This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Episode 012 – Abigail’s Story Part 3 – Surviving and Thriving after Bill Gothard’s IBLP Cult (Shiny Happy People)

June 28, 2023

T: Hi, I’m Tracey.

S: (choking) And I’m Sharon and I was just taking a cup of tea sip!

(laughter)

S: We still are – we are Feet of Clay …

T: Confessions of the Cult Sisters.

…

T: Hey listeners, we wanted to give you a heads up that in this episode we will be discussing very disturbing topics, such as arranged child marriages, domestic abuse, as well as physical and sexual assault. Please use discretion when listening, and take care of yourself.

…

T: Confessions of the Cult Sisters, and we’re so excited today because as we did last episode, we’ve adopted a new cult sister. Woohoo.

S: We have. Abigail, say hi to everybody.

A: Hi everybody!

T: Ho, so this has been – in typical Confessions of the Cult Sister fashion it’s been the heartbreaking, and the funny, and the cringeworthy, and we are so grateful for Abigail opening up and sharing her story. If you haven’t listened yet please go back to the first couple of episodes, because there’s a point in there where Sharon and I become speechless, and that doesn’t happen very often.

S: No, that hardly ever happens. For those who might have just popped in on this one, Abigail was part of the cult IBLP, Bill Gothard’s whole empire. It was featured in the documentary on Prime, Shiny Happy People. If you haven’t seen that you should go check that out as well. Abigail, so when we left off our conversation, you had gone into a lot of detail sharing with us about that childhood betrothal, and what was going to be this arranged marriage that came to a screeching halt through horrific abuse and you mentioned before we started up this recording session, you mentioned that was the first time you had ever really told that story from start to finish. I’m wondering how you’re feeling now, about having done that.

A: Yeah, it was. I think my closest people in my life know the majority of the story, but I have never told it all the way through, the whole arc like that. It was kind of a weird experience to say it all at once. I felt for a long time it’s a really important story. I’m actually feeling more relief than anything else, to just have it out there for people that have had similar experiences, so they don’t feel like they’re alone, or the only one. Also for the many, many young girls who are still in that kind of high control group, arranged marriage situation.

S: Yeah. You know what’s so hard; you think about these girls and when they’re 12, 14, 16, 17 years old, they are truly trapped. Our hearts may go out to them and we’d love to help and rescue every one of them, but the fact is you can’t.

A: No.

S: So all we can do at this point, to help those girls currently in it, and the future girls who might be put into it, is we’ve got to get our culture and society to open their eyes and see that these aren’t just harmless, quaint little oh isn’t that nice they’re bible based, they’re bible believing, what could the harm be in that. Holy shit, there is a lot of fucking harm. We gotta stop closing our eyes to it.

T: Yes, and I just wanna say we are honored that you have been able to tell your story from start to finish on our podcast, so thank you very much for sharing that with us.

A: I’m so grateful to you all for giving me this platform, it really means a lot to me.

S: Alright Abigail, we left off you had been – oh my gosh – shattered. Devastated by what happened in your teenage years and then you’re out of that church and trying to make your way. Can you pick it up from there and tell us what happens next?

A: I decided to make the very rebellious decision – you guys are going to be shocked at this rebellion – to go to Covenant College.

(laughter)

T: That’s so rebellious.

A: So rebellious!

T: So I’m going to stop you there for our listeners. We did print and publish a tract at Last Days Ministries, Should a Christian Go to College, and it was actually written by Sharon, she’s mentioned it before in a post.

S: (making noises of pain)

T: Obviously it’s a rhetorical question, because Christians should not go to college.

S: Yeah.

T: Because it’s a waste of time and money, and you should be all about going after Jesus. So tell us a little bit about Covenant College.

A: Yeah, so in the IBLP there’s a very small group of colleges that you are allowed to go to as a woman, mostly for husband hunting; and as a man, perhaps for some kind of education to fund your quiverful movement. But Covenant College was certainly not one of those colleges. It is a gorgeous, gorgeous college right on the top of Lookout Mountain, right outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee. It is a stunningly beautiful campus, and that was a solid 95% of the reason why I wanted to go there. The other 5% is that it’s a PCA, Presbyterian Church of America, which is the more conservative branch of the Presbyterian Church. It’s their college. Having just left the cult, I had been under the teaching of a man named Louie Giglio in Atlanta, who was all about grace and reformed theology, and I was really into that because I had had this devastating experience where I was dirty and ruined, and had just ruined the lives of everybody, and the idea of grace was incredibly soothing to me. Presbyterians are well known for being Reformed and very conservatively grace oriented, so that was exciting to me. It was also a college that my parents were willing to pay for, and to allow me to go to and I was still in their home. So that was a piece…

S: You were still under your father’s authority basically?

A: I was – there had been a slight shift of power. I had gone to my dad several months after the courtship ended and said listen, I will never lie to you again, so you have a choice; I can either tell you the truth inside of your home, or I can tell you the truth and not live in your home, and it’s your choice.

T: Wow. That’s a pretty empowering statement for you to say that. It shows a lot of courage.

A: Yeah, I’m not really sure where I came up with it to tell you the truth, but I did say it, and I think I was really just so destroyed and guilt ridden that I had lied. In my mind at that time it was still 100% my doing, and I didn’t ever want to do it again. And he did agree that he would rather me live in his home and tell him the truth, so that’s how we proceeded from that point forward. I applied for Covenant, I got in, it’s a competitive school, everybody was very happy, and I was due to start school that fall, but before that I ran away to Jamaica on a missions trip.

T: You ran away on a missions trip?

A: I did. I just wanted to be as far away from all of Calvary and those people as I could possibly be so in my still so controlled mind, at that point the right way to do that was to go be a leader on a missions trip with a boy that had previously left the cult and was in the PCA. That seemed like definitely the right thing to do.

T: And the PCA is…

A: The Presbyterian Church of America. It’s a major evangelical denomination.

T: Okay. So rebellious!

A: So rebellious. It was the most rebellious. So I ran away to Jamaica, and on the missions trip to Jamaica one of the guys that was on the trip was also starting Covenant in the fall, and I’ll be really honest with y’all, I didn’t pay much attention to him. We were there, I knew he was going to Covenant, he was the only soul on the planet I knew that was going to Covenant, and that was about the extent of our interaction. So we start Covenant in the fall, Covenant’s quite small, there were 306 people in my class and this boy Tim and I happened to be in the same small group, because Jesus.

(laughter)

S: These small groups, were they like fellowship groups that weren’t academic? It was like, the religious part of things?

A: Yeah, they were like freshman social prayer groups.

S: And they were co-ed?

