I Fired God: My Life Inside—and Escape From—the Secret World of the Independent Fundamental Baptist Cult

by Jocelyn R. Zichterman

There are many ways of dealing with abuse. Ultimately, Jocelyn and I both decided that it wasn’t healthy to deny what happened to us. What we have been through is a part of who we have become. I’ve been asked many times how I survived. My method has been to accept the past as part of my development into the person I am today. I refuse to sugarcoat the memories that still cause my heart to race when I hear a garage door open after all these years. I will not minimize the effect the sound a belt buckle has on me when it hits a hard surface even now. I no longer attempt to block out the memories of crying and screaming as the wooden dowel whistled through the air and the rage-filled eyes of my father glared down at me as a child.

Courage cannot be manufactured. It is cultivated. The desire for social justice comes from an inward motivation to see right prevail. This is the spirit of the words you will read in the following pages. No child should endure the brutality we did, especially not under the pretense of religion. No child should suffer at the hands of his or her guardian. Jocelyn’s story is written so that others will gain strength to take up the cause of fighting for the innocent—so other children will be protected from harm.

Our family sank deeper into the IFB subculture with every passing year. Our home life and the Christian school we attended, in the basement of our church, were steeped in IFB philosophy and rhetoric. The cult breeds paranoia in its members, about society, law enforcement, and the government so we became more and more isolated. The more immersed my parents became in IFB ideology, the more abnormal and confusing things got in our home. The combination of dire financial struggles with the IFB’s draconian rules and isolationist culture sometimes made me feel as if I was losing my mind. My parents fought constantly about money, and the strain of poverty stoked their belief that the U.S. government was the enemy. Most of the other IFB families we knew were as dirt poor as we were, and the church leaders exploited the emotional instability engendered by poverty. Police officers too were bad guys, according my parents—the only “good guys” were members of our own church. It was a frightening way to grow up. Instead of reassuring us that the monsters from our nightmares were figments of our imagination, our pastors seemed to assure us that the monsters were real and that they were everywhere, waiting to pounce. Our parents and our fellow IFB members were the only ones who could protect us, they preached.

Essentially, the IFB ideology inculcated children in sadomasochistic thinking. It taught that love and pain were interconnected and that by hurting you, your father—or your teacher or your pastor—was expressing his love for you.

Listening to them, I could never quite figure out if I was really supposed to love America or despise it. On one hand, ours was the best country, and we were the best people. On the other, God was going to destroy the U.S. for its wickedness—and that destruction could happen any day now. Our pastors continually contradicted themselves, which made it impossible to figure out what was truly “right” and “wrong.” Like so much of the teaching I received as a child, it was a recipe for emotional imbalance. Our cult leaders knew exactly what they were doing; they knew that confused, unstable people were more likely to cling blindly to them for support.

“Dr.” Jack Hyles churches most often used “Dr.” Bill Gothard’s Advanced Training Institute (ATI) and the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) curriculum favored by TLC’s Duggars, which were relatively inexpensive. Bob Jones University churches, on the other hand, used Bob Jones Press materials and A Beka Books from Pensacola Christian College, the two largest IFB curriculum distributors in the country. Both programs were considered top notch in the IFB, and they were, not surprisingly, considerably more expensive. IFB homeschoolers often use a mix of all of these programs. It didn’t matter which “curriculum” they favored, Christian schools and textbooks typically taught nothing but memorization and obedience. We were drilled in reading, writing, and math, but we learned almost no legitimate science or history. Our critical thinking skills were virtually nonexistent. We were told exactly how to think on just about everything.

According to recent data from the U.S. Department of Education, 80 percent of students who participate in Washington, D.C.’s, voucher program attend a faith-based school. The number is even higher in Florida, which has the country’s highest number of tax-subsidized school vouchers. A 2012 report presented to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce by the National Coalition for Public Education noted that, “Private schools are not subject to the same transparency as public schools—there are no elected school boards, rights to review records, or other accountability measures.… Students attending private schools with vouchers are stripped of their First Amendment, due process, and other constitutional and statutory rights offered to them and guaranteed in public schools.”

Like everyone else in the cult, I thought mental illness was a myth and psychology was the devil’s work, so I had no idea I was suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Having grown up in an unpredictable, menacing environment with no way to protect myself and being trapped now in a lifestyle where the church and the college dictated every move I made, I was using organization to give myself a sense of control over my life.

Every homeschooling guru I met encouraged moms like me to believe that America should be a theocracy and, judging from their speeches, Christian Dominionist politicians agree with them. Not surprising, of course, since Christian Dominionism and patriarchy go hand in hand. These fundamentalist ideologies do not promote freedom of religion for people of all faiths, but freedom of religion only for people of one faith—their particular brand of Christianity. It’s a scary proposition that would undercut our Constitutional rights as American citizens. The field for the Republican presidential primary race of 2011–2012 illustrates just how far the tentacles of Christian Dominionism have wound into politics. U.S. representative and homeschooling mother Michele Bachmann, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, Texas governor Rick Perry, and former Pennsylvania senator and homeschooling father Rick Santorum (for whom TLC’s Duggars campaigned) all have ties to the movement. So do former Alaska governor Sarah Palin and political commentator and homeschooling father Glenn Beck.

