I Fired God Read online

  I have only recently begun to fully understand the effects of incidents like this on my psyche. For many years, my father was my hero. I convinced myself that there was a good reason for every decision he made.

  In fact, if you had asked me at the age of twenty what my childhood was like, I would have said it was wonderful. I would have told you how loving and kind my parents were. I would have said they were some of the godliest people I knew and that they had endured great heartache and trial. And I would have assured you that the Lord had seen them through all of it. But by then I had become a master at blocking out the more unbearable aspects of the truth.

  My Parents’ Background

  My parents, Bart and Sandy Janz, grew up in conservative Catholic households. My mother was the oldest of three girls, a straight-A student and homecoming queen at West De Pere High School in the small town of De Pere, Wisconsin. My grandfather, Jim McCabe, was a mill worker and a war veteran. He and my grandmother, Marilyn, provided a loving and stable, albeit strict, home for Sandy and her sisters, Sally and Debbie.

  My father was a stark contrast. He had once been an altar boy, but by the time he reached high school, he was notorious as a hard-drinking rabble-rouser, the prototypical bad boy, prone to benders and bar fights. He was raised on a farm as one of eight kids, and he harbored a lot of anger about his upbringing. He used to tell us tales about how rough his childhood was because he had to get up early every morning to milk the cows before school. Apparently the rigors of farm life prevented him from playing sports in high school, and he was deeply resentful about it. He also claimed that his five sisters tormented him unmercifully when he was little, and, perhaps because of this, he had a tremendous hostility toward women. He condemned the entire gender as manipulative and conniving, and would sometimes launch into long, loud misogynistic rants, all of which ended with his vowing, “No woman will ever run my life!” as he slammed his fist down on whatever hard surface was nearby.

  My mother met Bart in high school. My grandfather’s protective instincts must have been aroused instantly, because he did his best to stop the relationship as soon as they started dating. But my mother always said that she would have spent the rest of her life wondering what he was up to, so she married him to find out. From the perspective of a studious, straitlaced high school girl, Bart Janz must have seemed wildly exciting.

  They married when they were twenty, and by the time my mother was twenty-one she had given birth to her first child, my brother Jeremy. In the next four years, she would have four more babies—my older brother Jason, me, and my twin younger sisters Meagan and Melissa.

  My father was relentlessly critical of all of us, even when we were tiny. One of his favorite pastimes was rattling off our many faults and vowing to correct everything he deemed a character flaw. Jeremy got upbraided for his fiery temperament. We used to say he was full of life, but in truth he was a loose cannon, flying high on happiness one moment and teeming with rage the next. You never knew which Jeremy would surface.

  Jason was full of strength and passion, but my father accused him of having a devious, manipulative streak. He often predicted that Jason was destined to be a “great man of God,” but would figure out how to control people and use his power against them.

  I was born January 1, 1975. As the middle child and the first girl, I ended up squarely in my father’s crosshairs. According to him, I was in serious need of taming. I was too talkative, too emotional, too dramatic, too eager to please. And my will was too strong for a female child. My father was determined to break it to make sure I became a godly wife and mother, even if he had to beat it out of me. I did ultimately bend to my parents’ wishes, but I nearly lost my soul in the process.

  He chastised Meagan incessantly for being too soft-spoken. He was convinced that she couldn’t make decisions for herself and, if not “corrected,” she would grow into a manipulative woman.

  Melissa, on the other hand, was too strong-willed and independent. Like me, she needed to be reined in and subdued. But my sister was smart. She figured out early how to fly under the radar and escape my father’s fury. As a little kid, even though she received her fair show of beatings, she became strategic about avoiding conflict and punishment. I wasn’t as skillful, and I tended to let my emotions guide me, so I fell victim to many more of his physical assaults than she did over the years.

  Converting to the IFB

  Before he joined the IFB, my father was still in unbridled party mode. He worked as a carpet layer and as soon as he got off work, he would hit the bars, drinking hard and staying out late. This left my mother caring for us alone in those early years, and she became depressed and distraught. The low point for her every year was the annual ten-day deer-hunting trip to northern Wisconsin he took with his buddies. She dreaded being left with us for such an extended period of time.

  She used to tell us a story about the one time she tried to take the five of us grocery shopping when we were all under the age of five and the twins were still babies. She loaded her cart with canned goods and was waiting in the checkout line when Jason clambered up on the side of the cart, overbalanced it, and sent the whole thing toppling over with a crash. Canned goods rolled everywhere, under other shoppers’ feet and out the front doors of the store. Kids were tangled in the overturned cart, piled on top of each other, lying on the floor wide-eyed in surprise or bawling among the dented cans. Sympathetic grocery workers picked us up, packed us into our car, put the groceries in the trunk, and told her to come back and pay later. The clerks assured her it was no big deal, and when she recounted the story to us as teenagers we laughed uproariously. But my mother was humiliated. She cried all the way home. And she never took all of us out together again.

  When my parents married, they were both disdainful of religion. They had experienced enough of Catholicism to know they didn’t want to raise their children as Catholics, and church played no part in my infancy. But one fateful weekend when I was two, a friend of my mother’s invited her to come to church with her on Sunday morning. My mother agreed but backed out at the last minute. Undaunted, her friend invited her again and this time she went, leaving us home with my father.

