as you go. That’s how we end up with Doug Wilson. Doug Wilson is the darkest. He’s still very, very active online. He has his own denomination, his own seminary, his own town. He’s trying to take over Moscow, Idaho he is embodied, he’s a dark, dark, dark character.
Clare
His own town? Not concerning at all. Jonestown didn’t teach us anything. Oh god…
Shari
Yeah.
Tia
So in 2005 we moved to Tennessee to be in a Doug Wilson covenant reformed congregation. That’s why it got dark because I was now in an actual congregation where everybody was that way. There were no other families to mingle with or my family nearby. You know, it was we were isolated. We were contained and everybody practiced these really dark things that no one wants to say out loud. But I did and as a result of having said them out loud, I have people coming to me saying to me, “thank you for saying this,” and it validates that it was the right move.It was the right move
Clare
Yeah, saying things out loud – ooof that is so hard. It is so hard, and I’m aware that we’re sitting here with four women – four women who have lost family over this, over saying the things out loud over choosing ourselves. It’s not easy. Like Shari, you recently got married. and I streamed in from Australia. It was so fun. But that visceral loss of family, its coupled with the knowledge that you cannot go back. Coupled with the knowledge that even though you can explain yourself until the cows come home, they’re not going to see the logic and the gravitas and the importance of what you’re saying. That is something that I think you and I have bonded over because there’s been a lot of loss there. What was it like for you watching Shiny Happy People and seeing Jill Dugger sitting on that couch weeping, talking about the lack of consent and the ways that she was kind of used for profit? What observations of that and if you care to share some of your own story?
Shari
I mean there are a lot of reasons why I’m not currently in contact with my family. But what it comes down to is I needed to feel a certain level of safety in my relationships with them and like you said, they couldn’t hear me when I expressed that. In watching Jill, I honestly cried watching her because like when she breaks down crying, I feel that in my own body. I know what she’s feeling and it’s a heartbreaking thing because nobody wants to ever. Put in a situation where you have to walk away from your family because they can’t see you and they can’t hear you, because the need to preserve their way of life, their way of thinking, their way of believing is just so important that it blinds them to even their own children? Like that is devastating and heartbreaking. I just wouldn’t wish that on anybody. I actually sent her an email, I don’t know if she’ll read it but I sent her an email just like “I’m cheering you on like you are a superhero. I am so proud of you. I know what this is like, and you are amazing for speaking out.” And honestly, I just I have the most respect for her because it does come at a very high cost.
Clare
Yeah, and then that’s like I can see the look of recognition on your face there too Cait
Cait
Yeah, it’s just – losing family. It’s not something that you go into this wanting to happen, and sometimes it comes down to needing to survive. You can’t survive in that relationship.
If it’s harmful, if it’s abusive, if they’re using you – and you don’t want to lose that person but sometimes that’s what happens. It’s hard, but in some ways, it’s harder to be abused right? So its complex.
Clare
Exactly. It’s complex and the complexity doesn’t lessen over time but the moment you broke me on Shiny Happy People, Tia, was when you said there are people that catch you and then your voice cracked a little bit, and you took a breath and you said “the universe catches you.” And ooof, I felt that. I felt that and I hope that people know that even though, when they listen to our different stories they can they can hear the heartache, and yes I sit with the heartache, I will take the heartache. Because it’s the price of love, and because it proves to me that there’s genuine love. But it doesn’t mean I can go back, and it doesn’t mean I can lessen these walls. But you said the universe catches you. What was that like for you when you left there?
Tia
So that was an ironic moment for me in the interview itself, because I had said all these really hard things and not cried, and then she asked me that question like, “what was it like when you left? I was so astounded and continue to be astonished. It’s like the experience that I have over and over and over again, of finding unconditional love and actual real true support in places that had been vilified my entire fundamentalist yearsall of them – they had said “You know the gays are this, and the and the feminists are that” and they just had all these awful, awful things they would say about the outside world to keep you inside. When I escaped it was through the love and support of people who weren’t just not of our same belief system. They had been actively vilified by our belief system. It’s such a healing thing to allow myself to sit in vulnerability and love people because I just believe love wins. Like just go towards what? What is the most loving response? What is the most loving choice if I if I’m faced with two options? Which one is the most loving? It’s humbling over and over again. I’m not alone, I’m healthier than I’ve ever been,? Choosing myself felt like a trust fall and I was caughtand it was really special to get to share that in an interview that had a lot of sadness in it, to get to so to shine because shining and reclamation and healing is such a big part of what I talk about too. Like that trauma took my past it doesn’t get my present and my future and that moment was me getting to say, “Hey I’m not there anymore. I’m here and I’m shining and I’m curious. I’m curious enough to sit here and tell you the story through the hard things as an example to show people that it’s possible.
