Ask an Ex Fundie (VF style)

[Palimpsest]

2 minutes ago, PennySycamore said:

isn't tzitzit something that men and boys do?  

Tzitzit = the strings on the corners of the tallit (prayer shawl).   This girl sewed fringe like this to the bottom of all her skirts and called it  tzitzit.  

Quote

I don't think it was a Seppi.  Scratching my head trying to remember all the fake Jews we have discussed.

[Leftitinmysnood]

Fundies love fake Bar Mitzvahs. I attended one of the Lindvall ones, presumably along with the Seppis. I dont remember much about it except it was at a church in a neighboring town, the son had to read his scripture passage and was really nervous about it (don't remember it being in Hebrew), it was way too crowded for the size of space, and I think we ate deli tray sandwiches (with meat and cheese ?). Lindvall also really liked the idea of segregated dancing like in Fiddler on the Roof, but no one could dance, so we ended up marching in circles while he played one of his 3 strum patterns on guitar.

[hoipolloi]

1 hour ago, Palimpsest said:

Still, I remember Dougie cavorting around Israel, singing snatches of Fiddler on the Roof, and spouting Christian Zionism. 

All the time. Here's a pretty typical comment from the Doug's Blog entry for July 4, 2003:

[DomWackTroll]

"The delightful light show being finished, 'Little Bear' and I shared a brief speech..."

Mm. "Brief." I'll bet. 

[Soulhuntress]

Rushdoony.  Fuck that guy with a rusty barbed wire encased pineapple shoved sideways up his ass.  

Quote

“The false witness borne during World War II with respect to Germany (i.e., the death camps) is especially notable and revealing…. the number of Jews who died after deportation is approximately 1,200,000 … very many of these people died of epidemics.”

 

[PennySycamore]

@Dreadcrumbs,  I do know that many Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist Jewish women wear talllit, but I expect the practice would be pretty unusual among Orthodox women.  If someone knows differently, I'd love to know.  

@Palimpsest, that fringe that you posted reminds me of fringe that you'd see on saloon girl costumes in Westerns.  

[Palimpsest]

2 minutes ago, PennySycamore said:

@Palimpsest, that fringe that you posted reminds me of fringe that you'd see on saloon girl costumes in Westerns.  

Yes.  I am obviously not Jewish.  I get terminology wrong all the time but I am always interested in learning about religious faith. 

So even this Goyim knows that tzitzit are important religious symbols.  Not decorative trim for Fake Jew's skirts, saloon girls, and soft furnishings.

As an atheist, and Fundie-lite in recovery, I still respect the faith of others even if I don't share it.  Most of the time.  Brent Detwiler just tested that.

[Monstrous Black Sheep]

There may have been a great deal of Jewish tradition-stealing in Vision Forum fundyism, but they never admitted it. They certainly made a big deal out of 12th/13th birthdays, but it was just presented as 'BIBLICALLY YOU ARE NOW AN ADULT AND ARE EXPECTED TO BEHAVE 20 YEARS OLDER THAN YOUR ACTUAL BRAIN DEVELOPMENT"

The girls usually received hope chests, and IDK what the boys got. My family felt social pressure, and did buy me a chest (it's a pretty cedar piece from Costco), but they told me "we really wanted to throw you a party, and we asked Michael Bradrick (at the time we were very close with them) to make your chest, but he didn't have time."

For my 12th birthday (or 13th, can't remember) my mom (who was an admin of the Patriarch's Wives yahoo group) had a bunch of the ladies write me letters. I got one from Stacey McDonald as well as others. My mom also printed off the Botkin Girl's pretentious letter to a 13 year old girl and swapped my name for hers. I remember being so confused because in the letter they talk about seeing "me" at an event I never went to. LOL ok

There were some zionists in our extended circles, but they weren't in the Vision Forum world. Most Vision Forumites were reconstructionists/theonomists/postmillennialists who believed that ethnic Israel was irrelevant and that the church/all Christians were considered to be Israel.

[unsafetydancer]

Hello and welcome @Monstrous Black Sheep! I just have to ask, what is a hope chest?

