Introduce Yourself- Part 3

[heathenjaye]

hello

i am a 30ish female from PA in the US. i lurked for a couple of years but lately i have been itching to try and comment. this is probably not the best time to start commenting since i call my laptop the Lemon.

i watched the Duggars in fascination because i am an only child. i did not mind them until they started toting politics and actual religious beliefs.  the episode where they go to the Creation Museum was my breaking point. since i am from PA, i know how horrible Rick Santorum is and when their faith guided them to support him, i put a personal boycott on all TLC shows.

the Duggars extremist beliefs drive me crazy so it is nice to come and read sane comments on how crazy fundies are.  this is also helping keep my sanity over the new government administration. they seem to be even crazier and have a lot of fundie beliefs. the VP truly scares me.

i grew up without being raised in a religion. i do not consider myself a christian even though my family is. they are not very religious but they believe in god. i would say i am a confused agnostic, liberal.

[RebelliousEscapee]

I was homeschooled through high school. Escaped the nonsense of patriarchy by eloping. Lived in Alabama most of my childhood/teenage years. Still a Christian, though the word "covenant" makes me wanna gag. Was in deep with the VF crowd, as well as the "reconstructionist" folks. Here to lurk more than post, since I've lost contact with pretty much everyone I grew up with and you guys seem to know more about some of them than I do/did.  

[Hmmm_idolatry]

Hello, FJers.  I'm a 40something who was born and raised in California.  I met Mr. Idolatry while living in Hollywood, the epicenter of sin.  Mr. Idolatry is a native of Iowa (and far too naive to live in LA).  When his elderly father became very ill with cancer, we moved back to his homeland in order to be near his parents.  Mr. Idolatry is an only child.  

Upon moving to the land of corn, I decided to go back to school.  I am nearly finished with a doctorate in English as a second language education.  We don't have any human children, but we do have a zoo (5 cats, a Pomeranian, and the raccoon in my avatar).  I am currently apprenticing as a wildlife rehabber in my spare time and the raccoon is my permanent foster child.  He's blind and has neurological issues.  

I first became aware of the Duggars when they started doing their Discovery channel specials.  I was appalled that the channel would feature this family, as I believe that glorifying this lifestyle and oppression of women is really harmful to society.  I never watched a single episode of that show until the Josh scandal.  That's how I discovered FJ.  I was feeling schadenfreud-y and googling for articles about the Josh scandal, and that's how I found FJ.  I was so pleased to see that there were so many people out there who also thought this lifestyle was really harmful to society.  I just love the threads here, and I had no idea there were so many fundy families out there who were such fame-whores.  

[Jane M.]

Hello!

I'm a looooong time lurker but finally decided to join because this is the best site to get my daily Duggar fix. I'm addicted, they're my favorite trainwreck. 

[AnnEggBlandHer?]

Hi! I've been lurking here on and off for a few years, but much more often since my babe was born about 6 months ago. I'm a 30-ish y/o SAHM now, live on the East Coast of the US. I was raised Catholic but I 'quit' that after high school, and a few years ago decided I missed God and religion and am now very happily a member of a nondenominational Christian church. 

I'm ashamed to say I'm a former Duggar fan, but credit FJ with showing me the ugly truth about them. I also follow the Bates, the Shupes, have recently been lurking in the Arndt thread, and have a longtime fascination with all things Mormon and FLDS.

Not sure why I decided tonight was the night to stop lurking and start posting, but here I am! 

[AuntKrazy]

I consider myself something of a fundie refugee.  Many of my long-term friends are Quiverfull, attended ATI symposiums while growing up, and are now proudly homeschooling their offspring.  

I'm in my mid-40s; and infertility issues and some other drama in my church really opened my eyes to the damage of the cult-like tendencies around me.  And now it's like a train wreck that I cannot look away from; especially as I notice more and more the crazy things that I never questioned for years.  

I've been lurking for a while in the Quiverfull of Snark threads for a while, as I definitely need an outlet for all the snark I have saved up; especially with a glut of family and friends who do not appreciate it at all.

 

[samurai_sarah]

Hi newbies,

Welcome! Good to have you here!