Clare
Yeah, yeah. Shari’s just written in the chat “we were promised unconditional love but it wasn’t. We had to leave to find it” and just you’re determined to be the pull quote for the shareables of this, aren’t you? You’re determined, and I see that Shari, the quiet achiever there.
I have to agree with what you’ve just said Shari, and what you’ve just said, Tia. Because my church had campaigned against marriage equality, had campaigned essentially against gay rights before we left. My then Husband and I had been put out the front of a campaign about that because he was high up in the local branch of a political party, and tried to disendorse a sitting MP over his support of marriage equality…under kind of, I say under duress, because my dad was really pulling the strings behind the scenes there and having meetings in his lounge room about how he could campaign against this guy. For all appearances to the outside, we were deeply homophobic. We were deeply anti-gay.
Even though my husband was closeted and I knew it. I wasn’t saying it out loud yet. I definitely hoped that he was bisexual and we went with that for a while but you know, no, he’s gay and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s a beautiful thing. I think that humanity is technicolor and without the rainbow flag in there I mean we’re all very kind of boring both black and white. But ah there’s a whole lot of more you know proper analysis there not just platitudes.
But when we left it was the Gippsland LGBT Community who embraced us before he came out, and it was atheists that we had tried to convert that embraced us and all of these people that we’d been told were less than and that we’d been told we needed to reach out to, and the language is so abhorrent now it I almost choke on the words to say it out loud. But I think it’s important to say the things so that people understand what it is they’re dealing with when they kowtow to dominionists and to white nationalists and I want people to understand the Venn diagrams here. There are not these disconnected nazis over here in these disconnected transphobes or homophobes over here and it’s not just abortion rights over here and no-fault divorce over there. It’s all very much under the same ,I’m going to say it, umbrella. Even though the umbrella thing kind of triggers us all, and of course I’m I’m referring to that diagram that a lot of us women were kind of browbeaten with where you have the big umbrella is Christ and then there’s a little smaller umbrella which is a husband and a smaller, smaller umbrella which is the wife and then a smaller, smaller, smaller umbrella which are the kids. Ironically, if you’re in the rain you only need one umbrella I mean Jesus should be enough.
But you know we were browbeaten with this, but having to call these things out, I think, is a really important thing at this time in history when the advancements made within the dominionist area – the way that they’re coordinated and organized and clandestine and even I think sometimes dishonest in their approaches to politics. I mean there’s so much to it and it starts off with really, really innocent sort of appealing-seeming stuff. Tia, you’ve actually spoken about this – the high voices in IBLP. It seems all very innocent but it’s not…
Tia
No, and it’s manufactured and manipulated. It’s really, not so easy to pin it down to one single cause or book or teaching. There is some cultural impact, and there’s generational impact, and definitely like regional with the south and things. But the idea it goes along with, the gender roles that women are to sound soft and sweet. And there’s a sound that’s soft and sweet no matter what is happening in their life. I mean we’ve seen stories where even if she’s in labor, she’s to be soft and sweet…
Clare
Ah, screw that.
Tia
And she’s not great! It’s manufactured. It’s also infantile. It’s childlike, and there is emphasis on a childlike faith, and a childlike behavior in a subservient sweet underling position. Um, and it doesn’t really help anyone. It makes the men you know. Men are getting attracted to childlike women instead of women – equal partners. But it’s audible, and it’s constant, and it’s a manipulation. I think a lot of abuse hides underneath it.
Clare
Creepy.
Tia
I call it gentle narcissism because so many of the abusers are actually the mothers and they sound sweet and it fucks with your mind because you’re being abused in a soft voice and then you don’t know what to trust? What is what does safety sound like? It doesn’t sound like your mother. Because your mothers sounds twistedit.
Imagine Michelle Dugger. Her voice does not communicate safety to us. But it is soft, and it is sweet, and so it can be really hard to identify where refuge is, where a haven is if it sounds fake and childish.
