The Homeschool Apostates

Kathryn Joyce:

At 10 P.M. on a Sunday night in May, Lauren and John,* a young couple in the Washington, D.C., area, started an emergency 14-hour drive to the state where Lauren grew up in a strict fundamentalist household. Earlier that day, Lauren's younger sister, Jennifer, who had recently graduated from homeschooling high school, had called her in tears: "I need you to get me out of this place." The day, Jennifer said, had started with another fight with her parents, after she declined to sing hymns in church. Her slight speech impediment made her self-conscious about singing in public, but to her parents, her refusal to sing or recite scripture was more evidence that she wasn't saved. It didn't help that she was a vegan animal-rights enthusiast.

After the family returned home from church, Jennifer's parents discovered that she had recently been posting about animal rights on Facebook, which they had forbidden. They took away Jennifer's graduation presents and computer, she told Lauren. More disturbing, they said that if she didn't eat meat for dinner she'd wake up to find one of the pets she babied gone.

To most people, it would have sounded like overreaction to innocuous forms of teenage rebellion. But Lauren, who'd cut ties with her family the previous year, knew it was more. The sisters grew up, with two brothers, in a family that was almost completely isolated, they say, held captive by their mother's extreme anxiety and explosive anger. "I was basically raised by someone with a mental disorder and told you have to obey her or God's going to send you to hell," Lauren says. "Her anxiety disorder meant that she had to control every little thing, and homeschooling and her religious beliefs gave her the justification for it."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 17, 2013 12:46 AM
Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom: Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas