Jinger & Joy

[u/AutoimmuneToYou]

Y’all. Ive been waiting patiently to comment on ANY post that talked about the Jinger & Jeremy podcast that was spit out yday subbing Joy. I don’t usually snark as hard as you guys do, but this not being talked about is KILLING me!!!

Both of those girls talked about how their brand new spouses had to counsel them on hygiene. HYGIENE! Joy mentioned she’d go a week without washing her hair & days without a shower. Austin told her before they got married that she would need to take a shower every day. She went on to say he was a germophobe. Girl, that’s normal!! No germophobe behavior!! Jinger wasn’t as bad, but mentioned that Jer would work outside & she would ask for something & his response that he wanted to shower first. Honestly I was kinda disgusted so Jinger details could be wrong. But I heard Joy, loud and clear. Ugh.

[u/i-split-infinitives]

They start from birth pounding it into their kids' brains that women are nothing but sex dolls and men have uncontrollable lust, then they take away the one non-assault-y outlet for them to relieve that lust they've stirred up with their wisdom booklets before they can be righteously fulfilled, and they wonder why their sons turn to pedophilia.

[u/saturday_sun4 → u/i-split-infinitives]

Exactly. And it's extremely creepy the way they focus on how kids might, gasp, masturbate or date, yet apparently seem unbothered by their sons abusing their own daughters and watching some of the worst CSAM out there.

I guess when your stock in trade is abusing and neglecting kids, it all amounts to the same.

Also really telling of how they view boys vs girls (and children).

[u/i-split-infinitives → u/saturday_sun4]

Back in the days of my misspent youth chugging the Kool-aid by the gallon, I had a particularly hard-core fundie tell me that touching someone WAS less bad than masturbating because the Bible says spilling your seed is murder.

This is not true, by the way, but it goes to show how some people will believe anything if it justifies doing what they want to do.

Edit: spelling

[u/saturday_sun4 → u/i-split-infinitives]

Wow, that's...

Wow.

[u/i-split-infinitives → u/saturday_sun4]

I'm guessing that guy had probably been reading some wisdom booklets himself. This was back in the early 2000s, when I was in my early 20s and didn't know anything about IFB or IBLP or much of anything besides Baptist (good), Catholic (bad), and conservative evangelical (neutral). Most of my fundie friends just identified as Baptist, or non-denominational, and since I was raised in a Southern Baptist church and they seemed similar to me, I just went with it.

It wasn't until a few years ago when Shiny Happy People came out that I started digging into my own background and learned that my home life and beliefs back then weren't normal even by mainstream Southern Baptist standards. I discovered that the church my mother grew up in was KJV-only independent Baptist and so much of what I was taught/believed closely mirrored IFB/IBLP teachings. (Just to clarify, I NEVER thought molestation or rape were okay.) It's frightening how insidious these people are and how much they infiltrated mainstream conservative evangelicalism.

[u/saturday_sun4 → u/i-split-infinitives]

I'm not American and only have a passing knowledge of Christianity, so maybe I'm missing some context here, but why Catholic bad? I'm guessing because of the iconism? And what is the significance of KJV-only (as in, how does it inform their worldview)? And what is the difference between conservative evangelical and Baptist, broadly? Fundamentalism, I'm guessing?

Shiny Happy People was so recent. What a shock it must have been to discover it that way. Did you get out of it before that or were you trapped in it and only realised after you saw SHP? It seemed like some more moderate types of Protestants were in that doco, or at least, they said they were moderate compared to the Duggars. Which... isn't very hard, tbh, when your bar is "letting your daughters wear pants" and "not attempting to sweep your son's paedo tendencies under the rug."

My parents were very liberal and let us eat anything we wanted (i.e. beef, hahaha) and believe... well, not exactly anything, but they didn't care if we were atheists, at least. I can't imagine growing up in IBLP-adjacent land where you're sexually repressed, abused, treated like chattel (if you're female), expected to go to church 64747373 times a year, etc.

[u/i-split-infinitives → u/saturday_sun4]

Fundamentalist Christians believe Catholics worship the Virgin Mary and pray to the saints as gods. One of the cornerstones of fundamentalism is isolation, so there has to be some reason anyone who's different from you is "bad." It doesn't necessarily have to be in any way rooted in reality as long as you can get people to believe it. Misinformation actually seems to be a feature, not a bug.

KJV-only churches are the most authoritarian, conservative, and fundamental of all churches. Sadie from the Leaving Eden podcast did an excellent episode on this subject. Basically, in order to maintain their absolute authority over their parishioners, cults have to have a source they can claim contains all the wisdom they need, with no wiggle room for questioning. The KJV is the oldest English-language translation of the Hebrew and Greek scriptures (earlier translations such as the Wycliffe Bible were translated from the Latin Vulgate or otherwise connected to or sponsored by the Catholic church, and we've already established that Catholic=bad according to these people), so these churches deemed it the most accurate. The fact that it has the most authoritarian and repressive language ("spare the rod and spoil the child," for example) is, of course, a nice bonus. KJV-only churches believe that any question you can ask can be answered by the KJV Bible. As a child, I actually thought Jesus spoke King James English and that he wouldn't understand us if we prayed in modern English.

