I escaped from Christianity and the Family-Integrated Church movement - Jen Fishburne

[Music] today i'm speaking with jennifer fishburn jennifer thanks so much for joining me today good to meet you finally tim and i just want to give everyone a brief bio for jennifer uh you have done a lot so this isn't going to be covering anywhere near as much as what you have done i'm going to ask you to fill us in a minute but so you i've gotten my notes here that you went to a christian school called salem academy christian school and then you went to the university of maryland and then you went to heber university of jerusalem which i want to ask about in a second and then you were also in the military the u.s army and you homeschooled your kids and then you also now work in finances with insurance and retirement consulting and you also uh study holistic health coaching with nu involving nutrition as well um but before i ask my questions can you tell us a little bit more about what i don't know what is what is your life like and what are you all about today uh today um today uh let's see i live in san antonio texas i moved 45 times before i got here wow so a lot of the different experiences i have in life including the different churches that i went to came from moving around so much and that really had less to do with the military and more to do with just we moved that's all yeah so um so i have lived all over the united states uh we were in germany for 10 years where all my kids were born um i lived in scotland um for a little while my dad still lives there and um so um i've had a huge variety of jobs i've had a huge variety of living experiences i've met a lot of different people um i've done a lot of different things and and that's been really a defining factor in my life it's cool you said you you were in germany for a while my wife uh her parents were in the air force and stationed in germany for a long time so she kind of grew up there and know some german it's really cool what um can you tell us uh before we dive into your your real uh full story what was the hebrew university of jerusalem like and what were you focused on there uh that was um so that's the university of uh university of jerusalem in israel and i was studying biblical hebrew so i want my at one point um i wanted to write a bible translation that would be more accurate because i had studied dozens of different bible translations in english and found that they all had major errors and so uh my goal was to do that and so i wanted to be trained in in that and so i studied biblical hebrew there that's awesome i i'll say i um i actually had applied to that same university and got accepted and submit some things in my life just ended up having to to pull out but um i'm very jealous you got to actually uh to go there that's awesome man it was i was focused on that in a similar sense but i was my path was going to be for bible translation uh with new tribes mission and so it was the idea of of why translate the bible from english which a lot of people are doing um you know with help obviously with with greek and hebrew experts but why not go as a as an expert in the original languages and translate into a tribal language from the original if you can so i'm really uh glad you got to do that and so right now you're doing insurance retirement consulting that must be i can't imagine some of the situations you see with that i don't want to dive on that focus on that too much but is it is it a pretty crazy time to be involved in financial consulting um it's a good time because uh people are scared of what's going on and so basically my goal is to give them peace of mind so it's a good time there's lots of lots of ways that i can help people you know we have literally hundreds of different ways to help people so i treat each situation as unique you know yeah that's awesome i haven't uh dove into the insurance part of it but i was involved with retirement consulting a little bit um i was a stockbroker for uh a few years and um that was it was interesting excited to see more of the active traders the other people that are getting in and out of the market every 10 minutes but on those interesting side of the market i know you're dealing with more of the people that get into the market and stay there for you know five or ten years at a time actually we don't do the market at all so i do what's called safe money options so after people have played with the market and they've lost a lot of money and all that kind of stuff then they're like well what's going to happen to my retirement money what if we have another 2008 2009 crash you know what if you know the value of the dollar is devalued you know what if the taxes go way too high what if the interest rates go way too high that kind of stuff so i help with safe money options where you don't lose your money so you can actually make a lot of money but you can't lose any yeah that's awesome that's awesome i'm sure people appreciate those uh that counseling advice well for every anyone who uh knows you know my channel harmonic atheist my my goal is to focus on uh people's stories uh of you know where when they left christianity and so we're gonna go through some of that but i also often bring in people that have some uh experience uh either just in terms of their own personal research or maybe they even write books or teach but where they've studied the origins of christianity and uh just where the bible christianity came from and so our interview is going to touch on a few of those different aspects which i'm excited about because i love that you know you've done a lot of research uh yourself and uh appreciate that you know you're bringing a lot of important information to the to people's attention not just your personal story but let's start with your personal story um could you tell us about your you know your experience with christianity did you grow up in a christian home i did um i grew up in a christian home my dad um he was a pastor for a short period of time he decided he wanted to get his phd in theology so he found the university of edinburgh in scotland i thought that was the best place to do that so we moved there and i was four when we moved there and uh so uh then my parents marriage didn't last um much longer after that so we moved back to the states we moved to seattle at that time and um um just a a short little diversion here my my dad um after studying all the different religions in the world for his phd he said well how do i know christianity is the one true religion so he became i guess agnostic at that point and what do you do with a phd in theology when you're agnostic so um he went to the um to the president of the university of edinburgh said i can help you make your school as good as any ivy league school in the states and so he gave him that job and that's basically what he did and so he brought the university up and the the uh the um what's the word i'm looking for anyway the value of the university today is what my dad did so he did that for 45 years as he basically ran that university and made it into uh one of the top schools in the in the world so that was uh so that was um so then we you know we basically we went to uh church twice on sunday wednesdays any other time the doors were open you know um growing up i did go to uh private school um for high school um and um so it was a it was a christian school so then of course we had uh bible classes every day um all that kind of stuff um i was in high school i was on the bible quiz team um so i memorized like a whole book of the bible a year and then would participate in competitions um and um and i did well on that um so you mentioned you were a bible quiz i was amazed when you said that because i was something i did too and it really took like the whole concept for me as a child of uh you know hide god's word in your heart to a whole new level because my my dad would would do this thing on saturday mornings where he would have us put verses in three by five cards and we would go through you know 50 to 100 of them on any given saturday morning and so i memorized hundreds of maybe thousands with him and then on top of that once bible quizzing hits it was like you know a couple thousand more and so by the time it was all said and done i was done high school i memorized entire books of the bible and i know you said you did something similar and it's in terms of obviously we look at it different now but just in terms of being able to understand the bible it's like it's been so helpful even though i obviously wish i you know had been had a different worldview from the start but it's been helpful now from this perspective because i can i can remember where all these things are and i just i know the bible so well um not that i'm a scholar but just i can i can interact with a lot of the subjects and i'm sure you feel the same way where you know as you as your research stuff or maybe you know even like you you read a different apocrypha book or the book of enoch like oh i can read that book and i can see where it's paralleling from the bible just because you you know it pops out to you which is really cool yeah do you um do you recall when you were younger that like how the interaction was with your your dad's agnosticism was he after my parents divorced then i didn't have any contact with my dad again until i was 18. okay so the church was most of the dream your mom taking you yes okay yeah definitely yeah and was that just cultural christianity or was she was she a strong believer um she was she i think she grew to be a strong believer you know at the beginning i remember in um in third grade for example and um we had moved to another town we were in bend oregon by this time and um and she wanted to go to this uh conservative baptist church and there weren't too many churches to choose from in town and she wanted to go this conservative baptist church but they had a really long list of rules that you had to follow in order to go to this church um you can't drink you can't smoke you can't play cards you can't go to movies you can't dance you can't do all this stuff and on sundays she would have a glass of wine with dinner we'd go to my grandma and grandpa's and and i remember her struggling with well do i continue to have a glass of wine with dinner or do i go to this church you know and so finally she agreed to to go to this church and and give up you know all of these different things and that was really the start of her becoming very um very judgmental very um what's what's the word where you didn't have a lot of rules in your life uh like very typical or i can't think what the word is but anyway um so her her rules kind of grew and grew and grew from there you know so you know that was definitely one thing that impacted us a lot um it was also a church though where i started memorizing the the verses um in order to go to church camp at summertime um i would have to learn i think it was 600 verses memorize 600 verses each year um and say them word perfect um in order to be able to go to church camp and so that's how we earned our way to that and and so you know it was that was not a bad experience that was fun but also at that church was where we started seeing um they started showing a lot of movies about the end times and um the rapture perspective yes and um and and showing that um really the teaching that stood out to me the most at this church was that um if um if jesus came back and we weren't ready that the world was going to be in total chaos and it would be it would be worse than hell basically so this was much worse teaching than the hell teaching for me right so it was all of the horrible things that were going to happen to us if we weren't ready and what what did it mean to not be ready well first if you didn't ask jesus into your heart of course but the second thing was even if you asked jesus into your heart if you had sinned between that time and the time jesus came and you had not apologized for that specific sin and asked for forgiveness for that specific sin then jesus was going to leave you here and you were going to go through hell on earth basically so at the end i remember at the end of every day racking my brain trying to remember all the sins that i had committed because if jesus came in the middle of the night and he took my family and left me i didn't know how i was going to survive you know i was 10 years old at this point and um and to me that is just it's child abuse you know i look at it now and i i lived in that fear for probably um oh goodness almost 20 years i lived in abject fear that jesus was going to come at night and i was going to be left behind and everybody that i knew was going to be taken to heaven and i was going to be here and and i would just be tortured and so it was i had nightmares for 20 years i had those nightmares and um i've seen other people say something very similar even this morning i was reading someone's story about that and it's amazing how many christians seem to ignore what you're talking about the abusive side of this and the fact that it scares people um and and another side of it that was related was for for me was the whole uh what i would call the frank frank peretti dynamic of you know there's spirits there's demons all over and if you you know you don't read your bible enough or you don't focus on christ enough or you you let any kind of sin in your life you're kind of giving these demons a door in so you've kind of got this threat of some day something bad could happen where you're not taking up the rapture you have to face the tribulation um but in the meantime you know best case scenario there's demons that are just sitting there and it's like they're just waiting with their little scalpels or something to come get you and it is it's of course a lot more than that with you know shame culture but so many ways in which it just it rips you up and a lot of videos i remember videos of youth group where they they'd show these kids like you said they were just left behind and everyone you know all their friends were christians but they weren't and now they got to face this this horrible tribulation by themselves yep a thief in the night that was um that was a really big one i remember yeah that we watched um yeah and the frank peretti books definitely they were they impacted me later on you know maybe uh in my 30s um they were they were a big part of it but you know when when i had my kids later on and i was teaching them um definitely taught them from a christian perspective all of their growing up years but the one thing i did not teach them was any of the left behind stuff it impacted me so much it was i had so many nightmares from it i thought i don't want my kids to have that and i never even spoke to them about it once they didn't even know you know it was a thing so um could i ask about that left behind think for one second um is it correct you you worked one point with phila hayes directly no i with conservative women for america yeah so that was um that was a group that i belonged to that was beverly lahaye's uh group that um it was just it was kind of like um an act an act of a political activist type of a group so i didn't work directly with them i was just part of the group okay gotcha did you feel obviously looking back when everything looks so different but at the time did it feel like they were just you know kind of them and the focus in the family jim dobson kind of stuff that they're just they're just doing the best thing on the planet to kind of save this culture from