Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions

by Cami Ostman

  “Mom, I need to tell you something,” I start, taking a deep breath, “I think you should know that I’ve decided to have sex before I get married.”

  She looks over at me and raises her eyebrows.

  “My future husband needs to know what he’s getting into,” I quickly add. “It’s only fair to let him see all of me and know what it’s like to have sex with me so he’ll know if he’ll be grossed out.” I wait and watch her face.

  She looks away from me out into the gray Seattle day. Then she quietly nods her head, pats my hand with hers, and says, “Okay.”

  Her quick agreement surprises me. Does it mean I am right? She knows about sex. She knows how ugly my disfigured body is. She agrees that I will gross out my future husband. I am filled with deep disappointment. I wanted my mom to argue with me and reassure me that I’m still beautiful just the way I am. I wanted her to get indignant and guarantee me that no man would ever be grossed out by my body. The last thing I expected was her approval.

  My heart feels hard from betrayal and anger. The kind of hardness that protects from cruelty what is vulnerable.

  THAT NIGHT, ALONE AGAIN at 3:00 AM, I pray what will be my last prayer for a long time. “God, you shouldn’t have done this to me. I have worked so hard to be good. Don’t expect adoration and blind faith any longer. I’ll deal with what you’ve done the best I can with or without your help. But I won’t hold my breath.” This isn’t a threat or an ultimatum. It is my last stand against this unfair, sinister prank.

  The reliable rules of reaping what you sow, of being rewarded for good behavior, have changed. God changed them midgame, and so I will too. Though I still need God’s help, I’m not going to ask for it. He doesn’t deserve that respect.

  I turn my head away from the colored Christmas lights glimmering outside my window and gaze toward the warm yellow glow of my call button. I push it and lie back to wait for the nurse to arrive with the next injection.

  Dirty Girl

  Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  My mom kept an arsenal of romance novels that lined the higher shelves of our home library. Judging by the pristine quality of the dust jackets and the tightness of the bindings, I suspect she never got around to reading any of them. She was a lab technician who spent her second shift cleaning up after four kids and occupying a double-wide rocker with her high school sweetheart. After all that, who has time for rippling muscles splashed across a page?

  As a little girl, I often stood en pointe atop a wobbly skyscraper of never-consulted encyclopedias and dropped my mother’s pink-and-purple romance novels—one by one—into a neat stack at my feet. I was playing author. In my mind I was a dashing copper-haired beauty, clad in a flowing dress and laced into a corset that barely contained my heaving breasts. I was a serious grown-up just like the women gazing up from the jackets of these grown-up books.

  One day I held a reading before a corps of taffeta-clad Barbie dolls and cracked open a volume at its midpoint to a randomly selected paragraph. I was new to reading but the best in my class, so I wavered only a little as my tentative, little-girl voice visited the subjects of thrusting manhood, supple breasts, and coming together as one. My face grew flush, and I gently closed the book, blushing into my appliquéd teddy bear sweatshirt.

  I’ve often felt at a loss to describe the singular moment when sex clicked for me but, looking back, I could have done worse than what I found in my mother’s library. Apart from the lurid and naked-sounding mechanics of it all, I discovered in the romance novels a humanity that whispered to my little-girl spirit. This mysterious force called sex was responsible for about 80 percent of the world’s happiness and always occurred by page ninety. It sounded beautiful and alluring, so why did the topic make me—and everyone, really—uneasy and eager to change the subject?

  IF MY MOTHER’S LIBRARY was my first primer to sex, religion was a close second. One spring, the gospel waited for me in a dollar-store Easter basket, tucked indiscreetly between a chocolate rabbit and the new pop album I’d been begging for. In that spot, the Bible was a bridge between my life before and the road ahead—an indelicate message to put away childish things and join the ranks of the God-fearing. As I lifted my bounty off the table, the plastic wicker cried out beneath the weight of eternity. I withdrew the leatherette volume and cracked open the cover to read the inscription: “With all my love and the Lord’s, I hope we lead you in the right direction. Mom.” I was fourteen.