A: Yes, yes, let me tell you how rebellious Covenant is. I’ve got to break it down for you.

(laughter)

A: Covenant is a co-ed college where you have open dorm hours for four hours every weekend.

T: Ooh.

A: It’s very rebellious. Open dorms, four hours every weekend – now you have to have two feet on the floor at all times.

T: Oh, you can do a lot with two feet on the floor.

S: Yah, you can. Or knees. Do knees count?

A: Yes, knees do count. I happen to know they count.

S: And how about condom vending machines, any of those in the hall?

A: No, there was no condom vending machines. There was a nurse, but I never asked her for condoms so I can’t say definitely what would have happened if I did.

S: Okay.

A: She was kind of a cool lady though, so maybe. So, we’re at Covenant, we’re kind of thrown together which of course in my mind was all God.

T & S: Mhm.

A: Where in reality there’s 306 people there, so…

(laughter)

A: But at that point it was so interesting when I was re-reading my journals a few weeks ago after the documentary came out, the biggest thing that surprized me re-reading my journals, was how much the arc of this story was in fact the same arc as my courtship. I had remembered them as two very different things, and going back and reading it was probably the most devastating part of the documentary coming out in all of this, was realizing that I no longer needed the IBLP to control me. I was controlling myself within my own high control group.

S & T: Wow.

A: That was a really, really hard realization to come to just a few weeks ago. It was pretty devastating.

T: The conditioning had been successful.

A: Very successful.

S: Well, train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he won’t depart, right?

A: Absolutely.

S: Yeah. Beat the shit out of you, do mind control fuckery, and yeah – you become the prisoner of your own mind. Thank you.

A: That is so factually true. It is. It’s 100% what was happening. I remember spending the majority of my freshman year crying in theology class because it was the first time I had heard actual theology, and I would just stay after class and cry and cry with my professors, who thank God were such kind men. I would cry and say what do you mean, there’s more than one way to read Revelation? What do you mean, grace alone? What do you mean about these things? I was so overwhelmed to start to get real education, for the first time in my life really, about much of anything, but certainly about doctrine and theology, and hermeneutics and apologetics, and all of those pieces.

S: Were you still firm in your belief in God, in Jesus?

A: Very much so, yes. I was very devout, and I felt I had found this freedom in God. I really felt that I had found this grace thing, and that I was enormously free in the teachings of God and in the theology of this Reformation movement, and I was totally 100% bought into it. So, Tim was a legacy, grandparents were missionaries, parents were missionaries, pastors, the whole thing. You said the last name and it was like the red seas parted. I was like a little mutt child, I had no upbringing in the PCA. They really love their history of families…

T: The family.

A: Yep.

T: The motherfucking families.

S: Bloodlines, right?

A: Yes.

S: Patriarchal bloodlines.

A: And he, from his genealogy, was Scottish, which is also a big thing in the PCA, and just MTW missionary royalty. We began dating so quickly, y’all. Oh my god, it was so fast. By October we were certainly going steady, seriously dating, right after this massive devastation in my life had happened at Christmas time the year before.

S: Mmm.

T: Wow.

A: It was just so fast.

T: Did you have to let your dad know, or did he have to make any calls, or were you guys completely autonomous in being able to make these decisions yourself?

A: We were completely autonomous, which is another piece that re-reading the journals now was pretty devastating – I did it all myself.

S: Well to be fair, let’s just say this. Yeah, you did it all yourself, but no, the whole mindset was already done to you.

A: Yes, you are very right. And you know, Covenant’s pretty devout so you go to chapel every day. I was a triple major in Theology, Community Development and Sociology. He of course was a Theology major with a minor in Youth Studies because he was a good boy and did what he was supposed to do. And I was hungry in the faith, I was deeply devout; I was eager to learn this whole new freedom that I thought I had found in traditional evangelicalism and I was really, really into it. Completely into it. I was in prayer groups, I was in bible study, and I was at chapel every day, and I was in all these theology classes, and I was so hungry for the Word and so feeling the spirit all the time, and that’s really where I was. Covenant at that time was such a beautiful bubble that quickly became a prison, but at the time it was this bubble of amazingness, and it was in the middle of the wilderness on the top of this gigantic mountain, and you could just go to the overlook and see five states and pray for hours. It was a magical place to be, in that moment.

T: Well, and it was so much freer than the IBLP.

A: So much more freedom. It felt like I could do anything I wanted to do, within the will of God. It really felt almost drunk on freedom that was still within God’s plan.

S: It was like you were born again, again.

A: Yes. Very, very much so. I was very happy there. We had a pretty traditional dating relationship really, I think for evangelicals. It was chaste. I was very committed to my purity culture values, even still. He was very committed to purity culture values, and we were quite successful. Now, I had amended my values in my newfound “freedom in Christ”, that kissing was fine, hand holding was fine, and for me that felt like such an enormous amount of freedom, and I was so happy with that amount of freedom. I really was not struggling with what we called sexual sin. It wasn’t on my radar. But what did seem to follow me to Covenant was this idea that I was too sexy. It very much followed me to Covenant. I remember the resident director of my dorm calling me into his office (which is also just so gross and creepy, because he was young, he couldn’t have been 27, there’s no way), and calling me to his office over and over and over again. Just to talk about are you staying pure, I know you have a serious boyfriend.

T: Oh my god.

S: (laughing) oh god…

A: At that point I was starting to find my voice a little bit more, and I’m kind of an asshole all the time now, but at that time I was really just kind of figuring that out. I do remember looking at him across his desk and saying, unlike most of these people here, I actually do know what sex is, and I’m not doing it.

T: Oh wow.

A: I was so mad that that had followed me. It felt like a curse.

S: I can just picture it there, Abigail. He’s got you in there, and he’s talking to you and his brain is doing this flip file thing, and he’s building up this little Rolodex of images so he can have something to jerk off to.

A: That was so it, and in hindsight it was so clearly it. But at the time I was just so angry. I couldn’t understand why I was still the pariah. I couldn’t understand why I didn’t fit in. I thought maybe it was because I had graduated early and I’d worked fulltime for two years and all these other girls in the freshman dorm had come straight from high school straight to college, and I’d been out for two years working.

S: You were a worldly woman!

A: Exactly. I kind of had this huge experience that no one else had had, but my god, I never knew that girls cried that much.

(laughter)

S: In the dorms?