from the devil and from our ourselves um did you feel like that was just the best way to live your life oh yeah absolutely you know at the time that's that's really what i thought [Music] with i know you mentioned to you were um you were involved with some different churches that had some different um some very interesting dynamics and by the way this would be a good place to plug i'm going to put put a link beneath our video for your video where i think you take an hour and a half or so where you talk through all these things that we're kind of touching when you go through them with infinite detail which is awesome i love seeing that um i've watched it twice now and i recommend people go go see if they're interested it's a great great story so i know we're not going to do that justice but your your video does do it the justice it deserves and i know you've got more videos coming but in terms of just just a overview of all that what were some of the negatives you began to see in some of the churches specifically that you know you went to you took your family to um and what was that like so at what point am i seeing these negatives because while i was there i was totally in you know i was um and and and so from the positive side like what were the what did what that stood out to was the positive side of it at the time i think um that was where i made my friends you know um that was where i that was and we went to um like in in germany for example um there was a church that we went to for six and a half years or so that was assembly of god church um you know completely different from the conservative baptist um and we had um picnics and potlucks on a very very regular basis not every sunday but almost every sunday and because we were in germany we on holidays we spent the holidays together and so they became more closer to me than my family was you know and so these people were my family and um and we would have you know retreats church retreats together and you know and so it was a lot of fun and a lot of community and um and so there wasn't a whole lot of judgmentalism at that church that was the church where i learned love for the first time in my life um i i did grow up in uh in a home that um um just back uh go back just briefly um you know i didn't have any contact with my father from age 5 to 18 at all i didn't have any contact my mom didn't talk to us um so we never had i never had a conversation with my mom so there was um about god oh no about anything okay she was just very very um very private very quiet yeah so she read us a bible story every night um you know but but that was it and so i didn't have love in my life and i didn't know what it was of course at the time i didn't know that i was missing anything because when you're a child you all you know is what you have right so um and so then it was very difficult uh as an adult trying to fit in um to to anything right and so this assembly of god church was the first time that i learned what love was and and and i rejected it at first um i didn't like people getting close to me i didn't like people touching me i didn't like people talking to me in that way and trying to give me a hug and things like that but after a while i learned it and so it was it was actually a very very good experience i loved most of everything that happened there they did try to force me to speak in tongues [Laughter] and i didn't i wasn't going to ever fake anything and i've always been about it's got to be real and so um i would open my mouth and wait for you know some magical thing to come out of my mouth and i did that every week for six years and and it never happened never happened and i started that's when i actually started studying the bible and i thought well let me see what the bible really says about this and that's when i realized i just did a word study for tongues throughout the whole bible it was my very first one very first word study and it and i realized that it was just a known language that you don't know so if i just started speaking russian and i haven't studied russian that would be you know speaking in tongues that's really what all that it was and then if somebody else in the room didn't speak russian you'd need an interpreter and that's really all that it was and so it gave me it that gave me the um the desire to start studying other things in the bible it's like okay well if that's not really what they said it was then what about other things and that's when i started doing k arthur precepts and beth moore studies and henry blackaby studies and really really in-depth studies that were at least an hour a day and i would often do two of them at a time some i'm studying two hours a very very in-depth bible study um a day and then i was teaching those bible studies so sometimes i'm teaching on tuesday and sometimes i'm teaching on sunday but i was the teacher you know at from that point on definitely can i go back to the church for one second did they look down on you for not speaking in tongues or were they just open to the no they were very very loving and i mean i had many many many many friends there um i have nothing but good memories from from that church did you ever have people say something specific about you like i've got this vision for a prophecy from god a word from god for you specifically or was it more generic to the church yeah they didn't do that a whole a whole lot um sometimes they did i remember for instance this one man and this wasn't to me directly but this this one young man and he was around 30 and he had uh some kind of an accident um and he he hurt his head and he was in a coma and he was been in a coma for about 30 days and and um and and uh there would be people that would say they had a word from the lord that he was gonna recover and be fine and then he died and so that was uh so that made me really really question that whole thing right there but every service that we had um people would stand up and speak in tongues and it would be a word from the lord for the whole congregation right and then there would be somebody to stand up and interpret and that was every service and i just thought well i can make that stuff up too you know so but i just didn't i just i didn't think a whole lot about that because there weren't any other choices you know we were in germany there wasn't a lot of choices and i loved the people so much so you know it was just like well you know that's that's fine they can do that yeah i was going to go back for one second to something you said earlier about the whole um the the context of the church being legalistic and how you know that's the word legalistic you get used to it um i went to bob jones uh for my freshman year in college and it's funny i went through a transition where at first i felt like it was legalistic i feel like it was true restrictive and it's funny you when you're in something you know you're insulated you're you're shielded um it's just it's a barrage it's all over it's the whole brainwashing effect everyone's doing it everyone else is happy so what you know what's your problem and it just it gets to you in a you know from the from the insider's perspective it gets you in a good sense you just get used to it and i remember distinctly by the second semester that i loved it like and it kind of scares me to think about but i thrived at bob jones university my second semester of my freshman year because it just was like it was like all the pieces were coming together like how do i live the best life for jesus oh this is it if i do these rules then it's just i'm protecting myself from sin i'm setting up good structures for you know healthy relationships and it just felt so so good now on top of that kind of a side positive was they have this huge art gallery for western religious art and second in the world only to the vatican in rome so i was i was able to go to this art gallery all the time and i even worked there i guarded rembrandts and it was like i loved the artwork part of it um and it's funny i wish i could go back to someone because you know the whole astro theology i think was probably woven into some of the pictures more than i you know knew at the time but um between the art gallery which was such a positive experience for me which i loved and the legalism becoming very much acceptable it was like i felt like i was actually not oppressed at all i felt truly like i was thriving which is so ironic but i think a lot of people feel like that oh yeah yeah definitely i i didn't feel like well there were times so another church that i went to for a long time was a home church from doug phillips and we met in his home and um oh in the home itself okay oh yeah um yeah he had a big like 6 000 square foot house and we actually had an indoor pool and we met around the pool and hoped that nobody would fall in but anyway um so um when we first started i was there you know shortly after they began is when i started going there and that's here in san antonio or just outside of san antonio and um when when we first began it was just a nice family friendly church and families came together there was no sunday school there was no um children's church there was no nursery or anything though all the families came and and we met together and and we had about 125 people all together so it was um bigger than your traditional family church our home church yeah and um and so after aft after the sermon then um we had questions and answers um so you could ask the the pastor or the speaker whoever it was um anybody could ask questions and that would go on for maybe an hour or so and i loved that part of it because you don't get that in a regular church right so i love that interaction um and then after that um we would have a potluck every sunday and so church started at 10 a.m and it would go till 6 p.m every sunday um and so it was so that was another family type atmosphere where we really um became a family so you can see the the common thread here of what stands out to me i didn't have the family atmosphere growing up but i needed that later on right and i was getting that at church and so um but as time went on then it started with uh the the home church started with four um homeschool leaders and because they were all alpha men basically they all had their id own ideas so one by one the three of them left and started their own churches and so then it became just uh doug phillips church and as each one left they would take their kind of their perspective with them and it would that would be taken away from the church and so the church became narrower and narrower and narrower in perspective until it did become very very legalistic so it didn't start out that way but it became very very legalistic and so then we had rules and then so one of the rules was that now only men could ask questions in the time after the sermon so women couldn't talk anymore at the beginning women could talk but then it became that women couldn't talk in the church at all you know is that based on that verse that says that in timothy yeah yeah so um so it became you know much more legalistic in in uh in much different ways so at the beginning they didn't care if you homeschooled your kids or went to private school we didn't have anybody who went to public school but there were some private school families and then along the way it was a rule that you had to homeschool and then at the beginning it wasn't um there were no rules about what to wear but then along the way it was long dresses only um and then you know certain things you know you had to have some kind of sleeves it didn't have to be long sleeves but you couldn't be sleeveless definitely and that's reflective of the i think what people call the ultra modesty movement or how would you describe that movement yeah modesty definitely yeah and the idea that you're a lot of a woman's um holiness and sanctification in in a community context is to avoid being a stumbling block to men so you don't do anything that's going to draw undue attention to yourself and in that sense it seems like and it's very similar to bob jones uh you know women wear long dresses and very um you know modest uh dresses blouses etc so that they don't cause a man to you know look accidentally and see more than he should so to speak um whether it's married man to be tempted to look away or a young man to be tempted to just think in pure thoughts did you at that time feel like that was just a really healthy perspective too just that of course we gotta gotta be holy women we gotta protect the men yes yeah um i really did um and and what was interesting to me um uh at that time in in this church was that the young ladies um were really into jane austen and so they wore jane austen clothes well jane austen clothes were not very modest really they really accentuated the breasts and so um it was it was even though they were long dresses um this this whole part was very very accentuated and it was kind of funny you know when when i look back at it i was like okay well yeah but when i i remember years later learning what the word modest actually means and it had nothing to do with anything sexual but it just had to do with attracting attention to yourself and i was thinking okay these girls wear jane austen dresses every day and they have their hair in jane austen's styles and they go to the grocery store that way they're attracting a lot of attention [Laughter] so it was like okay well i think that that we kind of took that verse and did something crazy with it but um it was almost i was exposed to that a little bit not as much as some groups but there is definitely a sense of the glorification of certain historical eras as if they were more civilized and more i guess protective of women's honor and some of those those ways of dressing really became a just a big source or a big point of like if you're really serious about this you'll look like like this and and it was it was interesting to see it i didn't really dive too deep into what i thought about at the time but i do remember that dynamic being very strong in certain groups especially like you said the the home church kind of groups the homeschool groups um and you know a couple other related you know groups like that that i was exposed to yeah so doug phillips um had a business we called it a business tree he called it a ministry but we called it a business because he made lots of money and um and he would put together uh tours and they were mostly historical tours and people would come from around the world to do these tours and they were all over you know they in fact the tours were all over the world and they were very very good he was very good at what he did um and it was it was really a lot of fun we got to meet a lot of people but you dressed up for the tour so if it was a revolutionary war tour then you wore all revolutionary war clothing you know if it was a civil war tour we wore all civil war clothing it was if it was uh you know victorian era we wore victorian era clothing so we dressed up a lot did you do a titanic one at one point yes yes i think i remember seeing that picture of that one yeah yes yeah i made my daughter titanic clothes and yep wow yeah i remember seeing those pictures ironic that uh they would pick the titanic um and they just so i know we've talked about uh doug phillips a couple times um for anybody who doesn't know um he i don't know too much about him so you add to this but he was um someone who had a ministry called vision form which i think is what you're about to describe vision form and some some side groups