This past April, the North Carolina Values Coalition organized a Sex Ed Sit-Out in order to fight what they called “radical, graphic, tax-payer funded, gender-bending sex education.” Protests occurred across the U.S., and also in England, Canada, and Australia. Along with the sit-out, the organization circulated a petition that garnered nearly 60,000 signatures, speaking out against the use of taxpayer dollars in the promotion of “sexual liberation, deviance, and gender confusion to our precious kids.” They declared their intent to stand together with all parents pulling their children out of school on the day of the sit-out.

This protest is just one example of the push-back against comprehensive sex ed, a form of sexuality education that, as defined by SIECUS, “includes age-appropriate, medically accurate information on a broad set of topics related to sexuality including human development, relationships, decision making, abstinence, contraception, and disease prevention.” At the heart of these objections is the concern that children aren’t ready for this information. That learning about sex will inspire them to have it.

But many adolescents end up faced with relational and sexual decision making they’re unprepared for when they’re not given the information they need. And when they make decisions based upon faulty or inadequate information, there are negative consequences.

At the heart of these objections is the concern that children aren’t ready for this information. That learning about sex will inspire them to have it.
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Though CSE classes are open about the fact that abstinence is the most effective means of avoiding pregnancy and STIs, they also teach adolescents about various safer sex methods, and provide them with developmentally appropriate information about reproductive health, interpersonal relationships, intimate partner violence, and more.

But a lot of what Americans feel and believe about sex ed seems to be wrapped up in our conflicted attitude toward sex, and around the values we attach to it. What sex means to us not from a health standpoint, but an emotional one. As Ashley Bever, the organizer of Opt-Out Day, tells her two daughters, “[Sex] is intended to bring you together with someone else. It is intended to satisfy your soul. But it needs to be in a certain context.” And who gets to define that context can have drastic consequences for public health.

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Where does this this mindset come from? It may actually be a holdover from Christian beliefs beginning in the Middle Ages, when the church first placed marriage under its jurisdiction, eventually elevating it to the level of sacrament. As the church grappled with how to manage marriage, they came to see not just premarital sex—but sexual desire in general—as a distraction from one’s spiritual life unless it was procreative.

Disease also sparked fear. In the early 1900s, America saw the rise of venereal diseases such as syphilis, especially during World War I. At the epidemic’s peak in 1939, syphilis killed about 20,000 people, with an estimated 600,000 Americans infected. But what was even more alarming than this public health crisis, to social health organizations in particular, was what these rates of infection indicated: Americans were increasingly engaging in extramarital sex and prostitution. Members of the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) decided that the only way to stamp out prostitution and the spread of STDs was to teach people about the “proper” uses of sexuality. And so, sex education was born from a moral panic.

In her book Talk about Sex: The Battles Over Sex Education in the United States, Janice M. Irvine describes how these socially conservative values around sex eventually led to a movement against sex ed in the 1960s, partially in response to the socially liberal political climate of the time. At that time, both conservatives and Evangelical Christians who felt alienated by this cultural moment banded together against sex ed, and against the organizations that championed it. Since then, the contention that exists between such groups has only intensified.

Between 1972 and 1990, thanks to an increase in contraceptive access, sexual activity outside of marriage rose again. Because abortion was also legalized, sex became increasingly uncoupled from both marriage and procreation. It was this—more than public health concern—that worried people. So in 1982, the Adolescent Family Life Act brought about the first federal funding of abstinence-only until marriage education programs. In the early ’90s, these programs were coupled with the first virginity pledges, kicked off by “True Love Waits.” Even now, many abstinence-only education programs still use some form of these pledges.

Because abortion was legalized, sex became increasingly uncoupled from both marriage and procreation. It was this—more than public health concern—that worried people.
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“There is a very strong push from socially conservative organizations for abstinence-only-until-heterosexual-marriage education,” says Elizabeth Schroeder, who’s been a sex educator for over 25 years. “Their propaganda is based on the assertion that teaching young people about sex and sexuality encourages young people to start having sex earlier. The awful thing about this is that they know this is false—they know there is a lot of research showing that when we talk with young people about sex, particularly parents and caregivers from the earliest ages, young people end up waiting longer to start having sex, and to practicing safer sex whenever they do become sexually active. The hyperbole is designed to scare parents. There is a lot of hysteria that has always been built up around the idea of anything having to do with sex and sexuality being responsible for moral decay.”

Our country continues to double down on its investment in abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. Recently, the Trump administration announced new rules around funding for programs intended to prevent teenage pregnancy, showing a clear preference for programs that emphasize abstinence or, as it has been rebranded, “sexual risk avoidance.” And they move away from a condition implemented during the Obama administration that required organizations receiving federal money to choose from a list of approaches that have been scientifically shown to effectively change sexual behavior.

“The reasons behind why they’re opposing sex ed in its various formats really has to do with this idea that educating young people either encourages them to start having sex earlier, or is taking away their innocence and their purity,” says Schroeder.

Newer comprehensive sex ed programs also challenge traditional gender norms, striving for greater inclusivity for those along the gender and sexual orientation spectrum, and confronting long-held beliefs about conventional, heterosexual gender roles. “Sex and relationships are shaped by gender norms and power,” says Nicole Haberland, a senior associate and researcher at the Population Council, who has found that programs addressing these issues are more effective, “and I think that spills over into the sex ed debate. There’s significant anxiety around people feeling that their traditional power is being threatened and, to the degree that sex ed transforms that, it is a direct threat.”

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Meanwhile, programs that promote abstinence-only until (heterosexual) marriage uphold traditional gender norms. But while these programs may align more closely with the values held by some, they aren’t keeping teens safe.

According to a 2016 report from the CDC, there are an estimated 20 million new STDs in the U.S. each year, and more than 110 million total (new and existing) infections. These infections can lead to long-term health consequences, such as infertility, and can also enable HIV transmission. And some of these numbers are now climbing, despite having been on the decline for years.

And it’s no wonder. The research shows that abstinence-only programs do not delay sexual initiation, nor do they reduce rates of either teen pregnancy or STIs. Young abstinence pledge-takers are one-third less likely to use contraception when they become sexually active, have the same rate of STIs as their sexually active peers, and are more likely to have engaged in both oral and anal sex than their non-pledging peers. In states that offer comprehensive sexuality education, STI rates are actually lower.

The research shows that abstinence-only programs do not delay sexual initiation, nor do they reduce rates of either teen pregnancy or STIs.
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It’s easy to find examples of women whose health has suffered due to inadequate sex ed. Jenelle Marie Pierce, for example—a woman from a conservative rural town in Michigan who later went on to found the STD Project and become the spokesperson for Positive Singles — received abstinence-only education. “All of it was about avoiding pregnancy,” she said. “Avoiding infection. There was never information around [the types of things] that would help you feel good about your womanhood. Just: ‘Here’s your uterus. Here’s where babies are made. Don’t get pregnant.’ I knew I needed to make sure not to be a slut and not to be trashy, but what did that mean?”

As she began exploring her sexuality, Pierce tried to be smart about it, knowing that sex ed left her with a lot of missing information. She drove herself to a Planned Parenthood and got a prescription for birth control. However, she didn’t use other protection when having sex. “I really thought I was being a proactive and responsible person,” she said. “I wasn’t having sex with any of the people who get STDs. The dirty people. The trashy people.” She was blindsided when she had her first outbreak.

“The things that would help you advocate for yourself were not discussed,” she said of her sex ed classes. “I thought that since I was protecting myself, I didn’t have to push my partners about [their testing history or condom use]. I didn’t feel empowered to ask them. Afterward, I thought, ‘This is all my fault. I’m being punished by god. I’m damaged goods. Nobody will ever want me.’ Afterward, I still didn’t know how to have the talk with partners.”

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The consequences of our values-based decisions around sexuality become even more stark when compared to the approaches and outcomes in other countries. Research shows that countries with a more open and positive attitude toward sexuality have better sexual health outcomes, and lower adolescent pregnancy rates. This is reportedly because there is less pressure for adolescents in Western Europe to remain abstinent, and more emphasis on teaching young people to protect themselves. Because of this, government-supported schools in many Western European countries provide—and often require—comprehensive sexuality education, and they offer easy access to reproductive health services.

