My mom and I showed up at the Pre-Excel room and asked for a meeting with Sara, Rachel and Emily. They agreed to sit down with us behind the stage curtain, and this time my mom did the talking.
“Leona told me what happened, and she does not have an eating disorder. I’m her mother. I would know.” Mom pointed at my coffee cup, “she’s even drinking a vanilla latte.”
I nodded and sipped my coffee as proof.
My mom argued against each of their points and stated at the end, “I don’t believe you have the authority to kick her out.”
Sara, Rachel and Emily listened respectfully, but when it was their turn to talk, Sara piped up, “Well actually, we did get confirmation from the leaders above us and they approved our decision to tell Leona to attend the Student Sessions instead.” She looked at me suspiciously, “did you attend it?” fully expecting me to have played hooky.
“I did,” I said solemnly.
“But your reasons for kicking her out aren’t true,” my mom protested.
Sara looked at Rachel and Emily, as if reminding my mom and I that they both supported her. “Well, we still feel that Leona has a rebellious spirit, and we do feel after praying about this in earnest that this is what God has asked us to do.”
Then my mom faced the same issue I had. How do you argue with someone who says that God told them to do or say whatever it is they’d done or said? How can you contradict them without coming across as a rebellious mom with her rebellious daughter?
“But,” Emily conceded, “Leona can join her group for the performance at the end of the day.”
“Yes,” Rachel agreed, “she can come back at 3:30PM to join Mary to lead the girls to the parent session for their performance, then be here as the girls get picked up and help clean up the room at the end of the conference.” But that was their final offer. There were no apologies for their accusations. I wondered if Rachel looked my mom up and down and suspected she and her child-size cardigan had an eating disorder too.
We walked out of the room and my mom huffed. “That’s just not right.”
“I know,” I groaned, still reveling in having her on my side. “But what can we do?”
We happened past Chris Hogan, who was a friend to my parents, and who ran a ministry endorsed by ATI. Bill Gothard knew him personally, and Chris spoke frequently at the conferences.
“Hi Chris,” my mom stopped him as he was waving but still walking past, “can we talk to you about a situation for a minute?” Chris was happy to stop and listen, and when I mentioned the eating disorder accusation, he said with feeling, “That’s just not okay for them to say. My daughter has allergies and she can’t eat the ATI meals either. I’m so sorry that happened to you.” He paused, thinking of something to do to correct the situation. “Have you talked to anyone else? Do you think you could get a meeting with Mr. Gothard? Maybe you could find David” –who was what we called an MGA (Mr. Gothard’s Assistant)— “and ask him to pull Bill aside?”
This was a hopeful development! “What a good idea!” My mom told Chris, and “Thank you!” we repeated as we then began to wonder where to find David.
We found him outside of the Student Sessions room, and he agreed to pull Mr. Gothard aside for me. It helped that David knew me from when I volunteered at IBLP headquarters years ago, and just yesterday he’d been the one to hook up my lapel mic for my speech. Oh, how things change.
Close to noon, I was sitting across from Mr. Gothard in one of the main areas of the conference building.
“It’s good to see you again, Leona,” Bill said to me sweetly. “Your eyes are so bright and full of the holy spirit. When are you coming back to Headquarters?”
“Thank you! I’d love to come back sometime after I graduate high school,” I offered, which was true.
“Tell me what’s going on?” He asked, so I explained.
After I concluded my story, Bill’s first question to me was, “What kind of music do you listen to? You said you play guitar?”
Feeling exasperated but remaining polite, I answered, “Yes, I have a guitar. I play the guitar in my youth group band sometimes. And I sing.”
“What kinds of music do you play?”
“Well, we play church music….And hymns,” I threw it in there, hoping it would make a difference, even though we mostly played the kind of music you hear on K-Love.
“You know,” Bill went into his whole monologue on the risks of listening to any music with a backbeat, whether it was worship music played in church or not.
I listened intently, not hearing anything I hadn’t heard many times before, then I tried to bring us back to the issue at hand. “So…what I want is to go back to Pre-Excel for the rest of the day. Can you help me do that?”
He thought for a minute. “When I went to college…” he started, and shot into another longwinded story about how a PhD project got rejected when he was in college due to his faith in God and he felt persecuted. “Sometimes in life, we experience persecution, even when we do nothing wrong, but God works it out for our good, and we experience His outpouring of blessings. Leona, I think in this instance you are being persecuted; but remember, God blesses those who are persecuted, and He will grow you as a person because of it.” He smiled at me in conclusion.
And that was that. I took my problem all the way up to the top leadership of the organization that put on the conference, and while he agreed I was being unfairly treated, and while he had all the power he needed to make it right by telling Sara, Rachel and Emily to go suck it to let me back into Pre-Excel to finish the conference, he didn’t do that. He told me that I would grow as a person from this wrongdoing.
Completely baffled and hurt, I cried again, this time in the fancy sitting room attached to the lady’s bathroom upstairs. I couldn’t help it. It blew my mind that a man who had the power to–with a few words–correct a complete injustice chose not to. Did he not care enough? Did he think I deserved it? ATI was God’s way of living, and I’d spent the last ten years of my life living by the standards they taught me. Then, like the flip of a light switch, they turned against me, unwilling even to understand my point of view.
Mid-afternoon, my mom was over the situation and treated me with impatience. “This is just the way it is. It’s okay. You’ve gotta wipe your tears and get over it.”
Ah, now this was the mom I knew. She had to come back sooner or later.