A: Oh my god. All they did was cry, and they cried about everything. It was exhausting, and I was just like why are they crying? So it was definitely a big adjustment for me to be in dorms. I missed my dogs. I really didn’t want to go to college; I knew what I wanted to do, I was very determined on my career from a very young age. I really didn’t want to go to college; I wanted to take an internship and immediately start in animal behavior. Of course, at that time you couldn’t go get a degree in animal behavior, it’s not like it is now. Apprenticeships were really the way to do it, I wanted to go to California, I wanted to take an internship, and I was very frustrated, because my parents would not allow it, and I was not in a position to do it anyway.

S: Just out of curiosity, was there anybody in particular you wanted to intern with?

A: I was showing dogs fulltime at the time and there was a very famous professional handler who wanted me to take an internship with them, which is a very big deal, but my parents did not want that so I turned it down, and then I really desperately wanted to go to Bergin University – like, oh, my heart’s desire was to go to Bergin and do their service dog program.

S: Mmhm.

A: And that’s really what I wanted to do.

S: But instead you’re at Covenant College with PCA and you now have this boyfriend Tim.

A: Yep. And we had a pretty traditional evangelical dating thing; you know, we dated, we were very serious, everybody at Covenant is serious when they date. They call it the marriage mill on the hill.

(laughter)

A: It’s traditional Christian college dating. I did not feel rushed or in a hurry at that time, but when I read back on my journals recently, I was rushed and I felt an enormous amount of pressure as I re-read those entries about constantly journalling to God about showing his will, and making Tim more serious about our relationship and to take it more seriously. I was also keenly aware that I had a skillset that Tim was lacking that was vital ministry.

S: What was that?

A: I was really good at people, and I was really good at business. He was nerdy and cerebral and shy. In my journal entries I recognized just terrifyingly early that he needed somebody like me to be in ministry and therefore that was God’s calling for my life.

T: Mmhmm. I can relate to that.

S: Yeah. You’re still the support. You’re the support for the man, because the man is the one who’s going to carry forth God’s will ultimately.

A: Absolutely. I was journalling at that time about not wanting to have children and that I didn’t think children were God’s plan for me. There were journal entries about that in my freshman year of college. So those pieces of my mind were beginning to change, and I was beginning to have some original thoughts, but the entries were still God take this rebellion from me, take this will that I want to do something away from me, make it only your will – there was still just – everything was encased in that. So, we did quite well freshman and sophomore year and in our junior year there was a chapel speaker that came and gave a chapel talk on if you could not take a physical fast from your boyfriend, you were sinning against God.

T: Love all these teachers with these crazy topics.

A: Right? I mean, it’s just straight purity culture, straight typical mainstream evangelical purity culture.

T: Yeah. And layer some more guilt and shame; give you something else to struggle through as though you haven’t had enough already.

S: How did they define a physical fast?

A: Zero touching for 30 days.

S: Okay.

A: So at this time leading into that, we were only holding hands and making out in a pretty chaste way. So we did it man, gung ho. We loved Jesus and we don’t want to be sinning against God, so we took a 30 day physical fast, and let me tell you, day 31 was a hell of a day.

(laughter)

S: It’s that scarcity thing again; like, you make something taboo and off limits and all it does is create a craving, and an insatiable fixation. It’s like human psychology 101. What the fuck.

A: It’s insane. I can’t speak for anyone’s mind but my own, but I’m here to tell you I was not struggling with sexual sin when we did it. Everything was totally fine. I felt no push to do more or cross a line, or whatever you want to call it. I was great where we were. But man, 30 days, and day 31 you just slipped right over the edge – which was just heavy petting. We’re not talking about a crazy thing, it was just heavy petty while making out. So that started the death spiral.

S: Can I ask you a question? This is something I still try to figure out. I kind of grilled Tracey on this before. How do you define the difference between heavy petting and light petting? What’s the line?

A: To me, heavy petting is anything that happens over the clothes, to any expression of pleasure.

S: So you’re still over the clothes.

A: Over the clothes is the key.

S: So what’s the difference then – what’s light petting?

A: Light petting, to me, is like, you’re making out, your arm is definitely grazing her boob and you don’t move it, but your hand’s not on there squishing it.

T: Yeah, and you’re not groping, like ravenously groping.

A: Right, correct.

S: So touching and exciting and arousing over the clothes, direct to genitals or boobs?

A: Correct.

S: Alright, so then what happens when you actually are touching without the clothes? What’s that called?

A: Oh, I mean, I …

T: Sin.

(laughter)

A: And I would have defined that as sex.

T: Oohhh.

S: Oh, interesting! Interesting.

A: That’s how I would have defined it at that time.

S: At that time. Okay. See, we’re old. We don’t keep up with the culture.

T: And different groups have different definitions, because I would say in a secular setting in the 70s – secular, not Christian – heavy petting would have been hands under the shirts and down the pants. Still clothed, but you’re penetrating the clothing.

A: Yep.

S: And to orgasm, perhaps? Yes, no?

A: Yeah, so heavy petting could be to orgasm, if you were that talented.

(laughter)

A: If you were talented enough to get to orgasm over the clothes, then that’s still heavy petting.

S: Okay then.

T: Challenge accepted.

A: Exactly. So that whole 31 days thing started the death spiral of that horrible pattern of behavior of sexual sin – repentance, sexual sin – repentance, over and over, almost on a seven day cycle, and it was exhausting. And then of course you had to confess it, so you had to go…

S: Who were you confessing to?

A: I was confessing to accountability partners, which are like, other teenagers, who are stupid….

(laughter)

A: So you confess to your accountability partner who is mostly just like, your girlfriend and they’re like, we’ll pray about it. So then you pray, and you’re like, oh Lord Jesus, please help Abi to stop touching Tim’s penis. Then you pray about it fervently, and you usually cry…

T: Yes.

A: I don’t know who the boys confessed to, but I think pretty much the same thing.

S: Yeah.

A: And then I think, if I’m remembering correctly, we did not feel the need to confess it higher than that level at that point, because it was just heavy petting. But that is when it suddenly became urgent to the both of us that we probably needed to get married.

T: Yes – it’s better to marry than to burn with lust.

A: Exactly that. Which was frequently preached in chapel.

S: And it’s the perfect reason to get married. The perfect reason.

A: What other reason could you possibly have to shackle your life to another human being? So we’re now in our junior year, and this is where all this culty stuff gets so weird again. I go home, because I have agency now, because I’m Reformed. So I go home and tell my dad – this is how I remember the conversation. We are in the car and I say hey, Tim and I are struggling with sexual purity, and I think we need to go ahead and get married. And my dad said how much are you struggling? And I said well, we’re not having sex, we’re just struggling. We’re just making out too much. Which was true. And he goes, okay, I think that’s a great idea.

T: Wow.

S: Okay.