  First Bible Baptist Church was housed in a small building on Libal Street in nearby Green Bay, Wisconsin. It was one of thousands of Independent Fundamental Baptist congregations across the country. Almost all IFB churches share certain rituals and practices, including what is known as an altar call—a period following the sermon when attendees are invited to come to the front of the church, kneel, pray, and confess their sins. Altar calls can last anywhere from five minutes to two hours, usually with a single hymn playing over and over. If you want to take part, you approach the altar during the “invitation” and ask to pray with a deacon. You can also choose to become “born again,” which means you pray for Jesus to come into your heart and save you, calling you to a life of obedience to Him and the Holy Bible. You follow this with a prayer of conversion and participate in believers’ baptism.

  An IFB pastor named Harley Keck led the service that Sunday at First Bible Baptist, and something he said must have inspired my mother because during the altar call she stood up, walked down the aisle, and became “born again.”

  A few weeks later, she let herself be submerged in a baptismal tank filled with water near the choir loft. “I baptize you now in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” Keck proclaimed.

  “And all God’s people said?” he demanded.

  “Amen!” the congregation responded enthusiastically.

  My mother said she was flooded with an immediate sense of peace, joy, and contentment. She went home soaked but elated, filled with a happiness she had never felt before.

  My father happened to be gearing up for one of his yearly hunting trips at the time, so she proposed a deal: If he was going to leave her alone for another ten days with the five of us, he had to promise to go to First Bible Baptist at least once when he returned. He agreed. When
he got home, he did his best to back out of it, but she was determined.

  Finally, he caved in and let himself be dragged to a service at her new church. As always, an altar call followed the sermon. The way my father told it, he leapt out of his seat and bolted for the exit, assuming the service was over. But several deacons blocked the doors, refusing to let him leave and doggedly attempting to engage him in conversation. A man named Dave Dunbar asked him to go downstairs with him to spend some time in prayer. My father felt trapped, so he acquiesced. During the meeting he prayed with Dunbar to become “born again.”

  Later, he swore he had faked the repentance act just to get the deacons off his back and that it wasn’t until a year later that he became “born again for real.” But from that day on, our family attended First Bible and my parents soon committed their entire lives to the IFB. I was so young that I can barely recall a time before the cult’s strict dogma controlled every aspect of my childhood.

  The Schoolhouse Years

  My earliest memories begin in a small, renovated schoolhouse, a home my parents rented on an isolated country road in De Pere. It had been converted into a three-bedroom home, with all of us girls packed into one room and the boys into another. They had a trundle bed and we loved to play “shark” on it. We would pull out the bottom bed, then one child would crawl into the space under the top bed and the rest of us would jump from mattress to mattress. The child under the bed would reach out and try to grab our legs and arms as we squealed with laughter. The boys were always much better at catching an arm or a leg than we were and whenever they got one they would pretend to chew it to pieces.

  Another of our favorite activities was running through the sprinkler in the front yard on hot summer days. There was a kindly elderly lady named Mrs. Deitrich who lived across the street, and she used to tell us that Popsicles had come in the mail so she needed children to eat them. We would make as much noise as we could in the sprinkler every afternoon, hoping she would hear us and come out to offer us one of the frozen treats. If she didn’t, we would feel disappointed, but we always tried again the next day. We managed to land about one Popsicle per kid every week.

  There was a cornfield behind our house and we spent countless hours running through it, playing hide-and-seek among the seemingly endless tall green rows in the summer, though I always secretly worried a tractor would crush me if I strayed too far from home. We also had an apple tree in our yard, and one of my brothers’ favorite games was having apple fights against us girls. It was much more fun for them than it was for us because the apples could leave welts that stung for days. My father soon found out about the game and, far from reprimanding them, he got in on the action, pummeling us all so hard with apples that my brothers would end up huddling on the ground, covered in bruises and begging him to stop. Like all of Bart’s “games,” it was cruelty masquerading as fun. His other favorite was pouncing on us and tickling us until we were literally sobbing and sick to our stomachs. He called the game “tickle torture,” and the emphasis was definitely on torture.

  My mother realized the apple wars were getting so aggressive that somebody was going to lose an eye sooner or later if the game wasn’t stopped. But telling Bart to take it easy on his kids was like telling a fox to leave the chickens alone. She finally got him to stop by convincing him she needed the apples for pies and if he smashed them all it would be like pouring money down the drain.

  Since finances were tight, my father was always looking for ways to cut costs. One of his schemes was to build what he called a “pet barn” at the back of our property, a one-room model no larger than a storage shed. Inside, he built small coops for chickens, with the hopes that we could collect fresh eggs. Outside, he erected a fence, creating a pen to hold a few goats and one cow, which would provide fresh free milk for us. He also caged a few pigeons that were supposed to be pets. I was fond of animals and at first I found the barn a source of great interest. But after watching poor Rob pinned in its door and impaled on a pitchfork, the barn became a source of nightmares for me.