that would help especially with um homeschool educational products but also um videos and things that would help you know talk about young men being brave and courageous and strong and doing the hard things and so forth and i think there was even a side branch where they got into doing like a a christian movie like a was it a you know they're like film festival yeah the christian film festival so um if anyone doesn't know that story that's who we're talking about um and um were you involved heavily with those ministries or were you just more in the very very very heavily yes so um yeah so doug phillips um he started out at hslda the homeschool defense association as an attorney there and um and he decided he wanted to start his own uh business um called vision forum and it was basically designed to help homeschoolers give them it wasn't really curriculum it was more just other things so he had a lot of books of teaching character and a lot of craft ideas um it was he focused on very high quality like the highest quality that you can get and that i appreciated you know that that level of um but um he was always teaching on um on how to be a better father how to be a better husband a better wife a better mother uh you know a young a young child who grew up pure and that you had to save yourself for marriage and if you did anything wrong at all that you'd never get married because you're you you were impure and nobody would want something that was broken and um you know so there were there were a lot of uh things that that he that he taught on that um and so then he decided to have you know so he became the de facto um homeschool christian leader there were probably a million families who followed his um his methods of teaching and uh he brought patriarchy kind of back to the forefront he was one of the leaders of bringing patriarchy back which was basically that the men are the leaders of the family the man uh makes all the rules the man makes all the decisions we were not allowed as women we were not allowed to even to ask our husbands questions you know so we could ask a question about the sermon at home but we weren't allowed to ask our husbands questions about a home or lifestyle or anything some some men took it so far as they chose the meals of the day they chose they wrote out schedules for um how the family was going to homeschool you know what each child was going to learn and basically they would tell the wife this is what you will do all day you know is that how your home ever ran no um um there were so for some people the the patriarchy movement helped a man to kind of step in and be a good leader and some people some men took it that way um some of them um it was very very discouraging for the woman when the when the man wouldn't step in and step up and and do anything and we were told you know that we were sinning if we would make decisions on our own and yet the man wouldn't make decisions and that's often what happened in my home and it was very very difficult um because i felt like i'm not going to just sit here and do nothing and he's not going to do anything and you know i'm not going to just abdicate you know so i always felt like i was sitting um because i was teaching my kids and i chose what to teach them and i chose what they were gonna wear and i chose you know all the rules that they were gonna live by and um and and he was more an absent type father um that's gotta put women in a bad spot especially when that kind of situation you're describing where you know you feel compelled to do certain things for you know just for moral teaching and for you know spiritual uh biblical guidance um but also just with even going back to the bible you know you do have this conflict these conflicting messages where paul says that you know i don't don't allow a woman to speak in church let her ask her husband at home but yet he has women deaconesses and women that are very involved in this ministry and even in the old testament you have these these great examples of of you know deborah and and esther stepping up to the plate and then other people um you know coming up and doing great things saying great things doing doing amazing things and um even i remember even recently um somebody post a christian posted a meme about uh that lady and judges i forget who it is but what's that how does it say deborah but um the one with the the the stake yeah yeah i forget the name but it's like it was like you know i wanted a proverbs 31 or i wanted to be a proverbs 31 woman but just so you know that includes being a biblical woman in every sense including this i might have to drive a stake through a bad guy's head right it's like you put women in this horrible spot and i was going to ask you do you remember or were you exposed at all to a group called the institute of basic life yeah so that's bill gothard yeah i think that was i i wasn't heavily exposed to as a little bit exposed but i think that's got some similarities right yeah so most of the people in our home church at doug phillips church they did um they did bill gothard's material and and iblp was was one of them you know one of bill gothard's material um i grew up with that um with the iblp so i kind of already knew all of that kind of stuff and i did go to bill gothard's conference so he has a big conference or used to i don't know if he does anymore but um he used to have a big conference that they encouraged um young people to go to um definitely from 13 to 18 you know and and that's where he would teach make sure that you dress modestly that you don't date and um that you have to have this umbrella covering over you and so um a young woman is never too um never to do anything without her father's permission and then she lives under her father's house until she gets married and um then she doesn't do anything without her husband's permission so a woman never does anything on her own basically it's that was a big big part of his umbrella teaching you know um so one of the uh the the director who i think he wrote the homeschool curriculum for bill gothard which is another uh aspect of bill gothard's ministry right it wasn't the iblp but it was uh they're they're all meshed together right he uh he was the director of the homeschool um curriculum writing uh area i can't remember what was called anyway um so he had eight eight kids and um he decided he at one point he had an affair with his secretary now the secretaries uh that they had at bill gothard's in um place they were all young 15 16 17 18 year olds who were supposed to be learning the bill gothard's methods right and so they bring these young beautiful young girls in to be secretaries to these guys who were in their 40s 50s 60s and um and these girls um you know they're all modest they're dressed in these long beautiful dresses and you know it wasn't like they just wore some of them wore like a long jean skirt but usually they wore long beautiful dresses and they looked beautiful and um and so there was i remember there was controversy about whether or not they could wear fingernail polish you know and so some of them would some of them wouldn't but um it was not uncommon that the men would end up having affairs with these young women and um in many stories that bill gothard you know was inappropriate with many many of the young women i don't think that he ever had sexual intercourse but very inappropriate with many of them so anyway this this man he had uh he had an affair with um his secretary and um so he decided to leave his wife and eight children for this young secretary and so um i think because she got pregnant um and so the wife and the eight kids moved to our church so they they moved from illinois to san antonio to come to our church because they were absolutely devastated so we had a huge bill gothard um presence within our church uh after that definitely could i ask i want to keep it you know focus on your story but just a quick side uh question with the whole you know ultra modesty the the long dresses and so forth do you it seems like kind of like what i said about bob jones when you're in it you feel like you're actually thriving you feel there's a sense of pride i'm part of a community that's doing the right thing we're obviously totally thinking about god all the time we're trying to you know take all of our all of our actions all of our thoughts captive for christ um did you ever talk to other uh you know women or young girls throughout the years where any of them ever seem to question kind of the the implications of if you didn't do that you're you're a bad person you know you're you're a temptress or what have you that like it's did people fall through the cracks ever that you saw or did people ever you know kind of quietly question um and also kind of a kind of maybe the bigger narrative that a lot a lot of society asks about is just this whole idea of if you if you do end up getting attention to yourself either a little bit of attention or a full-on attack or something that it's really your fault that you're the one that should be blamed for it did that kind of discussion ever come up that you recall we weren't really allowed to talk about those kind of things um if if if we if i ever brought and i was the most vocal person in our church all right so if i if i ever brought up um a concern or a question that went against anything that we were being taught um i was disciplined and shut down and not allowed to speak to people for a period of time and things like that so that was just not allowed um so like a kind of shunning almost kind of yeah yeah wow and but um at home um you know my daughter my own daughter she brought it up all the time and i and i wanted to have a very open um atmosphere with my kids at home and so i let my kids talk about everything even though i did not agree at all and so we would talk about that kind of stuff for hours and hours and hours because she hated wearing um [Music] on one hand she loved the jane austen clothes she loved you know all of the clothes that i made her for dress-up things she loved all of that but she wanted to still be normal in other areas and we didn't do that because it was you know 24 7 we wore these long dresses so um you know even our our nightgowns had to match um the match those you know those uh those different things so um so i did have many many many long conversations with her about it and she did not did not like it at all you know even though i told her the reasons and all that kind of stuff it was she was never you know this first thing that she changed when she left home i'm just curious you mentioned the word nightgown i'm just curious what were women still encouraged to be very um you know connected and fun in their you know marriage life with their intimacy with their husbands or was that was there any discouragement on that or i would assume that with all these people having um you know preserving themselves for it that at least in my in my experience the message was preserve yourself for it but once you get to it you know dive in this is god's gift for you you know enjoy it did it seem like that to you or was it a different story at all i don't think they really talked about it i don't remember it being talked about much at all you know not not in the not in the groups that i was in yeah um gosh one funny example that came up recently there's a show on netflix now uh it's called unorthodox um if you've ever seen it but it's about there are i believe hasidic jews in um in new york and at one point they focus a lot on how this young girl who got married was um you know expected they're pretty much expected to start having kids as soon as you can and it was it was almost ridiculous how they uh portrayed it like like they don't take almost any clothes off you know they pulled the blankets way up so you can't see each other they're wearing the whole show and it was like you know being in it with your partner with you know 99.9 clothes it was just it was pretty comical to see so you the one other thing i want to ask about the whole if you've messed up um you have basically cross bridges you know you've obviously upset god you've gone against the church community um kind of the whole i kissed eating goodbye concept you know you go to the altar and as you're about to get you know married to your spouse you know the other people that you've you know kissed or slept with would ever come up beside you and it kind of ruins your wedding day um was that pretty strong in terms of that like like if once you've made a mistake if anyone in the church ever does make mistake pretty much you're now the you know you're the you're the black sheep of the group and then like was there did you ever see cases where people would kind of get restored and was restoration full or was it like yeah we restored you but you're still kind of on the outside like what was that dynamic like of of the people that didn't do those rules and made sometimes maybe some really bad mistakes from the group's perspective so there were only two people who um who got caught you know i heard years later that things happened in the bathroom um because we were at church all day you know ten to six you know so things would happen in the bathrooms but um i only know of two people that got caught and so um one was a young lady who got pregnant and um and so they brought her forward in front of the whole church to rebuke her and chastise her and um and then they said that the devil made her do it and i thought that was very strange but they wouldn't name the man and there were rumors about you know who it was that one of the church leaders um that's like the jesus story with the stone or the kid whoever cast the first stone um you're like where's the man yep yep so that you know there were rumors that it was one of the church leaders i still don't know um you know who it was but um then i remember that um the it was a big scandal about whether or not we could have a baby shower for her because she had a baby in sin and so she was pretty much ostracized from everything from that time she continued coming to church with her family i think as long as she lived with her parents because it was mandatory um but she was ostracized from most most of the people ostracized her even after she had publicly repented well um yes uh you know it was it was never the same it was never the same that's gonna break your heart so much to see yeah yeah well and at the time you know i didn't know what else to think you know she sinned i didn't i didn't like the the whole devil made me do it type of thing i actually spoke out against that i'm like the devil didn't make her do that you know but um um but uh you know that's we were so steeped in it it was the the absolute worst thing that could happen that was the absolute worst was that a woman um has sex outside of marriage there was nothing that could possibly be worse in that church you know so she had committed the basically the unforgivable sin yeah the kind of the the permanent um the thing that comes across so many cultures and religions is like your virginity is your primary gift and once you lose it you're just you're so tattered and and worthless it's it's amazing what that that one concept does your virginity is your primary source of pride you lose it you got nothing really you know your life's pretty much a shambles at this point [Music] could i ask just for saying going back to the patriarchy thing um just for anyone who doesn't know obviously people in general in the culture talk about patriarchy meaning they're you know that men