A: That was it. And I was like, well okay God blessed this, this is what we’re going to do. So we get engaged early junior year and then we get married between our junior and senior year. In that time of engagement, the lines get very blurry on sexual purity. I was technically a virgin when I got married, but it was like, I’m talking a hairline technicality.

S: Okay wait. First of all, had you been using devil stick tampons?

A: Well yes. I’d already been using the devil sticks. That was done.

T: You were also a horseback rider at this point?

A: I have many, many reasons why that might not be true.

T: Okay. Thank you for that clarification.

S: But in terms of penile penetration, you were still technically a virgin.

A: Correct. A penis had not fully penetrated a vagina.

S: Just the tip?

A: Just the tip. And of course, you could get expelled from Covenant for having sex, so this was very risky behavior.

S & T: Yeah.

A: It wasn’t like a oh it’s on our books you can get expelled, it’s like legit they expelled people. So you add in that secrecy element and it’s suddenly very exciting.

S: Of course.

A: And so we have a very large, very white, very Atlanta wedding, the summer between our junior and senior year and I was 21 and he was turning 21 the next week.

T: Oh my gosh, you’ve already lived so much life in this relationship turmoil, but you’re so much babies.

S: Yep.

A: And he was already working as a youth pastor, as one does, while you’re finishing college. We lived in this teeny tiny basement apartment with no windows, and we had no money, and two weeks into our marriage he hit me for the first time.

T: (gasps)

S: Wait. He – he hit you.

A: Yes. In the face.

S: In the face!

A: For the first time. And when I tell you it came out of nowhere for me, I mean it came out of nowhere for me.

S: Was there an argument? Was there a conflict?

A: We were disagreeing but I would not have classified it as an argument. There was no shouting. We were driving in the car; I was driving. We were having a disagreement about the car, and whether we should sell that one and buy a cheaper one – there was just a typical discussion about what should happen next, and we disagreed on what should happen. But it didn’t register to me as a fight; it was a disagreement. It didn’t feel like a fight. We weren’t yelling, I wasn’t upset, and I was driving and then my face was hot. It was so surreal.

S: So with an open hand?

A: No, closed fist. On the face and on the shoulder.

S: So, more than one punch.

A: Yeah. Two.

T: And it was to get you to be quiet – he didn’t like what you were saying?

A: I  – don’t know. I dumped him on the side of the road, because at that point I was again, starting to have my own thoughts and opinions and feelings, so I stopped the car and pulled on the side of the road and said get the hell out. I may have said get the fuck out – that’s probably true. I drove immediately down the mountain to our pastor’s house. I knocked and walked in the door – who also happened to be his cousin. Important.

T: Oh, wow.

A: But I will say this, because I’m going to tell all the ugly things, so I think it’s important to tell all the good things too. It was handled so beautifully in that moment. I walked in the house, he and his wife were there, I’m sobbing, I have a huge welt on my face, and she immediately just gathers me up, the pastor is livid. I mean, livid angry, and immediately assures me none of this is your fault, there is no excuse, it does not matter why it happened.

T: Good, good.

A: That does deserve to be told, because there’s a lot of pieces of this story that aren’t so lovely, but that was lovely. Immediately the pastor left to go find him, and did. I do remember getting counselled that one day, that one time, by the pastor’s wife, that I could leave. She did say that. She said you have biblical cause to leave, if you want to. But I had just had a massive black-tie wedding, in Atlanta, with every person I had ever met in my whole life, and I wasn’t going to. It was unthinkable. I couldn’t imagine even telling my parents. The whole thing just seemed impossible.

S: The social constraint is what kept you absolutely frozen in that.

A: Yes. So the agreement was made that we would immediately start counselling. I do want to say that we did a full year of pre-marital counselling with the church, but it was 100% about staying sexually pure until marriage, so nothing helpful was done there.

T: Isn’t that just so frustrating? It’s so frustrating as I hear these stories because I know similar to mine – there’s no helpful counselling whatsoever. The whole focus is on this ridiculous sexual purity leading up to it, and once that’s over you’re left with this bucket of crap in everybody’s lives.

A: And realistically, any human being could have looked at us and our family of origin and said this is going to be a huge mistake. ANY person could have seen that.

S: Did you have any indication during your dating and during your engagement of any sort of anger or tendency towards violence, or anything like that?

A: He was quite an avid sports watcher and would yell and scream at the TV, but outside of that, nothing.

S: Okay.

A: In my journals there are some notations about significant bouts of depression with him, but outside of that, no. So I really was very stunned, and we dated for a long time. The agreement was made that we go to post-marital counselling, and we would tell his parents. We would not tell my parents because I did not want to ruin his ministry, and he was in repentance. And that’s what was counselled, so that’s what I did. We told his parents and I’ll never forget this conversation. His mom said to me pretty much that God is going to create something beautiful out of this story, and it will be a story of redemption and grace and hope. And that’s mostly what everybody said, outside of that very first counselling on that first day.

S: Did you tell any other friends?

A: I told one friend – this is where I can start to see myself happening, in these times. I took pictures of the injuries and I emailed them to a trusted friend of mine, and I said I need you to keep these.

T: Wow.

A: It’s where I can see little glimmers of my present self starting to appear.

T: You’re also at the physical age when that starts to happen. You’re becoming a woman.

A: Yeah. I mean, early 20s. I was 21. That’s about right.

T: Yes.

A: And it was about this kind of same time we went to counselling and we were working through things and it was just so much work. There was also a lot of sexual dysfunction in the marriage, because purity culture does that to children.

T: Mmhmm.

S: Yes it does!

A: There was erectile dysfunction; there was completely mismatched signals and scheduling. I wanted to have sex much more than he did. When we would have sex we didn’t know what the hell we were doing, and it was not good. It was just a disaster. We discovered he had a latex allergy, which is a hilarious story for another day.

S: Oh god.

A: So this is all kind of – you know, we’re brand new married with this huge curveball of this incident of violence. I do remember we were seeing a Christian therapist who was rather good, not great, but comparatively quite good. I remember expressing in couples counselling that I felt really robbed; that I felt like he had robbed me of my newlywed moment. So we did talk about some important things in that post-marital counselling. I went to post-marital counselling every week, for eight years.

T: Wait. Every week? For eight years while you were married?

A: Yes.

T: Did he go with you?

A: In the beginning yes. Often not later. If my memory serves there were five or six therapists altogether. We are now in our second semester senior year, he’s applying for positions at churches within the PCA. I am sitting in my 300 level theology class. I signed up for the class on accident. I thought the class was ancient cultures of the Middle East which is right up my alley – super fun anthropology, let’s do this. Unfortunately, the class was ancient texts and cultures of the Middle East which was very sad for me, but we’re translating the Epic of Gilgamesh against the flood story in this class, and I’ll never forget this kid was sitting next to me – who I’d been in class with all four years – and we’re translating the Epic of Gilgamesh, I’m three quarters of the way through, I’m sitting at my desk, and I just went oh no. He looks at me and goes what? And I said oh this is all bullshit.