The Dutch, especially, have received attention for their approach to sex ed. Sexuality education is mandated for all primary school students. And while different schools take different approaches, all programs treat sexual development as a natural process, and assume students have the right to honest and reliable information. Because of this, they happen to have some of the best outcomes when it comes to teen sexual health.

Bonnie J. Rough, author of the forthcoming Beyond Birds & Bees, maintains a deep respect for the cultural attitudes she observed during the time she lived in the Netherlands with her husband and two young daughters. She speaks admiringly of a culture in which body differences between boys and girls were normalized, and of how this seems to have translated to a wider culture of respect and tolerance. They have since moved back to Seattle, and it’s been a challenge to uphold the lessons they learned while abroad.

“The truth is,” said Rough, “I can’t fix this problem for my kids. What they’re missing…what they’re not going to get is the experience of getting educated with their peers…of getting the same education at the same time and everyone being on the same page about what we’re expected to know and what information we’re capable of dealing with and what is acceptable or not acceptable. I can regurgitate knowledge, but I can’t change the culture.”

The cultural attitudes around sex won’t be changing anytime soon. “The more socially conservative a religion,” says Schroeder, “the more likely they are to have restrictive ideas and beliefs about who should or should not be having sex, and under what circumstances. Given that our government was founded by people of Christian backgrounds, and roughly 85 percent of Congress identifies as Christian, these religious beliefs cannot help but inform how people make decisions — including about sex and sexuality.”

“For many social conservatives,” adds Schroeder, “the end justifies the means. They have no problem shaming or judging young people, or not representing all of the facts, as long as it keeps young people abstinent. And that, again, is very evangelical. But that should not be the way people choose to teach others.”

Identities are important. They help us define who we are, and understand our place in the world. But sometimes, those very same identities exist as diametrically opposing forces within us; they are a juxtaposition that sends ripping cracks through our very idea of selfhood, leaving us confused, isolated, and bound in inner conflict.

And that’s how I felt for many, many years. Jewish. Lesbian. Lesbian. Jewish. I was both, and that made me feel like neither.

From one community I hear, “how can you be a part of a religion that hates your very existence?” while the other says, “how can you be a part of a group that G-d would not approve of?”

And so I’ve teetered on the edge of both worlds; finding pride in both my faith and my sexuality has been a long, arduous road to reconciliation.

At 13 I came out—for the first time—but at a fairly religious school (as you can expect) it was not accepted with open arms flung wide. I distinctly remember the moment it happened. During a history lesson, we had trailed into a dangerous discussion of homosexuality. The usual comments, slurs, and noises of disgust echoed around the room. I couldn’t take it. Years of anger, angst, and self-hatred burst forth and formed the words that blurted from my mouth: “I’m gay.”

What came next is a blur. But the moment those two words left my lips, my world changed.

Although there were those who stood by me, I had the usual mix of rejection, name-calling, and in one particularly unfortunate episode, a petition by some of my peers to get me expelled. Old Testament verses of corporal punishment were frequently quoted during discussions of my sexuality at school alongside other students and in the Synagogue with sermons; my fate of eternal damnation was certified, and attempts to save my soul through prayer were lovingly given.

But in truth, the harshest criticism, and the most vile disgust and hatred, came from none other than myself. Every night I would pray to G-d to make me straight, to make me like the way a boy’s hoodie smelled when he gave it to me if I was cold, to make me feel enticed by the way stubble rubbed against my cheek, to make me normal. I didn’t understand, why me.

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If G-d loves all his children, why would he make me so detestable? I used to sit on the floor of my kitchen, tears flooding my face, feeling painfully torn in two directions. Knowing who you are is supposed to be a beautiful thing, a moment of epiphany and realization and calm.

But for me, knowing who I was was to be tormented.

Over the next four years, through deep conversations, debates, and determination, many came around and embraced my sexuality, including those who had previously shunned or questioned me; they loved the sinner despite the sin.

But for me to truly learn to love myself and accept my sexuality, it took far longer. I went along with the usual playground flirtations and games, the adolescent dance of sloppy kisses at parties, the dates over drinks and food 18 year-olds think is fancy. I was in and out of the closet so much that people believed I’d found Narnia.

Those around me just couldn’t understand; how I could be so vocal in asking for acceptance from others, but couldn’t find the same acceptance from within? In truth, until I was 19 (six years after I first came out, and 12 years from the time I first realized who I was), I couldn’t understand this internal dichotomy either.

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment where I finally found my peace. It’s an amalgamated feeling of foggy memories of finally finding love—slipping my hand into my girlfriend’s felt right, not wrong—throwing handfuls of sweaty glitter onto Pride floats, and hours of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Seeing all the joy, beauty, and goodness people felt within themselves because of their sexuality, and not in spite of it, made me question what could be so awful about feeling the way I did.

I recognized that I didn’t have to make a choice anymore — my Judaism and my sexuality were equally valid aspects and wants of my heart. I suppose I finally believed the old adage that tells you to follow it.

I was in and out of the closet so much people believed I’d found Narnia.
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My story is not unique. It is one that plays out in churches, mosques, synagogues, and places of worship across the world. Coming out is never easy, but coming out within the context of religion adds another layer to the struggle. Individuals who are both religious and LGBT+ face the prospect of an entire community that they grew up with turning their backs on them, of being cast out and criticized.

Pride means something different to those who face these particular threats. So, I asked people who identify as both having faith and as LGBT+ to share their experiences, and what Pride means to them.

Rowan, 18, FTM, Christian

“I’ve received a lot of criticism — I’ve had people tell me that they ‘disagree’ with my identity. It just so happens that growing up in a Christian community meant that most of the people I came out to first were childhood friends I knew via the church. These people always made it very clear that their opinion of my identity didn’t affect how much they cared about me—even if it hurts—and that counts for something I suppose.

I never personally had any doubts that God loved me under justifications that He doesn’t make mistakes. If I’ve been made like this, it’s a path he wants me to take, and I can use my body in a way that honors Him through becoming the person He wants me to be . . .

But there was always the thought in the back of my mind that I was twisting the Bible’s words to make me feel better about my situation. Talking to other people who shared my faith—or at least who had a faith and so understood my experience—made it a lot easier for me to reconcile my sexual/gender identity without feeling guilty at all.

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I do feel proud of both of my identities, kind of more so because I have both identities—like, there’s often stereotypes of people with a faith/religion hating queer people and queer people in return being intolerant of faith groups, and it’s nice to think that I can be open minded on both sides.

Pride should be a celebration of inclusivity and tolerance, so it would be unfair of me or anyone else to allow my faith to prevent me from enjoying it.”

Brian, 21, Bisexual, Christian:

“The most rejection I’ve faced has been from my parents, and the Afrikaans church that they’re a part of. My parents don’t accept my sexuality; they say that they pray for me to stop being gay every day and refuse to be a part of my life with my partner.

Religion to some people is something very beautiful, but to others it is something very harmful. Because I have understood what it means to be rejected by a religion, I find Pride is a concept that means a lot to me; it means I’m saying I’m not going to let any institution tell me that what I am isn’t okay. I take pride in the fact that me and others share in a large experience of rejection. Religion for me informs my pride.

Religion has meant that people aren’t willing to consider what it actually means to be gay, and for a lot of religious communities being gay is not accepted and it’s a fairly common experience amongst LGBT+ globally that they find it difficult to come out or they’re completely rejected by their community. For me and those people, Pride means something powerful: I’m proud of who I am, I’m proud of my chosen family.”

Qaisar, 30, Queer, Muslim:

“Pride is not only the opposite of shame; it’s the opposite of invisibility, erasure, and silence. To be a queer Muslim during Pride month is about voraciously affirming one’s own existence against a backdrop of religiously-motivated homophobia, and against the virulent Islamophobia and racism that underlines many Western queer spaces and movements.

Online and in the books of bearded Saudi-funded clerics, you can find a million ways to spell out your hell-bound journey. But my own experience in real life has been remarkably serene; I am lucky to have a family that for the most part—though with difficulty—has accepted my sexual orientation, and have further found allies within my own community networks. Granted, there have been plenty of friendly and unfriendly debates on the reconciliation between faith and sexual orientation or gender identity, but oftentimes I have found being Muslim in queer spaces a greater challenge than the reverse.

