The Story of Liz Franklin, Installment 2 - System Immersion Must Be Good

In Installment 1, Liz Franklin detailed the rules of the Allegheny Wesleyan Methodist Church and what they meant to her.  Installment 2 will begin her story of complete immersion in this abusive church.

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At first, it was normal.  Ok, not as abnormal as it would become.  When I was very young, while my parents were very into the church, we had a semblance of a life outside it.  They still did want us to be Bible (Church) oriented, and that showed up in some weird ways.  I remember listening to a tape called “The Adventures of Luju", a story about a boy in Africa who disobeyed his parents’ order to not light a candle.  The result of this was Luju's little friend was killed in the fire he started.  Do you know how scared I was to disobey my parents after this?!?  I was just 4 when Luju's adventures were introduced to us.  Not only could disobedience result in death, but obviously, enlightened (white, American) children would know enough to not disobey.  Disobedience was no doubt the result of witch-craft, or whatever Africans were practicing.  Racist much?

One more thing that you should know, before I really get into my story, is that abuse was rampant in my house.  Not because the church dictated it, but because my father was a monster.  My older brother was beaten regularly.  I was raped regularly.  My twin, who is mentally retarded, escaped most of the physical abuse, but was subject to emotional stuff just as scarring.  I think these details are important to my story because it helps to explain why I was so willing to drink the Kool-Aid and, in fact, mix batches of my own.  I was damaged to my soul, ripe for the picking when it came to having a formula that would cause god to hate me less than he was already inclined to.

It also must be said that in the church, there were degrees of how “into the rules” the pastors were.  While the rules were the rules were the rules, and everyone considered them good rules, there were differences in how important they were. Maybe the difference was how some pastors taught the rules, or how much mercy they showed to their congregations.  I'm not sure, because as luck would have it, as I was growing up, we had a rather sadistic pastor.  The other thing I need to explain was that in our house, the pastor was infallible, God's second son, as it were. Just as important as Jesus, if not more so.

Somewhere between 3rd and 6th grades, we got the sadistic pastor.  Every year, the church voted on whether or not to keep the current one.  I don't know if the one we had got voted out or retired, or what.  Up until now, church was what happened on Thursdays and Sundays.  We had moved to the country, and I was busy playing and being a kid (as much as the dynamics of my family allowed, at any rate).  Terrible things were still happening, but not yet in the name of God.  As a child, I didn't need to worry about my eternal soul.  Life was as good as it could get in my family.

That changed the summer before 6th grade.  We got the new pastor, and gee wow!, the change was drastic.  The church had its own school about half an hour away from where we lived.  I don't know when it was started, or why it wasn't even considered for us kids at first.  My mother had a couple teaching degrees, and taught in the public schools for years before we were born.  She taught mostly special ed classes, which makes the irony of what is coming even more ironic.  So from K-5, my siblings and I went to public schools.  Sometime after 3rd grade, after we got our new pastor, the pastor's wife began pressing our parents into enrolling us in the church school.  I mentioned that my twin is mentally retarded, and the pastor and his wife used that as a reason for us to switch. 

The church school used the ACE system.  As an educational tool, it is laughable.  Kids teach themselves out of workbooks, and move at their own pace.  (I've had, in my whole school career, Algebra I).  My twin was struggling in public schools, and the pastor's wife was vehement about the church school.  My mom wanted to put my brother in special ed.  My dad, however, was afraid he couldn't handle that. Told you it was ironic!  So, against (I want to think) my mother's wishes, in the 6th grade, we enrolled in the church school. 

The school was K-12, and grades were split K-1 in one room, 2-6 in another, and 7-12 in another.  We worked in cubicles called offices, and did the workbooks.  We had supervisors, who answered questions about our schoolwork, and monitors, who gave us permission to get out of our seats as needed.  It's funny to me now, but then, there was no questioning allowed, and so I didn't.  Even in the secret places of my own mind, I obeyed the rules – for now, anyway.

I want to take a minute to say all things good about the principal.  He was a gentle, loving man who just loved kids.  His love helped me survive a lot of what was going on at home.  The unfortunate thing was he'd drunk the Kool-Aid.  I don't blame him. (Ya kinda had to drink it if you wanted to go to heaven, after all).  He also was answerable to the board of the school, and ultimately, the president of the church conference, so there were certain things required of him.  While he never had to discipline me, beyond the occasional demerit, I saw his disciplining of the older, “rebellious” kids.  He had, after all, been trusted to help kids make it to heaven! Because we were in the same room, it was impossible to miss.