 

[Escadora]

Hey everyone, 

I'm 22 and from England. My interest in Fundies actually began in the beginning of 2015, when a youtube playlist led me to watching the original Duggar special, back when they had only 14 kids. I was out of both school and work for the first half of that year and watched a lot of the episodes of five billion kids and counting. And then I don't remember exactly what I googled, but it brought me here.

It was either just at this time or very soon after that the Joshley Madison scandal broke out. I remember being horrified, as any person should be, when the other thing was revealed too. And then I couldn't read the threads about it because it made so angry and upset, so I began to branch out and became a little fixated on checking FJ every day. I've read about everything from the Maxwells to the strange lady who sits on loaves of bread during unfortunate weeks, and I've spent hours and hours of listening to Steven Anderson's 'sermons' on Youtube (with him I'm torn between being amused at his pulpit antics and feeling bad for the really bad situation he's putting his own family and his followers' families in. I do thumbs down every video i see, though, so I call it as good as i can). I made my account in January(ish?) 

As it turns out, what started as a time-wasting (no offence, FJ is interesting and I procrastinate a lot) hobby led to me deciding to go back to college, where I'm taking a short course in Teacher Ed, before going on to study *insert name of degree here that I won't actually say because anonymity and all* so that I can take my basic understanding  of society and expand my knowledge and empathy before going on to teach primary aged (4-11) children. 

You'd think that having to write a butt-ton of proper formal emails and essays this past year that i'd know how to conclude something.

I don't. 

Either way, I'm looking forward to jumping in here, finally, and I apologise in advance (except not really because this is the end of the post??) for being so long-winded;  brevity is the soul of wit, and i'm an awkward little duck.

 

[LiLSeaWitch]

Hi y'all.

I'm in my 50s work in the family business my dad started 50+ years ago. I'm baptist, can't stand Bill Gothard's cult (went to one of his seminars back in the 80s, still gives me nightmares) that whole mess gives christians a bad name.

I love all people no matter race, religion, nationality or LBGTQ. I respect all humans, unless they are complete jerks. I love animals, they are never jerks and always so happy to see me, lol, we have 3 dogs and a bunny.

I'm married with 2 grown children, I work, I shop, I maintain the family budget and pay the bills (from our joint account). I believe marriage is an equal partnership. I have to admit, I love having my husband open doors for me and pull out my chair at the table he makes me feel like I still am as attractive to him as when we first started dating. 

There is more to my life of course but I'm basically posting this to get out of the bathroom. 

[L1o2u3]

Hello

I'm twenty and in a relationship (like, past the dating phase, but nowhere near engagement yet). I heard about the quiverfull-patriarchy thing because I wanted to know more about courtship and stuff. I did not grow up evangelical or something like that. I think I am a Christian, although I used to consider myself an atheist for some time. But I am not in a church because every church I look into has some creepy stuff  that I don't want. I believe in evolution, religious freedom and I'm not prolife. I hesitate calling myself a feminist or prochoice because I think many people associate rather radical things with these terms (as they do with Christianity sometimes). I'm more like in the middle - i think some regulations for abortions are okay, but I don't support a ban (especially not for victims of violence) and I think there are some differences between men and women, or different tendencies, but I don't believe that all people of one gender should be the same or conform to the ideal. 

And I still have kept some of my atheist beliefs  I think religion is only good as long as it helps you (through a dificult time or whatever) and as long as it doesn't force you to believe in an alternate reality and I try to be very careful that I don't end up doing stupid things or being sucked in by weird teachings. 

[ak1188]

Hi everyone! Super longtime lurker here, I registered a couple years ago but never posted and then my account got lost (I'm guessing with the transition to the new site?).  Anyway, I've been following the Duggars since I was in college because they were always on TV when I was doing homework, and I was a cultural anthropology major so they naturally grabbed my interest.  As I started learning more about them I started seeing a lot of similarities between their beliefs and some of the stuff that my old church used to teach.  To be clear, we were NOT a Gothard affiliated church, and I don't know if anybody ever used any VF or ATI materials for homeschooling, but there were definitely homeschoolers (a lot of them!).  Lots of the courtship and female submission to male authority stuff, and the church started taking a hard conservative political stance, which is ultimately what drove my dad away.  My mom left the church (and my father) right around the time she found her new man at Bible study.  I stopped going in high school.

