When I was a child, I understood the world through a set of absolute rules that required absolute obedience. I heard these rules at home and at church, and I was very good at telling them to the neighbor kids. I was called a “goody two-shoes,” but I didn’t feel too offended because at least I was “good.” I desperately wanted to be good. And to me, that meant following the rules without question.

I can look back now and recognize that my life was controlled by religious fundamentalism—in my case, a Christian ideology framed by a rigid, literal interpretation of the Bible, which I was told was inerrant and completely transferrable to our modern lives.

Being controlled by religious fundamentalism or a high-demand group is a little like living in a very small, dark box . . .

Getting Out of a High-Control Group

Eight years ago, I left my life as a stay-at-home daughter in the Christian Patriarchy movement.

I was struggling with depression, anxiety, and terrifying fear. My voice was silenced, and I had no agency over my life. I was not allowed to get a job outside the house, not allowed to go to college, not allowed to date. I had few friends and was mostly cut off from extended family.

The conservative Christian church I was a part of as a teenager was deeply invested in teaching strict gender roles, homeschooling as the only way to raise children, courtship instead of dating, and father-controlled families. Hate speech toward women and the LGBTQ+ community was preached from the pulpit. In this church, I learned to fear everything and to hate myself . . .

On Loss and Leaving

I’ve been thinking about those of you who have lost through leaving.

Maybe you have lost your family, community, sense of safety, belonging, friends, church, or work. Maybe you feel this loss in ways you can’t share with others. Maybe you have lost everything, or what used to be your everything.

Maybe you feel like you’ve lost yourself.

Leaving can mean different things: leaving behind something or someone you care about, leaving a faith, leaving your past self in an effort to grow into who you are becoming. For me, leaving Christian patriarchy meant losing some family relationships, losing the scattered kind of community I grew up in, losing my sense of certainty, my support network.

When I left, I felt like I was losing pieces of myself, only to find that leaving was the only way to healing, to becoming more whole. . . .

Stories like Ours

We all need books that move us, change us, challenge us, enlighten us, educate us, heal us. One book that has been healing for me in my journey away from fundamentalism and spiritual abuse has been Devoted by Jennifer Mathieu. This is just one of many that have made me feel less alone in my experience, that have opened my heart to the possibility that my story is important too, that this hasn’t all been for nothing. That our experiences mean something.

When I first heard about Jennifer Mathieu, I was attending the Festival of Faith and Writing three years after leaving the stay-at-home-daughter movement, and I saw her talk in the conference program, with a description of her book mentioning Christian Patriarchy. I hadn’t heard of any fiction books about the world of fundamentalist Christianity, and I was curious to see what she had to say and what her book Devoted was about. . . .