No Longer Quivering
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
Vyckie from No Longer Quivering is hosting a blog event November 1-4 called NLQ Carnival Days as a way to promote her site and highlight the flaws in the patriarchy system. There will be guest posts, forum activity, and prizes!
If you haven’t read Vyckie’s story, you should definitely check it out! She and her family participated in the Quiverfull lifestyle for many years before getting out. If you like my story, you’ll definitely like hers. Every time I read a post, I shiver with how so very close I came to falling into this trap. I’ve said before, if the right boy had caught my eye any time from 13-21 (if I hadn’t met and married Bob at 20), I would have succumbed. Even though we weren’t strictly quiverfull, many of the same things she thought and said to her children were the same things said to me. At one point, my mother bought into the quiverfull idea, but not enough to get a reverse tubal ligation. So there are many parallels, even if she lived even more extremely than I did.
Women leaving lifestyles such as these are truly strong, amazing women. Hillary Clinton hasn’t got anything on women who leave abusive marriages, whether the abuse be emotional, verbal, physical, sexual, religious, or any combination of the above. When you tie religion to it, though, I think it makes it so much worse because you aren’t just thinking about how you are going to manage without your husband, but what you are going to tell God when he doesn’t say “Well done, good and faithful servant!” Many fundamentalist women can lose their entire support system: not just their husbands, but family and friends who do not agree with their choices as well.
So definitely check her out! Her format is much more comprehensible (Vyckie, if you’re reading this, don’t be surprised if I re-do my site a little to mirror yours!), so you can read her story start to finish!
Tags: fundamentalism, Quiverfull
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October 30th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
Well….
Have to chime in with my opinion.
Think overall that the Scripture teaches a kind of mutual submission. It’s not a matter of wives submitting to their husbands, and the man is simply off the hook, altogether.
All Christians should be looking to one another’s interests, and concerns. This idea that Christian woman should be like these mindless doormats, with the husband calling all the shots, making every decision, and having his way about everything is positively sinful.
It’s a sure way to enable abuse, controlling behavior in men, and emotional/spiritual immaturity all the way around.
But, it is sad to me that many of these formerly “quivering,” women rightly protesting this spiritual abuse, have also ditched their faith altogether, not able to seperate things out, and have pitched “the baby with the bathwater,” IMO>
Basically from just looking over the blog (forum) you’ve recommended, it seems to me that these same abusive men have somehow been allowed to continue to define the Christian faith…
I mean if Jesus says that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves..He is presupposing that we also are loving, and caring for ourselves.
No one is much good to anyone else, if they’re not also having their own needs met as well, and are just at the end of their wick.
Will end my rant now!!
October 30th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
hm, Grace, I have to say that I think the same rules apply to them as they do to my other post, Everything in Moderation. As someone said over there, once you start questioning, it’s hard to stop. I certainly can’t speak for Vyckie and the rest of them, but I know I tried very hard not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and found that I did like the Episcopalian church. But questioning snowballs. I do think it is easier for those who have been wounded to take a step back and think, “Does this really make sense? Why am I doing this?” (Which is probably one of the reasons so many Christians associate people leaving with people getting their feelings hurt.) So you do research, and more research, and once you start, you can’t stop. While I liked the Episcopalian church, I just found myself rolling my eyes half the time and thinking, “Do people really believe this? Why do I? Oh, well, I guess I don’t.” The ceremony, bells, and candles! It all seemed so ridiculous to someone who had grown up without it. That’s when I realized: We believed the same things! We just expressed it differently. It really allowed me to step back and say, “Wow. This is nuts. I just really don’t think this makes any more sense than any other religion. No, I don’t think I believe it, after all.” And I wanted to. I still wouldn’t mind believing if I could. I just can’t anymore. I threw the bathwater out and found that the “baby” was actually just a rock at the bottom of the tub. So then, yes, I threw it out, too. But not before examining it.
October 31st, 2009 at 2:13 pm
“have also ditched their faith altogether, not able to seperate things out,”
Grace. I know you mean not to offend, but this attitude… this one little bit more piece of blame put on these women (me too, as I left, though never was quiverful). It’s one more little dig at our mental abilities, one more dig at our capacity for reason. We are “not able to separate” faith from the bad. It’s these phrases that act as one more snowflake that falls and suffocates the spirits of those that don’t agree, that left, that allows those who still believe to marginalize our stories just a little bit more. “THAT’s why she left, it was because she was too stupid to separate out the bad behavior of a person from the faith. There wasn’t anything wrong with the beliefs themselves. There isn’t anything wrong with what I believe.”
It’s this marginalizing, this inability to listen, this psychological suffocation, that isn’t necessarily wholly confined to what YOU see as “spiritual abuse” in the church. It’s pretty endemic, and that little phrase of yours hurts. It hits hard the part of us that has already been rubbed raw by the evangelizers, the ones who never really listen but yet still know best, who know exactly why we’re doing something “better than we do” and who can diagnose us with spiritual and mental stupidity. I know you don’t mean to offend, so please be aware this is a VERY RAW spot for those of us who have left, and please take care not to hit there. I know you don’t mean to hurt… but through inattention and carelessness it is VERY EASY to hurt persons with minority beliefs in a culture. Especially if they have left that majority belief.
Listen to us, the actual reasons why we left, and don’t pin it on our inability to discern things.
October 31st, 2009 at 6:36 pm
I’m very sorry Jemand, and Lauradee, and ask your forgiveness. My remarks were insensitive to you.
I’ll do more listening, and not comment for awhile.
November 1st, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Forgiveness certainly granted! I know from reading previous comments and even the tone in your earlier post here that you most definitely aren’t an insensitive person. You just happened to not quite see the implication your word choice made (and we have gotten that comment given to us purposefully by others with far less honest and kind motivations than you have, so we’re sore on that point.) I don’t blog myself, but I think it’s awesome you’re so willing to listen to the experiences of us unbelievers, and actually care.
November 1st, 2009 at 8:05 pm
Thank you, Jemand. Appreciate your honest feedback to me, too!