By Navarone Peterson
We got two calls that day. Two pieces of news, neither of them good. I say we but it was my mom’s phone that rang. The first piece was about my sister’s dog. She had just found out her pup had diabetes, and it was already too late. It was the end of what was supposed to be a beginning. The second call was the beginning of an end. It cut open the world my mom and so many others thought they knew, revealing an infection that glowed so neon no one could look it in the face.
It was a tragedy for which I struggled to find sympathy. A year earlier, I chose to break open the same wound. I struggled while my community averted their eyes. Suddenly, that shame I bore alone was shared.
. . . .
“Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it”. -Matthew 7:13-14
I was 6, maybe 7 and my sister’s middle school was putting on its annual Holocaust exhibit. She and her peers had worked together to make a short film about Anne Frank. My naive self had helped them shoot the film in our basement. I was excited to see whatever the film was about. What greeted me was a horrible truth I could barely fathom. Photograph after photograph, diorama after diorama, lined the library shelves. Everywhere I turned was death. I learned that millions of people were murdered irrespective of age or gender, all for being Jewish, disabled, or whatever else the Nazis had dubbed unfavorable. I saw their faces. Children no older than me stood before a camera, nothing more than skeletons wrapped in skin. I saw myself in their eyes.
“They all died awful deaths.” I sobbed so violently that my bed shook. Apa held me in his arms, not knowing what to say. “They were kids like me, and they were in pain, and they all went to Hell! Doesn’t God love us? Why would he send 6 million people to Hell?”
“They might not have all gone to Hell” Apa tried to soothe, but I could hear the confusion in his tone.
“But they were Jewish! They got nothing from life and then they have to be in pain for eternity? It isn’t fair!”
That night I had a panic attack so intense I couldn’t calm down until my parents gave me a tranquilizer.
. . . .
“Whosoever putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery: and whosoever marrieth her that is put away from her husband committeth adultery” -Luke 16:18
If someone asked, we’d say that all are welcome to attend meetings. In theory, anyone could give testimony. But we all knew this wasn’t true. Those “living in sin” would be asked not to take part. I didn’t quite understand this until a Lady who had been attending our Sunday morning meeting for as long as I could remember got divorced and then remarried. Overnight, it was like she had been infected. No one talked to her. The kids stopped talking to her kids. For a bit, she continued to show up to meetings, until one day, I realized I hadn’t seen her in a month. No one spoke of her. No one spoke of her kids. At least the dead are remembered. It was like she had never existed. I remember thinking she must deserve this. Why would she choose Hell and a new husband over eternal life? What an idiot.
That’s how it was, and to be honest still is. You break the rules and you lose everything. Friends, family, community, and above all Heaven. And we’d look at you like you’re contagious.
. . . .
“And ye shall be holy unto me: for I the LORD am holy, and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine” -Leviticus 20:26
I’m not sure how I first found out the name the world called us by. We were the church without any name, the one true way, the original faith given to us by Jesus Christ himself. Perhaps out of curiosity with the vastness of the internet, I searched some keywords like “the truth”, “the friends,” or “the fold”. Perhaps someone had mentioned to me in passing the colloquial term “two by twos”. Regardless, one day, when I was probably 9 or 10, I discovered the Wikipedia page and a blog post from an ex-member. To my shock, it said our faith wasn’t from the days of Jesus but had been started in Ireland by somebody named William Irvine. I showed my findings to my parents, looking for some sort of answer. It was against our church’s rules to record anything. We have no recorded doctrine or records, we weren’t even registered in most countries unless completely necessary. In the legal sense, we barely existed and our Workers (what we call our ministers) preferred to keep it that way.
I saw the concern on their faces as they said, “Never look up our faith. The people that hate us will know you looked at the sites and they will be able to come find us and kill us.” My stomach twisted. I had heard stories from the Workers about people trying to hunt us down. Some Workers had even been shot before by angry family members of the converted. I didn’t doubt their words for a second. At that time, the internet was a mysterious and dangerous place full of evil. I rarely engaged with it.
“Don’t pay any attention to Wikipedia. The world doesn’t understand us, and never will.”
Back then there was only the Wikipedia page and the one poorly made blog post. We were virtually unknown to the world despite being in almost every major city and most countries. Now a quick Google search brings up enough information that it would take days at least to sort through.
Several years later in my sophomore sociology class, I made the decision once more to search us up. I had, against my better judgment, decided to do my cultural analysis assignment on my own religion. I locked myself in my room, my hands trembled as I typed “two by twos” into my borrowed school laptop. My heart beat like a hummingbird’s wings. I felt sick. I felt dirty. We aren’t supposed to ask questions. To ask questions is to doubt, and to doubt is to open oneself up to evil. But I had to know.