control things and men are in in such uh spots of authority in most churches in most religious groups and that's you know something we all see it's obvious but patriarchy within some of these groups we're talking about it meant a little bit more um you touched on some of it but one of the things too is um the whole idea of of a a man conquering and a woman's submitting and i know that um you've had a little bit of exposure to doug wilson uh new st andrews college uh out in idaho and that concept that they instill in their students of you know the man is the one with the vision he's the one who who plants uh and i think doug phillips may have had some of this stuff too but what is that did that did that concept hearing that as a woman did that feel like yeah i just i want to find a good strong man and i want to this is just this is the way god made it did it feel threatening at all do you think to some women to hear that i'm supposed to just be submissive i'm supposed to receive i'm supposed to follow and especially for the women i would think that were more headstrong maybe naturally you know did did that cause a lot of rips or how do you remember that kind of fallen as the different people that you interacted with so that would depend on where you were at at what stage of life you were at when you heard that message right so if the young girls grew up with it then they were kind of brainwashed into well that's just the way that it is right and um and so we didn't have we didn't have too much rebellion on on that from the girls that kind of grew up in all of that but it was more the people my age that you know you're already in your 30s 40s 50s whatever and then all of a sudden you can have no life of your own you have no opinions you have no views you have no vision you can't do anything uh that you like to do you have to give up all of your likes and all of your life now and you just have to do whatever your husband likes to do whatever he wants to do if he wants to move you have to go and follow him if he wants a new job you have to support him if he wants um something for dinner that you don't like you have to make it anyway you know if he wants sex in the middle of you doing something else you have to stop and do it whatever it was um that he wanted um you gave up your whole life just to serve him so that was more difficult for those of us who didn't grow up that way right so that was where i think the difficulty came in and then especially you know as i was talking about before not all the men took that message and did what they you know were being told to do with it and so then you know a woman can't follow a man who's not leading so if the man didn't lead the woman felt twice as bad because she maybe wanted to but couldn't and you know so it really depended on on where you were when you first started hearing that message puts a lot of pressure yeah it puts a lot of pressure on the men too to really step up like if you're naturally more of an introvert or you're more passive just for whatever reason it definitely puts that that sense of shame and like shame on you for not leading your family and devotions through three or four times a week shame on you for not bringing insights like you know i remember the the sense of you know if you don't it's not just about reading scripture you need to almost like teach almost like a little little church service like teach you know your family what does this mean how does this apply to us and if you're not good at that or you just feel like you're more you know more passive in it there's a lot of shame for the men to say you're you're not stepping up and yeah there's a lot of books that have come out you know i remember books like uh point man by steve ferrar and other similar books um i think uh it may have been the um steve um they their radio show they may have done some of that just you know men step up to the plate be a man um and i remember several books coming out you may remember these the titles that i don't remember but men about men being adventurous like like take the adventure be a warrior for god yeah wild at heart that's well to heart that's the exam uh eldridge and he's like yeah and it was very inspiring if you're in it but if you didn't measure up it just felt like you know kind of like you were just you're this you're the car in the slow lane that can't the can't you can put it at full throttle and you can't get over 65 and people are just passing you at 90 and you're like oh well i give up and it very much would i think a lot of men did give up because they just felt like they can't i can't measure up so what happened uh obviously you've talked about a lot of different dynamics of this group what happens next in your personal story so uh politics happen next okay so um i was um it was the 2004 election um with um bush and who was he running against carrie i think it was john kerry and um and doug phillips father was the howard phillips he had been a cabinet member in nixon's cabinet i believe and he was the president of a third party group called the constitution party in that particular year they their candidate um was a little more well-known than other third-party candidates uh peroka that's what his name was and so um doug uh preached a lot on why we should all vote for his father's political candidate and um so at the same time doug in his ministry uh vision forum he had a blog and he wrote on his blog every day and and this was you know this is in 2004 so there wasn't um not a lot of blogs had comment features on them you know people would just write and then you'd read it and then that's how blogs worked right and so you just follow people that you just were madly in love with and you just you know oh look this person wrote this today and and you had no opportunity to interact right and so uh doug um doug was uh he used to be a speechwriter for was it bush for one of the presidents i do believe it was the uh the old elder bush that doug phillips was a speechwriter for he's very very good at public speaking and writing um and so um i mean there was reasons why he did so well in in what he did and i do like to give credit where credit is too um so he had written this article and he had candidate a candidate b candidate c and it was supposed to be a logical article on how you choose who to vote for and so he talked about these three candidates and everybody knew who canada a b and c was without saying the names right and so um at the end then he had of course you're going to you know vote for candidate c and then he said if you have any feedback to this article please write me and he had an email address down there and the email address was one of his interns so it wasn't actually to him but um of course we were very close i had a cell phone number i had his email added you know all that kind of stuff and i'm not going to write to his intern you know so i decided to write and i wrote a long response maybe 10 pages and he was really emphasizing logic so i wrote back from a logic perspective and i went paragraph by paragraph by paragraph of everything that he wrote and i showed him all of his logical fallacies because that was his perspective right and then at the end of my uh and i did send it by email directly to him um at the end of my email i said written with the blessing of my husband and because i couldn't say anything without my husband's blessing [Laughter] so he got that and i didn't want his intern to read it and for doug to be embarrassed because i felt that he was so far off the mark you know he'd made so many logical fallacies on the on this so what happened was this was a week before the elections so 2004 16 years ago um and it was uh we were getting ready for church now we had communion at the beginning of church every sunday and this is um more of the the shame and condemnation type of stuff that we would have but so every sunday after we would sing our three songs we would um have a communion message and then we would have to ask for forgiveness for the sins that we had committed since the sermons start i mean since the since the service started so from 10 to 10 40 we had to ask for forgiveness for those sins and i'm thinking i'd sing three songs and listen to a sermon i didn't sin you know so i i wasn't sure what in the world we were doing it always confused me because we were supposed to have confessed all of our sins before we got to church right and then we had to do that and then if we had offended anybody at church we had to get up and go to them at that point and make it right before we could have communion so people would you know get up and apologize for what they had done wrong so doug came to me and asked if i was going to apologize for writing that letter and i said no i didn't do anything wrong i didn't sin by writing you a letter i said i even had the blessing of my husband and he says okay you're gonna pay for this and i didn't know what he meant at that time so um after we had so we have two sermons so the first was a communion sermon and then we'd have a regular sermon after communion right so he so he was preaching the regular sermon that day and what he did was he brought my letter and he read my letter paragraph by paragraph and he preached against me for the whole sermon people knew it was your letter um i don't think anybody knew because he didn't say my name okay um i made sure that people knew i just made faces you know i wasn't allowed to say a word um i couldn't respond i couldn't do anything but i made enough faces that people could figure it out and people knew that i was the only person that was vocal enough to ever oppose doug phillips ever right so um somewhere along the way um in that same little time period um doug had decided that he wanted to sleep with my daughter's best friend and she was 15 i think at the time maybe 16. and so um based upon other things that we had had he knew that i was vocal enough that if my daughter's best friend said something to my daughter i was gonna know about it i was gonna do something about it so he had to get me out of the way so in january then he excommunicated the whole family and um so at first we thought it was because of the election thing um and it took us it was actually 10 years later that we found out that it was because of lourdes um but anyway so when they got up um and they read the charges against us they're they were very vague and very broad and it was like jennifer's not a godly wife and i'm like okay so what have i done wrong you know if you don't tell me what i've done wrong then i don't know how to change it and how to be better you know and i tried everything i could to be the most godly wife i could possibly be right and um and he had no examples he had no nothing to say and so i was excommunicated that day and they excommunicated the whole family with me basically for that which means just don't don't come back till we tell you to be pretty much oh no ever however okay ever yeah it was a permanent it was permanent and remember at the beginning when i told you that the church started with uh four different homeschool leaders and then they they split off and started their own churches so that became a community of churches and eventually we had five churches in that community so all five churches were required to shun us and by shunning that meant that if they saw us in public they literally folded their arms and turned around and turned their back to us including my youngest daughter um who is severely and i remember that was probably the hardest part for me was how they treated my kids because um she was let's see at that time she would have been 11 or 12 years old and she had the mind of a two-year-old you know and all she did was hug people that's all she ever did was hug people and so we'd see you know we see people out in the community you know at the grocery store or whatever and um and she'd run up to them to give them a hug and they would turn her back turn their back on her and she would just cry you know she had no idea i couldn't understand you know why at all did anyone buck the system and be friendly anyway oh there was at at first that one of the churches did take us in but um then finally doug is so powerful he's very very powerful man he was able to get them to stop allowing us to go to church and then nope for um for years and years and years nobody nobody would speak to us so that was our whole life yeah you know that was all of our friends my kids lost all their friends overnight because of up of nothing you know because because he wanted to sleep with natasha's best friend um and you know i lost my whole support system overnight um we tried no sense of restoration or let's let's let's work this out [Music] i tried over and over and over again and and mark my ex he tried um he wrote letters to um some of the other people and you know you know we tried everything and uh and they just said nope you haven't repented and i'm like i don't know what to repent from because you haven't told me what i did wrong yet i can't you know so you know it had nothing to do with it because he wanted to sleep with this girl so you know they were having a relationship this whole time that's why you know they had they weren't going to let us back in for anything we even tried going to different churches in town i don't know maybe 20 maybe not quite maybe 15. and um and when he found out then he would contact them and threaten to sue them um and so the next thing we knew we'd get a letter in the mail or a phone call saying don't ever darken our doors again so um you know basically that was the end of me going to church even though i desperately wanted to go to church at that point can i ask it sounds like it has a lot of similarities to what we all read about hear about of cults did it at any point in that like when did it strike you that this is going way beyond a regular church in church because there are churches that do church discipline but it's very very different but that's that's like to me um fringe and extreme and bizarre and all that that's very much did you feel like yeah so the day that we had that that uh confrontation where he asked me if i was going to apologize for writing the letter and i said no um and he said you're going to pay for this i answered and i said i think you have now officially become a cult and to me that was that day and that was three months before we were excommunicated so that was you know when i saw them crossing lines like that when they demanded that everybody vote for their candidate yeah yeah could i correlate that to christianity then did you were you questioning only you know one church one one narrow viewpoint or were you actually questioning christianity yet at that point oh no not at all um yeah so no i was i was 100 on board with with everything that that they were doing and so that's why you know it was so devastating to me to be kicked out of everything that i loved everything that i believed in and i knew there was nothing else out there because all five churches in the community who believed that way had were required to shun us you know so it was it was you know it was something that i desperately wanted but now i look back on it you know it was probably one of the worst things that ever happened to us but at the same time it was the best thing that ever happened to us looking back because it got me out of a cult it got me out of you know that that uh really really religious thinking it got me out of all of those rules and all that kind of stuff and so i'm grateful now but it was very very difficult