Clare
I’m going to have to sit with that for a little bit. Got to say that is that that’s something that just hits you between the eyes. What does safety sound like it doesn’t sound like your mother? Oooof. Cait, I want to get your insight on this.
You were raised Vision Forum. You were homeschooled. You were a stay home daughter. I find that I reflexively shift my voice depending on the environment. At work, I’m a general manager. I’ve got a division under me. At work I’ll drop my voice. I’ll speak in a deeper voice. On first dates, I’ll shift my tenor higher. And it’s so reflexive, I almost have to catch myself. And let’s be honest I’m chicken shit. So, I don’t go on that many first dates. Definitely don’t go on many second dates! I’m just like this too hard. But I found myself mirroring people and going “Who do I need to be to be safe here?” and the vocal tone was something that I shifted in order to do that. Have you found yourself doing any of these similar things as you were out there navigating the world for the first time?
Cait
I think for me, it wasn’t so much about tonal shift as just talking. My whole growing up, my family called me shy. They thought I was like the shyest person in the world. But I think there were different reasons for why I just didn’t talk very much and one of them is because women aren’t supposed to have opinions or talk about those opinions if they do have them. It’s better to be quiet than to speak at all, and so I learned really early on that. Not speaking meant I didn’t get in trouble as much. That meant I could go under the radar. I could blend in and survive in my environment better. So for me, leaving was actually using my voice, even to the point of practicing phone calls. You know, like things that I didn’t learn how to do very well when I was at home. Like how to interact with people at the store. Things like that – that was something I had to learn – it was more just talking in general.
Clare
Wow, goodness. So, I’m not alone there, but in a different way than what I thought!
Tia
Definitely not alone. That’s echoed by a lot of survivors. Finding your voice, like sometimes very ordinary, just knowing how to say what you want for dinner. They’ll ask “what do you want for dinner?” and if you’re not accustomed to being able to identify what you want and what your choice is and then going through the language of it. That can feel like a personal revolution of saying, “you know, this is the toothpaste I like. This is t what I want to do.
Clare
Yeah, that is actually really interesting. I’ve got kind of got a funny story about it because I lived with my husband for a year after we separated, and the reason was covid 19 and moving house. But I had been so conditioned towards submission, and not by him. He’d say to me “Fuck the patriarchy” and I’d say “Yes dear, yes” and he’s like “No, not because I told you to!”
So he’s a very good man. Before we split, he’d bought me a laptop for work and everything and it just so happened that he lost the charger for the Nintendo DS and the charger for the computer worked. Anyway, we had an argument, and we were separated for I think nine months at this point. I was instinctively trying to submit, instinctively trying to agree with him, and then I just had this moment where I stopped and went “We’re not married. We don’t have to agree” and I kind of laughed and went upstairs. Patrick’s a very gentle man. but he was quite furious at this point, and he didn’t know how else to win the argument. He’d never had this moment of “We don’t have to agree, I can stand on my own two feet.” So he comes up to my room and he grabs the charger and goes “well this is mine and stormed out of the bedroom.”
And then tried to slam the door but the doors in out in my house don’t slam very well, so it kind of just went “ffffffth” and didn’t quite click shut. I’ve just started cracking up laughing and then he started cracking up laughing on the other side of the door, and still years on whenever we have a stupid little argument one of us will go “well this charger’s mine” and it just undoes the whole thing. But it was a big moment for me. Making financial decisions actually was a big thing, I would still instinctively go to grab the milk that he preferred I would still instinctively you know, get gluten-free stuff even though no one gluten-free lives at my house. It was stuff like that that I really noticed, and um, you know it takes time doesn’t it?
I want to just also lean into the Josh Dugger thing
Tia
Just casually lean into the Josh Duggar thing
Shari
Um, yeah.
Clare
Let’s casually lean into horrendous child abuse. The Vision Forum gent that you were speaking about Cait, there was abuse stuff that was covered up there. Gothard, there was abuse stuff covered up there, and I think if we’re honest, there’s a cultural moment happening right now where people are being called out on abuse, and the church wants to cover it up that was a jarring moment.
Shari
And it’s all denominations too. It’s not just one. It’s everywhere.
Clare
Yeah, yeah, literally in Australia, the news hit last week that it was out in the catholic diocese in Lismore, which is middle of nowhere basically, and I hope I’m getting this right. But ah, there was somebody was suing the Catholic Church for child sexual abuse at the hands of a priest. The church tried to countersue because the mother should have known if she left her child with a priest, he would get abused.