 

Also, how much contact did you have with non-fundie kids/families? I am guessing you were homeschooled but did you ever go to events or on trips where there were kids from other backgrounds? Maybe it's because I grew up in a secular household but the isolationism thing really confuses me. How is it even possible all of the time? What would your parents have done if they caught you talking to a kid they didn't approve of or had you bought into the rules too much to even try it?

Also, as someone else mentioned upthread, you guys are all heroes in your own way. I can't imagine how hard it must be to leave behind everything you grew up with.

[Palimpsest]

2 minutes ago, unsafetydancer said:

I just have to ask, what is a hope chest?

I can answer that.  It is an American term (hope for eventual marriage) for what used to be known as a bottom drawer in the UK. Also sometimes called a dowry chest.  Where the unmarried maiden stores things she collects for her trousseau.  Very old-fashioned concept.  Quite a few Fundies have them, but pressuring a girl to start one as young as 12 is creepy.   It is a good example of driving home that a Godly young woman's best and only valid life choice is marriage and children. 

[unsafetydancer]

7 minutes ago, Palimpsest said:

I can answer that.  It is an American term (hope for eventual marriage) for what used to be known as a bottom drawer in the UK. Also sometimes called a dowry chest.  Where the unmarried maiden stores things she collects for her trousseau.  Very old-fashioned concept.  Quite a few Fundies have them, but pressuring a girl to start one as young as 12 is creepy.   It is a good example of driving home that a Godly young woman's best and only valid life choice is marriage and children. 

One more question. What the hell is a trousseau? (OK, maybe this is a daft question but I had a weirdly selectively sheltered upbringing, even though it wasn't a fundie one)

Edited July 30, 2019 by unsafetydancer
I know I ask daft questions.

[Palimpsest]

Just now, unsafetydancer said:

What the hell is a trousseau?

I never had one.  But a single google got me this.  The Queen did!  Apparently they are coming back into mainstream fashion!    http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/news-features/TMG3360665/The-trousseau-all-a-girl-needs-before-the-big-day.html

In the olden days, the personal possessions of a bride.  The clothes, undies, linens, and cooking pots she bought with her to the marital household.  Young ladies used to weave, sew and embroider 12 of the best of everything as an example of their skills. 

[sableduck]

9 minutes ago, Palimpsest said:

I can answer that.  It is an American term (hope for eventual marriage) for what used to be known as a bottom drawer in the UK. Also sometimes called a dowry chest.  Where the unmarried maiden stores things she collects for her trousseau.  Very old-fashioned concept.  Quite a few Fundies have them, but pressuring a girl to start one as young as 12 is creepy.   It is a good example of driving home that a Godly young woman's best and only valid life choice is marriage and children. 

They were obsessed with hope chests.  The idea was that the girl would spend her teen years filling it with handmade home goods.  Back 150-200 years ago, this was a good idea.  It wasn’t easy or cheap to purchase your linen and napkins, etc, and so when a girl married it could take a year to make all that. If she’d been working all along she’d be able to have all her household items.  

Fundies were in love with this idea.  In fact, there was a homemade girls magazine, written by two teenage homeschooled girls, called “Hope Chest.”

 

[Monstrous Black Sheep]

33 minutes ago, unsafetydancer said:

Hello and welcome @Monstrous Black Sheep! I just have to ask, what is a hope chest?

 

Also, how much contact did you have with non-fundie kids/families? I am guessing you were homeschooled but did you ever go to events or on trips where there were kids from other backgrounds? Maybe it's because I grew up in a secular household but the isolationism thing really confuses me. How is it even possible all of the time? What would your parents have done if they caught you talking to a kid they didn't approve of or had you bought into the rules too much to even try it?

Also, as someone else mentioned upthread, you guys are all heroes in your own way. I can't imagine how hard it must be to leave behind everything you grew up with.

Haha
So my hope chest was a place for me to store things for my "future home" when I was married. Measuring spoons, keepsakes, bowls, pots, odds and ends. When I learned new handcrafts like crocheting, VF would encourage girls to make things for others or for her future house. I think I probably still have a few atrociously bright colored and badly made dishcloths in my hope chest.