i love how you portray it because that my experience is very similar where you when you're in something bad you feel like this is crazy this is so painful but looking back you wonder would i have really been shaken up enough if things have been kind of status quo um and even i remember what you're saying reminds me of a show i watched years ago as a kid um i didn't watch it for purposes of trying to deconvert obviously but i remember as a young teenager there was this video my parents had had on it's called the silence at bethany and it was about a very ultra uh conservative mennonite group back you know um way back in kind of the anna green gables time frame i think and you're very very conservative you know men sit on one side of the mennonite church women on the other um you know if you have white walls on your tires you have to switch them out to you know black tires and paint over the chrome or get the chrome removed somehow you know nothing flashy and if i remember correctly the story was about a man who who came to the community who was kind of a an outsider still probably a christian but an outsider of sorts and he kind of joined the community by way of of you know marrying one of the elders uh daughters and you know kind of fell in line became part of the group and it was very very healthy so to speak but eventually there was some kind of conflict and eventually it kind of built to this you know boiling point and i remember as a kid being surprised at the outcome they kind of painted it like everyone expected this this man who is the the new guy to kind of eventually you know crumble and repent and fall in line and it was almost like we know this is all about to be over and we're going to have a great time and we're going to break you know have this big sigh of relief and if i remember that it was against those years ago i met from my memory correctly um in the movie the man gets up and basically in church and says goodbye we're moving away we're done and you know looking back when things like that you know make you think like wow like there's there's more options than just i can bow my knee and and you know take this oppression i can actually choose to walk away and that that wasn't much big part of my deconversion but it was you know kind of probably a behind-the-scenes seat of like there are other options and it makes you wonder if you didn't ever have this situation you wouldn't have considered the other option so it's it's cool that you're kind of seeing it in the i guess maybe the healthiest way you can even though it was painful at the time could i ask you i forgot to ask about one of the dynamic about these kind of groups and i wanted to touch on it before we get to your um kind of your main deconversion story quiverful for anyone that doesn't know what quiverful is um if you haven't seen the duggars etc um what does quiver full mean and how does that relate to these churches and then after that we move on back to your master d conversion story so this book here quiver full is uh written by katherine joyce and uh so she wrote about a bunch of different stories and my story is one of the stories in this book um but quiver full um i just had to get the book thank you for showing me uh quiver full just means to have um a quiver full of kids uh so it means to have lots of children um so people were the definitive number is different with ever with different people so you know some people think six is um a quiver full of kids some people think eight um i actually looked up the definition and there is no real definition um you know it's different with everybody in our church the number was a dozen and if you didn't have a dozen kids then you were you were you were looked down on you didn't you didn't meet up to the to the right number we only had three so we didn't make it and the word i'm sure you'd know this remember this first better than i can but there's a verse i think in proverbs it talks about um some like blessed is the man that has a big family it has this quiver full of children is that yeah that's where it came from so it's just it's just a bag that carries arrows and so the arrows were the children you know and you send them out you know you train them the right way and then you you send them out when they're when they're ready basically shooting the arrow and the idea in a sense is just you're kind of creating a little you're a little army for jesus you know that you know we're christian soldiers but the more christian soldiers we have the the easier it will be to impact culture and there was it seemed to me and i might be uh just making this up but it seemed like there was almost a sense of out out breed the pagans like if you want to take over this world for christ outbreed them yes that's what we were taught every week definitely was very much the message do you remember ever seeing single women that um just maybe maybe would have wanted to have a family but just it didn't work out they didn't find the right guy or whatever or they were even married women that you know were presumably you know unable to have children did you ever see that and were those women kind of seen as outsiders to the to the main group we weren't all we didn't really uh have people like that in our group they wouldn't have been they wouldn't have been to made welcome yeah it would have been uncomfortable yeah that's interesting and a good example for for anyone that uh again doesn't know any of these families i i know several myself but um if you've ever seen the duggars um on the tv show and so forth they're they're i think a classic example among many and they came and visited our church too because they were definitely a part of our same movement so okay so you've met the duggars okay very cool um the and i believe i remember um one of the books i saw something about a love that multiplies is the idea that you know i think the other side too i didn't mention this but just the idea that god god wants to bless you you know it says in genesis be fruitful and multiply and it's almost it's not just seen as like a you know build up a christian army of little kids that love jesus but also just this is the best life a lot of these things were from my perspective they're like this this is the best way to live it isn't just yes there's a theological implication or there's a directive here for the way we attack the cultures uh you know rejection of god but this is just this is the best life the most beautiful life is a life full of full of children and obviously that the hard part about is the distortion because children are beautiful we for example we have four children um they're all young four kids under age six i would be open to having you know another one or two children if you know we were able if we're able to uh to work that out but it's it's it's it's like you you want to you want to take the beauty of life of children but it's kind of taking it to an exponentially different level it's saying yes this is abuse children are beautiful things they're beautiful creatures um they bring so much joy to your life but when you bring this you know pretend god into this situation it becomes like a if you if you if you do anything if you use birth control whatever if you stop it you're basically saying to god god it's clear that you have a plan you have a design and we want to follow it not just in the sense of it's it's one way i'm with one woman for life but in the sense of god clearly expects you to be coming together in intimacy on a regular basis which means you're going to have kids on a regular basis don't stop god's design in any way and i think without getting again hopefully side tractor i would imagine there's a lot of people who felt very a lot of guilts if they chose to say you know what i think it's time to stop let's use birth control let's abstain but whatever and just this guilt of we we we chose to not follow that quiverful path um i i'm just saying this more passing but i feel bad for the people for him that guilt was was probably he keep going pretty heavily oh yeah very much so i mean it was that was taught almost every week probably so um you know i don't if anybody chose to do that um they didn't voice it um because that would have been definitely a sin yeah yeah and even even passively the sense of uh just linked a lot in my experience to abortion in the sense that um for example woman on the pill is is thinning potentially sitting the lining of her uterus therefore you could technically get pregnant very short-term the uter the this the fertilized egg looks for a place to implant and can't implant because you have effectively uh changed where it would basically nest you've made it an inhospitable place for that fertilized egg therefore it kind of self-aborts and you're basically a participant in abortion if you don't just let it happen the way god designed it and yeah it's it's that's uh i don't want to get again off track but that's that's that's a heartbreaking uh set of another set of of shame shame culture things to bring people so go back to your story i'm good if you want to comment and then uh if you could also just um bring us back to your story um yeah so let's see so at uh after i was excommunicated then you know we fought for about a year and a half probably to try and come back or to try and find a church to try and reconcile try anything you know absolutely desperate my kids took it much harder than i did my ex he didn't seem to care at all he just went to work every day you know but my kids were absolutely devastated and i taught them a lot to then about um forgiveness we studied the story of joseph over and over and over um you know trying trying to move on um and then i began to find out that uh doug phillips had um done other things to other people and um he had hurt other people in in other ways and it was all very very secret but people started contacting me and so i began to realize that he wasn't who he portrayed himself as being and um and so the biggest thing that he portrayed himself as being is the example of how to be a godly father how to be a godly husband how to be a godly pastor how to have the perfect church and that's really what we were we were the example of how to have the perfect church and um and so you know that was very much what what he was teaching all of this and then i found out behind the scenes that he was stealing many people's businesses and selling those products in his catalog they were actually stolen he actually started his business by stealing the database from hslda homeschool legal defense association he stole their database emailed everybody and it looked like they were just getting something from hslda but it was really him starting his business and so he was able to start it up immediately he just you know had a huge huge amount so that was very very common and then um anytime that anybody uh did so he would he was very active in um it was called the national council of um ncifc it family integrated fcific national council of family integrated churches so he was like the the the head i guess president i'm not sure uh scott brown and doug phillips i think were uh president of this this council and basically home churches would apply to uh join this group uh where they could have these family integrated churches and so they had to basically go by doug's rules and that's how we ran our church so we were the ones that everybody looked to and so if they had somebody in there in another church that didn't follow the rules exactly then doug was the one who made the decision on how that church was to discipline this person and so if anybody kind of uh disagreed with that decision then a doug would threaten to sue them to shut them up and because he was a lawyer he did that pretty often and so i found out that he was regularly stealing businesses he was destroying families he was destroying churches and he was threatening to sue anybody who said anything about it in addition to the whole allosaur thing where he actually stole the whole dinosaur head from the allosaur dinosaur dig that was another whole big thing so i knew about a whole bunch of things that he had done and i knew that he had shut everybody up and everybody was afraid of him and i thought why is everybody afraid of this man he needs to be exposed and the and so i chose to go online and this was my first time i'd ever been online really basically um and other than reading his blog i chose to go online and tell my story of what he had done and um and i had a couple of um lawyers who were helping me so i could do everything legally um so that he couldn't sue me um and uh so um the only reason that i did that was because he was a major ministry leader there were a million families following him he was doing this across the board it wasn't just a little oh we've got a little you know i'm excommunicated from this little church of 125 people you know it was you know it was this was a big thing that affected a lot of different people and because he had a pattern of doing this over and over and over that i found out about so um so i did tell my story um eventually i had over a million readers on my blog in 2007 and um that was supposedly the the biggest story in 2007 in the in the christian world although it was still in a very small pond you know um and so um i just started exposing everything um that he did and eventually and it did take you know 10 years for the whole thing to play out you know eventually he lost everything he lost his business he lost his ministry he lost his church he lost his family he lost everything and um and i i don't feel bad because he did it to himself you know it wasn't something that i did maliciously i um the people said that they believed me because i was so kind in the way that i told my story he actually set up 10 websites he had people working for him set up 10 websites to lie about me they were basically 10 crazy crazy websites that just told wild and crazy things about me and my family it was it was crazy so but um during that time when i was um um i was i still believed everything and then i started to like question the values that we had in in the patriarchy movement and i and no i'm getting ahead of myself all right so i'm still believing everything and there was a pastor who was commenting on my blog and um and i remember it was something about slavery and i remember saying we're still under the law of moses you know because that's what we were taught very much in doug and doug's world um he taught on the old testament every week every week we didn't teach about jesus or anything we just taught in the old testament and so um and so he started challenging me with questions and he said things like do you go out in your backyard every month when it's that time of the month and i was like well who are you to talk to me that way you know he's like how much of your cumin did you tithe this month and i'm like what are you talking about you know and i thought i knew the bible really well he started asking me these questions that i couldn't answer um and he's like did you did your husband trim the corners of his beard today like what you know so it was and and i was like okay so um i got he got to he got me to the point of begging him to teach me what he was talking about i was like i've never heard anything like this what are you talking about please please please teach me and and at first he would say no i'm not going to and it turns out that he had written a bible study on the law of moses and um he'd been teaching it for 35 years and so um he finally agreed