T: Oh my gosh.

A: And he goes, oh yeah. That was the moment when I really started to think that maybe I had made a huge mistake about my faith and what I believed. I was struggling with other things about faith and God’s promises and those things, but I was – how can there be two flood stories with two different gods that are exactly the same? I was just pretty devastated, but at that point I was married to a pastor. So we took our post shortly after graduation. He hit me again when we got here.

S: He hit you again.

A: Yep. He only hit me twice; the very first time, and about a year later. I did drop him that second time though.

S: What do you mean, you dropped him?

A: I kneed him really hard in the balls, and he dropped.

S: Ohhhh.

A: And he didn’t ever do it again.

S: Single event learning, folks. You can understand the quadrants of positive punishment.

A: Exactly. While he had episodes of violence, breaking furniture, windows, things like that, he never hit me again after that. And I stayed. The leadership of the church knew, because I told them, and I told them many times. We were referred to counselling, and we went – or I went, and he sometimes went. The church then pressured us very much to purchase a house, and as I think is very common in all evangelicalism, he was making so little, like below poverty wages, I was working two jobs, they wanted us to have a house near the church which was in a very wealthy part of town…

S: I just want to say something. You guys were making very little; there are some that make a shit ton of money.

A: Oh, for sure. The high-level pastors, for sure.

S: Absolutely. Fleece the flock.

A: And youth pastors are a two for one deal.

S: Yeah. The wife works for free.

A: Absolutely. I was working two jobs, fulltime, because we had to buy this house near the church that we certainly couldn’t afford. This was in 2008, right at the beginning of the great recession.

T: Oh yeah. Were they willing to help you out? How does a church try to tell you where to buy a house?

A: That’s such a good question. I wanted to buy a house further out of town because I’m pretty decent at real estate, and I felt like that would be the best investment house, which turns out sure as hell would have been, but it was too far from the church, and the senior pastor pretty much said you can’t do that. So we purchased – we over-purchased a house, and it was a very modest house, it was just in an area of town that we couldn’t afford. Six months after we purchased the house they fired him with no notice. Then we were in some financial trouble, and I was working like crazy, and I was also struggling more and more with my faith with what did I believe. It became completely impossible for me to make the sin of homosexuality work in my heart and mind. I couldn’t do it.

S: Why that particular thing for you?

A: I had grown up showing dogs, which has a pretty diverse presence, particularly in the queer community. I was very much loved by gay and lesbian people, and I loved them. I’d struggled with that all through my teen and early adulthood years – how could that be a sin? I couldn’t make it work. They were the best people to me, consistently, in my life, and the older I got the more impossible it got to justify that they were allowed to be gay but had to be celibate. It just didn’t work in my head anymore, and I became increasingly combative at church, in our Sunday Schools and small groups saying I can’t bring my gay friends here, there’s a problem with this theology if I can’t bring them here.

S: Betcha they loved you at church.

A: Yeah, I was the worst pastor’s wife, ever.

(laughter)

T: Oh, that’s so awesome.

A: An elder’s kid used the “n” word in passing, and I strung him up and drug him to his daddy in the middle of the church and made him say what he said, and I looked at his dad and said he sure as hell didn’t learn that here, and I walked out. I was the worst pastor’s wife ever. I took a girl to Planned Parenthood; just the worst, worst pastor’s wife ever. And then of course, we didn’t have children – which was a huge problem.

S: Was he in agreement that he didn’t want children?

A: It was an agreement that we’d made before we’d got married, but I don’t believe it was – well, it clearly isn’t something he would have chosen for himself.

S: Okay, so he had some inner conflict with that.

A: Yeah, and I was very determined I was not going to have children.

T: And the pressure – the cultural pressure of church is family. The family. So…

A: And I was working so many hours and if I had to work on a Sunday it was like you got punished for it, and I’m like, maybe you should pay him more.

T: Did you say that?

A: I did. I did say that.

T: Good job.

A: I was really bad at being a pastor’s wife. I really was.

T: I’m laughing because I can imagine, and I guess all of us would be thank god there’s a voice that’s thinking, thank god there’s some logic coming in, thank god these are being challenged.

A: We had friends in the church who were dear friends, and those things were true, but I was very career oriented and I was really starting to build my career. It was getting more and more complicated to balance my views on the world with where I was in the church. It just got much more complicated. I found myself wanting to spend time with my unchurched friends more than I wanted to spend time with my church friends, because they were nicer!

S: Yeah.

A: Throughout this process the violence was still happening in the home, not physically towards me, but breaking windows and tables and things like that, and always deep repentance afterwards and it was just getting more and more untenable. Then he got fired and started working in the secular sphere, which put more pressure on things.

T: Was your church leadership learning that there was violence at home, or was there something else that caused that?

A: They already knew about the violence at home, and we had stopped talking about it because it wasn’t changing. We hadn’t talked about it for quite some time and certainly no one asked about it. it was mostly a kind of we’ve decided to go a different direction. He was not a sexy fun youth pastor. He was very cerebral, very thoughtful, very well educated. He really wanted to teach the kids theology.

T: Yeah, not usually what they want to hear.

A: Yeah, and I think they were looking for a more traditional, let’s go eat pizza and play basketball and pretend it’s about Jesus kind of a youth pastor.

T: Right.

A: I think it was probably an honest break of difference in how to do those things in that time, and he was also very, very young. The pastor who had hired us on as the assistant pastor had left very quickly after we got hired, within three or four months, I believe, so he had almost no support. In complete fairness, he was swimming alone as a very, very young clergyman with such little support and such little guidance on what to do and how to manage being in leadership at 22 years old. It was a really unfair situation to him. Really unfair. So of course losing a position in the ministry was devastating on so many levels, from an extended family perspective, to his own views on what his career was going to look like, to the fact that it put additional strain on our marriage. He had had long bouts of depression throughout the marriage, but they got much, much worse, and it was so deeply tied to my origins in purity culture in IBLP, and that’s so important. Finally, after seven years of being married, I said well let’s do one last hurrah at a marriage counsellor, but this time I want to see an actual PhD that is secular. He agreed, and we went to one session and not halfway through the session, the psychiatrist stopped and looked at me, and he goes what the hell are you still doing here?

S: Wow.

A: I pushed the button for the elevator, and I called a divorce lawyer that day.

T: Wow.

A: I just needed somebody to give me permission.