Looking forward to finally joining in on the snark!

[Palimpsest]

4 minutes ago, ak1188 said:

I registered a couple years ago but never posted and then my account got lost (I'm guessing with the transition to the new site?). 

The transition was way more than 2 years ago.  You might want to shoot an email (or a PM) to the Admins in case you accidentally socked yourself. That is against the rules. 

That said, cultural anthropologists are always welcome.  As is any input you may have.  

 

 

[ak1188]

Thanks for the tip, I'll send a PM now.

[MarblesMom]

Welcome Wagon here.  Always glad to see new members.  Welcome

[Unicorn]

I'm a long time lurker with insight into how fundies operate since I grew up homeschooled fundie light with a social circle mostly more fundamentalist than my own family.

I was my family's Jana, albeit in a smaller family without worldwide onlookers.  Her personality and choices remind me of myself, and I'm the oldest daughter.  I pretty much broke my silence to offer hope for Jana's future.  

I married a very kind disabled man my age in our late twenties.  Because of his disabilities, I'm our family's breadwinner.  I was able to get a salary job with family insurance outside the home, with only nanny and housekeeping experience prior, and I like being both a caregiver and provider.  He's a stay at home dad, and we both keep the house clean and family meals served.  My husband was also raised fundie light.  Because he was noticeably disabled since infancy, in ways that disqualify him from most jobs, he wasn't raised with a sense of infallibility and patriarchal entitlement.  His parents didn't think he'd marry and sent him to life skills classes to essentially learn housework.   

I don't like the concept of bringing people up like second class citizens for any reason.  

We both have problems expressing our opinions.  He struggles with this more than I do.  We help each other with this by awkwardly talking through our feelings to each other, and encouraging and congratulating each other when this happens.  It sounds simple and childish, but it's nice and cathartic and brings us closer together.

I got grief for the way I moved on with my life, of course.  However, people knew me to be responsible and trusted me.  

My husband and I are still Christians.  Christianity is a comfortable coping mechanism for him and a spiritual concept for me.  He doesn't have a bigoted bone in his body, but finds peace in taking the Bible literally on subjects like heaven.  We live on a more rural, isolated plot of wilderness paradise than our suburban parents ever did, and we do homeschool basically because we want to homeschool better than our parents did and because our daughters are square pegs like we should have been allowed to be.  We don't believe in hell or evangelism, or anything that would stifle a spirit.  

My dream is to gently but strongly raise kind and confident women ready to take on the world, however they as individuals want to do this.  They'll learn their parents are emotional abuse survivors soon enough.  We have a habit of apologizing to the kids when we get upset, which is frankly more than I see most normal parents do.

We don't have Internet at home, due to the cost of rural Internet (and cable), so my posts will be infrequent.  

So yeah, I'm here because I made it to freedom in my own way and think I have things worth saying.  I feel like I let both the outside world and my relatives down, but happiness is a personal decision.  

I'm editing this to say I have a very liberal, very atheist, soon to be upper class younger sister in graduate school who will never leave the large city she moved to or have children.  I feel like she looks down on my family and is what the western world in general wants from all girls raised the way we were.  This is my own insecurity as well, and I'm aware of that.

Edited April 27, 2017 by Unicorn
Further background on my life situation

[subsaharanafrica]

Hello all. My parents were saved from the Catholic Church shortly after my first communion. Thereafter I was raised in the nexus between reform theology and Evangelical Protestantism. I was confirmed Catholic as an adult, which is still a bone of contention with my immediate family. 

I have several family members who grew up heavily involved in ATI/IBLP so I've known about them for quite some time even if it was always a bridge to far ("it's great if that's what you're called to do but it's not for me") for my immediate family. 

Anyways, I'm an expat who is living in her 5th country on her 4th continent and absolutely loving life in a way I couldn't have imagined 20 years ago. 

[ChildofScience]

Hi Everyone!

I've lurked since 2K14 and finally decided to join. I've been posting for a while and still adjusting to FJ culture. So far enjoying the conversations and how welcoming people have been here!

[MarblesMom]

Welcome! Such great, varied backgrounds   Looking forward to your posts.