Pride is not only the opposite of shame; it’s the opposite of invisibility, erasure, and silence.
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Firstly, that the history of Islam and the Muslim world — the orientalist geography of the term notwithstanding — is replete with orientations and identities wholly alien to modern heteronormative ideals, and queer life has found expressions in Islamic cultures from Persia, to Morocco, to India and Indonesia.

Secondly, I have found like-minded Muslims from across the LGBTQI+ spectrum with whom to build affirming community groups, discussion circles, and prayer spaces, and in doing so, shatter the false fantasy shared by Islamic conservatives and LGBT secularists; you can’t be gay and Muslim.”

Masha, 24, Bisexual, Roman Catholic:

“I grew up in Russia, where the majority of believers belong to the Russian Orthodox Church. However, my family background is partly Polish and Lithuanian, therefore, at the age of 9, I was christened into the Roman Catholic Church and had been a member since. This period covers most of my experience growing up, as well as exploring my sexuality and coming to peace with it.

I slowly realized that I may not be totally heterosexual around the age of 15. As I was a devoted Catholic, I had a mini-breakdown a couple months before my Confirmation, but had no one to talk about it with at the Church or in my family. I went to confession and asked forgiveness for kissing a girl—among other things—skipping class and smoking a cigarette.

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Finally, a little while later, at one of the services during the homily, a priest said, “one should not come to the confession if they are not truly sorry about their sins, and shouldn’t come to the communion unless they have committed something extremely bad.” Personally, I didn’t feel particularly bad about loving another person and although I knew it was a sin, I did not feel it was extremely bad; in all other parts of my life I acted like an “OK” Christian.

In a way, Pride for me is to know who I am, and not be ashamed of it. With Christian morals, it is also important to me to be a good, kind, and forgiving person. I believe that, no matter what, the way you treat people is always more meaningful than who you are attracted to. I am always glad to see religious organizations and charities taking part in Pride marches and I feel that in general, we as humanity are moving in the right direction.”

As a community, we’ve all faced rejection, isolation, and the external, internal, and eternal struggle of finding acceptance from others and from ourselves. But, as the above stories show, despite the darkness there are glimmers and bright glares of hope, acceptance, and love to be found and to be proud about. Watching this year’s Pride celebrations around the world, I think I finally understand what that word means.

In the Talmud, the sacred text of Judaism, there is a story of Hillel, a sage scholar said to be associated with the holy book’s development—one of the most important figures in Jewish history. He came across a gentile who demanded that the entire Talmud be explained to him while standing on one foot. Hillel simply replied:

“What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary.”

Love, kindness, and social justice are the beating heart of the Jewish faith, and of many other religions; these virtues should be given freely no matter how a person identifies. We are all deserving subjects of the Lord’s love.

I’m Jewish, and I’m a lesbian. I can be both. I am both. I will always be both. The internal divisions have healed, even if the scars are still there — and I endeavor to live a life that G-d would be proud of.

It’s no secret that Christianity has a history of mishandling sexual misconduct allegations. From the Catholic Church’s well-documented pattern of silencing child abuse victims, to evangelicals brushing aside allegations against both Roy Mooreand Donald Trump, there’s a common theme that one should not touch God’s anointed, no matter what they do. One would think secular communities that promote skepticism — a method of determining truth where beliefs are questioned until sufficient evidence is presented — would do a better job of handling sexual misconduct allegations. Yet, a recent BuzzFeed article documenting the many sexual misconduct allegations against famous physicist Lawrence Krauss, taken with the attendant responses from the atheist community, demonstrate how even skeptics have a long way to go.

To be fair, several prominent atheist organizations and activists severed ties with Krauss shortly after the article’s publication. The American Humanist Association released a statement on March 9 saying they would no longer invite him to speak at any upcoming conferences, and they are considering rescinding his 2015 Humanist of the Year Award. The Center for Inquirylikewise announced that they were suspending their association with Krauss “pending further information,” as did evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne after doing his own investigation.

However, author Sam Harris, whose 2004 book The End of Faith first launched the so-called New Atheist movement, voiced his doubts about the accusations against Krauss on his “Waking Up” podcast, saying “there were many things obvious about [the BuzzFeed article] that suggested that we shouldn’t rush to accept all of these allegations,” and that he hoped Krauss “finds some way to redeem himself.”

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And Krauss isn’t the only prominent skeptic with allegations against him. News broke last week that David Silverman had been “abruptly fired” from his role as the president of American Atheists due to both financial and sexual misconduct allegations. On top of this, much has been written about the multiple accusations of sexual misconduct against Skeptic Magazine editor-in-chief Michael Shermer and historian Richard Carrier—yet they are still invited to speak at atheist and skeptic conferences.

What is most troubling about the Krauss story is how many in the atheist movement knew about his reputation before the BuzzFeed article came out, including this writer. If secular communities want to provide a better alternative to religious institutions, why didn’t anyone confront Krauss sooner? Why are Shermer and Carrier still given a platform despite having similar accusations to those levied against Krauss?

Perhaps it’s another sign that people in general are inclined to protect their beloved leaders, regardless of religious affiliation. The only difference is that while the church uses God’s grace to cover up sexual misconduct, the atheist movement uses what sociology professor Marcello Truzzi referred to as “pseudoskepticism”: denial instead of doubt, and discrediting instead of investigating.

I recently interviewed Minnesota Atheists associate president Stephanie Zvan for my Bi Any Means podcast, and I asked her if she’d made any similar observations. “I think there’s definitely an element of that,” she said. “I think there are probably a good half-dozen ways that the secular movement goes about justifying disbelieving women.” Zvan calls this use of pseudoskepticism “hyper-skepticism,” where instead of looking at all the evidence and information presented, one nitpicks tiny details that do not fit one’s preconceived ideas.

She used the example of the 2014 BuzzFeed article detailing sexual misconduct allegations against Shermer and how, despite there being “a couple of people contradicting small parts of various things in there because it’s never completely a clear-cut story,” the overwhelming evidence suggests that Shermer, according to Zvan, is a predator. “But what we get instead from skeptics,” she said, “what they’re calling ‘skepticism’ is them trying to pick apart the story of that evening and saying, ‘Well, this little tiny detail doesn’t make sense,’ as in it does make sense in their head—that it’s not the way they think the story should go. And that’s not skepticism.”

‘I think there are probably a good half-dozen ways that the secular movement goes about justifying disbelieving women.’
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Iranian atheist blogger Kaveh Mousavi recently experienced this hyper-skepticism firsthand. On March 17th, he wrote a blog post,

“Skepticism Means Believing the Victims of Lawrence Krauss,”
echoing Zvan’s criticisms of skeptics “who choose to disbelieve the victims of Lawrence Krauss, or to be silent about it, or to pretend it is a murky and unclear case and act agnostic about it.” The post received a number of negative comments including one that compared multiple independent sources making the same allegation against Krauss to multiple independent sources claiming to see Bigfoot. As Mousavi explained in a follow-up blog post, there’s a big difference between an extraordinary claim (e.g. seeing Jesus, Bigfoot, UFOs, etc.) and ordinary claims (e.g. a man groped a woman). The supernatural claims require extraordinary evidence, while the latter doesn’t.

“These hyper-skeptic dudebros are harmful to human society because they systematically defend sexual assault and fight against the rights of women. They are harmful to atheist movements and causes because they encourage tribalism instead of honest self-criticism and oversight, and harmful to skepticism itself, as they blunt this sharp tool, sacrificing it at the altar of their celebrity hero-idols.”

A common technique used in skepticism is “Occam’s razor,” a “scientific and philosophical rule that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily which is interpreted as requiring that the simplest of competing theories be preferred to the more complex or that explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities.” For example, if a man claims to have psychic powers that enable him to talk to the dead, either he can really talk to the dead, or he is just doing mentalist cold-reading magic tricks to convince everyone he’s speaking to the dead. So far the evidence suggests he’s more likely to be doing mentalist cold-reading magic tricks.

When it comes to the allegations against Krauss, either he’s right that a bunch of women are attacking him simply because he’s famous, or he really is a sexual predator. Since studies estimate only 8 of 136 reported rape cases are false (RAINN estimates only 310 out of every thousand rapes are even reported to the police), and given the fact Coyne did his own investigation and found the accusers’ stories do add up, it’s easier to assume Krauss is a predator. So why do many skeptics doubt sexual misconduct allegations?