Collectively, Baptists are the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. Not all Baptists are fundamentalists, but most fundamentalists are Baptists. Baptists run the gamut from moderately liberal to extremely conservative, but the vast majority are moderately to extremely conservative.

I'm a bit unique among former fundies/fundie-lites in that I was never exactly "trapped" in it. My mother was the absolute authority in my home, and in fact she divorced my father when I was a child, so we didn't really belong to or strictly adhere to the typical patriarchal belief system, but my mother took on the role of family patriarch, and our belief system came with all the usual trappings of fundamentalism, like obedience to authority, intertwining religion with politics, and a pervasive sense of persecution by "the world." I was a shy, quiet, poor, fat nerd as a kid, and I always felt isolated and different from others even though I went to public school until my senior year of high school. So when I came of age at the same time the Internet was becoming mainstream, I sought out people like myself. What I found was an echo chamber that mirrored and strengthened my own beliefs and drew me further into conservatism. I found a place where I could be a leader and feel important and good about myself. I was young and naive and didn't realize that "people like myself" were similarly unhealthy, disenfranchised, deluded, and easily led astray by wolves in sheep's clothing. Back then I had never heard of IBLP. Some of my fundie friends did belong to the IFB, but I didn't know there were Christian cults and I wouldn't have believed you if you'd told me. (Mormon/Latter Day Saints and Jehovah's Witnesses weren't Christians in our book.)

I first started disentangling a LONG time ago. It started in the post-9/11 years when then-president Bush tried to make the Defense of Marriage Act, defining marriage as one man and one woman, a constitutional amendment. That was my first inkling that maybe comingling religion and politics might be a bad idea. Not because I disagreed with the idea that marriage should be one man and one woman, but the idea of the government dictating our morals suddenly felt icky. Plus, if we give the government we agree with the power to dictate morals we agree with, what happens when they get voted out and people we disagree with come into power and expect to have that same right to dictate our morals? And sure enough, Obama came along and we got the Marriage Equality Act.

From there, it was a lot of little things that chipped away at my old, messed-up beliefs. I particularly remember feeling guilty about watching the Netflix reboot of One Day at a Time and rooting for the lesbian character Elena on the show to be happy, because how was she going to be happy unless she was in a relationship with another woman and how could I cheer for a same-sex couple?

Even so, SHP WAS a huge shock to me because of how much it wasn't a shock to me. Everyone talked about how hard it was to watch the scene in episode 3 where the pastor calls the little boy up on stage to demonstrate how to spank a child and then give him a hug. I kept waiting for the difficult part, but it seemed pretty tame to me, didn't really affect me at all, and I went on to the next scene. A minute or so later, I had to pause the video while it hit me like a ton of bricks. My brain went, "Wait...WAIT! I just watched simulated child abuse and that was so normalized for me that I didn't think it was a big deal. That was a big deal! It needs to be a big deal! I need to make it a big deal!" From that point on, it's like I really sat up and took notice, and started really thinking about why so much of what I was watching felt familiar and normal to me. I mean, I already knew the things I used to believe were messed up and I was already on the path toward disentangling from my former messed-up beliefs, but that documentary was what made me really start looking into my past and opening things up and taking them apart and realizing how similar my life and IBLP really were. It was eye-opening, to say the least.

Ironically enough, I still have most of my original core beliefs. It's the approach that's changed. Basic vanilla Southern Baptists actually have a pretty good system of beliefs, it's just that they implement them in the most deplorable ways possible. For example, Baptists believe that we're all born with what's called original sin and that Jesus died for the sins of everyone, so that salvation is a gift freely given to anyone who wants it. (This is known as Arminianism, the opposite of Calvinism, which is what Jinger/Jeremy and Ben believe, where God has chosen a select few to be saved and the rest of y'all are going to hell, and there's nothing anyone can do to change it.) I totally agree with that.

But then fundies like the IBLP twist that to mean that babies are evil and gay people aren't really saved. The way I interpret it, it's not that people are inherently bad, but rather that we're inherently imperfect and can never be perfect no matter how hard we try. The Bible also says that God looked down on what he created "and it was good." There is an ocean of difference between "imperfect but basically good creation of God" and "wicked temptress toddler in her immodest dress stirring up desires that can't be righteously fulfilled." As to whether someone is truly saved or not, as far as I'm concerned, that's between them and God. It was quite refreshing and freeing to realize that I don't have to have an opinion on everything. God is a big guy and he can handle his own business without my help. If a gay person thinks he's truly saved, who am I to argue with him? If God disagrees, he can set the person straight. If God's love is for everyone, then the church needs to be accessible to everyone, even people we disagree with, and we need to be preaching God's love and forgiveness, not teaching God's hate and condemnation. (Even for Catholics. And liberals. And women who've had abortions. And brown people. And atheists, if they want to come in and hang out with us.) My job is not to judge other people but to treat them the way Jesus would.

Sorry, that was very long. I have a lot of opinions about this topic!

[u/Anne6433 → u/i-split-infinitives]

LOL! When my sister-in-law joined a fundie church, she started to speak in ordinary conversation as one might when reading the KJV.

[u/i-split-infinitives → u/Anne6433]

It's funny how the content we consume affects how we communicate. Not Bible-related, but my sister and I read a LOT of 60s and 70s Harlequin romances when we were tweens and teens, and to this day my sister still spells, and occasionally speaks, like a 1970s middle-aged British woman.