Huckabee wrote in his book Character Makes a Difference, “People say, ‘We ought to separate politics from religion,’ I say to separate the two is absolutely impossible.” In 1998, Huckabee and his wife, Janet, took out a full-page ad in USA Today thanking the Southern Baptists for supporting the idea that “a wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the leadership of Christ.” It could have been lifted wholesale from every IFB sermon I ever heard. No one should be surprised at Huckabee’s action, considering the fact that he has attended “Dr.” Bill Gothard’s seminars and praised them as “some of the best programs available for instilling character into the lives of people.” Even scarier, Huckabee has advocated merging Gothard’s institute’s teachings with government programs and posed for fundraising photos with the IFB icon and homeschooling leader.

Huckabee reiterated his misogynistic views in 2012 when he defended U.S. representative Todd Akin for making the incendiary public statement that abortion shouldn’t be legal, even in rape cases. As Akin explained his views, “It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that [conception after rape is] really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or someth...

Like Huckabee, Palin and Bachmann have talked about being called by God to serve in politics. That’s the quintessence of Christian Dominionism. Born-again Christian Bachmann is an ardent follower of the late Francis Schaeffer, a pioneer of Dominionism, calling him “a tremendous philosopher” and “very inspirational” in her life. She’s also fond of talking about letting God’s will dictate her every political move. Just to make sure the nation knew the Almighty was backing his presidential campaign too, Santorum told the press, “We believe with all our hearts that this is what God wants.” When his political star was on the rise, I couldn’t erase the image that sprang into my mind of the Duggars at the White House in their matching long khaki skirts, teaching American women how to do home perms and shop at Goodwill for inaugural ball gowns. Santorum’s impassioned speeches about “the dangers of contraception in this country,” likening homosexuality to “man on dog,” and warning that legalizing same-sex marriage would lead to pro-gay indoctrination of schoolchildren echoes countless passages in the books I read and the speeches I heard by Mary Pride and Nancy Campbell. What’s more, it smacks of Bob Jones–style extremism. Jones III stood up in a public forum in 1980 and stated that “I guarantee it would solve the problem post-haste if homosexuals were stoned, if murderers were immediately killed as the Bible commands.”

John McCain seems to be all too aware of the extremism creeping into mainstream politics, judging from the fact that he’s distanced himself from Sarah Palin just as he distanced himself from BJU years earlier. If the GOP is to have any long-term chance of survival, responsible Republican politicians will need to purge their party of the right-wing extremist fringe that has infiltrated it—the sooner the better.

Joseph tried diligently to find a job as a Christian counselor to bring in some income for our family, but no place—not even evangelical organizations—considered his master’s degree in counseling from Bob Jones University a legitimate credential. BJU’s staff had duped us into thinking that accreditation was a meaningless term, but we were learning the hard way that it mattered a great deal. In fact, accreditation serves a vetting process—validation that the education a college or university provides is reputable and high-quality based on standards set by a peer review board. It would be impossible for my husband to get licensed as a counselor in any U.S. state with his counseling degree from BJU, a fact the folks back in Greenville conveniently forget to tell their students.

Every person who leaves a cult has to overcome three primary hurdles. First, he must reprogram his conscience not to fear God’s imminent wrath for leaving the “truth” and instead learn to how think reasonably for himself. After a year out of the IFB, we were making strides in that direction. Second, a defector has to rebuild his entire network of personal and professional relationships. This can be a long and lonely process, but Joseph and I were progressing. The third and often the most difficult step is to find new employment and sever old financial ties to the cult. That was the most arduous task for us, partly because, no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t sell our house in the small IFB community surrounding Northland International University. And regardless of how strapped we were, the mortgage payments still had to be made.

Now I find it dismaying that IFB churches, schools, and universities claim tax-exempt status and yet shamelessly promote a specific political position. Don’t they understand what “separation of church and state” means? Why can’t the church develop a mutually respectful relationship with the government and vice versa? What about a “middle ground” of pro-choice (the state), yet anti-abortion (their church)—in other words, you can oppose the concept of terminating a pregnancy but respect other women’s right to have opinions and make decisions that differ from yours? Or pro–gay marriage (the state), yet anti-homosexuality (their church)? Once again, it seemed clear to me that the IFB’s stand on these issues was about power and control over other people. It’s one thing to have a personal moral belief based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. It’s something entirely different to demand that the rest of society adopt your beliefs. By this time in my journey, I was glad the government allowed me to make my own choices about my body and my personal life. I had become an advocate of free will and would never ask another person to give up his rights. With

My only brush with “feminist history” had been the many diatribes I heard on how those evil working women were destroying the American home. It had never dawned on me that I was sitting in a classroom at Bob Jones University because feminists had risked everything and devoted their lives to fighting for a woman’s right to higher education.

person’s maturity level is often unrelated to his chronological age and that we need to treat people in a manner appropriate to their maturity level. For instance, we can’t sit back and allow a playground bully to kick little girls in the stomach. Recess monitors need to say, “No! That is not acceptable behavior!” The monitors can’t walk over to the little guy and gently, slowly, and kindly remove him from the situation. They need to rush in and grab him before he kicks the next little girl so hard that she falls and ends up with a concussion.

I finally took a six-week break and went back to therapy. It took some intense soul searching, but ultimately I decided other people’s opinions of me no longer mattered. I was proud of the work I had done, proud that I had taken a stand. I was going to own my role in the exposure the cult was getting, regardless of how many ugly slurs and threats came my way. For a people pleaser like me, who had spent a lifetime trying to be liked, it was a major turning point.

IFB Westboro Baptist Church