The only contact my siblings and I had with children who weren't in the cult was our neighbors. We were all playmates as children (I also had friends and cousins as playmates when I was young who went to public school). That's how I found out about sex, when my friend passed it onto me from her public school sex ed. (My parents to this day have never had one conversation with me about sex or anything related to it).

The more immersed in VF my family became, the more isolated we were. We went to churches where 99% of the families homeschooled and followed "the rules", but we only saw them on sundays and didn't build relationships. The neighbor kids moved on with their lives and after age 12 or so we all kind of hated each other.

I had many siblings, so we always had someone to play with, but we didn't have outside friends except on sundays after church.

[JermajestyDuggar]

4 minutes ago, sableduck said:

They were obsessed with hope chests.  The idea was that the girl would spend her teen years filling it with handmade home goods.  Back 150-200 years ago, this was a good idea.  It wasn’t easy or cheap to purchase your linen and napkins, etc, and so when a girl married it could take a year to make all that. If she’d been working all along she’d be able to have all her household items.  

Fundies were in love with this idea.  In fact, there was a homemade girls magazine, written by two teenage homeschooled girls, called “Hope Chest.”

 

I could easily imagine a hope chest becoming quite the opposite if a good fundie girl is 37 and still unmarried. What a horrible daily reminder of your failures.

[quiversR4hunting]

My brother, sister and I all have "hope chests". We aren't fundie, never were, never will be. We are all Catholic.

My grandparents gave them to us as a place to store our treasures. I have a handmade shawl my grandmother gave me, old letters from HS/MS years and other items that I can't part with but don't use. So our "hope chests" were really given to us to store very special items. 

[unsafetydancer]

21 minutes ago, Monstrous Black Sheep said:

That's how I found out about sex, when my friend passed it onto me from her public school sex ed. (My parents to this day have never had one conversation with me about sex or anything related to it)

This begs one more question; how the hells did they expect you to understand any of it? I thought my school's sex-ed programme sucked but just not discussing it ever seems pointless.

 

20 minutes ago, JermajestyDuggar said:

I could easily imagine a hope chest becoming quite the opposite if a good fundie girl is 37 and still unmarried. What a horrible daily reminder of your failures.

Aye, this. Even as someone who is not particularly interested in the idea of marriage, I am 29 and questions from my friends about finding "the one" make me feel kinda shit. While I agree with the idea of being prepared for living life as an adult, I just accepted a bunch of hand me downs, some of which now have a bizarre sentimental value. 

A cool way to modernise this might be to pitch it as preparing for life away from home, with or without a spouse. We could even include boys in this and start them up with wee supplies of cooking utensils and household items. It would be a great way to prepare every child for a day when mum or dad isn't around to cook/clean/fix around the house. Making it specific to girls and part of "preparing them for marriage" sucks and I guess just reinforces all the crappy gender norms around chores and housework. I was pretty horrified in my first shared flat when none of the boys ever did stuff like clean the toilet or tidy away their stuff. One guy couldn't even cook and lived on instant noodles for a year. 

I can't even imagine what the Queen would put in one. As far as I know, she doesn't do any chores and probably doesn't even do "girly" tasks like knitting for herself anymore. I can't see her putting away tea towels and blankets when she could just buy some or have her staff take care of it.

[Letgo]

Thanks for your answers, Monstrous Black Sheep! I've always wondered if any of these women who married  young and had children quickly and often ever struggled with the idea of no birth control and having as many "blessings" as possible? Having lots of children means lots of hard work, and pregnancy and birth aren't easy either. Do any of them ever break down? Say no?

And on that note, did you ever know any young women who liked being a stay-at-home-daughter and didn't want to get married, have kids, or get a job? Sometimes I wonder if some of the older SAHDs have purposely not married because they like the freedom of not having a husband and bunch of kids. Yes, they are still at home with their parents but there is far less work than they'd have had if they'd married and had a family. They would STILL be stuck at home if in a marriage, but with way more work and responsibility. Does that ever happen to your knowledge? 

4 minutes ago, unsafetydancer said:

This begs one more question; how the hells did they expect you to understand any of it? I thought my school's sex-ed programme sucked but just not discussing it ever seems pointless.