T: And he said that in front of your husband at the time?

A :Yah, he did. I have a lot of big feelings about my first marriage. I certainly in absolutely no way, shape or form should have been entering into a marriage. Absolutely shouldn’t have. I brought so much baggage and so much unpreparedness to that relationship, and I had no idea who I was, or who I wanted to be. In the same way, he brought many things in too, and I know he loved me. I certainly loved him. It was a terrible match. Someone in pre-marital counselling should have been like, what a bad idea this is, and yes he was violent, but the real sin in that was the fact that no one did anything about it. there was no wise counsel, there was no talk about what to actually do, other than trust God to make it a beautiful story and don’t damage the ministry.

T: Yes.

S: I mean, that is the answer we get out of fundamentalist circles, evangelical circles, charismatic Christian circles. Everything you need is in the bible, and you dare not go to a secular counsellor. What are you talking about? They’re going to have the devil’s words for you. It’s just so ridiculous and intellectually lazy, and ineffective – obviously so ineffective. It’s part of the conditioning.

A: And that was mainstream evangelicalism. The PCA is a huge evangelical branch, and this was within a prominent PCA – and yes towards the end of the marriage there was infidelity on his part, but I don’t want to – it’s not really even important to why we divorced. At that point that was an aside that existed, but it’s not the reason.

S: So when you got into the elevator and you pushed the button and the counsellor had said why are you still here, was your husband in agreement that it was time for a divorce?

A: I think at that point he was so defeated he would have agreed to whatever I said I wanted to do, which is I believe what happened. He wasn’t just defeated in the marriage. He was so defeated.

S: In life.

A: In life, and I do remember asking him – we had filed for divorce, I told him that’s what we were going to do, and I remember sitting on the couch with him and I said what are you going to do? I remember him saying I think I’m just going to become a hermit. It was heartbreaking. It does an injustice to tell that story and not tell his – he was broken too. Evangelicalism did that to us. The clergy did that to us. The church as a whole did that to us. That’s so important.

T: I appreciate so much what you’re saying about where your husband had come to. I can so relate to that, I look at these two young people and you’re not given any keys to really unearth what it is that’s driving the violence and depression in his life and it’s just that band aid of you need to pray more. My heart broke also for my husband I was going to be leaving, because we were two broken people that weren’t getting fixed, and we were just making it hard for each other. I really appreciate your compassion, I can hear it in your voice. That’s a hard place to come to.

A: I think my goal any time I talk about that part of my life in the PCA, which I talk about more frequently in the past than I have about the IBLP; the villain in this story is not the two kids that came into this relationship having no skills and no education, and no really meaningful way of how to grow up together. The villain in the story is the people who told you all you need to do is just pray about it.

S: Well, because what that does as well is put all the failure back on your shoulders. You must not be praying hard enough or in the right way; you must not have the right kind of faith, because we know God is able, and we know God is willing, so if it’s not getting fixed, it’s because of something wrong with you – some sin, some stubbornness, some defect. You look at it that way, and it’s pretty hopeless.

A: Yeah, and that you are unwilling to let God play a redemption story for you, and that it is somehow selfish to the kingdom to not live in misery for your whole life to show something about the kingdom of God – it’s insane.

S: That’s right. Pick up your cross, follow Jesus, die daily in this relationship – that’s your cross to bear. It’s like holy fuck – what?

A: And it was so presented to me that way, that oh, this abuse in your marriage is just like Paul’s thorn in his flesh.

S: Oh god.

A: That’s insane when you really think about it. That’s nuts.

T: It is – especially since this is supposed to be the haven that people go to get healed. And all they do is get heaped upon.

S: And what about the comparison? The husband and wife relationship is supposed to be like God and us, Jesus and the bride of Christ. You’re saying it’s okay for Jesus to smack the shit out of us? I guess that’s what you’re saying.

A: I mean, that is sorta kind of what they’re saying, though.

S: Yeah, it is. So you make this decision, you’re going to go file for divorce, and then practically speaking, what happens next?

A: The church rallied around, of course, the man. They were not at all interested in helping me, but they were very interested in helping him and making sure that he got where he needed to go safely. But you know who helped me is I had – in the year prior, just carved out this little nook for myself in the LGBT community here where we live. Those people showed up and mowed my lawn and took my trash out and sat with me when I was pretty sure I was going to die. The thing that was so wild to me about that time is you know you’re taught your whole life in evangelicalism in the faith, be the hands and feet of Christ. That’s who was the hands and feet of Christ to me. People who were Christian and pagan and atheist – all queer. I didn’t know how to start a lawnmower, I didn’t know how to register my car; I didn’t know how to change a tire, and they just came and sat with me. I was terrified to live alone; I had never lived alone, I was having horrible PTSD nightmares daily, they were so brutal and I wasn’t sleeping. These people would come and sleep with me and stay with me and cook for me – you’ve just never seen love until you’ve seen two queens mowing your lawn because they love you. Like, that is some love, y’all.

T: That IS some love. And shout out to the queer community. That’s one thing Sharon and I also share with you, our fellow cult sister – we were both involved in drama and had these relationships, and that was the juxtaposition we were seeing. These were some of the most openhearted, caring, compassionate people we have linked with. This doesn’t make sense.

S: And they’re gonna burn in the lake of fire!

T: So crazy. I’m getting tears in my eyes thinking of you in that state of devastation, and they’re the ones that come and wrap their arms around you.

A: Absolutely. And you know, especially for a child coming from so much grooming and so much purity culture. At that time in my life, gay men were a solace that could be found nowhere else. They provided safety, and also I still was in deep need of male-ness to tell me what to do.

S: Right!

A: To have these men come in and I was like what should I do? And they would just sit with me and say well, what do you want to do, and be so patient. I’m not sure I could have come out of all of this without that very particular dynamic, because I needed men, because I was terrified to make a decision, but I also needed safety because I was terrified of being alone in a world where I had been taught my whole life, pretty much everybody wanted to rape me.

T: Right. Ugh.

S: What a beautiful bridge they were for you.

A: I don’t think I would have survived without them. I really don’t. And I certainly would not have thrived without them.

T: So I also just want to say – and I know there’s a lot of memes out there, and a lot of postings that the drag queens and the queer community are grooming our kids, and I know people out there are saying hey look, your kids are being groomed but it’s not by this community. It’s by the religious community and the fundamentalist community, and this is one of those stories – how many times throughout these past couple of episodes have we called out the grooming that is taking place in the IBLP and the fundamentalist community to prepare us for being victims, to prepare us for being abused. I am so happy that you punctuate that story that way, because it is a beautiful bridge, and we want to magnify that message as much as possible.