Even if you reason as precisely as a computer, you’re still subject to ‘garbage in; garbage out.’
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I asked this to Zvan in a short follow-up interview through email. She told me that there are two factors at work here. First, there’s people’s unwillingness to believe their heroes have done terrible things. The second is, according to Zvan, skeptics confusing critical thinking with expertise. “The people who do the best jobs of fooling themselves on sexual harassment haven’t bothered to study harassment and assault,” she said. “They may have a handful of stats picked up from a YouTube video, but even if they’re accurate, they’re no substitute for a background in the subject. Even if you reason as precisely as a computer, you’re still subject to ‘garbage in; garbage out.’”

So how can skeptics remain skeptical without silencing survivors, or automatically dismissing women’s stories? Zvan said sometimes it’s best to remain silent and listen. “Skepticism requires epistemic humility,” she said. “If you don’t know what you’re talking about, either because you don’t have the background or because you don’t have access to enough information to get a clear picture, you don’t have to shout your uninformed opinion to the world. We’re supposed to be working against ignorant pundits, not becoming them.”

Eleanor Skelton was homeschooled from kindergarten to graduation in Colorado and Texas, and for most of her childhood her parents kept a number taped beside their front door.

In case of emergencies, that number would connect them with an attorney from the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) — just in case any curious social worker appeared on their doorstep asking questions. States away in Michigan, Erin DePree, another homeschool student, had that same number memorized.

To them and many other homeschoolers, the HSLDA represents the first and best protection they have against an adversarial government bureaucracy.

In the early ‘80s, home education was widely illegal, and fell under truancy statutes—which govern compulsory full-time education—in many states. In response, a few intrepid lawyers founded the HSLDA and over the decades have relentlessly pursued the utter abolishment of homeschooling regulation and oversight. As of 2018, they’ve largely succeeded. Not only is homeschooling legal in every state, it is now so unregulated that in 11 states, parents are not required to notify anyone of their intent to homeschool.

In those states, however, no one outside the home may know that a child exists, which leaves the door wide open to abuse—and even death.

Such is the disturbing case in Michigan, where Stoni and Stephen Berry were found dead in a freezer. Their mother tortured and murdered them, using Michigan’s gaping legal loopholes to hide her crimes for years. In New Jersey—another state where parents can educate their children at home without notice—a concerned neighbor found a 19-year-old boy who weighed 45 pounds rummaging through her garbage. If that sounds familiar, you might have read about the Turpin family in California — where homeschooling parents are required to give notice, but nothing else — who starved and tortured their children until one of them escaped out a bedroom window with an old cellphone.

In each of these states, representatives introduced bills that would create a meager amount of protection for homeschooled children. In California, Assemblyman Medina introduced a bill on February 16th that would require private homeschools to conform to the same requirement as regular private schools: a fire inspection.

However, it’s likely that this bill will fall under the same hail of fire that similar bills in New Hampshire and Hawaii faced this month. In my phone call with HSLDA’s president, Mike Smith, he grew rapturous at the power they have to mobilize the homeschooling community. “600 people showed up in New Hampshire, and 1,000 showed up in Hawaii,” he said of the hearings for bills in those states. Kahele, who wrote the proposed law in response to the death of a 9-year-old in Hawaii, withdrew his bill on February 21st.

When lawmakers seek to prevent parents from using the lack of homeschooling regulations to cover up abusing their children, they are frequently surprised by the ferocity of the HSLDA-organized resistance. In New Jersey, Weinberg said she and her office were “besieged” by phone calls from angry homeschooling parents after she introduced a bill asking them to take their children to a doctor.

Heinitz, a legislative director in Michigan, said “they make anti-vaxxers seem rational.”

This overwhelming political influence has been carefully cultivated by the team at HSLDA. For years they sent out the Court Report, a magazine that both Erin DePree and Eleanor Skelton remember reading. DePree read every issue her parents received, and said that social workers and child protective services were consistently portrayed as “evil” and people who “abuse their power.” Skelton only read the issues her mother decided were not too grisly; in her opinion, HSLDA has used resources like the Court Report and their modern e-mail alerts and Facebook posts to “fuel fear and distrust of government.”

To her, “HSLDA never believed children were being abused if CPS knocked on the door to check on families — it was always the parents who were persecuted for being godly.” In the interviews I conducted with homeschool graduates all over the country, the consistent message they received from HSLDA was debilitating paranoia.

A homeschooler who wished to remain anonymous said that even when her father beat her severely, HSLDA’s fear mongering had made her so terrified of family services that she didn’t even want to go to the ER for treatment. HSLDA has their political presence because they’ve successfully terrorized the homeschooling community into believing government regulations and CPS will destroy their families.

Kathryn Brightbill is the policy analyst at the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, an organization founded by homeschool alumni who seek sensible homeschooling reforms to protect children like the Turpins from abuse, neglect, torture, and murder.

According to Brightbill:

“HSLDA has had an outsized role in shaping homeschool culture, including secular homeschool culture. Whatever noble motivations they may have had to help homeschoolers at the organization’s outset, their belief that children don’t have rights — only parents have rights — combined with their decision to take parent’s claims at face value instead of vetting the cases they choose, has made them an organization that enables child abuse and educational neglect.”

In the decades since their founding, HSLDA has fomented a widespread culture of suspicion, paranoia, and wild conspiracy theories that propel parents to make phone calls to legislatures by the thousands — but that’s not where their political influence ends. Brightbill describes them as the “most powerful religious-right organization that nobody’s ever heard of.”

HSLDA’s Homeschool Foundation is a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization that drafts model conservative legislation for distribution to state legislatures. They are on ALEC’s education taskforce, and when I interviewed HSLDA President Mike Smith he described their membership as a fantastic success. In 2017, Betsy DeVos was the first education secretary to ever meet with HSLDA one-on-one, and they’re confident that DeVos will respect their wishes to keep government money out of homeschooling — and any regulatory strings that might come with it.

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Through their daughter organization—Generation Joshua—and the many state-level PACs that they’ve sponsored or encouraged, HSLDA’s political influence is pervasive. Kevin Swanson, one of the most significant homeschool leaders in Colorado, invited Republican presidential candidates to his National Religious Liberties Conference, which Rachel Maddow later dubbed the “kill the gays” conference.

Michael Farris, the first president of HSLDA, helped write the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA, often used to defend businesses who refuse to serve same-sex couples) in 1993, and has helped many states pass their own version. Farris is now the president of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group, and is working closely with the current administration, including Sessions and Pence.

Michael Farris would like to expand the influence of the HSLDA by recruiting and training homeschooling graduates to support his goals. To accomplish this, he founded Generation Joshua fifteen years ago, choosing the name “Joshua” to invoke biblical stories of the conquest of Canaan.

The first homeschooling parents were like Moses, leading their children out of the “Egypt” of traditional education; their children will be like Joshua, the next generation rising up to fill their parent’s (conservative, religious) shoes.

According to Joel Grewe, Generation Joshua’s director, they’re focused on getting homeschool students politically involved; he defines true success by whether students learn how to become “active citizens who robustly impact the political process.” In real-world terms, Generation Joshua deploys about a dozen or so Student Action Teams to conservative races around the country every election cycle.

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In 2016, Grewe says those teams saw a 90% success rate in the races they campaigned for. When asked about the upcoming 2018 cycle, he predicted “we’re going to see an increase in homeschoolers involved in the mid-terms,” and boasted in a 2014 interview that they can swing races by as much as seven percentage points, “if the stars align.”

He also claimed that many politicians — he named Reeves (R-VA), McClintock (R-CA), and Coburn (R-OK) — credit Generation Joshua with their electoral wins.

Despite HSLDA’s intentions, many homeschooling graduates have actually grown up to oppose their goals. The Coalition for Responsible Home Education and the Center for Home Education Policy are both organizations founded by homeschool alumni that oppose HSLDA.

The same social media that Smith praised in my interview as being a game-changer for homeschooling activism has provided a platform for alumni to find each other and begin sharing their stories — accounts that range from glowing to gut-wrenching. Homeschooling’s Invisible Children and Homeschoolers Anonymous are both sites that have formed in the last few years where homeschooler’s stories are told from the student’s perspective.

