I joined the Message in 1980 as a member of the Spoken Word Tabernacle in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I had been married less than a year when my new husband ran into an old friend who was a member. Within days, I was subject to constant pressure to join and to submit to all its teaching.
I was faced with a choice: either leave my new husband or join him in the church and see how things played out. Even though I hadn’t been going to church for the past year, I was a Christian girl, and I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving my husband just because he wanted to get closer to God. So, I agreed to join.
My first day in the Tulsa church was also the first day the congregation met in its new location. The minister had uprooted the entire congregation from a nearby small town into the city. After the service, somebody took a photograph of the church steeple with an unusual cloud formation above it. People were shouting and crying, and many in the congregation said the clouds and the conversion of two new souls that day were signs from God vindicating the move.
Unfortunately, I discovered that my husband suffered from a mental illness, and the Message teaching made it much worse. He became extremely controlling, telling me what to say and think and what expression I should have on my face. We both felt pressure to quit school, and I had to quit my job. We couldn’t miss service “any time the church doors were open” which limited my husband’s options as well. For the next four years, we barely scraped by financially and did not pay our bills, although we tithed and gave offerings to the church generously.
Money was always an issue, but our biggest problem was sexual. My husband loved the idea that I was obligated to submit to him whenever he demanded sex. I discovered at that time that he had sexually assaulted a child in his past and had broken into houses and "watched people sleep." This was told to me in the context of “look at how the Glory of God has redeemed a lowly sinner,” so I couldn’t leave him or really even criticize or discuss this past behavior.
When our minister preached a sermon against “unnatural sex,” my husband confessed to me he was "having trouble controlling his thoughts and impulses.” He tried talking to some of the church leaders about it, but he didn’t really feel any type of openness or ability to talk about such a sensitive and “unedifying" subject.
My husband became more abusive and demanding, including sexually, and decided to pray for deliverance from his impulses. There was really nothing in the teaching that helped in this area, and all the teaching about women being weak and evil made it much worse. At one point, he decided to “lay at the altar in prayer until God delivered him,” something clearly in-line with church teaching. After service, he and I prayed stayed at the altar praying and crying. Some people planning to use the sanctuary to rehearse a song became impatient for us to leave We were told to get up and accept that we were delivered already. So, we did.
Unfortunately, my husband's sexual problems got worse, and there was nowhere to turn for help. He took quotes from various Message sermons to exert his control, blame me, and keep me submissive. I did not know it then, but he began molesting our daughter, possibly starting when she was an infant. He continued to abuse her for years. Later, I heard that he raped my best friend and molested several women and neighborhood children during the years we were together.
We left the church around 1985, but the damage was already done. The Message teachings were so intertwined with my husband's thinking and mental illness that he couldn’t really shake it loose. I divorced him around 1990 and learned about his sexual abuse of children a couple years later. I went to the police, but they did not at first arrest him. He eluded capture for 6-8 years. He was finally arrested in Canada after a profile about him appeared on America's Most Wanted. He served time for molesting children in Canada before he was extradited to serve time in the US.
In prison, my ex-husband returned to the Message. He refused sex offender treatment for several years, believing that it would contradict Message teaching about repentance and salvation. In his mind, confessing and repenting wiped the slate clean each time, so nobody had the right to blame him for past transgressions. He said that that talking about past sins - even in the context of therapy- would be an offense to God.
He did finally go through the treatment and was released. He has since married a woman who, according to people who know him today, is elderly and disabled and suffers from dementia. I also hear (but can’t confirm since I am not there personally) that he regularly mocks and abuses her.
I know that ex-husband bears responsibility for all he has done. The Message teaching made it so much worse, though; it fueled his hatred of women and gave him justification for his dominance and abuse. It weakened me so I could not fight back. Even after we left the church, it took years for me to learn how to stand up to him and question him. The reticence to talk about sex honestly, combined with the shunning of secular mental health services, blocked us from receiving any help during that short window when he seemed to want help. The teaching that anything that was "under the blood" should never be spoken of helped him avoid responsibility for the harm he had caused. On top of all this, his religious manipulation of my daughter has turned her off about religion so much that I don’t expect her to be a part of any spiritual community, ever.
My life has changed immeasurably since I left the Message. I regained my life in phases, getting my courage back by working as a home health aide, then a maid, then a waitress (all very traditionally female roles). Before long, though, I was confident enough to get a job selling furniture and to enroll in secretarial school. Step by step, I kept going after bigger and better things: bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, a job in a technology company working with engineers in the overwhelmingly male-dominated field of electrical and software engineering. Sometimes I would barely recognize myself when I looked back.
The Message made me blind and mute, but an education, along with the services available at a major university, opened my eyes to the real nature of the man I had married and gave me the voice to fight for what my daughter and I needed. What’s more, I had an advantage over women who had never been in the Message, as I knew how to work hard, I wasn’t afraid of what people thought of me, and I was willing to give 100% to a cause I believed in. These traits came in very handy when I had to make the difficult choice to get a divorce, and these traits have served me very well my entire life.
I came to understand that the Message didn’t make my husband abusive. He was drawn to the Message because he had a sick hatred of women and wanted a convenient get-out-of-jail-free card for any crime he might commit. Just as I came to see what drew him to the Message, I came to see what parts of myself made me willing to put up with his abuse for any scraps of affection he might throw my way. At first, I was ashamed, but I finally realized that I just wanted to love and be loved. I wanted to be happy and to make someone happy. I wanted to be kind and to be treated with kindnesses. These are not weaknesses or bad traits that I should be ashamed of. These are beautiful traits that my husband used against me. Even though I wasted my efforts on someone who wasn’t worthy and on a religion that wasn’t worthy, I feel an incredible sense of peace and - I’ll say it - PRIDE in recognizing that I was then and still am a woman who wants to do good in this world.
America's Most Wanted (aired 10/02/2004): https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0511404/
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