S: It is. It’s the heterosexual horny men who have suppressed themselves – those are the ones that are the predators. Those are the ones that are grooming and using and abusing. That’s where it is, that’s where the problem is, folks.

A: And there’s a reason that those are the ones yelling the loudest about anyone and everyone else who could possibly be a predator. They’re trying to divert attention away from themselves.

S: Oh man. That is so true. Now where were you in your belief at that point, about the bible, about God, and Jesus?

A: I was not going to church at all.

S: Kinda hard when your husband is a youth pastor – oh he’d been fired.

A: Yes, he’d been fired, I wasn’t sure at all what I believed. I thought maybe there might be a God, maybe there might have been Jesus, but it was at that point – we’re talking about two completely different sects of Christianity had fucked me over so hard. I had no idea who to even go to or believe or trust, and so I got pretty comfortable with the help of a secular therapist with saying I don’t know, and I don’t care to know right now. I lived there for a really long time.

S: How did that feel for you?

A: It felt very strange to not have a guide book. It felt very strange to have only rules that were because you wanted to be a good person and make the world a good place, but not for any other reason. It felt very, very strange.

S: Scary?

A: I think at that point I just wanted nothing to do with it, so it was much less scary to not do it than it would have been to go back to church. That was the ultimate scary.

S & T: Mmhmm.

A: At that point my PTSD had gotten so, so bad that I couldn’t listen to worship music without having panic attacks. I really had a hard time – I had a friend that died in that time period, and I had to go to the funeral and I almost didn’t make it through the funeral, because it was in a church building. I was really, really suffering. It took a lot of therapy to figure out what that needed to look like. I really was much more comfortable being okay with not knowing, than making a definitive statement that I was an atheist. That felt very scary. To have said I was an atheist was the most scary, and I still don’t typically say I’m am atheist. I’m really not – I’m not really sure what I believe, and again, I don’t really care to know what I believe.

S: There is a freedom with accepting and actually embracing the concept that the unknowable is just that – it’s unknowable. When you realize (or at least, when I realized) that that is the state of the universe, it suddenly – wow, we’re all in this state, and it’s okay.

A: Yeah, I found that to be really kind of beautiful. And I found eventually – not immediately – but eventually, I found a lot of comfort in that. That it is unknowable and that’s kind of lovely.

S: It is. Alright Abigail, so you’ve got your therapist that’s really helped you, and the final one that said why are you still there. You have your friends in the gay community that have come alongside you with arms to support you and hearts to love you, so what else was involved in you making this transition out and away?

A: I think the word deconstruction gets used so much now, just in the last several years, but I do think it’s a really accurate word, because it is laborious to unbuild something. It took me years, it came in stages, in fits and bursts, and I struggled very, very deeply with complex PTSD and horrible night terrors. They got much worse after my divorce. I would have memory nightmares of my days back in the IBLP and in the cult that I couldn’t quite sort out. I had a lot of repressed memories that took many years with specialists to work on getting those memories back, and figuring out where my trauma really was. It took many years. And then here I was in the world, trying to figure out what dating should look like, because I’d really never done that thing before.

S: Right.

A: I like to call it my sexual renaissance.

S: All right!

A: I’ve had several therapists over the years, some with specialty like the dream disorder specialist; I’ve had specialists that worked on trauma; I’ve had specialists that worked on other things, I’ve had a behavioral therapist. I’m a big believer that therapy, and wide variety of therapy is really valuable. I had a therapist that worked specifically during that time period so I could figure out what my own rules were about dating and consent and sex, and what did I actually want. I was really grateful for that person – I had her for probably about a year, where I met with her and I’d tell her what date I had and what did I want to do, then it got to the point that I was having sex – and y’all, missionary was missionary, that’s what you did.

T: Mmhmm.

S: Yep.

A: So there was things I wanted to try and explore, and did I like it and did I not like it, but I was still really lacking the language to say what I wanted, or what I liked, or what was interesting to me, or what I was curious about – or what was and was not taboo. Those were things that took such a long time to pick apart and pull into little pieces, and figure out what that really looked like. Then there was that whole concept that you can, in fact, just have sex for fun.

T: Right!

S: Right? Pow – blow your mind, that is even possible, without ripping your soul all to hell.

A: Satan didn’t strike me or anything. But it took a long time to figure out, and I have worked for many years on this super fun disorder where I have panic attacks when I climax – the most fun. I’m talking years of work. Years of work. It is worse when I am emotionally intimate with somebody, which means that when I met my now husband, that was a huge, huge factor that took years to work through. If I was emotionally intimate with somebody, sexual climax would send me into a massive panic attack tailspin.

S: Wow.

T: I think if you’re open to it, we would love to be able to do another episode where we get to dive into all of these tentacles of the conditioning that we’ve been talking about through these past episodes, and how that impacts us in such deep ways. That is definitely powerful and I – as you’re talking – the work you have done. The work you have done to explore all this and uncover it all is – I’m in awe of it. I want to applaud you say I’m speechless, because I’m in awe of how much work you’ve had to do to (as you say) dismantle this system. It’s not just a theological system. It reaches into the trauma that our body stores on such a deep level, as well.

A: I don’t know if Sharon feels this way, but being a behavior nerd has been so protective, and also so helpful.

S: Yes.

A: My career as an animal behavior nerd made this dissection not always fun, but always interesting. I was always curious why did this happen, why do I feel this way. Can I re-learn that, unlearn that, re-train my brain. That was at least always fascinating for me, which I think was a huge factor here.

S: Absolutely. When we can look and see and understand the dynamic of a conditioned emotional response in an animal that can send them into fight or flight, the panic mode – sometimes we have the history and we know what happened, and sometimes we don’t, but either way, being able to understand the mechanisms by which those things, those neurons fire in the brain and set up this cascade, a trauma cascade, an out of control emotional panic response; these are things that we can look at the animals and give them so much grace. There’s no sin and evil intent – there’s none of that shit going on, and yet you see the distress, you see how it’s been caused by circumstances outside their control, and we can see that there is a path to healing. It’s no different for us as humans. What really fucks us over is this belief system that imposed upon you, Abigail, these concepts of umbrellas of protection and levels of authority, and the need for total purity of heart and body – that’s what warped and twisted you from the inside out. It’s so unnatural. It’s so apart from who we are as human beings; as members of this plant. And I totally agree. Understanding behavioral science, working with animals has been hugely healing for me as well.