to do this bible study with me i was the last student before he died and so i did this um and and i think most people have have something like this um where you have your first thing that is cognitive dissonance and you realize it and that goes right your first thing that goes after that you start finding more and more and more and more things and it gets a little bit easier right so my first thing was the law of moses so i studied literally eight to twelve hours a day every day for 90 days on the law of moses because i was convinced that we were under the law of moses and that we had to live our lives that way and i had even gotten to the point where i wanted my husband and my son to wear long robes i wanted them to start sacrificing animals i had gone very because it was like i'm not gonna do this half-ass i'm gonna do it the real way right and this is what the bible says so we're gonna do this they didn't agree but anyway i've never heard anyone say that that's i mean that's that is the logical conclusion though of a lot of these teachings is if if you're going to if you're going to do it like do it all the way and i would imagine that it would i would hope for some people would bring it home pretty quickly as to how bizarre it is if they actually did go through something like whoa like what are we into here we're talking about sacrificing sheep you know and like how weird is this to have you know blood all over and blah blah blah like it i would imagine if you did it it would hopefully make it pop at your quicker as to what you're actually into so um so after 90 days of doing this 8 to 12 hours a day was very very very intense i kind of had this gut feeling that he was right but i wasn't going to change my mind unless i was absolutely 100 convinced you know i had to be it wasn't i couldn't just go by feelings i had to know and and even though he'd shown me this a hundred times during those 90 days i finally just realized that god gave the law of moses to israel it never gave it to us he gave it to israel it was um it was uh i i was never under that authority they never had any jurisdiction over me and so i was like okay so when i finally had that realization that i think it was like day 90. i was like okay so two things how do i live my life because i've lived my whole life by following the law of moses and i don't know how to make decisions without doing that and the first thing was um i've always worn these for the seven years at this point i'd worn these long dresses because deuteronomy 2 don't wear clothing that pertains to a man so all right well if that doesn't apply to me then what do i wear right and this was the hardest thing for me actually and so i remember it was probably six weeks or so and i went to sam's club and i bought a pair of culottes so not even like true pants right and um and i took them home and i looked at them and i thought i can't wear them i can't put them on because if i do god will strike me dead and i literally thought i would die if i put those on even though i've been wearing pants all that time up until the time i started going to doug's church right right so i looked at them and i looked at them and it was probably another month before i was i had the guts to put them on i tried them on and immediately took them off i mean they weren't even on for a second because i was sure that god was going to strike me dead and i it was so much fear right but i didn't know how to live my life either and so um i remember um mike was the pastor who was who was teaching me and um he's like put him on again i don't think i can you know it was such a fearful time for me and then finally you know when i and i put them on and nothing happened i was like oh you know and then at that point then it was every day i had to learn how to do something new without the law of moses right and so it was like well we made the decision that our kids can't date because of the law of moses and so now do we just let them date you know it was so so so difficult on how to live my life um at that at that point the other thing that happened at the same time was okay so if the law of moses was only given to israel and um so he had taught me a lot he was a professor at dallas theological seminary all right and so he had taught me um he taught me hermeneutics i had a private tutor for all of this he taught me hermeneutics he taught me biblical grammar he taught me greek taught me hebrew he taught me how to um interpret from the original greek and the hebrew he taught me the logic and so he taught me all of these different things and so i learned tons and tons and tons during that time and and i said okay well if all of this was given just to israel and the new covenant says it's for the house of israel in the house of judah then how does it apply to me and so that got me started and he couldn't answer my question by the way um and that oh he did tell me i asked him so many questions now he'd been doing this for 35 years and he had thousands of students and he said i was his most difficult student ever and he said i was the one who asked him questions that he actually didn't have any answers for and he would go back to his bible and try and try and try to come up with the answers to these questions he's like you're the first one to ask ask answer these questions he he predicted that i would know twice as much as what he knew within 10 years and uh ironic that he couldn't link that skepticism to a deconversion though yeah as a like a prediction of i i predict you're gonna you're gonna ask so many questions that this is gonna fall apart but anyway he did it he did it kudos to you for asking the questions i mean that's whether you stay in christianity or not that's half the battle is just being willing to say i do have the right to question the the bible i have the right to question this god character i have the right to question the party line a lot of people that's that's blasphemy and it's very uncomfortable so yeah i recommend you for doing that yeah so then the next thing was um was hell and and hell was very easy for me i read one article that was the valley of hinnom and you know the garbage dump outside of jerusalem and i was you know and i'd already learned enough about the understanding the original languages and i was like okay well none of these actually mean hell and this one was where they dumped the kids when they sacrificed them to moloch and you know this is also where all of the bodies were put into the fire in a.d 70 outside of jerusalem i'm like okay it has nothing to do with what we've taught so for me hell went like that in one hour i was like okay i can see perfectly that hell has nothing so that was the easy one for me so were you at that point kind of at least including that people that didn't believe in jesus pretty much just just got annihilated or died and that's just it was like i didn't even know what to think about about that you know at that point um you just you just knew what it wasn't okay right right i knew i knew that hell didn't hell didn't exist and then and then i i just started so that's when i started um learning about audience relevance and time statements and i really started looking at audience relevance and you know who is it talking about because that's when i realized okay the lava is only given to israel all right i better look at all these different verses um do you mean that verse about if if my people pray and repent and all that and i will heal their land that's not for us americans it's not it's not and i used to lead the national day of prayer for many many many many years and so that was my theme verse for a long time so yeah like in yours in your church you mean uh no in my community in germany um there was nobody that did the national day appear in germany so i had a whole country right the whole nation everybody americans all over germany would come and i had a big national day of prayer rally every year interesting i've done lots of things um so very cool in the worst sense possible i remember uh one that was early to me that uh one of my calvinist friends was telling me that we know that calvinism is true because jesus said you have not chosen me but i have chosen you and i said but who was he speaking to and he was speaking to his disciples jesus chose his disciples he was not speaking to the rest of us it had nothing to do with calvinism it had nothing to do with salvation it had nothing to do with you're going to heaven when you die jesus chose a couple of disciples to go follow him that's all it had to do with you know and so i started really switching my whole mindset and and starting seeing every verse in this light was who's talking who are they talking to who's writing who are they writing to what's it about what's the time frame you know are what what things are supposed to happen within this time frame and so i really started um looking at eschatology at that time and remember you know for 20 years i had those horrible nightmares about being left behind you know and so that was when i came to see that um basically everything had been fulfilled um in the scriptures that was supposed to be fulfilled and this is what's known as full preterism is that correct right so as i as i um became very active in the full preterist groups then i noticed that most of them well they would talk about audience relevance and time statements that was our that's really what brought most people into full protesm is those two aspects they picked and choose they pick and chose the verses that they wanted to apply that audience relevance to and then the verses that they wanted to hold on to themselves like for god so loved the world you know let's put our name in there for god so love jennifer no it had nothing to do with that you know for god so loved the world of israel is what it was talking about when we really look at it in context um that um and that that jesus came to save only israel in in matthew 10 i think and so there were a whole lot of verses well all the verses every verse actually i began looking at in uh in light of audience relevance especially and so were you in the israel only camp i was not um i was um it was just a little bit different so i i met rivers of eden and donald hochschner they were the original israel-only uh guys right and they were the ones who really really were consistent on audience relevance and on on interpreting the scriptures according to what it said without putting your presuppositional thinking into it and that really impressed me and so i started um i started you know having conversations with them and um and i quickly quickly quickly because i had so many verses in my head for me it was just like putting on a different pair of glasses and all of a sudden i could see all of those verses had a different meaning it was like just flipping a switch and it was like okay that didn't have anything to do with me that one had to do with this person or this group or you know so i could easily see um this was jesus and his disciples or this was paul or this was paul you know talking to the men at athens it had nothing to do with you and me you know or this was paul writing to the the church at ephesus he wasn't writing to me uh this was paul writing to timothy he wasn't writing to me you know and so i started taking myself out of those immediately it was just it just was it happened overnight for me the good thing about that too is you're even though you're still a christian at that point you're going through a process where you're saying i saw it one way and now i see that i was wrong and in many ways it's flipping i now say it a completely different way even though you were still in christianity at that point that itself is a great step just to say i might have been really wrong before and i see it now i did the research i was wrong and so you know i'm gonna go down this path now that was a big divergence even though it was still within the umbrella of christianity but what a great process to go through in any you know no matter what just because you're opening yourself up to the idea of maybe i need to completely and even radically change my perspective and that's that's where it starts really right well at the same time then i was looking at all of what i called the church words so even church is a church word right because church was not actually the word it was just the called out ones and um so i was going back to the original and trying to find out what all of these church words were and so i was looking at uh different and i had a a secret group of people that um what i call it the round table i think that would that we had these discussions on what these words actually meant and one of them was faith and so as i'm looking at all of the and you know these are i go back to the word studies that i learned how to do with k arthur and i credit k arthur actually for helping me not to be a christian anymore she probably wouldn't like that but anyway so i'm doing a word study on faith and um and and she really taught me how to do it within a book of the bible but i started doing them for the whole bible and i started doing them in the original so i'd look up the uh the word for faith in the hebrew which was almost non-existent and the word for faith in in the greek right and i started looking at all the context of all of them and and the audience and who who it was talking about and and i thought um and this is one of the very first things that happened and i said you know i said this to a friend i said you know i can't find a single verse in the bible that says that i have to have faith in christ and he says you don't there's no verse and it was like click to me you know and between that and the hell thing i was like okay i'm a universalist overnight you know it was just immediately i thought well whatever happens to one of us has to happen to all of us so i didn't go into the annihilation phase or anything like that it was um ecclesiastes 12 7 you know the body goes back to the dust and the spirit goes back to god um so whatever happens to us it happens if hitler me same thing is gonna happen to us when we all die what happens when we die we don't know but i do know that it's the same thing that happens to everybody right there's no special privileges when we die because we believe the magic right words and so that you know so even so i became uh i stopped calling myself a christian at that time that was probably 2012 maybe so i probably stopped calling myself a christian you know a long long long time ago imagine that really shook you up it didn't it didn't because the law of moses was the hard one for me everything else was easy once i got past the law of moses it was just like you know i i had watched other people go through deconstruction and what i had seen was that they'd go through and they'd study a couple of different areas and then they'd would turn around turn and walk away and and i thought well that's not honest and so i studied every single area that i could think of every doctrine area in sometimes the doctrines would just disappear like when i studied audience relevance um for calvinism because i was a calvinist when i was at doug phillips church and i and i would study that and i would think okay well calvin was actually right he was just he had the wrong people the wrong audience and the wrong time period so he was actually talking about the group of people that lived from the cross to 80 70. that's all he was talking about he got the right concepts but the wrong group of people so that went out the window i didn't have to