I attended the adult sessions for the rest of the day, because I just couldn’t bear to be a navy-blue polo in a sea of white anymore. Then, when it was time, I finished out the conference with my girls, grateful to be back with them, but still heartbroken that my situation hadn’t been significant enough to correct.
I was still a mess on the drive home the next day. By then, mom was completely over me.
“Don’t tell anyone about this situation,” she warned. “We wouldn’t want this story to give anyone the wrong impression of ATI.”
It was like a knife through my heart. Not only was this injustice not important enough for Mr. Gothard to correct on my behalf, but expressing my pain from this situation to friends who could support me was not nearly as important as protecting ATI’s reputation.
I wasn’t the same person for weeks, feeling gutted, rejected, and numb all at once. Mysteriously, almost as soon as we returned home from the conference, my health issues disappeared. If there is a God who cares about me, I wonder from time to time if this was an act on their part to help me get out of IBLP.
I did tell some people about my situation anyway. I couldn’t find it in me to care if my story hurt ATI’s reputation–they had hurt ME. Shouldn’t people be aware that things like this could happen? Without realizing it, I began to take IBLP’s teachings with a grain of salt.
Time passed and Bill Gothard’s sexual scandals hit the news. People were beginning to talk about it. On a day I’ll never forget, I scrolled past an article reposted on Facebook suggesting that we’d misinterpreted Proverbs’ lessons on guarding our hearts. Curious, I clicked the link and plunged down a rabbit hole that I didn’t crawl out of for hours. Each article was rich with hyperlinks to other posts on Recovering Grace‘s site, and each article tugged at the threads of my belief system that began rapidly unravelling.
I read about Bill Gothard’s sexual scandals, dating back to the 80s, from young women who spent time at headquarters just like I did. I realized that it had been a mere stroke of luck that I wasn’t also one of them. I read about other people who had been hurt by IBLP, and read stories and theological arguments about how IBLP’s teachings are harmful, Biblically inaccurate, and often leading to abusive parenting.
It was like learning the words to describe feelings that I didn’t know anyone else had. These stories validated the thoughts and feelings I felt guilty for having and reassured me that I wasn’t alone. In a moment of immense relief mixed with hellish dread, I whispered to my empty room, now dark with the passing of so many hours glued to my desk, “Oh my god, I was raised in a cult.”
There is no taking back that realization, even if you want to. I debated with myself whether I would just ignore what I’d learned that day and choose the path of least resistance–carrying on with my life, safe within my limited worldview and loved by my family and community. It would have been the easier choice.
But there was this tiny spark of hope in me that kept prodding, “But doesn’t this mean that there is more to life than this? Maybe life isn’t supposed to be this hard.”
And it was hard. Everything about my life was controlled, monitored, and filled with fear of slipping up. Don’t sin! What if God raptures us during a moment when you haven’t gotten right with God? You’ll be left behind.
And sin was almost everything: thinking too much about yourself, loving anything or anyone in your life more than God, complaining, having a bad attitude, telling the smallest lie, being too interested in your own body, overeating, oversleeping, wearing anything too revealing, saying any bad words, watching anything that promoted living a worldly life, listening to worldly music–especially music with a backbeat in it, being close friends with the opposite gender, kissing before your wedding day, holding hands before you were engaged… The standards were impossibly high, always giving you a reason to apologize to God and remember why you needed His grace. Always making you feel like a broken, horrible person; your disgust with humanity cornered you into hating your body and turning against yourself. Earth was our waiting room while we longed for Jesus to return and bring us to Heaven. Until then, it was our lot to suffer in our human vessels on a planet that our earliest ancestors had chosen to invite sin onto.
I tried to imagine a life where I could be in tune with myself without it being a sin. I could focus on self-care without worrying that I was self-obsessed. I could be friends with people I was genuinely interested in without worrying that I was becoming worldly or accidentally giving away pieces of my heart that I should save for my future husband. I could pursue hobbies without fearing that I was putting my interests before God. I could pursue education and a career without believing that I was breaking God’s rules about what my role as a woman was. I could have a job that didn’t directly impact God’s kingdom without believing that I had become a heathen who didn’t care about saving souls. I just could be who I wanted to be.
I tried to imagine such peace and couldn’t do so without strong suspicions that such an existence was against God’s will.
And yet… What I was reading about IBLP’s take on the Bible being wrong was so relieving. You’re telling me that maybe I can go to Heaven AND enjoy a peaceful life on earth in the meantime? You’re telling me that God wants me to be happy? It seemed too good to be true. Actually, it took years to really believe that God wanted me to be happy, but I took the plunge anyway.
I left the cult. That is to say, I left it in my heart, and began to unpack my beliefs and slowly, painstakingly replace them with new ones. Once I graduated high school later that year, I told my parents that I didn’t want to be involved anymore, and was surprised and relieved when they didn’t disown me. I don’t mean to make it sound easy–it wasn’t. It was painful and isolating and I’m still rewiring my brain ten years later. Being steeped in a cult for so long gets into the cracks of your very core, and I know that it will impact me for the rest of my life.
But! I’m also okay. I’m happy. I live a good life, married to a good partner. I’ve gotten more education and have a great career and good friends. I’m still connected with my family, and I am working on growing my chosen family too.
If my story sounds like yours, I just want you to know that there is hope. Don’t give up, and don’t choose the path of least resistance and stay where you are. Get out! Seriously, GET OUT.
There is so much world out here and it’s beautiful. It will be very hard, but it’s worth it. I promise.
Header Photo Credit: James Staddon
Leona Left Fundamentalism 
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