A: And it’s not all rainbows and butterflies, I don’t want to ever give that impression. There are things that I am still so angry about; I am so angry that my first husband is still in the clergy and I have never received an apology. That makes me super angry. I am so angry that this happened and still exists, and especially the people in my generation who stayed in on purpose. I am angry about a lot of things. I am angry that my marriage now takes more work than the average marriage, for reasons that are hard to understand, and my husband has had to do an enormous amount of learning on trauma and trauma responses, and living with somebody who is never going to be all the way “normal”. Yes, there are definitely things that still make me angry, but I am very hopeful. Things like the documentary make me very hopeful; podcasts like this one make me hopeful; the exvangelical and fundy TikTok people make me very hopeful.

S: That’s great.

T: Yeah, and I’ll just tell you from the outside looking in, your speech and your stories are peppered with all that learning you have done and behavior work, because I too have the anger, but I think we have learned how to channel it in ways that are healthy, because you have a lot of compassion coming from you as well. A lot of understanding, and even to be able to have that hope, and have that voice to help other people get those keys says so much about your character and your healing, and the work you’ve done. It really is beautiful. I find you to be a very beautiful person.

S: Can I say amen? I will say amen.

T: You can say amen.

A: You have to deflect that praise.

S: What do you mean?

A: Did you guys not learn that in your fundiness, that when somebody compliments you, you have to say oh it’s all God.

T: Oh yes, yes. You have to say something self-deprecating like oh, it’s all Jesus.

A: 100%.

S: You know what Abigail? None of us gets where we get without others and sometimes the hindrance of others, but in the end girl, you are the one who’s done this work. You are the one who’s done this work.

A: That is true and still feels wildly uncomfortable.

T: Yes! I have to say we got a message, it was on Instagram, and somebody I guess had heard one of our stories, and they said that I hope you are feeling all the love you can feel today and that you know that you’re so worthy of it. Even now, years later, I thought worthy of it? I don’t know that I’m worthy of it.

(laughter)

A: It’ll get me just a little even now, where you’re like – mmmm.

S: Yeah, maybe I’m not. Well, Abigail, you mentioned the documentary so I’m thinking as we wrap things up here, I’m curious if there was anything from the documentary in particular that you learned new, something different, or a different perspective that you hadn’t expected – anything like that?

A: I watched the documentary twice, and I felt differently both times I watched it. The first time the whole thing felt so surreal (I think is the word they used in the documentary, and it’s a good word). We had been hearing that this documentary was happening for several years, and to then finally see it – the best way I can describe it is it felt like you’d been screaming into a void for a really long time, and then somebody just handed you a megaphone and you were like oh my god, the whole world knows now. Yes there were things of course – I think always with something so complicated like a cult where you were like oh they should have talked more about this, or whatever, but truthfully I thought it was so amazingly well done and so digestible for the average person. I was really pleased about that. As far as what shocked me content-wise, the spanking video with the little boy was just by far the hardest part watching it the first time, because it triggered memories, and I think the first time I realized, and many people I’ve spoken to realized, that that was organized instruction. That was hard. Then I was very grateful but I was surprized at the detail they went into about the content of Josh Duggar’s child sexual assault material. I was grateful they did it; I think it’s a deeply important part of an even bigger story than what they talked about but I was surprised when I saw it. I already knew that content, but many people did not. I thought that was really, really valuable. When I watched it the second time, that’s really when the people I’m friends with or who I’d been following on TikTok for so long that are being interviewed in this documentary; I cried for them. It was just different the second time. I was so grateful for them that they did this; many of them have families that are still deeply in, and their whole life structure changed because of their bravery. I was overwhelmed with gratitude that they were willing to do that, because it’s a really big deal.

S: It is a huge deal. Yeah.

T: That’s where I posted on Instagram the montage at the end, which I thought was beautiful.

A: That was one of my favorite parts.

T: I cried different points, but that’s where I broke down the first time, just seeing all of these beautiful young faces and their stories, coming out and telling their stories. I thought it was a beautiful ending, and I wanted to wrap my arms around everyone and go thank you, thank you for your bravery; thank you for not breaking to the point of being here – you’re still here, and you’re still telling your story and you’re taking back your life and your voice. And you’re one of them, Abigail.

A: It’s been so amazing post-documentary, the TikToks of course, of the people that were on it, went crazy, but not just theirs. I posted right after the documentary I had 136 followers, and as of right now I think I have 16,000, in a week.

T: Wow.

A: I have one video that has a half a million views.

S: Wow.

A: People care about these stories, and I’m not sure that people realize how valuable that is to me, and to those of us that did this; the fact that you’re listening and engaging and asking questions – we have felt really unheard for a really long time, and just seeing engagement on social media and TikTok that people are searching to learn more about it is just kind of amazing, and makes a lot of this feel like it might be worth it.

S: Yeah. Validating, and part of the healing.

A: Yep.

S: Also Tracey, you know how we were just talking about how we’re old and not on TikTok – holy shit, I guess we’re going to have to do it – right, Tracey. Not that I don’t want to do anything on TikTok, but I guess I’ve gotta download it so I can watch your stuff, Abigail!

A: You’ve got to at least stalk the people on TikTok. I do mostly lurking on TikTok, I’ll make some videos every now and then but the TikTok is the best lurking for all kinds of fascinating content.

S: Okay, very good. Well, this has been wonderful and again we are so thankful for your bravery. As we draw to a close, is there anything else that you – I sound like someone at the end of a church service. Is there anything on your heart you’d like to share, Abigail?

A: Every eye closed, every head bowed…

(laughter)

A: No, I just am so grateful to you guys for platforming voices like mine and other voices. I think this is so incredibly valuable to the people who have done it, but I also hope it’s very valuable to the people who are on the fringes, or just evangelicals or not any churched at all. I think there are things that are yet to be said about this, about how this fits into American culture, and politics that are going to be hugely helpful and valuable, and I’m just so grateful to you all for making this platform, and caring so much about these stories and these voices.

S: Well, it’s a privilege, and thank you. Abigail, you want to tell folks one more time how they can find your work?

A: So they can find more of my discussions about leaving fundamentalism and evangelicalism on my Tiktok which is called unicorn habitat. They can find my non-profit work with service dogs at theroverchasefoundation.org.

S: Very good, and we’ll put links to that in our show notes. Thank you again, Abigail.

A: Thank you so much for having me.

S: Alright Tracey, you send this thing off, okay.

T: If you haven’t listened to the first two episodes of Abigail’s story we do have all the links in our show notes so you can click into those. If you do like us, please rate us, if you would like to leave a review that would be great, that helps get us up into the ratings so that other people can hear these very, very important stories. And tell us Sharon, how they can find us on Instagram.

S: Instagram, Feet of Clay.cult sisters. Got it?

T: Wow, abrupt. Thank you so much, see you next time.