Whether these newer homeschooled children’s advocates will prevail in the fight to protect children, or HSLDA will continue dragging states down its reckless, unregulated, treacherous path remains to be seen.

It was a cold morning on the campus of the little Christian college I attended in Western Pennsylvania. Along with about 20 other students, I’d trundled in and unwrapped my coat and scarf. Now we all sat there sipping our coffees, waiting for the hardest class of the year to get rolling.

Our literary criticism professor paused as he announced the optional reading titles on our list for the next week, a funny look on his face.

“This one,” he said, “you may not like. It was written in 1984, published in ’85 or ’86, and was a reaction against the rise of the religious right — against the values that places like our school stand for. It’s pro-feminist, and anti-complementarian — against traditional gender roles. It sort of parodies what we believe in, in an interesting way. I’m curious what you’ll make of it.”

The shade thrown by my usually soft-spoken professor caught my attention. I had to read this book.

And so I did, unwittingly cracking open the beginning of the end for meek, conservative Christian me.

The story of The Handmaid’s Tale is a fairly simple dystopian one: A young woman is re-educated by the new totalitarian (and Christian) government regime to be a childbearing surrogate for the wife of a high-ranking military official. She tells her story after the fact, a narrative recorded on audio tapes found years later in someone’s attic. Her name is Offred, literally of Fred, having no name of her own anymore in this new society. It takes place in the U.S., post-Constitution, post-democracy, post-liberal humanism. Women are chattel. Religion is god. Order comes above all else.

To the average American in 1985, it seemed pretty far out there, an unlikely vision of future written as a warning. It’s been controversial since it came out, making ALA’s 100 most banned books list between 1990 and 1999, but that was because of the sex scenes in it and the way it depicted Christianity. It wasn’t really taken seriously as political foreshadowing.

But for me, when I read it for the first time, it felt like a prophecy that echoed rhythm of the world I had been raised in, reflecting the vision my church and community had for the future of American culture and politics.

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I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian community — the church we attended could fairly be called a cult, and my parents took things a step further than even our church did, homeschooling and raising nine kids. I was the oldest. We were part of a larger movement now called “Quiverfull,” the term taken from a Psalm where the writer talks about God blessing the man whose “quiver is full of arrows.” The metaphor refers to children, and our community understood this to be a command: Have children and raise them in this aggressively conservative faith, and then there will be more “true” believer Christians in the world to bring about cultural revolution in the name of Jesus Christ. Children like me were raised to see life as apocalyptic, and ourselves as serving on the front lines of a culture war to make America Christian.

Women in this world were treated much like those in The Handmaid’s Tale — most, like my mom, didn’t have their own bank accounts, didn’t have their own email addresses, and couldn’t leave the home without permission from their husbands. They were called helpmeets, a word taken from the King James Version of the Bible, which refers to wives as created to meet the needs of their husbands and be helpers to them.

Children like me were raised to see life as apocalyptic, and ourselves as serving on the front lines of a culture war to make America Christian.
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I even participated in a super-conservative worship church dance troupe for young women, called His Handmaids — again a term taken from the Bible, from the Virgin Mary’s response to the angel Gabriel telling her she’s going to be pregnant with the Messiah, which some translations open with “I am the Lord’s handmaiden, let it be unto me as you say.”

Just like Offred, women existed within the community to serve higher purposes than our own desires. Young girls who led the congregation wore white dresses and were stripped of identifying features — no jewelry, no nail polish, hair tied back and not in the face — while wives were submissive helpers to their husbands, with my mother used as the fertile ground for my father to breed a quiver full of Christian culture warriors.

And me, the oldest child in a family of nine? As was common in the movement, I was my mom’s right hand. She sometimes called me her strength, because I helped her co-parent my younger siblings and keep the household running. When she had twins shortly before my 13th birthday, it was me who got up with her during the nighttime feedings, not my dad. When things were too busy on Sunday nights, I took over doing all the family laundry and ironing. And I did the dinner dishes almost exclusively for about 10 years, foregoing activities with my peers at church and in the community because I had too many obligations to fulfill at home. Like Offred, my life’s purpose was subsumed into serving the “greater good” of my far-right Christian community.

We were not alone, either. My situation grew out of a larger movement in the conservative Christian community to be more invested in politics and cultural affairs on the national level. This push was led by the “Moral Majority,” a group of Christian leaders founded by Jerry Falwell in 1971, which sought to take on Washington to bring Christian ethics to bear on policy at a national level.

The Moral Majority focused on issues related to their priorities for promoting and protecting traditional family values. They celebrated Ronald Reagan’s presidency and encouraged his refusal to act on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which was killing thousands, largely because they saw it as fundamentally a judgment from God on the “immoral” behavior of homosexuals. According to historian Rachel Coleman — a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University, who is also a Quiverfull Daughter and whose research focuses on 20th century history of childhood, children, and religion — it wasn’t until kids started getting affected and dying from infected blood in transfusions that the issue was seen as valid. As a result, President Reagan eventually did act, releasing a series of PSAs about the epidemic…but these were all focused on kids, the future of the religious crusade for a Christian United States.

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Also part of this movement was the rise of Operation Rescue, a Christian group that encouraged protest (and, loosely, some terrorist-style) tactics against abortion practitioners and those receiving abortion services. In the wake of Roe v. Wade passing in 1973, the Moral Majority hit on abortion as the issue that would most viscerally and immediately grab the attention of their audience and rally support and action at the grassroots level. We still see this struggle impacting negotiations on the Hill today, as abortion remains an impossibly hot-button issue, regularly derailing policymaking. Shock-and-awe tactics with grisly photos of dead fetuses and terror of increased government oversight on family-related issues drummed up droves of supporters buying into the agenda of the Moral Majority.

This terror-based approach to protecting the “traditional family” and “family values” had a watershed affect, driving the Right to work against civil protections for sexual orientation and gender presentation, creating a fear frenzy that drove the War on Drugs to incarcerate an entire generation of young black men, while causing Christian universities (led by my alma mater) to seek legal exemption from being under Title IX if they would surrender access to federal funding.

This collective terror also allowed Phyllis Schlafly and the Moral Majority to lobby successfully against the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982. The United States is one of the last remaining countries in the world without a constitutional clause that protects the rights of women as full and equal citizens with men, and this prevents us from participating in key international coalitions against gender discrimination (like CEDAW, which we haven’t ratified either). The Moral Majority effectively took the United States backwards a century policy-wise — and we still haven’t fully recovered.

The U.S. is one of the last remaining countries in the world without a constitutional clause that protects the rights of women as full and equal citizens.
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It was during this rise of the Moral Majority that Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale. I was born, the first of what would be nine kids, just about five years after the book was first published.

Atwood has given many interviews about the writing of The Handmaid’s Tale and her creative process for it, but the thing that stands out to me the most is her comment that she made a rule for herself not to include anything in the novel that hadn’t already been done by some society, somewhere. Nothing was new.

And so, as I read the book for the first time that cold morning in 2010, the fictional world sounded a whole lot like my real life.

My ex-husband, who I met at that same little Christian college and who had also grown up in the same group of churches, wanted nothing more than to be a father, to have 10 kids and to homeschool them. When our marriage was careening to an end, we were sitting in a car outside his family’s house when he asked me if I might consider having a baby with him to rekindle something.

We’d chosen to wait initially for a host of reasons, the strongest one for me being that I had been raising kids for the last 10–12 years of my life and couldn’t see myself having the energy to plunge back into the world of poopy diapers and snotty noses. Two years into our marriage, I’d had a few pregnancy scares and each time as I waited for my period, I had had nightmares and panic attacks, unable to shake a deep-set terror of being trapped at home with a baby and no life outside the home. I would wake up crying and shaking from a dream about being pregnant, and the next morning he’d make me coffee and listen to my stories and try to assuage my fears.

So when he asked me to have a kid to save our marriage, I was stunned. “Are you serious?” I asked.

“Don’t be that way!” he responded. “I just think that I could love you again if you were a mother.”

Speechless, I told him to get out of the car. “I’m not discussing this,” I said. “There’s no way in hell I’d bring a kid into this mess if we can’t fix this on our own.”