  When the Easter egg hunts were over and the Resurrection long forgotten, I ate my way through a basket of waxy chocolates and read Genesis. The opening pages were familiar to my young, middle-American mind, but soon the story took a hard turn. God had a striking abundance of sexual advice and admonition. Incest was forbidden and then commanded almost in the same breath, and there was an unsettling preoccupation with rules for pairing up—who can sleep with whom, when, and for what reason. The guidelines of this arbitrary but lofty canon landed a crushing weight upon my shoulders. Why was God so vengeful? If I tumbled into bed with the right person at the wrong time, would I always stay unclean? How could a loving deity damn anyone who simply hadn’t heard all the hair-splitting rules?

  “God never meant for us to follow every little rule to the letter,” my mother said one evening while wiping down the dinner table. “You’re just supposed to sit down and read a few passages here and there. For inspiration. As long as you believe, you’re saved.” But how could that be true? Why write the book if you didn’t expect people to follow the rules? My Bible landed softly in a drawer and stayed there until high school.

  I STARTED GOING TO the Mormon church because I was dating Paul, a Mormon boy, and in the way of high school romance we assumed we would be together until one of us died in a tragic pie-eating contest. Our dates culminated in lulled whispers about undying love, eternity, marriage—which always led to the impossibility of a future together unless I was a Mormon too. I put aside my fear of Christianity’s weight long enough to get me to his church on Easter Sunday. I wanted, at the very least, to say I’d tried.

  At my first conversion meeting, a twenty-year-old missionary handed me a navy-blue Book of Mormon, standard church issue. Beneath the title, foil stamped in gold, were the words ANOTHER TESTAMENT OF JESUS CHRIST. The Mormons are nothing if not bold; from their pulpits untrained ministers preach the glory of the Bible and sprinkle in the church’s singular narrative about Christ’s ministry to the ancient Americas. Put away doubt, and even a skeptic will cheer at the church’s description of a humble farm boy praying for truth and receiving the wisdom of a prophet.

  The God of Mormonism had a fatherly touch. He was less willing to fly off the handle over a botched burnt offering or fumbled prayer than the God I’d read about in Genesis. Mormon dogma was forgiving and offered modern prophets, a wealth of scripture, and temples that would provide salvation for even those who never got around to it in life. It was beautiful and thorough, so when my boyfriend asked if he could baptize me, I willingly threw on an unflattering, white jumpsuit and reclined in a shallow font at the foot of an overcrowded reception room. My mother sat in the front row, and I saw complicated joy from behind her Mona Lisa mien as the afternoon sun shone through an opalescent pane.

  AS TIME PASSED, I became enraptured by the majesty of Christ’s ministry and the Resurrection—the cornerstone of Mormon faith. When I converted, I converted to Christ, and all the other little add-ons seemed incidental. No tea or coffee? No problem. Weekly seminary? No one said you could become enlightened without doing a little homework. Always wear a skirt to church? Lucy Stone would turn in her grave, but who wouldn’t throw on a pencil skirt to impress a major deity? I embraced the minor Mormonisms with pride, attending three-hour church services and offering up epic prayers before nodding off to sleep each night. After all, what were these slight peculiarities compared to the reward of eternal salvation?

  As I grew closer to the gospel, the rules were harder to follow, and my relationship with Paul became rocky
. He wanted sex. I knew by now we shouldn’t. The pressure compounded with every night that he stormed from my parents’ house, fuming that I had once again blocked the kick that would have landed us on God’s vengeful side. Each night that Paul slammed the door in my face, I returned to my quiet room fighting back the bitter confusion that comes with being young and trying to do the right thing. On a really good day, Paul would take my hand and insist that Joseph Smith had brought the world God’s lost truths, that obedience to his revealed laws would bring us to Celestial glory. On an average day though, he would get me alone, fondle me through half of Pulp Fiction, and leave in a huff when I refused to take my pants off. I was paralyzed, knowing that sex was a given in teenage life for most of my friends, but also that my newly adopted church asked its youth to maintain chastity with all the maturity and discipline of a Jedi. In moments when sex seemed like a savvy move, I played back the magnified evils of wanting to feel sexy and desired—evils covered at length at my young women’s meetings at church. And while I never felt wicked for acknowledging my sexuality, rules were rules. And I’d agreed to follow every one of them in exchange for something much more important than the twenty-eight-second experience of sleeping with a high school boy.

