Cherie Priest

In 1993 I was living in the girls’ dormitory at a Seventh Day Adventist high school in Florida. Inside “Little Alcatraz,” I was one of about a hundred teenagers deprived of television and radio (among other things); so I think we could be forgiven for being very confused when, at the end of February that same year, our high school came under a strange sort of assault.

Graffiti appeared, declaring the students and faculty “cultists,” and glass bottles were thrown at the buildings. Small fires were set. A police presence was summoned. Our ordinarily absurd, restrictive curfews and social boundaries became even more pronounced, and finally we learned the source of all this peculiar strife: Out in Waco, Texas, the ATF had stormed a compound and the big siege had turned a national spotlight on SDAs everywhere.

I’ve long joked that SDAs are like the Libertarians of protestant denominations. They may have some good ideas, but they attract a boatload of crazies; and God knows, the crazies get all the press.*

But contrary to persistent reports during that dreadful week, David Koresh was not an SDA. In fact, he was originally part of a fringe group (the “Davidians”) that had split from the SDA church back in the 1920s, and then split again from itself in the 1930s, and subsequently split yet another time in the 1950s. The Branch Davidians were an offshoot of an offshoot of an offshoot of the SDA church. But far be it from slathering media coverage to do its homework. Hell, the government couldn’t be bothered either. If you’ll recall, the final raid took place on a Sunday morning, under the idea that everyone would be in church, and taken by gentle surprise. Hard to believe a bunch of people who worshiped on Saturday would still be in bed asleep on a Sunday morning. No, they weren’t Adventists, but the group had risen out of that fold — and they still kept the Jewish Friday-night- to- Sundown-Saturday for Sabbath.

It wasn’t exactly a secret.

But I say all that to say this: For many years, when you thought of an isolated cult in Texas with a deranged figurehead who practiced and encouraged extensive polygamy with underaged girls, well. You thought of a mocking acronym — We Aint Coming Out.

So if I seem to have a somewhat morbid and intense interest in how members of Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are being treated by the state and by the media, well, there you go. It’s not altogether a dispassionate, passive curiosity.

And now I’m going to cut this entry, because it’s going to run long and rambly. Click the link below for some disjointed thoughts on misogyny, religion, separation of church and state, the obligations of outside observers, and why it’s all a lot more complicated than it looks.

I am more conflicted about the YFZ Ranch raid than I’m capable of successfully articulating. But let me be clear about one thing, right up front: I believe that anything going on between any given pairing or group of consenting adults is nobody’s goddamned business. It is especially no business of the government.

But. We’re not talking about consenting adults now, are we? We’re talking about teenage girls being traded like baseball cards. We’re talking about a sect that has reinforced the rightness of this “sacrament” for generations.

I’ll be the first to admit, when I see those FCofJC mothers crying on television, my heart breaks for them. They’re confused, they’re exposed in a fashion to which they are wholly unaccustomed, and they’re being accused of sexual crimes against their children — who have been removed and dispersed across a very large state. These women are deeply religious and they believe quite firmly in the moral correctness of their lifestyle. I honestly think that, overall, they believe they’re doing the right thing.

However. My sympathy wanes when they pretend they don’t know why they’ve been dragged out into the media spotlight. They aren’t stupid. They know exactly why; they just don’t believe it’s wrong to assign their teenaged daughters to matrimony with men who are old enough to be their fathers, or even grandfathers.

And why? Because they were assigned to plural marriages when they were young. As likely as not, their mothers were too. Many of these parents in question go back three and four generations in plural family homes that are largely the result of arranged marriages — the more recent of which were ordered by a “prophet” who is in jail thanks to his serial tendency to facilitate child rape.

And there is nothing in the world that’s quite so hard to break as a cultural habit, even a toxic, criminal one that harms the people who participate in it.

Consider the women expected to self-immolate over the pyres of their dead husbands. Consider the practice of forced female genital mutilation. Consider some Islamic religio-cultural mentalities that stake a family’s honor on the chastity of its women, and sanction the death of women who fail to uphold these standards.

Call it a phallocentric power play if you like, for it’s certainly driven, enforced, and perpetuated by the juggernaut of masculine authority concentrated in the hands of a small number of men — who siphon it directly off the Big Man Upstairs.**

But these assigned and occasionally forced underage marriages persist in part because the women also permit and encourage it. They cling to it as it has clung to them. This has never been so glaringly apparent as when these demure, modestly dressed women go on television and flatly, persistently dodge the question of whether or not unwelcome underaged marriages are taking place. They are complicit in the cycle, caught up in the momentum of it and, it can easily be argued, incapable of stopping it even if they secretly want to.