I found crappily made websites of ex-members detailing what we believed. I found a subreddit and a Discord server for ex-members. I found out about a sexual abuse case in Australia. I became ill in the weeks I did my research, but I couldn’t stop. There was one word that kept coming up: “cult”. But we weren’t a cult. We were the one true way to salvation. However, when I looked up the definition of a cult, I had to admit we checked every box. So, I tried another definition. Then another. And another. When I could no longer deny it, I scrapped my whole project and pretended I had never looked in the first place.
. . . .
“He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.” -Matthew 10:39
The first time I tried to kill myself was at age 8, though I had been desiring death ever since I learned what life was going to be. Three times a week I heard more or less the same message. Life is suffering, we suffer, we deny ourselves, and live apart from the world until we die and finally get our reward. Being as bright as I was, I figured why not just skip to the good part?
At the age of 15, I was admitted to an inpatient mental health facility, or as I think of it lovingly “the mental hospital”. Before I left, my Apa warned me that the hospital would try to draw me away from the truth. I assured him and my mom I wouldn’t listen. I would stay true. Funnily enough, he was right. In treatment, my therapists encouraged me to question my religion and, in the end, it was what saved me.
For the first time in my life, I had friends outside of the church. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t surrounded by constant indoctrination. For the first time in my life, I was happy. I wasn’t fixed overnight, but it was the beginning of my leaving.
. . . .
“The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.” — Deuteronomy 22:5
“You know God doesn’t approve of your choices right? Your place is as a woman.” I had been minding my own business at one of our conventions when a worker I knew came up to me and asked to take a walk in the woods. For the next 40 minutes, he lectured me about how I was living in sin. How God wouldn’t love me as I am.
Whether I hated being born female was because of some innate thing or because being a woman sucked, I will never know. What I do know is that at a certain point, I could no longer keep up the act. I would bring a set of clothes in my backpack that I would change into in the bathroom before 1st period. I would stuff my too-long hair under a baseball cap and put up with being called a “dyke” and “tranny” in the halls. At home and church, it was a different story. I followed the rules. I wore the ankle-length dresses and my hair in a bun. No makeup, no jewelry, no shoulders. I kept it up as long as I could. Until I couldn’t anymore, and I realized just how conditional love is.
When I was 16, I chopped off my hair and started wearing pants. I had a friend that I’d known since we were babies. We had tea parties together, learned to ride horses together, and got our first job together that we carpooled to for a summer. Since cutting my hair she has neither spoken to me nor looked me in the eye. Not even once.
All church gatherings are held in the homes of members. Suddenly people didn’t want me in their homes. They didn’t want me around their children. I was a danger to them. Workers came to me to ask that I stop taking part in meetings. They accused me of being promiscuous, of being sick in the head. They said I was living in sin. Funny how when it came out just how many of our precious ministers were raping children, the same people that didn’t want a child with short hair in their homes welcomed them in. Funny how their sins deserve to be forgiven, but someone like me deserved to be shunned.
. . . .
“I’m not going to meetings anymore.”
It was the night of my 17th birthday. I sat my parents down at the dining room table. I was on one side and they on the other. A gulf between us that only seemed to widen as I went on telling them about how I was done with it all. I stayed stoic in the face of my mother’s tears. I’m the type of person who cries at just about anything, but as my parents begged, pleaded, and persuaded, my eyes stayed dry. I had no more tears left, only a lump of unmovable resolve was left.
I waited patiently until my mother had run out of reasons to stay. I said, “I love you”. I gave them both a hug and went to bed. The next day was Sunday. After my parents left for church, I danced in the kitchen.
. . . .
We got two calls that day. The second carried news that a worker named Dean Bruer had died. When going through his belongings, evidence was found proving he had been abusing both children and adults for most of his life. My mom was on phone call after phone call, with each one becoming more horrified. How could a worker, someone to look up to for spiritual guidance and protection, do this? Victims were coming forward, having gained the courage to speak out after years of silence. Dean was just the start. After the news got out it wasn’t just his victims that were breaking the silence but all of them.
As the weeks went by it seemed like every day a new worker was implicated. The head worker or “overseer” Fred Skalitzky was implicated. So was Gary Paul, the worker who baptized me. The names kept coming. Not just names of rapists but also of the ones that knew and did nothing.
I wish I could say I was surprised like everyone else but I wasn’t. It made sense to me. Workers lived in our homes, parents trusted them more than themselves with their own children. To question a worker was to question God. To question God was unthinkable. The perfect situation for a predator to hide.
I’m thankful for that second call. Because of it so many people, including my family, were awoken to the reality of their situation. An open wound hurts, but it is far easier to clean.