study anything else about calvinism once i realized that he was just in the wrong time frame with the wrong group of people right so i started doing that with all of the different doctrines and until i had basically um done all of them you know so i i studied all of them to see if i was missing anything um and i wanted but once i realized that there i'm not in the bible anywhere there's nothing in the bible about me then it was like okay well none of these doctrines apply to me anyway and so that was kind of when i stepped away and did my video on why i left christianity and it was at that time i was ready to just shake the dust walk away i was just like you know i've studied my way out of the bible there's a whole lot more obviously in there but i've studied my way out of the bible i'm just going to walk away but so many people saw my video and people would say well have you considered this and this and this and this well some of them were religious they're like oh you just have to have more faith in jesus no you just you know some of them were have you tried muslim have you tried buddhism i'm like no no no no i'm not interested in any of that kind of stuff but other people were um were showing me about how the bible came about and that was something that i hadn't really studied i mean from a church perspective i had but not any more than that and so i thought well you know that if the bible's not true i guess i i should back up um i i had studied bart urban's books and realized how much of the bible or forgeries and fakes and you know all that kind of stuff and i thought well you know what if the bible is not true or much of the bible at this point is not true i considered it to be historical fiction at the time that i made my video then why would they make up all of this stuff the gospels are not true why would they make it up and and then i was like wait a minute i have something new to study so that's kind of been where i've been at since i made that video what was that four months ago and so i've been studying now okay how much of the bible is true at this point none um where all right so if it's not true why is why did they do it um i've kind of come to the conclusion that this is the greatest government psyop ever perpetrated against mankind and it's been going on for 2000 years you know it's that's that's like incredible following and it's acharya's acharya's line of thoughts a little bit i think [Laughter] what could i ask just for kind of uh my understanding of how it it kind of evolved so you were you were kind of going through different stages of interpreting what the theology theology was right the right way to see the bible's timelines but at some point you're saying you switched to you didn't even think the bible was was true uh meaning its depictions of reality of god and so forth like what were you at that point entertaining the idea that maybe there wasn't a god or were you just saying i just don't think the bible's accurately depicting ultimate reality um but i still think there's a god or maybe it's maybe it's more of a current question like where are you with it at this point do you think that there is something do you think there's an afterlife you think there's a god and do you think the bible has anything to do with it at all so um i that would be one of the subjects that i was studying as i was studying my way out of the bible basically was um you know who or what is god and at the same time i had so during this time i had gone i think it was 2014 i had gone to um the institute for integrative nutrition to get um to get a certificate basically in um in nutrition but they also exposed us to things that were outside of biblical things and so some uh some new age type things and it was at this point um that i was i had told myself i guess i should back up in my story a little bit um i had told myself that what i was going to do was i was going to remove all the presuppositions from my mind i was going to start reading the bible as if i had never read it before if just a blank slate that was very very very difficult to do because i had 50 years of programming in my mind right and i'm trying to just you know say if i had never read this before and i just saw it this way but i'm also trying to do it from the hebrew and the greek not from the english so it was a very very painstaking long process you know reading um because i'm not fluent in either one of them so i'm i'm reading in interlinear and and trying to look up and and things like that i know enough but not not fluent so um i remember and this is important as to who god was this is this was a key moment for me so it was 2014 i think i i had said because i'm going through the class and i had said you know what i'm just going to be open to the truth that's all i want is the truth that's all i've ever wanted is to be a truth seeker right and so i decided to go to a new age conference here in town and um and i thought i'm just i just want to see what it is i'm not afraid i used to be afraid that you know the the demons were going to jump on me and and that kind of stuff you know they were going to get a hold of me and i'd be filled with a demon and all that kind of stuff like playing with a ouija board you're going down a dangerous path there and so i went i went for a whole day to this conference and um and i saw like amazing things and so there was this one lady who was teaching a class on how to do chinese medicine and she asked for volunteers does anybody want to volunteer and so i was actually the first one to volunteer i'm like i'm really gonna just put myself out there and not be afraid right and so she basically she she read me from a chinese medicine perspective and she told me um things about myself that i thought nobody could have possibly known and it was very very fascinating and i thought well there's no way she could have known that and then the next lady to volunteer um she the this lady was trying to say things about herself um so the lady was her name the lady was teaching um i can't remember was a strange name anyway so the teacher lady was kept talking to the other lady in the audience and she was saying she says i would rather talk to you after class if you don't mind and she's like no i have nothing to hide i want to do it here. she's like are you sure she said yes and the teacher said well you're lying and she said and she started telling her things about her father and the lady started it was almost like uh you would see when a demon was leaving a person in church right she started screaming and yelling and getting very very angry and then she just started crying and then she started breaking down and and actually telling the truth about what was going on with her father and then at the end of this little session here maybe 30 minutes you know at the end of this session um she um she called her father and she had spoken to him in 20 years called her father and said she wanted to meet with him and could they talk and this was like during the class and he said yes and what i watched there was a reconciliation of a broken relationship for 20 years and i thought that never happens in church i've never seen what i just saw now i've never seen that kind of healing happen in church and so that was very fascinating to me so and then you have no reason to you don't think it was like a setup by the class or anything oh no no no and so by the next class then the next class that uh the same lady taught um she was teaching us uh clearing and you had a little crystal on a on a string and you and and you just hold it and then the crystal would start moving right and you wouldn't move at all and i thought i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna do this and i'm not gonna move at all and i'm gonna see if it and if it goes well my crystal went much farther than anybody else's crystal and she said that i had good energy and that's what made it go farther and all this kind of stuff so she wanted us to think of somebody that needed healing right and so um at that time i was estranged from my second husband we were married like that long and and he was in california i was in texas and he had just been injured and um pretty badly and so um i'm holding my crystal and i'm thinking about healing him and that's all i'm thinking about and i did not move my hand at all and the crystal just started going wow wow wow and i thought this is crazy you know this is really crazy so i called him that night and he said what were you doing today and i said why because i hadn't told him what was going on and he said my knee is healed he couldn't walk the day before he said my knee is completely healed and i'm like no way there's no way and i started understanding that energy is way more than what i thought it was and it was at that point that i started really really studying more about energy and especi especially electromagnetic energy and i was actually writing a whole book on this and i have not finished it but anyway so i got to the point where um i was thinking okay what do we know about what the bible says about god now i think that the bible is just israel's version of who they thought god was just like greek mythology is greece's version of who they thought god was right egyptian mythology is egypt's version of who they thought god was all right so that's at my at this point i think the bible is just israel's version of who they thought god was but it doesn't mean that they get it all wrong right it doesn't mean that you know so let me open this up here because i did make some notes so what i have at this point i think that if we think of god has no beginning and no end and energy is the only thing that can be neither created nor destroyed to me it was like okay what if god is actually energy and we have given him this name god or title basically we've given it a title right but we're actually just describing energy energy is what connects all of us energy is what connects creation or nature and people it creates you know the animal i mean connects the animals and all this kind of stuff energy is what has how this world started no matter if it was big bang creation something else a combination whatever um actually what's interesting is that there are some big bang theory proponents that say that the big bang happened in seven sections those seven sections are in the same order as the seven days of creation i'm not opposed to that um i do um i do see that um you know there was definitely an order and maybe they saw that same order when they told that story which was much later than when it really happened right so if god is energy their energy is really just we've given it the title of god it to me is actually just nature so nature energy all of that it had to start with something it just didn't you know it hasn't always the earth hasn't always been here it had to start somewhere all right so just can i just quick question when you hear the way i know this is a you know just a movie but the way that that star wars talks about the force do you feel like there's some similarities to some of the ways that you're beginning to see the world like i know that they're not making it up they're taking the force concept from some of the other uh you know other world views and other religions yeah absolutely yeah there is something there's you know there's a vibration that we feel you can feel you can feel a spirit if you will you know you if you walk into somebody's home and the husband and wife have been fighting and you walk in you're going to feel that tension in the air right so that's the energy that is that is being transmitted between you know all of the people right there we've got energy that's being transmitted worldwide from things that are going on worldwide like a pandemic or uh economic things you know when we've got wars going on that's energy that's transmitted worldwide so it can it can be it can be small it can be large you know it and it's just it's how everything is connected everything is made of energy atoms are made of energy the electrons the protons the neutrons they're they're all those electrons are all connected and with magnetism so the electricity the magnetism they're all connected and that's what connects everything in the whole world so i thought okay so scientifically everything that connects us is energy and i think of that verse god is all in all that's energy what if i changed the word god and and put energy instead of energy is all in all it makes sense right so i started i started thinking this way and so then i started thinking okay so with not thinking about any of the stories in the bible but just thinking about the attributes of god do they match up do they match up to what i think of as as energy right and so i just made a short list here that i thought um i would go over so um these were like the most common attributes of god infinite there's no beginning nobody energy can't be created or destroyed it's infinite right um immutable it does not change energy cannot change you know it goes from one form to another but it cannot change it's always there um self-sufficient it has no needs energy has no needs itself is completely self-sufficient right um it cannot lie that was interesting we think of god cannot lie energy cannot it can't do anything contradictory to its nature energy cannot physically cannot lie if we don't put a name and a face on it it's completely a different story anyway to me nothing is too difficult all right nothing's too difficult for energy whatever's going to happen is going to happen you know um the um the omnis the three omnis omniscient omnipotent omnipresent right so omniscient all-knowing energy is all know everything that we know came in originally from energy every single thing that is known came from energy or is is still you know the energy doesn't it doesn't leave the energy right um omnipotent all-powerful energy is all-powerful that's that's easy omnipresent everywhere that one is the one that makes the most sense right so we think of how can god be everywhere at once well let's put it this way how can energy be everywhere once nobody would question that right we know the energy is everywhere at once um all wise uh and all wisdom that we have has to come from energy it can't just appear on its own we just wisdom didn't just suddenly appear faithful that could mean always true energy is always true there is nothing untrue about energy it just doesn't doesn't even compute that it could be right good just uh so what for just i look at natural law um it in in natural law that comes from energy all of our natural laws come from energy which that can be a whole other subject the word perfect the word perfect is um another church word i call it because it doesn't ever meet perfect even in the bible just means mature energy is very mature you know that's that's the father that's the creator that's everything comes from energy um merciful uh often mercy often energy does not give us what we deserve you know or many people don't get what we just if we look at our own lives and we can think how many things that we've done that we deserve something bad from it and it doesn't happen right so very very merciful um gracious that's a common grace the sun shines on us all the rain comes to us all bad things come to us all good things come to us all you know there's just calm and grace everywhere love yeah with all those things could i ask it sounds like you were you're number one you've given me a lot to think about and i um i definitely want to think about these and i'm you know hopefully