The church believed in corporal punishment.  Extreme corporal punishment for stupid things.  So now, fear of breaking the rules entered my life in a real way.  There were rules that the breaking of didn't warrant corporal punishment.  Things like not pushing a chair in got us a demerit (to this day, I push chairs in!).  Three demerits meant you got detention.  That was the punishment for non-spiritual rules.  Broken spiritual rules were met with swift and painful punishment.  And spiritual to them was...If a boy didn't wear a tie during the revival meetings, he was warned at the beginning of the week.  If by the end, he still wasn't wearing one, he got paddled.  Anything at all that could be construed as rebellion was met with the paddle.  Girls, too, were paddled, but the vast majority of the paddlings went to the boys.

I don't remember specifically when it went off the tracks for me.  I was ripe for the picking, I know that.  I was being abused at home, I'd entered naturally turbulent adolescence, and now the importance of the rules and the keeping of them were in my face every day.

Installment 3 will detail the speeding up of my life’s downhill slide.

The Story of Liz Franklin, Installment 1 - The Only True Church

Hi!  My name is Liz, and I found this blog while researching the Duggars.  Before watching the show, I'd never heard of “Quiverfull”, “patriarchy”, Bill Gothard...any of it.  I was raised in a legalistic church that strangled any freedom, grace, and love even, so these blogs stirred up a lot of stuff for me.  I reached out and was asked to share my story, so here goes.

I was raised in the Allegheny Wesleyan Methodist (Original Allegheny Conference) Church.  (Gotta get the name right; the church sued for the right to use it after a VERY IMPORTANT split with a part of the church that began disagreeing about some of the rules.)  It's wrong to sue people generally - says so right there in the Bible - but over the name of the church, well, that's different!  Especially when it's the One True Church.  Only the members of the Allegheny Wesleyan Methodist Church (AWMC) will get to go to heaven.  Everyone else is lost.

AWMC was built on the teachings of that great and good (*snort) John Wesley.  I'm 43 years old, and it has never dawned on me until just now that the very name of the church is basically Wesley's methods.  Methods to bring salvation, keep it, keep the people submitted and bound up.  Maybe you'd think The One True Church should be built on Jesus' teachings, but you'd be wrong. The one I was born into was built on John Wesley's.  Just an accident of birth, I guess.

I'm going to share the beliefs of the church, then get into my story:

AWMC believes in two works of grace: First, salvation. When you confess that you suck, and always will suck...I mean…when you confess your sins.  This is best done at the altar at church, where you get to parade your “suckiness” in front of everybody.  Salvation can be lost with a sneeze, by the way. 

The second work of grace is sanctification.  This is where the roots of sin (the very thing that makes you sin) are removed.  After this you'll be a holy robot…er…person.  The roots of sin are evidenced by anger (the big one), jealousy, pride...all the negative emotions we exemplify as humans.  To be sanctified, you have to "be willing."  While sometimes you are given specific things you have to be willing to do, for the most part, it means denying all of your natural feelings, denying your person-hood, and denying any rights you have to that person-hood. Since this isn't easy to do, you'll be encouraged to "pray clear through", which was never really explained.  Basically, you have to make yourself miserable in prayer any way you can.  Self-punishment, if that is what it takes, is encouraged, also.

While the church was vaguely patriarchal, women did have rights – as long as we stayed in our place. The husband is the head of the home, and women really have no thoughts worthy of being expressed, but it wasn't the blanket oppression I've found while reading other stories of ultra-conservative Christianity and patriarchy.  It was expected that young women get married, keep house, and have kids, but we could choose to do something else without endangering our souls.  The church also didn't care how many kids we had.

The big oppression was the outer standards, and the denial of the right to be a well-rounded, feeling person.  According to the church's standards, the Duggars are LIBERAL.  The church I was raised in took the Duggars' standards and ran with them.  Yes, we had to wear dresses or skirts.  We had to have long hair, but it had to be up in a bun.  Sleeves had to come past our elbows.  Just the women's.  Men were exempt.  Back in the day, somebody, John Wesley maybe, declared that our elbows looked like breasts.  There must be something wrong with my breasts!!  Or maybe it's my elbows, I don't know.  At any rate, they look nothing alike!!  We weren't allowed open-toed shoes.  We had to wear panty hose.  We weren't allowed to wear any kind of stretchy material for shirts without a blouse underneath.  Those pesky elbows…er… breasts, had to be bound at all costs. 

These standards became our "fruits", and it was the way we knew whether or not others were going to heaven.  This wasn't considered judgment because doesn't the Bible say "by your fruits you will know them"? 

Speaking of Bibles, God Himself wrote the King James Version, and other versions were of the devil.  The fact that maybe the KJV was harder to understand added to its appeal.  If it was harder to understand what god wants of his children, we'd have to work harder, and works are where it's at, after all.

So now you know a little of the mindset of the church I was born into.  In the next installment, I will begin to tell you how it started to affect me – from the age of three.