 

She didn't need to understand or even know about sex because she wasn't married. Many people think that if kids know about sex and/or birth control they will engage in it. If they don't know anything those topics then they won't have sex-so no need for birth control, Very simple. Not accurate, but that's not important! Sigh...

[unsafetydancer]

That's just awful! It strikes me as pretty cruel to prepare young women only for marriage and not give them the tools to set boundaries with their partner or even understand a relationship.

[Monstrous Black Sheep]

1 hour ago, unsafetydancer said:

This begs one more question; how the hells did they expect you to understand any of it? I thought my school's sex-ed programme sucked but just not discussing it ever seems pointless.

I don't think they thought that far. There was a downright terror when it came to anything related to sex. (Fear is a strong theme in patriarchy.) I remember finding books written by fundies that were like "how to talk to your engaged child about sex"
Like literally HOW TO INFORM YOUR ENGAGED TWENTY SOMETHING CHILD OF WHAT SEX IS.

 

[MamaJunebug]

When I graduated from high school, I and all the other girls in the class received a coupon for a miniature Hope chest from the local Lane Furniture retailer. I chucked it in disdain. Looking back, I wish I’d gone ahead and redeemed it, because at this point the thing is probably a collectors item.

[Antipatriarch]

2 hours ago, sableduck said:

They were obsessed with hope chests.  The idea was that the girl would spend her teen years filling it with handmade home goods.  Back 150-200 years ago, this was a good idea.  It wasn’t easy or cheap to purchase your linen and napkins, etc, and so when a girl married it could take a year to make all that. If she’d been working all along she’d be able to have all her household items.  

 

P.S. "Calvin... Why do you keep calling me Calvin?"

[JermajestyDuggar]

37 minutes ago, Monstrous Black Sheep said:

I don't think they thought that far. There was a downright terror when it came to anything related to sex. (Fear is a strong theme in patriarchy.) I remember finding books written by fundies that were like "how to talk to your engaged child about sex"
Like literally HOW TO INFORM YOUR ENGAGED TWENTY SOMETHING CHILD OF WHAT SEX IS.

 

I have a friend from college who married her college sweetheart. He was a regular guy. He partied at college like the rest of us but was slightly quiet and nerdy but fun. He said that his dad actually tried to give him a sex talk right before he got married. At age 22! His parents are pretty religious and he said it was terribly awkward. Since he wasn’t a virgin at all. However his brother and sister in law went full fundie and now have 6 kids and homeschool. 

Edited July 30, 2019 by JermajestyDuggar

[wallysmommy]

Slight thread drift on the hope chest tradition.  In the early 1700s French girls were brought to the Louisiana French colonies as brides for the men.  According to this story, they were poor or from brothels.  They each had a box of their personal belongings that through translation became known as a "casket."  They then became known as the "casket girls."  Here's a link with their story.

https://gonola.com/things-to-do-in-new-orleans/history/the-casket-girls-wives-for-french-new-orleans

 

[Chamomile]

@Monstrous Black Sheep, do you find it hard now to make true friendships and social connections? IDK if this is common across general society, but my family was also VF/IBLP adjacent and to this day I struggle socially. Looking back, even when we did socialize with other "likeminded families" there was still this unspoken contest of superiority going on: yes, we're all fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers, but who watches the least TV? Who has the longest and most acceptably styled hair? Who has the most children? If you DO have the most children, do they wear coordinating outfits to maximize the "gasp! how many are there?!" factor? I remember one time some "good friends" came over to visit. Their son got mud on his pants and had to borrow a pair from my brother--- which happened to be made out of athletic material. Apparently these pants, for a ten year old kid, were "worldly". There were subtle snide comments made and we could just feel that we had been knocked down in the Fundie Holiness Dance. That's just an example, but I still feel like I struggle with normal relationships because I have this constant anxiety about how I am measuring up.

Edit to add: by TV I mean movies, VHS or (if you're snazzy!) DVD entertainment! Wholesome Bob Jones Productions or Moody Science Videos et al., never actual cable... 

Edited July 30, 2019 by Chamomile
Clarification