Shari
But how does that make sense?!
Clare
I shook with rage. I Shook with rage
Tia
No, let’s take your word then if the mother should have known that if you send your child to church, they’re going to be molested by a priest, then the mothers should know please do not send your children to church anymore. They are telling on themselves.
Clare
They are! They are! And yet, I mean, you say that with such confidence and such assuredness now, Tia, but that must have been a giant process for you to get to.
Tia
There was a day. It was actually a pivotal, pivotal moment, and I can’t really remember the details of the day because the epiphany was so strong. I realized that you can almost always take in the narcissistic abuser and take their words as a confession, and when I realize that, I don’t play the game anymore. They will accuse and blame you for what they’re guilty of.
Clare
Ah, yeah, yes, goodness me they will accuse you of what they’re guilty of. Trump does it all the time. Far out, what a dumpster fire.
Tia
Trump does it all the time.
Shari
Yeah, yeah.
Clare
Yeah, yeah, but it yeah absolutely and you know I get so much joy out of does anyone follow Abraham Piper on Instagram it’s adorable.
Tia
Yes, oh, he gives me life. He’s proof healing, ultimate ironic beautiful healing is possible.
Shari
Um, oh yeah, love him.
Clare
Yeah, I really, really love it I love Abraham Piper just because of his quirk and his nonchalance about the whole thing, but let’s be honest, there is a big growth to get to that point.
Tia
Yes.
Shari
Yeah.
Clare
There’s a huge growth from complete submission to and brainwashing by and immersion in these toxic doctrines to a point where you can poke fun at them and laugh at them. And I’m not there yet. I do laugh at some things I laugh at the sexual repression in Christian worship music. Um, and I’m just going to say Kari Jobi she comes out with some pearlers. I really enjoy that. The humor is part of the healing but it takes a long time to get there.
I want to ask Cait what was what was it like for you? What are some of those healing moments along the way? Some of those tiny moments of reclamation that actually are giant.
Cait
I think for so long after I left, I felt really alone, like I had been the only one to leave, and then I realized that wasn’t true, and there were a lot of people who have left these kinds of situations. Vision Forum and things similar. Once I got connected with people who grew up the same way or in similar ways, it helped me heal because I was like, “oh this is community. It’s not this pressure to conform. It’s just accepting each other for who we are. And supporting each other in our healing.” One of my good friends, Catherine, the first time we met in person. We’ve been friends on Instagram, we just spent a lot of time laughing about the ridiculous details of our childhoods. And it felt like we must have been sisters because they were so similar, and then somebody else at the table who hadn’t grown up the same way was just staring at us like “What are you laughing about? These are horrible things” and for us, it was like this is just the normal day to day life, and now we can laugh about it because it was so crazy.
That’s not to say it’s not serious. It’s just sometimes that’s the way to get it out of your system is to make a joke about it.
Clare
Yeah I think I think comedy is therapy. I think everyone needs some good comedians, some good comedic kind of stuff. Shit posting Exvangelical memes is a ministry that I take very seriously on the Unchuchable Instagram It is.
Tia
That’s right.
Cait
Yeah.
Clare
But also, I think we need a therapist, a comedian at a punching bag. They’re my 3 and good friends. What about you, Shari? When you left, what were the big kind of healing moments that might have masqueraded as something a lot smaller?
Shari
I think I resonate a lot with what Cait was saying. When I first left evangelicalism, I kind of felt really alone. But immediately, I found people who just kind of accepted me and loved me for who I was. These were people who were part of the LGBTQ community. They were atheists. they were agnostic. They were all of the people I was never supposed to have relationships with, and these people became my community. And I actually married one of them. So it was just like discovering how much I’ve been lied to actually about the outside world and how much I could trust people who weren’t in the church.
I Think coming to that realization was huge for me that was massively healing.
Clare
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was a big thing for me, and honestly, I’m really, really thankful that I’m still really good friends with my ex-husband because sometimes we do have this cute situation where we can be the couple friends that go out to the couple dates with people will like family hangouts and stuff like that. But also, we get the full benefit of being single as well. But sometimes we’ll be like having driveway drinks with our neighbours and stuff like that and because Patrick lives around the corner from me. And we’ll be laughing, and we’ll go “oh it’s just like that time when…” and one of us will tell a story. And then people just look at it like “what?!” Itjust what kind of sucks the air out of the room and you realize “oh yeah I was raised on Mars. That’s what happened.”
