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God’s People Can Be
A Review of
Girl at the End of the World: My Escape from Fundamentalism in Search of Faith with a Future
Elizabeth Esther
Paperback: Convergent Books, 2014
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Reviewed by Ellen Painter Dollar
Scenes from Elizabeth Esther’s childhood:
- At summer Bible camp, she was forced to squat over a dirt trench in the rain to defecate. When she didn’t, her camp counselor berated her for being a poor example (especially for a “preacher’s daughter”) and sent her to bed without dinner.
- She sat at the top of the stairs listening to her mother’s “child-training sessions” with other mothers, which consisted of toddlers being spanked over and over with a wooden spoon.
- One Saturday afternoon, she woke up from a nap to find her house empty, the iron still on where her mother appeared to have left it suddenly. She panicked, convinced that the Rapture happened and she was left behind. Actually, a tree had fallen and crushed a neighbor’s car, and everyone, including Esther’s mother, was alive and un-Raptured.
Esther recalls this episode as the first time she questioned the authenticity of her parents’ version of Christianity—in which believers’ primary job is to prepare their souls and others’ for the end of the world, and children’s wills were made to be broken. Esther grew up in a fundamentalist group called The Assembly, founded by her domineering grandparents. She was presented with lists and diagrams of her sins. Prodded by her parents, she preached on street corners. She internalized the Assembly’s views of women, in which, “Just a pinch of sexual defilement ruins the whole person,” and women don’t venture their own opinions when they are in the company of their husbands or other men.
As a teenager and young adult, Esther began having panic attacks. She eventually married a young man in the Assembly. After fraught sessions with her grandmother, in which the older woman cataloged her granddaughter’s sins and asked her to “admit your life is a failure and a mess,” Esther cut herself—high up on the thighs where no one would see it—with the sharp edge of her diamond wedding ring. She would weep after these sessions, not “for my sins…but because I finally realize that I will never be free. I see life stretched in front of me, and I weep for all the dreams I’ll never fulfill and the children I will bring into this oppression. I weep for naively hoping my marriage could be different from all the other marriages in the Assembly.”
On her baby daughter’s first birthday, when the child reached for a candy dish. Esther’s grandmother instructed her not to take the dish away, but to tell the child “no,” and spank her with a wooden spoon if she didn’t obey. Sobbing in the bathroom, the baby on her lap, Esther realizes that she has a choice. She can choose not to embrace the legacy of her family’s and church’s destructive ways.
Esther and her husband eventually leave the Assembly. Their leaving, and finding a new way of being Christian in a new community, is terribly hard. “When church is everything,” Esther writes, “leaving feels like a horrible, unimaginable divorce. We feel as if we’re abandoning our homeland and entering another culture as an immigrant. We have no friends, no outside contacts. We think and speak differently.”
After some missteps, including watching far too much television (which she had never owned before) and mistaking run-of-the-mill suburban interactions as heartfelt invitations to friendship, Esther finds solace in the Catholic church, particularly Mary. As she prays over her premature twins, Esther wonders, “Which hero of my faith can comfort me as my body leaks postbirth blood and my breasts swell with nourishing milk?….Mary understands. Mary watched her child suffer, and there was nothing she could do about it.”
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Nicely done, Ellen. Thank you. I was supposed to get an ARC of this, but it never showed up – I will order it.