It was our last big fight. We stopped communicating shortly thereafter, and the next time I had a real conversation was at the courthouse after our divorce hearing. He asked me to go to lunch, and I said no.

Because I running was late for my gynecologist appointment to get myself an IUD.

Offred learns early on that she is not the first Handmaid to be given to the Commander’s household to bear a child for him and his wife. The last one, she gathers from bits of gossip here and there, committed suicide.

In her room there is a little cupboard, and on the back wall of the cupboard is scratched nolite te bastardes carborundorum, which is bad Latin for “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” Offred assumes this message is left for her by the last Handmaid, a hand of camaraderie offered to her from beyond the grave.

When I ended my relationship to my father shortly after I got divorced, it was because he and I reached a crossroads where he had to choose to treat me according to his religious ideology or to treat me like a human, his daughter, his firstborn. He chose his ideology, and continued to use it to manipulate and mistreat myself and my mother and my siblings. We stopped talking, and I got my first tattoo — a black armband with script, “N.T. B. C.” Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Don’t forget you are human. Don’t forget what you have overcome.

Offred never tells the reader her real name — she only says she had another one, once. Under the new regime, her name is that of the man for whom she exists as a birthing vessel. It’s not important, she doesn’t exist as an individual anymore, her life is not her own.

When I got divorced, I repudiated the worldview that had been imposed upon me, rejecting a life where I existed only according to my relationship to my father or my husband. I took a new last name, a family name from further back on my grandmother’s side, naming myself to own myself. That was also the year I got my own bedroom for the first time, coming full circle out of a universe where my identity could not exist on its own terms, and carving out for myself a place in the world, a home, a name, a future that was my own to direct.

Today, Donald Trump is President of the United States, and there is increasing “constitutional anxiety” on Capitol Hill — what will he do next? The 24-hour news cycle is high-strung and exhausted, shrilly reporting on his tweets and Melania’s whereabouts and Ivanka’s so-called feminism.

Mike Pence is second in line for the presidency, and if Trump is impeached, we will have instead of an incompetent egoist for a president, a calculating and careful man who leaves a legacy behind him of anti-women, anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant policy-making. VP Pence is exactly the kind of man the Moral Majority of 1985 would have hoped to elect, as is demonstrated by their rallying around anti-minority and anti-choice legislators and policies and foundations.

The Quiverfull movement was created for this kind of world. I was raised to be a helpmeet in a world like Offred’s, and watching (white, middle class) liberals around me be shocked and unnerved by the election results has been curious for me. Didn’t they know this has been in the works for decades? I didn’t come out of nowhere, and neither did Trump, and nor did The Handmaid’s Tale.

Atwood recently wrote about the book in the New York Times, in anticipation of the new mini-series coming out on Hulu today, starring Elisabeth Moss and Alexis Bledel. In it she says:

“Is ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ a prediction? That is the third question I’m asked — increasingly, as forces within American society seize power and enact decrees that embody what they were saying they wanted to do, even back in 1984, when I was writing the novel. No, it isn’t a prediction, because predicting the future isn’t really possible: There are too many variables and unforeseen possibilities. Let’s say it’s an antiprediction: If this future can be described in detail, maybe it won’t happen. But such wishful thinking cannot be depended on either.”

The publication of The Handmaid’s Tale during the time of the Reagan presidency and the Moral Majority was an apt collision of vision and fears expressed through fiction — the release of the new mini-series timed at the end of the first 100 days of Donald Trump, U.S. President #45, is a powerful piece of foresight on the behalf of the studio which created it. Americans are more politically engaged than they have been in years, and we would all do well to pay attention to this “antiprediction” of a TV show in hopes that we can learn from it and resist the fruit of 1980s Christian conservative thinking running our government today, and save the future of our democracy.

Twenty years ago on March 26, 39 bodies were found beneath purple shrouds inside a San Diego mansion. Members of Heaven’s Gate, taking a page from Derek Humphry’s 1992 how-to guide — Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying — imbibed barbiturates and vodka with applesauce or pudding, tied plastic bags around their heads, lost consciousness, and were soon dead.

This marks the last cult-driven mass suicide in the United States up to the present day. In the 20 years before Heaven’s Gate, America’s new religious movements — like Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple in Jonestown and David Koresh’s Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas — had claimed more than 1,000 lives (over 900 alone just in Jonestown) either in suicide, governmental stand-offs, or a combination of both.

Meanwhile, some of the other religions that emerged around the same time, such as the Church of Scientology and the Family International (formerly the Children of God), continue to exist today with no such incidents — surfacing complicated questions about why certain new religious groups commit or incite large-scale acts of violence, while some don’t. (Certainly the majority of organized religions have a long and bloody history; killing in the name of god is one of humanity’s all-time favorite past times.)

What was it about the second half of the twentieth century that allowed for new religious movements to emerge, gain a following, and lead people to their deaths? Is the absence of such an event a testament to the evolution of our collective psyches, our law enforcement, or something else?

Why hasn’t such an event transpired in two decades?

The temporal proximity of the suicides at the Waco siege, Jonestown, and Heaven’s Gate (the details of which we’ll get to in a minute) makes it tempting to connect them on a psycho-socio-cultural level. But experts say they’ve found no correlation whatsoever — could their 20-year window be a coincidence?

“We kept looking for patterns,” Dr. J. Gordon Melton, distinguished professor of American religious history at Baylor University and author of Melton’s Encyclopedia of American Religions, told me. “But we couldn’t find any.”

The lack of a twenty-first century Waco — which had a death toll marked by suicide, but was primarily the result of violent governmental intervention — is, for Melton, due in part to a change in law enforcement tactics, as well as media coverage.

“There was a lot of pressure on the media to stop calling new religions ‘cults’ and treat them a little more even-handedly and not assume that any group that was ‘weird’ was also dangerous.”

Though familiar, the term “cult” is not terribly helpful as an analytic category, as it describes very different groups depending on who you’re talking to. In 2009, the Russian Ministry of Justice put out a list of totalitarian sects and extremist cults; Mormons made the cut. In Utah, however, 55% of the population is Mormon. This is some troubling math.

As Benjamin Zeller, an associate professor of religion at Lake Forest College and author of Heaven’s Gate: America’s UFO Religion, told me, “One man’s cult is another man’s mainstream religion.” “Cult” is a pejorative term that Zeller defines as: “Someone else’s religion that you don’t like.” Contemporary sociologists prefer to call these groups “emergent,” “alternative,” or “new religions.”

The term ‘cult’ is not terribly helpful as an analytic category, as it describes very different groups depending on who you’re talking to.

These terms are highly fluid, as religion remains a tricky thing to generalize and define. Heaven’s Gate, however, fits into any of these three categories with little resistance.

Formed in 1973, this was certainly a “new” or “emergent” religion. It had deep roots in Christianity, but with New Age twists that easily earned it the “alternative” title. These twists — such as the belief that the earth was a garden in which aliens planted souls — made outsiders consider its adherents eccentric if not “brainwashed” (another rhetorical nuisance for sociologists).

At the site of the suicides, there were plenty of bizarre details for the media to latch onto as well. Members believed they were going to evolve into aliens, and nine of the men had voluntarily been castrated in Mexico. They were all wearing uniforms — complete with black Nike sneakers — and they all had five dollars and a roll of quarters in their pockets. (Apparently this was an inside joke about always having bus fare.)

For Zeller, their peculiarities made them interesting, but not dismissible or mockable. “From the outside, it looks ridiculous,” he told me, but when examined more closely, it reveals our implicit bias toward more sanctioned, organized religions, and our intrinsic desire to Other these groups rather than understand them.

“It was never satisfying to me to just say they were ‘crazy’ or brainwashed. I think that it is too simple for us to assume that they are unlike us, and that they are ‘others,’ and we can just assume that they were irrational.

The vast majority of these people have basically what I would call everyday ordinary goals in their lives. They want to be happy, they want to feel like they are part of something which gives them meaning, they want to be able to put food on the table and have a place to sleep, they want to find success in a relationship, in love, they want to raise children, they want the same sort of boring stuff the rest of us want.

It’s just that the majority of them, they want it in such a way that none of the existing religions worked [for them]. The people who join new religions are looking for something they can’t find anywhere else, and they tend to want solutions which seem more extreme to the rest of us.”