  That wasn’t my only sinister memory of the schoolhouse years. My brothers often caught live frogs and played tug-of-war with them. They would literally tear the frogs into pieces, ripping them limb from limb and determining the winner based on who was left holding the largest part of the frog’s body. It was sickening to watch, but Jeremy and Jason would laugh hilariously at the sight of the mangled frogs. They also experimented with putting firecrackers in the frogs’ mouths to see if they could blow them up. I thought it was gross and mean. I used to cover my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see what they were doing. But my father, who always fanned the flames of violence in his boys, thought the “game” was a laugh riot. My mother, who came increasingly under my father’s influence, not only tolerated but at times facilitated my father’s abuse, and chuckled about it too.

  Isolation from Extended Family

  Even as a small child, I knew money was scarce. My father had a hard time finding work, and my mother never attempted to get a job, largely because our IFB community was adamant that mothers of young children should stay at home. I remember times when we had to use newspaper as toilet paper, and my mother sometimes told a story about the morning when she only had one can of peas left in the cupboard to feed all of us for breakfast. My father was a proud man. He would never ask for help, especially from my mother’s dad, who already disliked him. And since we spent less and less time with our relatives after my parents’ conversion to the IFB, they knew too little about our family’s financial problems to offer help.

  My parents never had anything good to say about my aunts and uncles. According to IFB doctrine, even though they were devout Catholics, they were going to hell because they hadn’t converted to the IFB and become born again in the IFB way, by praying the “sinner’s prayer.” I could never reconcile that notion with the devout and goodhearted relatives I knew and loved, particularly when it came to my Aunt Sal, who was so unfailingly kind and loving toward us when we were little that she seemed like a living saint.

  But my parents deemed them bad influences and warned us repeatedly to be careful about what we said in their presence. The fact that they drank wine at family gatherings, an act condemned as pure evil by the IFB, was the best proof to my young mind that my parents’ fears were justified: These were not people of God. I remember seeing their priest drinking with them at a family party once when I was little and thinking the man was destined for Hell and sure to drag all my aunts, uncles, and cousins there with him.

  Demonizing every other religious group—even mainstream Baptists—was a favorite tactic of the IFB to separate its members from outsiders and to instill distrust and fear. They’re hardly the only sect to use the technique, or to believe that they alone are God’s elite “chosen” people, but they are particularly vigorous in condemning all outsiders. There is no tolerance for different beliefs or viewpoints.

  Gatherings with my mother’s side of the family came to an abrupt halt during one ill-fated visit when I was eight. I remember it vividly. I had spent the afternoon cuddled up next to my grandfather, who was one of the kindest men I ever met. He always told me I was special to him and I can remember him whispering, “If you ever have anything to fear, you can tell me all about it.” I knew intuitively that he wanted me to be safe. Brutal spanking sessions had long since become a fixture in our lives, and I’m convinced that he suspected we were being abused. But our parents had drilled us never to breathe a word about our corporal punishments, so my grandfather had never had any evidence, until now.

  We had all taken a walk in the woods near their house earlier in the day and now adults and children were talking, playing, and laughing while my grandfather and I watched. The mood was jovial as the summer sun shone down on us, and soon the kids started chasing each other around the yard with water balloons. I ran to the side of the house to join in, but before I reached the balloons, I heard the familiar harsh, strident yells of my father. This time
, instead of freezing as I normally did, I followed everyone else in the direction of the commotion.

  My grandparents had a decorative water pump in their yard, under which was a large wooden water bucket painted red to match their house. Standing over it, his voice booming and his face a mask of fury, was my father, holding Jeremy upside down with one arm wrapped around his back and another wound around his feet. As I watched, he slammed Jeremy’s head into the bucket of well water and held it under while Jeremy struggled, helpless and panicked just as Rob the cat had done, desperate to get away.

  My father loved to frighten us, flooring the accelerator as we drove around dangerous curves and laughing when we shrieked. Right now, his eyes glinted in malicious delight at the eruption of terrified cries all around him.

  “He’s drowning him!” I screamed as my grandfather sprinted toward the struggling pair.

  “Get him out of there, now!” he bellowed at my father.

  Before my grandfather could intervene, my father yanked Jeremy’s head out of the bucket and stood him upright on the ground. Drenched and terrified, Jeremy started gasping and vomiting water everywhere. “What’s the matter with you!” my grandfather screamed at my father. Then he bent down to examine Jeremy, wiping the water off his face and trying to comfort him.

  Without bothering to justify his actions or explain what had triggered them, my father glared at the rest of us. “Get in the car!” he ordered. As always, we obeyed unquestioningly. I huddled in the backseat of our rusted-out station wagon and told my sisters between huge shuddering sobs, “I want to stay with Grandma and Grandpa!” They were sobbing too and holding hands, trying to comfort each other. My mother sat in the front seat, crying as hard as any of us. Jeremy and Jason just sat there, bug-eyed and silent.

  I turned and peered over the passenger seat at my grandfather in the driveway, his tall, lanky body towering over my short, beer-bellied father, as he waved a bony finger in his face. “Don’t you ever come back here again!” he cried. “Do you hear me?” My aunt and uncle were shouting too, but I can’t remember any of their words.