[Lulu22du]

Hi all! Just wanted to introduce myself. I am not new to these boards, but this is the first time I finally signed myself up to post. I have had a fascination with the Duggars, Bates, and any other fundies living the quiverfull lifestyle. I grew up as an only child with atheist parents. So it's so interesting to see people living completely opposite. Also have a fascination with Scientology. I myself got sucked into a cult for 6 months when I had just gotten out of a bad relationship. So in some ways I can relate to how it feels to be brainwashed.

Excited to talk with ya'll!

[Jelly Babies]

Hi everyone!! Long time lurker here
My name is Ashley, and I'm from Ontario, Canada. I was raised Christian (and still am), but my parents went through a fundie-lite phase (making us do the IBLP course)  for a few years in my mid teens and it drove me absolutely bonkers. Thankfully, my dad realized how bad Gothards theology was (we hadn't gotten deep into the patriarchy crap yet), and we stopped the course. 

My gateway fundies are the Duggars, probably because I met them when I was 11. Let me tell yall, Michelle is as crazy and Boob is as dim-witted as they are on the show. I hung out with Jinger mostly, and she was sooooo cool... I prayed so hard for her to escape the cult. At least she got the most decent husband :/ Recently I've been stalking Aunt Lori and the Maxwells too.

I'm 20 years old , and I still live at home (my choice), and I'll be going to University next September (also my choice) to major in Theatre arts and minor in music. 

I love the community on here, and I look forward to snarking with yall!!

Edited June 1, 2017 by ashley

[JellyDuggar]

I'm a long time lurker. Former hella fundy, the likes of which would shame the duggars into thinking they are going to bust hell wide open. Current spiritual guru to myself and anyone else who will listen, but far from Christian. The spotlight on these famous fundy families has literally become my reality tv obsession. They are my kardashians. Love this site, although it feeds my trashy tv hobby way too much. Lol


 

Edited June 5, 2017 by hoipolloi
Removed tapatalk signature

[grammyj]

     I have been reading here for a couple of years and finally signed up about six months ago, but have only posted twice. I used to watch the Duggars once and a while.  Thought the family was an oddity--to each its own,  and on the surface it seemed to work for them so didn't give their lifestyle much thought.  

    HOWEVER, I caught the the episode in which Michelle was interviewed  and  listed to all her lame reasons as to why her children would not pursue any significant higher education.  I thought, something is definitely "off" here here so I started doing a little research which introduced me to FJ   by way of "Duggars without  Pity" and then on to the  Maxwells (!!!!!!!!!!!).   I don't think I've surfaced yet.          

     I'm  a retired grandmother, mainstream  Anglican from Southern Ontario. This Fundamentalism is new to me and has certainly opened my eyes to a disturbing and even dangerous element in our society. Free Jinger has been a great resource and I spend (too) many enjoyable hours on this site.

  

 

 

 

 

[SapphireSlytherin]

Longtime lurker - finally took the plunge when the JinJer/books thread took off.

 

I'm 50 (how'd that happen) and a huge fan of all things Harry Potter. I've been to WWOHP at Universal Orlando (twice), and my hubby and I are going to the HPATCC play in London later this summer. He's an EU citizen, so going over there is easy for us. We have a pied-a-terre in London, which also makes things easier when we travel there.

 

I currently live in the Midwest USA, but have lived on the east coast and in the deep south, as well as in Europe.

 

As my screen name indicates, I'm a pureblood Slytherin (as sorted on Pottermore), and Pukwudgie in Ilvermorny. Hubby's also a Slytherin. Somehow, our kid is a Gryffindor. Don't understand how that happened, but she knows she's a disappointment. haha

[countingon]

Hello Everyone :-) 

A bit about myself....I am 23 and from British Columbia, Canada.  I graduated from university with a degree in sociology and communications.  When I was a teen, I watched 19 Kids and Counting because there was nothing else on TV.  Years later, I became obsessed started being sociologically fascinated  with TLC shows....among the shows, 19 Kids and Counting (again), and 90 Day Fiance.  The fascination has remained.  

[Lulu22du]

I'm a long time lurker. Former hella fundy, the likes of which would shame the duggars into thinking they are going to bust hell wide open.

Welcome! Would love to hear your story. Were you involved in the Gothard cult? What made you more of a fundy than the Duggars?