we could do a follow-up at some point i'd love to dive into some of them even more but in terms of christianity purely it sounds like you have at this point said that is not correct meaning the idea that there is a god whose name is yahweh who has a son named jesus who is condemning the world to eternal punishment but that there are some who are going to be redeemed because god chose them but in time that equates to them placing their faith and trust in christ as their atonement uh through his perfect blood sacrifice his death and resurrection our identification with his death and resurrection and thereby following his footsteps did that that to you is false christianity is false uh that is not the true reality is that fair to say that you have you have rejected that perspective yeah and that i pretty much got away from all of that in probably 2012. so i've been away from that version for a long time i know we've we've gone a long time i don't want to um make this one video too long but i do want to ask just kind of maybe to start to wrap us up what was it like to actually make a like was there a final a day or a week where you said you know what i i maybe it already kind of happened but i'm admitting to myself i am not a believer in any of this stuff anymore did it ever hit you and shock you and did it feel was there any temptation to like to say i must have been duped by the devil i must be deceiving myself obviously the you know the full says in his heart there's no god uh the beginning of wisdom fear the lord's beginning of wisdom just a sense of what have i done to myself um not in terms of what are other people gonna think but what have i actually just done to myself was there a you know a shock value to it and was there a fear and a fear of you know was there ever a temptation to go back to it because of a sense of you know what i like as a christian you know that you know that you know that you know that you're right god is god his son is jesus salvation is real and heaven or hell is what's at stake um was there that dynamic at all of i i just i know this is real i i don't care what i study i know god is real i know jesus is real i know the cross is real i have to get back to that somehow was there any kind of that pullback for you only with the very first one the law of moses that was that was really that was my defining moment you know and everything else because i was such a truth seeker um everything else from there came naturally you know just like okay yeah they lied to me about this they lied to me about that and then it became what else did they lie about you know pretty soon it was very very quickly that it was what else did they lie about and so i wanted i really wanted to know the truth and i thought i could find the truth in the bible which is why i kept studying the bible right and i literally studied my way out of the bible and then it was like okay so then what is the bible you know so um i had studied my way out of the bible before i even started questioning what is the bible that's a great um place to probably first to wrap up here in terms of that concept because that's that's also where what my my id conversion was all about and it's i've said this before in other videos so for anyone who's for watching my videos i'm sorry for being repetitive um but like i went to bible college i went you know i read hundreds of devotional books of theology books systematic theology memorized thousands of verses i was under great preachers uh created quote unquote great preachers uh both physically but also through the radio and videos um i was exposed to some awesome teachers at lancaster bible college in pennsylvania and before that at bob jones university and almost without a doubt i can say i don't recall any one of them ever ever telling me the truth about where this thing came from and even like just for current example like i'm going through the book of enoch and i know that everyone who who kind of knows about it a little bit knows that it's quoted clearly in the book of jude it's quoted dozens of times elsewhere in the new testament like why don't people and i know some of the people probably didn't know any of that they just kind of followed the party line with their blinders on and like i don't know that either but there must have been some people who who had studied this stuff who knew that there was more to this story um who'd read bart ehrman or or people you know whatever his predecessors were who'd done some textual criticism and they criticized the history behind this um and then when you add to it just the idea of well if it's not true then how did it get created once you open that door of the crack it's like okay there's a bunch of other options and for me one of the most fascinating ones is and this will be for another time but astro theology um that is fascinating and when you first look at like uh i see a few things but i'm not sure if there's that much there when you actually have have someone walk you through it step by step and you you really understand the zodiac you really understand the solstices and the you know the planets and stars and then you look at the like the gospel mark it just it makes your jaw drop you're like oh shoot this is a star story this oh my goodness what did i how did i miss it but of course you know how you missed it because no one ever showed you the how to see it but it just it floors me that so much of this stuff it starts with that one question of of you could say a bunch of different ways like maybe there's a different way to see this and it starts maybe with a different way to see it but i'm still a christian it starts with a different way to see it but i'm now a liberal christian but for a lot of us it's like once you open that door for because a lot of people they will not open that door not a crack i mean even even that even pretending it for the sake of argument is is like i'm not doing that you don't test god you don't play with god um but once you open that door a little bit and say i just wonder i wonder if there's more to this story and you give yourself the permission like you said earlier to actually go to stuff to look and listen to other people of differing opinions and just say i don't really think i'm gonna believe what you believe but i'm just open to hearing why you why you do believe what you believe you open yourself up to that and you're like wow there's so much that i wasn't told and it's it's like a the whole sheltering i mean you talk about sheltering on steroids there with with the church and you know everyone has to believe where you get kicked out and shunned um but like you this whole idea of just being willing to say there's more to this story and i i know that it shook me up a lot when i first started to do that and that i've told this before but um the critical there was one particular point in my journey that they kind of switched everything i was you know who ricky gervais is he was i loved him because of the office the british office but um he was because of my watching that show a lot and i liked really liked what he did with it he was being interviewed at one point i just clicked on the interview to watch it and it wasn't about atheism per se but it was just um somebody was asking what do you think about the bible and he starts out with well it's obviously not a it's obviously man-made it's not a it's not a divine book it's a human book and as soon as he said it i was like you know what i think i agree with him like and i cringed to myself for something i think i agree with you but it it kind of comes down to it and it's saying the same thing in different ways it's like it kind of comes down to saying i am willing to pursue the truth no matter where it takes me now if it takes me it keeps me in christianity like this is my circle if truth is is the same thing then great you're not going anywhere but if this is christianity and this is truth up here then i'm going to be leaving this circle for this circle and that you know that is crazy talk to cert christians you know they're if they're in it to win it like you don't you can't pursue the truth more than christ because christ is truth but to be willing to separate yourself and separate those things even just for sake of argument uh even if just as an apologist to say i want to be better at defending my faith i'm going to pretend for a second that there's more to this story even though i know there's not you begin to investigate and it it falls apart i mean it falls not a little bit it falls apart on so many levels and i feel like i've got about another 30 questions i literally have another 10 questions here on my notes but i've got a lot of other questions i'd love to ask you about your journey about where um where you've been with some of the theological things but i just asked if i could maybe potentially invite you back at some point and uh you know go over some more details of this but um could i maybe just have you wrap this up by saying what is what is life like now now that you have this in my words now you escaped christianity um my words left the bible prison what is it like to be where you're at um oh goodness um well i do think that it that it is uh hard to i guess i'm still at the stage of of kind of figuring out how do we how should we then live right that's actually my that's kind of my goal right now is is to not only figure it out but to be able to teach that i'd like to go to um get my phd in philosophy and teach that really i want to teach what can how do we live our life how do we make decisions in life without religion um you know so that's um that's kind of really where my my passion is right now so i have to do that for myself um as well as i have conversations constantly with people about you know philosophical things and how you know how does life what what happens when we die um what's the meaning of life what's the purpose of life you know why are we here um that kind of stuff um so um i i guess i still even though i thought i would walk away i didn't um because the whole meaning of life type of thing is still what's important to me uh truth is still important to me um i'm still looking at a lot of the various ideas on how we got the bible um if it's not what we were always told well there's like 40 different versions of how we got it and like okay so 40 different versions can't be right either um you know so um many different canons that have changed repeatedly over the years well could i ask just as a maybe as zooming in on one one particular kind of of difference for for a lot of christians the idea of you you being able to have peace and joy uh serenity true serenity um not like uh you know forcing the issue but just actual peace do you feel like you've got that and absolutely yeah yeah absolutely how does it compare to the kind of piece you had as a christian um well it would depend on where i was at in my walk with christ you know there were good days yeah there were times that um you know that it uh i would pray for it you know every day um i had a very very difficult marriage and i would i would pray for peace you know every single day and didn't have it um and and and didn't know and then there were other difficult things that happened as my kids got older and um i did i guess it was during the time where i was kind of transitioning out of the whole christianity type of thing where i started realizing a piece in spite of the whole world in total chaos around me you know um and it wasn't necessarily something from jesus but um the power of the subconscious mind that was a book that i read that impacted me a whole lot and just came to understand that you know our mind is everything it really is it i can choose peace or i can choose drama you know i can choose war or i can choose peace i can choose all of these things and um and it's not just a surface oh i'm gonna be i'm gonna choose peace today no no it's it's very deep deep deep deep within us so uh that's one book that really really uh changed my life power of the subconscious mind yeah i love that answer because it really brings in the psychological aspect of all this and maybe we could dive into that more in a future uh visit but there's so much of this is about psychology um both people's willingness to believe uh if it's if it's kind of introduced to him later in life uh people's willingness to stay in it if they you know we're introduced into it from childhood uh people's willingness to look at evidence or not look at evidence people's willingness to to make sure that evidence is read a certain way uh versus you know what i would consider more of a scientific method or rational method there's so much psychology in this and that's it's kind of been like a subject i've been not avoiding but like dreading the complexity of how much that plays a part but i think it's it's so much a part it's like you can't understand like for a lot of people it's like why like when you step out it's like why did i believe that for so long and so fiercely and like i i acknowledge i needed to go through this process of studying where did the bible come from blah blah blah but then when you step out of it you're like why did i really need that like why couldn't i have seen that this is a you know this is a a blood magic human sacrifice death cult focused on scapegoating you know as a christian there's like that's that's not what it is it's like when you step back i guess it was and he's like why couldn't i see that but when you're in it you can't you mean you cannot see it that way that that is just that's ridiculous to see the way um but it's like it feels like as i'm stepping further and further away from it psychology is is is a big part of these discussions it's not just about where the christianity come from it's why did we particularly because we can reject i mean we could look at you know a bridge if i can speak religions that say this this man wrote a white horse up to heaven oh that that's ridiculous you know oh this person got reincarnated 30 000 times that's ridiculous everybody else is ridiculous but we're not and it's like this is psychology of being willing to say no i'm just as ridiculous as the scientologist it takes guts to do that but it's like it's it's hard it's it's it's hard hard hard work but i'd love to dive into some of that and it's the other many questions i have written for you but um i just wanted to end by saying thank you for being willing to be vulnerable with your story i'm sorry again for a lot of the painful but even weird stuff you faced um i appreciate that you're willing to be strong through it and not just get angry about it you're actually trying to help people and be open to you know helping other people in their journey so thank you for what you're doing and i look forward to continuing the conversation well thank you very much tim thank you for having me on i really appreciate it absolutely let's do it again all right

Channel: Harmonic Atheist

Views: 24,736

Keywords: jen epstein, jen fishburne, doug phillips, doug wilson, new saint andrews, freejinger, patriarchy, vision forum, dominion theology, beall phillips, duggars, family integrated church, botkin family, stacy macdonald, quiverfull, rc sproul jr, israel only, why I left christianity, deconversion from christianity, #christianityismythology, harmonic atheist, deconstructing christianity, leaving christianity, leaving a cult, btwchristianityisfalse, jesus mythicist, mythvision, exvangelical

Id: pkliRxjCTec

Length: 134min 38sec (8078 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 06 2021