To me I was definitely raised on Mars.
I want to ask your opinion on this, Tia. How do we as a society… I mean I’m happy that these documentaries come out. Sometimes it can feel a little voyeuristic when they do these documentaries on these shocking things and it’s our lives. I almost resent being called brave. I’ve been called brave a lot since my story came out, or not much of it was like 1% of the story, but it was definitely a case to kind of put forward in the media last year. People are like “oh you’re so brave” but I don’t want to be brave. I just want to be happy. I just want to live a nice life. But once you’ve seen all of these obstacles to that there’s a responsibility that you feel you have, to keep on advancing the cause of progress, because it just is not a given and for me exposing the nastiness that is at the heart of evangelicalism and at and at the heart of IBLP – I mean seeing the Josh Dugger abuse covered up seeing the Gothard abuse being so difficult to expose, and then we’ve got the abuse in the Vision Forum and it’s stuff that’s happening everywhere. What do we…what kind of response would you like from people who have seen this documentary and see these different threads out in society that are definitely working towards something and definitely been hidden for quite a while? What do we need to do to respond?
Tia
My biggest one is believe survivors. I can’t tolerate, and really theres no room for the argument of “well this is attacking Christianity.” If that’s your takeaway, then go back and watch again because you should be listening to survivors.
How many people does it take to make the point? Everybody’s story is revealing a truth and bypassing to move on to protect the institution or protect the system or absolve the system? Look for causality. Today I read a piece that pointed out that first-generation Christians are very susceptible to cultic-type movements because they’re looking for solutions. Well, that is true in general. That’s why people get into any kind of cult group.
You’re in a chaotic environment, and a cult usually gives you a system that is reassuring. It solves a lot of problems. It’s usually attractive, and it appealing and people want to get into it.
Believe the survivor. Testimony is what breaks that, and it’s the same craving for truth that got us in there in the first place. Yeah, I remember as a Christian, I wanted to know the truth, I wanted to like you know, have the gospel and carry the truth, and the proof was not in the pudding, and the Bible says to examine the fruit. And the fruit was rotten and so I was like “okay, well then we got the truth. The truth is a not is attractive”, and I want to know that and I want to share that so I take survivors seriously. That’s always my point online is believe Survivors. Center them and believe them.
Clare
And oh gosh, that is just so important because the effort that goes into silencing survivors – the Dugger girls – the effort that went into not only silencing them but making them stand up for their abuser just was something else.
It’s dressed up as not touching the man of God in churches. It’s dressed up as gaslighting and you’ve used the word bypassing a couple of times and I want to pick up on it to you because it’s so important – spiritual bypassing is when we bypass emotions, we bypass physical realities and say “no, you’re being emotional. It’s not real because you’re being emotional” or “it’s not real because you’re not in faith” and we bypass things. There’s a lot of that that goes On. And actually being able to go “hey hang on. Don’t come at me with this Tripod being argument “Oh We are a spirit, We have a soul, and we live in a body.”
Actually, we are one and what happens in our body affects our soul, and you know, and nobody’s ever proven the existence of a spirit, so we can’t be sure about that either. But you know ,don’t bypass what’s going on in the physical. Don’t bypass what’s going on in the natural realm. This is all really important.
Cair and then Shari, I’d like to ask you what is it that you feel we need to do in response to documentaries like this rather than just be entertained by them and go “oh look at those strange people”?
Cait
I think some self-examination is important here because a lot of people who are Christians or who are conservative are watching this, and I’ve seen some feedback. Kind of like what Tia said “not all Christians are like this” or “not all homeschoolers”. In particular, I was watching the couple who – their Youtube clips were used with some transphobia – and I saw their feedback saying “I can’t believe they lied to us about what the project was”.
And she said “What’s wrong with Christians being in Government? What’s wrong with people homeschooling their children?” But I think that’s the benign message, right? So you’re getting from this from the top. It’s good for Christians to be in government but what they really want, what the leaders want, is for Christians to impose their beliefs on other people, right? So, I think Christians and government are a great thing, but for people of all religions and all Backgrounds to be in our government to represent who we are because we’re a diverse people, especially in the states, is what I’m speaking to. So just taking what you’re told from your church leaders about what’s right? And what’s wrong? And what’s really happening? Take that with a grain of salt and do your own research. Don’t just believe these powerful people, your pastor, your Sunday school teacher. Don’t believe them at their word. Research. Do your research and understand what’s really happening. Do you want Christians to be in government, or do you want Christians to take over the government? At least be honest about that and do some self-examination to see where you might be complicit in the system and you might be propping up an agenda that maybe you don’t even believe in.