  Besides, if I crossed the line, I’d have to repent to both God and the local bishop. This meant I could not partake of the weekly sacrament, I could not attend the temple, where soul-saving ordinances take place, and I could not lead a church meeting in prayer. If I gave in, I’d be denied the things that I now felt kept me strong.

  ONE SUNDAY, SISTER JOHNSON clapped her hands together to settle the chattering throng and gestured toward a plate she had brought to class of oatmeal-raisins dusted generously with dirt and small bits of yard clippings. “I brought cookies for everyone to share! Go ahead . . . everybody take one.” We recoiled, and I glared into her sunny face, irritated.

  “You girls wouldn’t want to eat a dirty cookie, now would you? If you lose your virtue before marriage, you’re just like this plate of cookies here,” she intoned, a sly, accomplished smile edging across her dimpled face. “And nobody wants to eat a filthy cookie.”

  Her clever prelude out of the way, Sister Johnson launched into a lesson covering such godly topics as abstinence and modesty, and how good boys won’t be knocking down the door for girls who dress in shorts and form-fitting tops—practically walking pornography. The message was clear: If we wanted good husbands—the ultimate aspiration for a committed Mormon girl—we had to enter marriage as flawless as the glittering diamonds that would someday grace our fingers. If I gave in to my boyfriend, I would be tainted forever. Christ himself couldn’t fix me. Even after earnest repentance, a stain would show on my countenance, and all the good boys would see right through to my sullied core. And because boys are just more sexual than girls, I could be sure that the guilt would fall squarely on me as the only party lucid enough to cry out and stop a sin.

  I was confused, though. Atonement was supposed to take care of everything, wasn’t it? It was a comprehensive benefits package that absolved you of liability as long as you pursued forgiveness sincerely. If you cheated on a calculus test, you could pray on your own and be forgiven. But with sex, the message was blurry. If you had sex, you’d now be dirty, and this was not a sin you could work out just between you and God. You needed the help of the bishop to be reinstated with God and the church, you had to tell a mortal man every juicy detail. And even though you’d technically be forgiven, all the cautionary tales screamed that you’d never be the same again.

  A FEW MONTHS LATER I became a dirty cookie. Paul said he loved me, and that I must not love him if I didn’t put out. Why was I being such a frigid bitch? It wasn’t like anyone else followed the rules, so we really didn’t need to tell the bishop until we were ready to get married. It was my job as his girlfriend, and I needed to either put out or get lost.

  I told myself I slept with him because I wanted to, but really what I wanted was to feel sexy and worth discovering. He wasn’t a good guy, but he was my boyfriend—maybe the only one I would ever find. I couldn’t conceive of my future beyond track practice and half-dissected frogs. So, I began having sex at sixteen, and I wore the guilt like a mask until my sophomore year of college.

  THE REALITY OF OUR intimacy lingered on through my first few semesters of college, placing a shameful gulf between who I was and who God wanted me to be. I felt my sexuality negated my positive spirituality, but still I tried hard to be a good Mormon girl. One night my roommate bounced into our apartment and announced that she’d told the bishop about her high school boyfriend and was finally ready to return to the temple. She’d been a wreck for months, going about her college life without really enjoying it because of her sin-burdened heart. Tonight, the glow had returned to her face, and her eyes glimmered as she told me how much better I would feel once I got my own confession off my chest.

  “It’s no big deal!” she promised.

  Maybe she was right. Fear was paralyzing me; without taking this next step I would remain stagnant, always falling short of the transcendence I so desperately sought.

