In 1995, at the end of my sixth-grade year, my mother decided that she’d had enough.
#Struggle session episode 52 how to#
We spent much of our school days in prayer and worship, learning how to properly fear God and how to be perfect. My siblings and I attended The Lamb of God School, a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade institution with a student enrolment of about a hundred kids, give or take. It was a culture of purity policing, struggle sessions, and shame. This meant that she was excluded from the leadership’s official meetings, segregated by sex, in which coordinators and handmaids would discuss the goings-on of their underlings-who was having marital problems, who was doubting the faith, who had transgressed and seemed to be straying-and come up with plans to deal with the problems. My father was one of the five male leaders, or “coordinators.” My mother, though she had at one time been considered for the corresponding female role of “handmaid,” was never officially appointed to the position.
The Lamb of God’s doctrine became explicit-Christianity good Islam, feminism, secular humanism, and Marxism bad and the rules strict-complete submission of all members to the leadership, and of all wives to their husbands. What began in the mid-1970s as a small group of born-again hippies who played music, prayed together, and proselytized to whoever would listen about Jesus’s unconditional love and mercy, descended into authoritarianism in the 1980s after its founder linked up with the broader charismatic renewal movement that had been sweeping the nation. I grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland, in a fundamentalist Christian community called The Lamb of God.
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