The Sin of Thinking for Yourself
I never had to work so hard to be happy.
My friend Michelle (not her real name) is one of the most generous, honest, and fun people you’d ever meet. She’s a mom’s mom and a kid’s mom. She LOVES kids. I mean is genuinely happy to have a bunch of them around, a little bit of chaos, a whole lot of fun, and always, I mean always, has an ear to listen with an inquisitive mind for conversation. If you have something to say, you can tell Michelle. If you want to get the scoop on something, you ask Michelle. Time spent with Michelle sends one skipping off smiling into a field of daisies and you’re glad she had time for you. I don’t know how many Michelle's there are in the world, but we need many more of them. Not only does a Michelle make you feel great about yourself, but she will stick up for you if wrong crosses your path, and she’s not afraid to use her voice to call out horseshit when she sees it.
Speaking of horseshit. I grew up on a huge ranch, in the middle of nowhere, which was also a foster care facility for kids. My parents were permanent foster parents and we had anywhere from 5-11 kids in our house at any given time. You can only imagine that foster parents may need a break from time to time and that’s where relief foster parents came in for a weekend or evening. Michelle and her family moved onto the ranch to fill that position.
The ranch was a complicated place because the pastor of our religious cult was also the ranch director. He later moved to full-time pastoring, where a new person called by God came in to continue ranch management, but still as a function of our church, under the pastor’s direction. Managing dozens of children with hundreds of animals on endless acres of rangeland was the perfect setting for a Disney western or a lifestyle cult.
Michelle quickly identified that things were a lot less Magical Kingdom and much more Kingdom of the Righteous Order.
I could see it from the beginning of how when he (the pastor) came around, people would flock to him. I never trusted him. There were so many things we weren’t told and I had to ask.
Our church pastor was nearly worshipped, and short of that, people were afraid to challenge him. Too smart to not see the situation for what it was, Michelle couldn’t help her impulse to speak up and challenge him when something didn’t seem right. The thing about challenging a person and a system that demands unequivocal obedience is that once you start asking questions or having different opinions, everything is done to keep you from having information or expressing your thoughts and concerns.
Michelle was starting to feel uncomfortable about some things, in particular, she was uneasy about her own children sleeping overnight in the foster home when doing house parent duty. To alleviate her worry, she would sometimes leave her husband there for the night watch and return home with her kids to sleep. She got in trouble for it, but there was a reason she felt she needed to protect her own kids. It wasn’t until a comment made by another houseparent, that she marched into the ranch head-office and demanded to know what they were keeping from her. She found out that some of the foster kids who came to the ranch had sadly suffered sexual abuse in their past, and incidents occurred where some of those kids were passing the same behavior on to other ranch children. As a replacement house parent who was required to have her own children stay and sleep in the foster home, Michelle should have been given this information. She asked why she wasn’t told things instead of having to dig to uncover information. She wondered why no one talked about something so important.
I was reprimanded so many times for how I talked. You don’t talk. But “don’t ask don’t tell” is dangerous. You give them (the people in charge) the power.
Michelle told me about a show she used to watch. She laughed at the memory, but it reinforced her conviction that our church’s policy of secrecy and extreme rules weren’t normal.
I used to watch Seventh Heaven about a pastor with seven kids. There was a scene where the pastor and his wife were drinking wine in the bathtub, and I thought “There’s nothing wrong with that!”
And another time, the pastor was counseling a girl who had been sexually abused and he said “You have to talk.”
Not only was devil juice not to be enjoyed in a bathtub or anywhere else, but the fact that Michelle got in trouble for acting on her concerns about the safety of her children served to sharpen her intuition to think for herself, ask questions, and speak up about things that looked wrong.
You have to think for yourself. You can’t have people tell you what to do.
Eventually, Michelle and her family moved from the ranch but remained in the church. When her oldest daughter graduated from the church discipleship training program, our pastor told Michelle’s daughter that she wouldn’t be moving back in with her parents. Systematically, our church separated young adults and sometimes teens from their families to facilitate church servitude and to govern the narrative, minimizing messages of possible dissent and questioning from parents.
When my daughter came back (from the discipleship program), the pastor had spoken with her and her friend about moving directly into your house.
She’s talking about the house I lived in with other girls. We were either assigned other families to live with who were leaders or elders in the church, or we were put together in young adult houses, often referred to as “the girl’s house” or “the guy’s house.”
He didn’t even tell me and my husband about his plan. But she didn’t even want to do that, she wanted to live with us. So the pastor came over to our house to tell me that my daughter was going to move into the girl’s house, but I got upset and said “Why did you talk to my daughter about planning her future?” He stormed out of our house because he didn’t like me standing up to him.
Michelle’s house, a major hang-out for a lot of us young adults, was a place we felt safe to be ourselves and talk about whatever was on our mind. One time word got back to the pastors that a young adult was driving too fast with Michelle’s kids in the car. Michelle was aware of it and handled it with the young person in question. However, leadership found out and wanted to punish the young adult and accuse Michelle of irresponsibility, so they called her into a meeting with two pastors and their wives. It was the right of leadership to discuss things about anyone’s family they disapproved of. Annoyed that they had every right to discuss her life, but Michelle could never discuss the things that she questioned, she point-blank addressed one of the pastor’s wives
Why do you get to talk and I don’t?
The pastor’s wife looked at Michelle somewhat stunned and could only say
I don’t know.
Michelle and her husband’s resolve to remain in the church deteriorated drastically with increased incidents of leadership scorn and wackery.
Things kept happening that I knew were wrong. Like the time the pastor’s wife made everyone at a ladie’s meeting stand up so she could tell everyone who’s shorts were too short.
It wasn’t only Michelle who had enough of the things that were happening in our church, but others were seeing it too. After the pastor extorted thousands of dollars from church members to build a new church, people were feeling the years of abuse. The New Year was approaching and the pastor was eager to christen the new church space with a special New Year’s Day meeting. It would be one of the last meetings with a dwindling church population. The pastor told everyone who attended the meeting that those who did not want to come to the meeting would not receive the blessing. Having had enough of the pastor’s control schemes, Michelle’s husband stood up said
People! Think for yourselves!
And that was the end of Michelle and her family’s allegiance to the church.
All the abuse goes back to the don’t tell. You have to trust your instincts. If something doesn’t feel good, then you have to listen to yourself.
When someone tells you not to talk and not to say something you’re saying - get out.
Michelle’s family did get out. She even told me that I was partly responsible for it, which I am honored to hear. During their last years in the church, I was in my late twenties and somehow convinced myself and leadership little by little that it was a good idea for me to go to school. My actions to step away from the church to do something that no one else had done made headway for others to think for themselves too.
As Michelle said, she never had to work so hard to be happy. When I finally cut myself free from the church, I began a journey in happiness that only existed in my wildest and deeply buried longings.
It’s impossible to live happily when you’re not allowed to think for yourself or talk about the things you question. To constantly self-censor and have someone shut you down does not lend itself to freedom of expression or exercising an inquisitive mind. It didn’t stop Michelle from doing her best to protect her kids under the steady grind of control that worked against her parental instincts.
Thankfully, those years didn’t change who Michelle is as a person. Somehow she was there for me and all the other young people who found refuge in her home. She listened to us, she fed and watered us, she made us feel good, and she stood up for us.
We need more Michelle's in the world.