Heaven’s Gate’s was founded by Bonnie Lu Nettles and Marshall Herff Applewhite, who called themselves “Ti” and “Do,” pronounced like the musical notes. They met in 1972 at the Houston hospital in which Nettles was a nurse. Applewhite was going through a divorce; he had recently been fired as a music teacher for having an affair with a student.

Nettles’ knowledge of mysticism attracted Applewhite, who, despite being raised Presbyterian (and briefly attending seminary school) was interested in other forms of spirituality; at their first meeting, Nettles read Applewhite’s astrological chart. They were the only two dedicated members until 1975, when they became involved with Clarence Klug — he was at the helm of a metaphysical group called “Self-Initiation” — and the L.A. metaphysical scene. After a couple dozen people left Klug’s group to join Nettles and Applewhite, momentum built. At their height a few years later, Heaven’s Gate had several hundred members.

Heaven’s Gate’s doctrine changed throughout the years, but adherents consistently preached asceticism, denying themselves anything that engaged too much with their humanness, such as having sex or eating for pleasure. Ultimately their goal was to enter the “Evolutionary Level Above Human,” a material ascendance into space and a metamorphosis from human flesh into a nongendered body that Applewhite described in a recruitment video as a “very attractive extraterrestrial.” This migration was necessary because, in one of their more confusing beliefs, the earth was going to be “recycled”; in other words, our planet was slated for a kind of watered-down Armageddon.

It is too simple for us to assume that they are unlike us, and that they are ‘others.’

Heaven’s Gate members originally believed a UFO would take them away. Later they predicted they’d ascend after being martyred. Applewhite and Nettles had long predicted they’d be killed for their beliefs and then come back to life, fulfilling the role of “the Two” in Revelation who are killed by a beast, rise three days later, and are taken up to heaven in a cloud.

Eventually all the remaining members chose to take their own lives. (Except for Nettles, who never got the chance, as she died of liver cancer in 1985.)

Applewhite harbored notions that he would be assassinated, most likely by the U.S. government, a fear which, in part, fueled his eventual suicide. His fears had precedence: The incident at Ruby Ridge in 1992 and the Waco siege the following year were evidence that clashes between alternative groups and the government could be deadly.

The Weaver family at Ruby Ridge in Idaho and the Branch Davidians — led by David Koresh in Waco, Texas — had both been illegally stockpiling weapons for the apocalypse. When the FBI intervened at Ruby Ridge, and Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) agents intervened in Waco, long, violent standoffs ensued, resulting in 79 (including a dog) combined deaths.

Heaven’s Gate members however, were already determined to depart their human bodies come hell, high water, or the FBI.

“Members of Heaven’s Gate came to believe the government might come and kill them and that would solve their problem for them,” explains Zeller.

“When the government did not come to kill Heaven’s Gate members, only then did they begin to embrace suicide as an option because it was clear that this wasn’t going to be done to them. Eventually they came to decide they had to do it for themselves. So, paradoxically the Branch Davidians and Waco are part of the story, but it’s because it didn’t happen with Heaven’s Gate that they had to commit suicide.”

While Heaven’s Gate members had been gathering weapons for a makeshift arsenal themselves they decided in the end — reportedly at Humphry’s recommendation — to opt instead for death by apple sauce.

Troublingly, there doesn’t seem to be much of a common thread running through the violent ends of these alternative groups — besides their violence that is — which leaves us reasoning in circles.

Melton explained to me that after the Waco siege:

“Texas rangers were asked what they would have done if they had been in the same position that the ATFs were in, and they said, ‘We would have knocked on the door and arrested David Koresh and we would have taken him away and that’d be it. We would not have used the kind of force that the ATFs used.’

Then you have [Heaven’s Gate]. It peaked at 200 members…and then it just kept whittling down and you were left in the end with a group of people that were ready to commit suicide.”

Between the time Applewhite first approached the other members of Heaven’s Gate about collective suicide and the actual event, only a couple of members chose to leave.

The 1978 mass suicide by over 900 members of the Peoples Temple in Jonestown is, again, not easily compared to Heaven’s Gate, other than in the manner of their deaths — suicide by poison. But while members of Heaven’s Gate believed they were choosing life instead of death, Jim Jones told the members of the Peoples Temple that they were about to be attacked, presumably by the government, and that what they were doing was a “revolutionary act.”

There doesn’t seem to be much of a common thread running through the violent ends of these alternative groups — besides their violence.

Many of those who drank Jones’ grape-flavored cyanide, however, were children, which smacks more of murder than of suicide. All the members of Heaven’s Gate were adults; Applewhite didn’t think children could make decisions about entering the “Evolutionary Level Above Human.”

Heaven’s Gate also tended to attract members of the counterculture of the ‘60s and ‘70s who, according to Zeller:

“… ended up becoming religious or spiritual seekers; they start looking for other options. Most people who join new religions end up having experimented with other new religions or other alternative religious practices beforehand. Obviously there always has to be a group which is a person’s first group they join, but often people then leave that group and join another one.”

Meanwhile Jonestown mostly recruited from some of the most vulnerable populations, including the elderly Black community, women, children, and working class people. A comprehensive 2005 study — Demographics and the Black Religious Culture of Peoples Temple — by San Diego found that:

“African Americans had long supported the Temple with contributions, tithes and wages while living in California, but in Jonestown it was clear that the Social Security checks of black senior citizens made up the primary source of income for almost a year…”

While the human mind loves to compulsively organize and codify our experiences to make sense of our world — particularly violent acts under the auspices of religion — helpful patterns between these emergent religions have yet to materialize.

Instead, it can be far more fruitful to look at the similarities in which outsiders interacted with these groups.

“Cultists are people too,” Zeller summarized. Of course individual crimes — such as financial predation in the Church of Scientology and the rampant child abuse in the Branch Davidians and the Catholic Church — should be investigated and prosecuted, but demonizing some groups only strengthens the “us” and “them” dynamic, which is tenuous considering the subjectivity of the way we apply categories. “There’s no real way to define cult and exclude religion and vice versa,” Zeller explained.

Twenty years after the effective death of Heaven’s Gate, Zeller is still interested in getting inside the members’ minds. In the inescapable dichotomy of “us” and “them,” he explores, to the best of his ability, the latter:

“They made very different choices which look frightening and perhaps ridiculous to us, but we need to understand why they made those choices. We need to understand why they believed and acted the way they did. And then, if we choose to believe it was nonsense, so be it. I don’t think they were right; I have no interest in joining them. However, in my study of them, I’ve come to understand why for them it made sense, and I think that’s important when we look more broadly around the world at all sorts of groups.”

By Monica Busch

Like most fundamentalist Christian kids raised during the golden years of Focus on the Family, I grew up watching VeggieTales on VHS any chance I got. Videos were often borrowed from my church’s lending library, where I would drag my grandmother after church services ended on Sundays. She would hover over me as I selected two tapes that I hadn’t seen yet, or at least not recently enough to remember.

Most of the show’s episodes and movies are musicals, and they all feature a segment called “Silly Songs With Larry,” a goofy sing-along featuring one of the show’s main characters, who is a cucumber. I can still recite the lyrics to “Everybody Has a Water Buffalo” (“yours is fast and mine is slow”) without tripping up too much. And somewhere on the internet, there is a video of me singing “God is Bigger than the Boogie Man” into a flashlight.

The show is fun, goofy, brightly colored, and riddled with Christian parables as catchy as the music. I remember the words to the song “The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything” with the same clarity that I remember the moral lessons imparted by the series week after week.

My favorite episode was called “God Wants Me to Forgive Them?!” In it, Junior Asparagus deals with some nasty bullies who call themselves The Grapes of Wrath. They are a family of grapes who ride around in a rickety car and bully those they encounter. Predictably, while Junior Asparagus is playing in his front yard, donning a yellow baseball cap, the family stops by to berate the unsuspecting young vegetable.

“Is that cheese on your head?!” one yells from the car. The whole family laughs and dubs the young asparagus a Cheese Head.

