S5:E11 - Escaping Christian Patriarchy with Cait West Katherine Spearing

New book on Spiritual Abuse available from the founder of Tears of Eden: A Thousand Tiny Paper Cuts: The Subtle, Insidious Nature of Spiritual Abuse and Life on the Other Side

Cait West is a writer and editor based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her work has been published in The Revealer, Religion Dispatches, Fourth Genre, and Hawai`i Pacific Review, among others. As an advocate and a survivor of the Christian patriarchy movement, she serves on the editorial board for Tears of Eden, a nonprofit providing resources for survivors of spiritual abuse.

In Cait’s memoir Rift, she tells a harrowing story of chaos and control hidden beneath the facade of a happy family. Weaving together lyrical meditations on the geology of the places her family lived with her story of spiritual and emotional manipulation as a stay-at-home daughter, Cait creates a stirring portrait of one young woman’s growing awareness that she is experiencing abuse. With the ground shifting beneath her feet, Cait mustered the courage to break free from all she’d ever known and choose a future of her own making.

Uncertain is a podcast of Tears of Eden, a community and resource for those in the aftermath of Spiritual Abuse. If you’re enjoying this podcast, please take a moment to like, subscribe, or leave a review on your favorite podcasting listening apparatus.

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Transcript is unedited for typos and misspellings:

I am so excited about today's guest. Kate West has a very special place in my heart. We met over the internet in the very early days of Tears of Eden, in the early days of the podcast Uncertain. She was the first person that I encountered outside of my family who'd Similar to the way that I had, who was talking about it openly in public, online, we have been friends and colleagues ever since then.

Her book is about that experience of growing up in the Christian patriarchy movement in the stay at home daughter movement. We'll talk a little bit about the dynamics of that. podcast before. So I'm going to link to some of those episodes in the show notes. She's also a member of Tears of Eden's editorial board.

and is responsible for a lot of the content that is on the Tears of [00:01:00] Yin blog, the website. Super grateful for her. Very grateful for her story. And here is my interview with Kate West.

katherine: Well, hello, Kate. Hello. How are you? I'm doing all right it is good to see you.

Cait: You too. And I think we both have sunny days. It seems like you have some sunshine in your room.

katherine: Yes. It's going to be, it's going to be a relatively warmer weekend. I think like 60s ish. How's weather where you are?

Cait: Yeah, I think it might get up to 60 today. And I want to, I want to get outside and start. Scraping around in the dirt and get my garden started, but we'll

katherine: see. Speaking of dirt, your book.

Cait: What a segue.

katherine: Your book is called Rift, and you have a metaphor throughout your book about geology. And the earth, you talk a lot about like the earth [00:02:00] and I'm not even going to try to like get into scientific things.

So talk to me about your book, which is the full title is rifts, a memoir of breaking away from Christian patriarchy. You have been on the podcast a couple of times before, so I'm going to link to some of those episodes in the show notes. But talk to me about the, the theme of this book and that metaphor, that geological earth metaphor that you use here.

Cait: If you've listened to other interviews, the other interviews, you'll know I grew up similar to you, like, as a stay at home daughter, Christian patriarchy movement, quiverful. And this book is a story of me growing up in that and not understanding the world I was living in until it started going wrong and how I figured out how to leave and my life afterwards.

And the idea of rifting comes from [00:03:00] this idea in, Well, there's this interesting thing that happens in geology where the earth splits apart and something like continents can be caused by rifts. You might think of like, there's this big rift in Africa where you can see the rift valley. And where I live in Michigan, rift, a rift started the great lakes.

That's, we're surrounded by water in Michigan. And that's, that's partly why I talk about rifting is because I'm surrounded by water and I'm fascinated by this idea of, Breaking away because when I left patriarchy, I, I wanted to start over, start with a clean slate and never have to think about my past again.

And so I wanted to break away, right? But, but I couldn't escape who I am and where I came from. No matter what I tried, it, it kept coming back. And I feel like that trauma is stored in your body and you just can't. Move on without healing from that. So the idea of a rift is both sides of it [00:04:00] are the same materials, you know, the same ground, but over time they change.

in separate ways. So I've, I've moved on from the Christian patriarchy movement. There's still part of me that is because of what happened to me, but I'm changing now and I'm separated from it in a way that allows me to grow. So that's just like a bigger metaphor I'm using throughout the book. It helps me to think bigger picture instead of focusing in on my own story all the time.

It's, it's kind of like a grounding practice.

katherine: Oh, for sure. And it's a perfect metaphor too, because the new space or the new geological formation, Comes from the old and it's still the same earth, but it's a, it's completely new thing. And it's perfect. And I've been thinking about that so much lately, because I think we all have this leaning of [00:05:00] like, of wanting to have a before and an after, and like, I went through this, but then I healed and now I'm better.

And here I am. And this, the reality is. We are impacted forever. Especially something as traumatic as what you went through as what I went through impacted our very identities impacted our bodies. We're never going to not have lived that story, but this. new formation and this new life that we create on the other side of it is, is also possible.

So it's not like it has to control the narrative of at all. That's perfect. I love it. I love it. I love it as a metaphor. Yeah. So just in case folks are not familiar with the Christian patriarchy. Would you mind talking about some of the key factors and, and feel free [00:06:00] to just share like how that showed up in your family as well.

Cait: Sure. I try to explain this in the beginning of the book because it's, I feel like, I relate to a lot of cult documentaries and cult vocabulary, but the Christian patriarchy movement isn't one singular church. It's this bigger movement. And there are churches within that, but they're across different denominations.

And what's really happening is each family is a cult. I know you've talked about that too, where the fathers are the cult leaders and. The mothers, the wives and the mothers are supposed to obey their husbands and all things and then the children under underneath that so It's this hierarchy But it's based on this literal interpretation of of the Bible at least a cherry picked version of that I would say a

katherine: version of the a version

Cait: And it's this it's really problematic [00:07:00] Belief system where men are on the top, women are beneath them and women essentially don't have any agency in this system.

And so you see it in a lot of churches. Some churches will actually say they're patriarchal and they're proud of it, but then other churches will be more subtle about it. And I consider something like complementarianism to be. a version of patriarchy. It's just more, more subtle, something like soft patriarchy.

So the bigger movement, I think we grew up like in the nineties where This was a big part of the homeschooling movement, quiverful ideology, having as many children as you can. So it's all tied together, I think, with that, and it's connected to evangelicalism. So it's very complicated. And people are still living this way, so

katherine: Yes, they are.

A lot of

Cait: churches who are patriarchal.

katherine: And I think the connecti...