Thus my conflicted feelings.

I cannot in good conscience blame the victims of this cycle; but at what point do the adult victims assume some responsibility for perpetuating it? This is an honest question, and not one designed to generate internet flamage. I want to know. Where does that line get drawn? For whom do we conclude, “This was imposed upon you and that cannot be undone; but you could have shielded your daughters from this injustice, and you chose not to”?

And back we come to the question of consenting adults. Some of these women no doubt resented and resisted, but were compelled by social or physical force to surrender their daughters or, at some distant event, their own virtue. But not all of them. Surely, not all of them — by their own sworn and stubborn testimony.

Cries of “brainwashing” ring out through the land, but is it brainwashing when behavior is symptomatic of a carefully controlled context? I don’t think any of us has the right to claim, “Oh, they think they’re happy, but they’re not, really.” I’m sure as hell not comfortable throwing such bold statements into the pot.

Maybe someone out there believes I think I’m happy, but I’m not really. God knows my own behavior is symptomatic of my context. Does that give anyone the right to remove me from my context for my own good? I would argue that it most certainly does not.

I think it is telling that the majority (though certainly not all) of the women who leave these scenarios are teenage girls with few or no children. These girls, such as the one who testified so extensively about Warren Jeffs and sent him to prison, are too young to know how much leaving is going to cost them. They don’t yet grasp the difficulties they’re going to face; they don’t understand that these compounds exist in part to breed children without Social Security numbers or birth certificates — and they are not aware that they lack the education, much less the paperwork, to easily establish themselves as masters of their own destiny.

But young people rebel by instinct, perhaps — and the girls do not have their mothers’ deep-seated tendency to cave in the face of divine male authority.

It’s not something specific to this sect, not by any stretch of the imagination; but it’s common to many religious institutions that evolve into holistic social institutions. Since I don’t have much experience with anything outside the Judeo-Christian purview, I’ll restrict myself to that discussion and say that even the Bible depicts its prophets in a light that’s bright enough to reveal their flaws.

Abraham lied. David murdered for sex. Peter denied Christ. And that’s just the tip of the saintly iceberg. There’s an established tradition of deeply imperfect men serving God and attaining divinely sanctioned authority. Therefore, it’s not a problem for theologically and socially isolated women to see sins and abuses of power rain down from the mouthpieces of heaven. It’s simply not a philosophical conundrum to serve a flawed man who speaks on behalf of God.

I suppose I’m frustrated by my reaction to the commotion out in Texas because I can see it from all these uncomfortably close angles, and make all these excuses for all these different parties. And I’m certain that, once I hit “post,” I’m going to be at the mercy of internet masses who refuse to make excuses — or who conversely make even more excuses — for the way the situation has been perpetuated, and handled, and addressed by the authorities and the participants alike.

So why am I bothering? Well, I’d like to see some discussion apart from, “Those crazy women!” or “Those crazy feds!” There’s much, much more to examine and talk about than a systemic acceptance of institutionalized misogyny or the abuse of a sect’s civil liberties. There is an intersection somewhere, and it isn’t clear-cut — and it isn’t a blanket observation that can apply to every seized family. At this intersection of rights and obligations there is a gray zone where consenting adults consent to things that don’t make mainstream culture very comfortable; and there’s a place where an outsider’s moral outrage must remain outside … and likewise, there’s a place where it can’t.

In a nation that ostensibly separates church and state, this epically complicated court case will be one to watch. Can the civil investigation be handled with respect to both religious freedom and the legal impossibility of a minor’s sexual consent? Will these women be assisted rather than further victimized by a different and unfamiliar system?

I’m thinking about this out loud and in public because I’m conflicted by my own impulses and my own automatic responses. And I’m cut this entry for the sake of politeness, but I’d like to hope that readers will scan the whole thing before freaking out and commenting. This conversation is open for the joining and opposing opinions or observations are welcome.

Feel free to comment here, or over on LiveJournal.
Let’s try to understand each other.

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* As an aside: A few years later, I came home from a camping trip and saw a newspaper headline saying that 39 cult members had committed suicide over a comet’s appearance. From pure reflex, my first thought was, “Holy shit, please don’t let them have been Adventists.” Although I’d largely left the church by then, I was — yes, oddly enough — attending yet another SDA boarding institution in pursuit of an undergraduate degree … and frankly, I didn’t want to go through the turmoil and scrutiny yet again.
** And if it’s ever struck you as strange that there are such a disproportionate number of women to men, then you might begin reading some of the articles you find linked here. I’m not saying that this is a fact and that it regularly occurs, but I am willing to declare that there’s a great deal of evidence to imply that this practice is routine.