Clare
Yeah, exactly – far out. There’s a big difference between Christians being in government and Christians taking over the government. That hit the nail on the head. Shari?
Shari
I would just you know echo everything that Tia and Cait said and I would add to that. You know, Christians love is supposed to be our number one thing. So if survivors are speaking up about what their experiences have been and we’re not listening, that is not loving. We also need to have the humility to be able to not just question things that we’ve done, but like “what is our church doing? What is our denomination doing?” Are survivors welcome at the table to speak up about their experiences? I think if Christians were to centre love and humility in their spiritual practices I really think there could be a massive change in the culture. But we’ve got to center love for our neighbour above love for our doctrine or love for our past or love for our church and on and on and on. Without that then nothing could change.
Clare
She’s determined to take out the great quote of the episode. Ha! Gosh. Yeah, absolutely. You’re absolutely right? And it was the love Conundrum that really got me thinking and really got me on the road to deconstruction. Would love cover-up abuse? Would love campaign against the human rights of another person? And gosh, one of the most iconic moments in my life in the last few years (actually that’s a lie. There’s been a lot of them) but a moment was when I questioned somebody about whether they knew of the sexual abuse that had gone on in a church that we knew of, that the case was going to court. I asked them whether they knew and whether their pastor had known and covered it up and this person looked me dead in the face and said, “Ah, they’re just offended.” This is a little girl. A little girl who had been abused, and I looked in the face of this person who would honestly believe they’re good, that they’re a good godly loving person.
Shari
Oh my gosh.
Clare
And I said “if you don’t think that child sexual abuse is offensive, what the hell is wrong with you?” Evangelicalism has put being offended as almost a greater sin than being offensive, than being an abuser, and we need to flip that. We need to undo it, but the other thing that we need to do is read beyond the headlines. Because headlines can be spin, and the example I want to give here is I think it was last year a religious freedom act came to parliament, and people went, and the right-wing kind of went “Oh yeah, that’s great – religious freedom.” What it was was a religious discrimination act. Christian Schools, faith-based organizations, wanted the right to be able to fire people who didn’t line up with their um with their faith.
And my my boss who’s a Muslim,. he was like “oh you know, great! We should be able to have religious freedom. I said to him “this law isn’t written for you. This law is Xenophobic it is white-centric. It is not about Muslims being able to practice their faith, buddy, that is not it. Its not about Hindus or Buddhists being able to practice their faith. This is about Christians being able to prioritize theirs.”
And there’s this thing that I’m passionate about is religious freedom for all or religious freedom for none, and you know I do hope for religious freedom for all, but we have to recognize that sometimes in the nuance in the detail in the fine print, the judgment is there. The clauses are there. It wasn’t going to be Christians who were going to be protected by this law. It was going to be unskilled workers was going to be migrants who were looking after our frail and elderly and doing these jobs that we didn’t want to do. They were the ones who get going to but get put at risk to be fired from faith-based care organisations and stuff like that, and of course LGBT people who you know Newsflash “You can be a Christian and be Same-sex attracted. You can be a Christian and be trans.”
That is possible but for some reason we’ve created the two as being mutually exclusive, which is just not factual l so I would like people to believe survivors, be better informed about legislation, and realize that. And Sharis just written in the chat. This is all related to the Christian persecution complex. Holy wow, you are so right. That’s a whole topic for a whole thing. You know, I like to say it’s only persecution if it comes from a specific region in France otherwise it’s just sparkling consequences.
I think there’s is so much to unpack. But we’re getting up to the time that we had allotted. Any last thoughts Tia about this whole thing, this whole quiverful thing, and undoing church abuse and advancing the cause of understanding and believing victims?