The Hidden Trauma Of Life After Fundamentalism

As these types of stories go, Junior learns — after considerable anguish — the difficult lesson that God wants him to forgive his enemies, and He wants him to do it every single time. The good little Christian vegetable that he is, Junior eventually gives in to his father’s guidance about making amends with his bullies, and the Grapes are so moved by this forgiveness that they promise to change their ways.

The episode references the well-quoted Bible verse in Matthew 18 in which the apostle Paul asks Jesus how many times he is required to forgive people who wrong him. “Jesus answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven” (Matthew 18:22).

Doing the math, it’s unlikely that one single person is going to wrong another person more than 490 times, as Jesus hyperbolically implies to his follower. So the point is, of course, that every Christian needs to forgive every enemy 100% of the time.

This need to forgive everyone, and to do it relentlessly, is a lesson frequently taught and re-taught to fundamentalist Christian children.

When my brothers and I fought, growing up, we were immediately halted and told to apologize.

“Say you’re sorry,” my dad would command, towering over us, brows furrowed.

I’d purse my lips and ball my fists before hissing a “sorry” between clenched teeth.

“Now, hug. Say ‘I forgive you,’ and tell each other ‘I love you,’” my dad would say next.

We did — and then stormed off to other rooms to avoid getting ourselves grounded in a moment of untempered rage.

The same scenario played out in my religious teachings for years. After all, my family and my preachers told me, Christianity itself exists because Jesus forgave our sin-riddled selves, so much that he died for us.

The sacrificial lamb metaphor was never one I completely grasped growing up, though. It never quite made sense to me that some oppressive leaders slaughtered the human embodiment of my religion’s deity because I was going to someday be born, bully my little brother, and go to hell for it. And every time I asked how that sacrifice worked logistically, I was given dismissive answers or elusive explanations with too many contemporary Christian buzzwords like “covenant” and “unconditional.” An English degree later, and I still don’t quite get it.

It’s with this same convoluted understanding that, as an adult atheist who must respect her family’s religious views in order to maintain healthy relationships with them, I’ve been forced to ask a question that Junior Asparagus never posed: If Christians are supposed to forgive every enemy, every single time, does that still apply when forgiveness could cause more harm than good?

My dad molested me throughout most of my childhood, and it tore my extended family apart the second I tearily confessed the abuse to my grandparents during my freshman year of college. What followed after my admission was a harrowing saga of police reports, family members asking for details they probably had no right to ask for but that I offered anyway so that they would believe me, and, eventually, a two-day trial that found my dad guilty on three varied counts of sexual misconduct.

He was sentenced to two and a half years in prison and handed a slew of stipulations once he was released, including but not limited to registering as a sex offender and wearing an ankle bracelet for a length of time.

Before the sentencing, my grandmother hugged me, crying outside the courtroom, and asked me to see if the lawyers would go easy on him in their recommendations for penalties. I don’t remember responding. I just remember looking at her and wondering why she would ask me to do something like that for a man who basically tortured me for 15 years. I did not think he deserved my mercy.

When Forgiveness Isn’t A Virtue

Moments later, after I failed through heaving sobs to deliver a victim’s impact statement to the courtroom, the judge punished my dad to the fullest extent of the law. Justice was served, and my mother hasn’t spoken to me since, choosing to disbelieve my allegations and continue living with my dad instead.

Now, years later and as an atheist, I have to reckon with my family’s pervasive religious views. This complicates our conversations, which seem to endlessly focus on what my grandmother calls “healing.”

“Healing is important,” she said to me on the phone this past winter.

It’s a record that plays on repeat between the two of us now, and a major reason for my gradual recession from a relationship I once counted as paramount to my emotional health.

“Where does God play into all this?” she asked me in the same conversation. I choked back a haughty laugh and pretended I hadn’t heard her.

More and more, haughtiness has become my immediate response to these otherwise reasonable, albeit tense, interjections.

Now, to be clear, I’m not opposed to forgiving enemies — even the worst kind. If a victim of a sexual assault can honestly say that they forgive their assailant, then I envy that person. But to contend that it is required in order to get right with God seems at best absurd, and at worse, intensely damaging. This is particularly true within the fundamentalist Christian community, which touts metaphors about being made clean as snow about as often as they plan potluck dinners. Which is to say, pretty damn often.

As a victim, to be told that I should focus on healing or forgiveness, effective synonyms in the fundamentalist community, instead of having a family that rallies around me in a show of support, is invalidating. It’s saying that I can never be whole, never be totally free of my abuse, until I forgive my dad for what he did to me, or more specifically, unless I let go of my anger and resentment. It’s assuming that what he did will latch on to me and hold me back and says that this will be the case until I recompense his actions.

As a victim, to be told that I should focus on healing or forgiveness, instead of having a family that rallies around me in a show of support, is invalidating.
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What’s worse, my dad touts this same self-righteous tone of forgiveness and directs it at me, using other family members to relay the message since we no longer speak. So relentless is this message of forgiveness that just months after the end of his sentence, he forced one of my brothers to send me nonstop text message for nearly two days, explaining and reiterating how changed his heart is.

More times than I can count, I have been offered anecdotal evidence, via secondhand texts and side-comments from family members, that my dad has taken steps toward “healing.” I’ve been told he would accept me back into the family, reminded that he still loves me, and asked to speak to him on the phone. All the while, he maintains that he didn’t sexually exploit me and that I fabricated abuse charges in some deranged attempt at revenge for strict parenting. But in a fundamentalist community like the one my family subscribes to, my unwillingness to engage my abuser in this sort of forgiveness horserace actually manages to make me look worse than my assailant in the grand scheme of eternity.

I Grew Up In A Fundamentalist Cult — ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Was My Reality

Frequently I am told in some variation on a theme that he’s better — “fixed” — because he’s going to church more often and that it’s time to let bygones be bygones, get a therapist, and move on. My sister didn’t exhibit signs of molestation when she was evaluated by the Department of Social Services, I’m told in what feels like a thinly veiled attempt at victim blaming. It was just me, I hear. It was just something that happened. “Healing is important.”

Meanwhile, I’m barely able to sleep at night because of murderous nightmares that exclusively feature my dad as the villain. I haven’t the faintest desire to forgive my dad, or to ever have anything to do with him again. And I think that expecting me to do anything else is unreasonable and insulting to my trauma.

I suspect that my experience is not singular. One needn’t look further than Megyn Kelly’s interview with two of the Duggar sisters to find an example of two molestation victims taught to forgive their abuser under the guise of fundamentalist Christianity. And while the family and their religious practices are a commodified spectacle, I have met hundreds of families over the course of my childhood who profess interpretations of their own faith that are precisely as devout and literal.

I haven’t the faintest desire to forgive my dad, or to ever have anything to do with him again.
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The message often told is that you need to forgive your perpetrator in order to liberate yourself from resentment and other negative feelings that are also considered sinful. Focus on the Family specifically addressed this in a broadcast last year, in which a guest speaker recounts how she forgave her abusive father because she felt God told her to. She goes so far as to express shame over her initial unwillingness to do so.

Christian writers, speakers, and clergy will sometimes delineate what they say is a difference between forgiving and excusing, or forgiving and trusting, but I don’t buy it. Forgiveness, by definition, is to let go of anger and resentment. But a secondary definition is to pardon. One could argue that advising a victim to forgive an abuser is twofold: It means telling a victim to stop being angry about what happened to them, and also means telling a victim to pardon their abuser’s actions. When my family asks me to forgive my dad for molesting me, they’re asking me to pardon the fact that in moments of self-centered sexual desire, he repeatedly violated me, all the while warning me that he would be murdered in prison if I told anyone.

They’re asking me to forgive his irreparable debts — the sleepless nights, the panic attacks, the sexual dysfunction. They’re asking me to make him clean as snow because, after all, if Jesus can forgive me, who am I to judge? They neglect the fact that I am better suited to judge than anyone else because I am the one who was dehumanized.

Forgiveness, by definition, is to let go of anger and resentment. But a secondary definition is to pardon.
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There are things about my abuse that I can forgive, but the list is short and circumstantial. I can forgive my dad’s untreated mental illness; I can forgive my dad’s alcoholism and drug abuse; I can forgive my mother for feeling too stuck in an emotionally abusive relationship to risk standing up for me. But I cannot forgive the act and I will not forgive him.

I don’t feel guilty about this. And that’s the best healing I’ve experienced so far.