  Two days passed before I could get up my courage. Then I met with my bishop in a hot, little room in the basement of my dorm complex at the Christian university I attended. The bishop had silvery hair that offset a kind, suntanned face. He had the look of a seasoned grandfather, the kind of guy who wears Tommy Bahama to a picnic and knows the names of all his grandchildren’s pets. His sparkling eyes calmed my nerves, and I eased into one of the uncomfortable folding chairs that flanked a small table.

  It was the first time I’d ever been alone with him, so we started with some perfunctory getting-to-know-you questions. He let fly an arsenal as if he were reading the questions off an index card: “How are you? Where are you from? What is your major? What do you want to do with that?” The cinderblock walls were Spartan, the headachy beige offset by only one embellishment: a printed reproduction of Christ tacked onto a thin strip of cork. The Savior’s eyes blazed as the bishop and I shared our trifling pas de deux. The familiar eyes urged, Tell him why you’re really here.

  The overhead light began to buzz when my confession spilled indelicately into the open air between us. The bishop’s grandfatherly demeanor retreated now, leaving just a tired, old man, poised to hear about my erotic life. His stewardship as a church official required him to pry, to know the full story. I struggled to meet his eyes as he pressed me for details. Had I had intercourse, or just heavy-petted? How often? Was it still going on, or had I stopped the behavior? Had it been just the one partner?

  I snuck a glance at him with this last question. Deep creases formed on the bishop’s leathery forehead. I sighed and relayed the most personal parts of my life, unsure of which details were need-to-know and which would only make him blush. When I was through, the bishop did not scold my disobedience or pen a brief letter recommending my expulsion from the church’s university. Instead, wearing the same wooden expression he’d adopted earlier, he told me that, thanks to Christ’s atoning sacrifice, I could repent, be forgiven, and return to the temple when I was ready.

  “That usually takes six months to a year,” he said with a slight smile, and I wondered why temporal months meant so much to an eternal God. Still, I allowed myself to breathe again, and my heaving sigh expelled the guilt that had chained up my soul. When the meeting ended, I walked out of the office by way of a dank stairwell and into what I hoped would be a new and brighter life.

  Only it wasn’t brighter after my confession. After four years together, Paul and I still lived half a country apart. At the university I had friends, a schedule that would never quite fit on my tiny white board. Back home, Paul had little else but paranoia and free time. More than once a week he’d pick a fight at forty cents a minute and then admit he’d done it to keep me on the phone. Insecurity consumed him. I thought that hormones had made him forceful in high school and that the distance was doing it now. When I returned home later that year I marr
ied him, hoping it would all go away so that I could enjoy the man I wanted so badly to see in him.

  At least legally wed we wouldn’t clash with the church, and I would be fulfilling my duty to commit my life to my only sexual partner. Soon after the wedding, however, Paul abandoned all remaining pretense of emotional stability and grew violent. I finally had to leave him to protect myself. By my junior year, I was a divorcée peering out at my whole life from the horizon, with nothing but a box of clothes and a blender. I’d repented for what I’d done, but if church had taught me anything, it was that searching for a new boyfriend would mean explaining why I was a dirty cookie, and why I hadn’t waited. Life would be more complicated than ever.

  ON A SUNNY AFTERNOON just before my last semester of senior year, I made my way through an ostentatious conference center built by the CEO of a successful multilevel marketing company. Here I go again, I thought. In my haste, my stiletto heels clacked hard against the high-polished marble in the foyer, sending ghostly echoes dancing through the open space. I shuffled past a small bistro where two youngish businessmen chatted over lunch. Across the hall stood a wide bank of elevators that would carry me upstairs for an audience with the CEO, who moonlighted as my area’s bishop.

  I stepped into the spacious lift and pushed the FOUR button. When the elevator glided to a halt, the doors parted to reveal a small reception desk. I gave my name to the man seated behind the counter and had barely sat down myself when the CEO swung open his door, revealing a cavernous maw of an office.

  “Thank you for meeting me here. Erin, right?” he said as we shook hands and bellied up to a sprawling conference table in a room affording a view of snowcapped mountains.