Tia
I think that the documentary struck a nerve, and one of the things that I want to make sure everyone hears, if you’re listening, is that if you’re feeling alone, if you’re feeling guilt, if you’re feeling regret, you’re not alone. That is what we’re seeing in this wide response. Between people that yes, yes, people in the IBLP who have come out of it feel very validated, but on a much wider level, people are relating to the influence that they’ve seen in their churches and in their culture and there’s a lot of complicated feelings that come up so just know that those are normal and they’ve felt alone in them. It’s okay, if it takes time to explore them to pace yourself through recovery and to understand that some of these are really deep-seated memories and things that are gonna take work to work through.
Clare
Yeah, absolutely and you’ve got a book coming out soon and Cait is also typing away on her memoir any final thoughts?
Cait
Something I’ve learned along the way, something that helped me get out of the situation I was in, was learning that I have an inner sense of right for myself and intuition. Whatever you want to call it, and I think a lot of times in these environments, we’re told our hearts are deceitful. We shouldn’t listen to Ourselves. We should only listen to the leaders or the teachers or our fathers, and we shut off that voice inside of ourselves that tells us this abuse is wrong or this is not right that this is happening to you. And so, when you have cognitive dissonance about reality, like someone’s telling you they love you but they’re also hurting you in some way, pay attention to that cognitive dissonance. Pay attention to your intuition and follow that and see where it leads because that’s a sign that you’re in a situation that’s not healthy, and if you follow it through, it can help you get out of the situation.
Clare
Absolutely. And Shari, any last thoughts?
Shari
Yeah, so just something that came to mind is just how structured and binary this world is in terms of what’s expected of you if you’re a woman, a child or a man. And so there’s not really room there for individuality, and I think what’s important to state is, if you do not fit into these very narrow boxes that the system is trying to push you into ,that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. God did not make a mistake when he/they created you. We need you to be that person that you were meant to be, and you know, if the system that you’re in is trying to tell you that it’s wrong or sinful, then honestly they’re sinning against you. And don’t question the person you are because we need you.
Clare
Yeah, absolutely. I feel like we could go for another hour and a half and talk about the persecution complex and talk about a whole lot of different critical issues that came up in the documentary. A couple of things before we finish. One is that the leaving is hard, and I think I think you highlighted Tia that you don’t leave the IBLP in the same way that you leave the church. A church you can leave but IBLP is this teachings that go deep within and it can follow you..
Tia
Right.
Clare
So, I think I would encourage people to acknowledge that to yourself and realize that recovery does take time and it does take support and don’t be afraid to seek out community. The fact is that isolation that Cait and Shari spoke about and thinking “There’s no one else out there that has experienced this,” silence is our worst enemy. But as soon as you speak up, as soon as you say the thing just like Tia has, you realize that there are actually a lot of other people there who resonate with some part of your story or a lot of your story, and we can take great comfort in each other in recognizing that what we went through was not normal, was not okay. So there’s that.
Theguilt of complicity. It was another thing I’ve picked up from your content this week Tia. You can you can feel so guilty because of what you were involved in because so much of what these systems are if you can help perpetuate it. They can keep you captive in it for longer.
And that is a really tricky one to undo and perhaps something that I’ll talk about on unchurchable along with that Christian persecution complex in the coming weeks. So there’s both of those things. But I think of that quote from the Doco. “The universal catch you there. There are people out there that will catch you.” There are times when I know I feel rudderless as a parent who’s got young children, who doesn’t know how to raise them because the pattern I was raised within was quite toxic to me. Sometimes you feel rudderless. But you’ve got to trust yourself and sometimes that’s in small steps. Choose your own toothpaste first. Getting the wrong band brand of toothpaste isn’t going to isn’t going to hurt you.
Then maybe work it up to the brand of shampoo and maybe work it up to whether or not God exists. You know you can take this in increments. Thank you so much for making the time today. We’ve got four women on three different continents at the moment.
Tia. Thank you for your bravery and Shari and Kate your unwavering commitment to feminism and recovering from complementarianism and recovering from patriarchy and fundamentalism and evangelicalism. Your voice is so important. I’ll pop all of your contacts in the show notes so listeners make sure that you check it out there. This has been a special episode of survivors discuss Shiny Happy People. If there’s other big issues that you’d like to convene a panel discussion about. Pop me a Dm at unchurchable pod on Instagram or kit mkennedy that’s kit m for Marilyn Kennedy on Twitter and I’ll do my best to follow it up. Tia Cait and Shari Thank you so much for your company today.
Tia
Thanks kit.
Cait
Thanks.
Shari
Um, thank you.
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