Valerie Hobbs: "I Left"

I’m aware the subject matter and content of the book discussed below can be triggering for some. Please read respectfully.

A highlight for this house this year has been the publication of memoirs, and two by women stand out. Shannon Harris’s forthcoming The Woman They Wanted takes apart the complementarian ideal for the woman and for the pastor’s wife because of what it does to the woman’s self-identity. Valerie Hobbs’s just-published No Love in War (available free here) stuns as she details – story by story, feeling by feeling, reason by reason – the impact of a fundamentalist, complementarian, separatistic, and burgeoning dominionism (some Christian nationalism, some conservative politics, all mixed) on her self-perception and growth as a woman, as a mother, as a wife, as a theologian, as a scholar, and as an author.

Valerie can write. Sometimes her pen becomes a sword and she slays the enemy. This book is her song of Moses. You must read it to know it. No summary does it justice. Some quotations with comments will suffice for me to ask you to read her book. Slowly. Painfully. Sorrowfully. Clapping for her as you read along. It’s a song, in some ways like Shannon Harris’s, of resilience, victory, and freedom. A freedom that can never forget. And will never let others forget.

Her world was dominionism. Not all dominionists are alike. But their inner world creates a culture, sustains a culture, and protects that culture with the weapons of words and emotional blackmail. Dominionism cannot be assigned to cranks and margins. It has entered the “mainstream of evangelicalism” in ways many don’t see. But keep your eyes open to our world as you read what I write and quote below.

One of the leitmotifs of this book comes to expression here:

I am a sojourner, I am a sideliner, I am merely passing through, I have no allegiance to power-seeking spaces, these hungry dictators who cling to the night, the playbooks of kingdom warriors whose dwelling place is passing away.

Valerie came into life in a world where each woman had to have a Man in her life (she frequently uses upper case for Man). Her relations with boys and young men wore that history, that culture, that worldview.

Dominion seeking man sees woman. Man wants woman. Man moves between controlling, belittling and love-bombing woman until she feels sufficiently lowly enough to submit to his will. Or, if she’s lucky, to shield herself with whatever means she can get to hand.

The Dominionist philosophy has no use for the women who cannot, who will not sacrifice their bodies as pedestals for the prowess of men.

Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but only one receives the prize? Make no mistake. Among such people, this one runner is not Jesus. In this bloody battle for the crown, it’s every man for himself, and every woman for every man.

But this is not love, and she knows it, however systematized she may be in the world of dominionism and Rushdoony.

This vision of love is not the only one possible, it isn’t the love I want. It is no love at all. When someone is harming me, claiming me, seeking dominion over me, my every no is a yes to myself, a yes to the truth, it is a yes to everyone else who is also being exploited and otherwise harmed, it is a yes to Love, in which there is no fear.

A question many men, white men, men of the system, and some men not of the system, ask is “Why not leave?” or “Why did you not leave sooner?” Valerie Hobbs responds, and her response leads us to ask what leaving actually means, and does the person ever leave:

I am a person who was not allowed to leave and now leaves, has left, has moved on. … Yet my mind was mapped from infancy to navigate threat, to live amongst warring wolves, to expect their bite. Every act that resembled love was infused with transaction, with the take, take, taking. This is what I knew, this is what knew me. In the early days of my initial exodus, when I went off to university, I begged my parents to return home, this new freedom was frightening, wouldn’t it be better for me to go back to Egypt, if only I’d died by the Lord’s hand, surely even death there is better than this desert of uncertainty, all this unknown.

The months, the years, even the decades after a person physically leaves an abusive community, a workplace, a relationship, a family, a marriage – these are times we are perhaps more vulnerable than ever. We have left, but what we left hasn’t left us. It lingers in our genetic makeup, it traverses our veins, it tracks our thoughts, our movements, it will not let us go. We disentangle, we rewire, we rewrite ourselves, but this is a life’s work. No, it is a life’s rest.

The dominionists had heroes and some of their names are still cited today with authority. The heroes were men on a mission, fiery and passionate and resilient. Heroes to the people. “Demigods” even. Their stories are “curated.” Institution creep all over the place, and the institution matters more than either character or people.

Like blogger Jeri’s, my church was part of a network of churches across the country that held up men like Larry McDonald, like Rousas Rushdoony, like Greg Bahnsen, as demigods in the war to reinstate God’s law in the United States. Even to this day, all such men, together with my pastor, are spoken about in certain circles as men of impeccable character, men of integrity. If and when we hear any stories about them, when they have been introduced to us at conferences, in Sunday worship, all details are carefully curated, all their potentially noble qualities and acts collected and gathered together like gold jewellery, melted and cast into images for worship. And still, some continue to challenge any of us who ask questions about these heroes, they invoke their right to privacy, their personal pain at any exposure, their suffering. Don’t embarrass us. Don’t stir the pot. Don’t distract from the mission. Stories are mostly irrelevant, lived experience is immaterial in its materiality, peripheral, beside the point. What matters is our theology, our concepts, our apologetics, our ideals.

But in her leaving she dug up details about the “heroes” of the world of dominionism. She boldly reveals what she has discovered. She names names. Character matters ultimately, but not for all in the dominionist movement.

Just as I never once heard the name Arda [Rushdoony] growing up, neither did I hear the names Ann Lawrence Sith nor Anna Tryggvadottir, the first two wives of our pastor’s favourite congressman, his brother in arms. In all the praises heaped upon dear Larry McDonald, “the most principled [member of Congress],” we never once heard even a whisper about how he divorced his first wife Ann after meeting the woman he’d leave her for, the Icelandic daughter of a wealthy industrialist. This second wife, Anna, would later accuse dear Larry of adultery and with “beating her with ‘a garden tool’ when she was pregnant.” At the time of their divorce, Anna told the judge that McDonald had denied her sexual intimacy for five years on the grounds that Christians are all soldiers in a Third World War and “people do not make love in wartime." Lies! All were lies, according to McDonald, who of course objected, of course insisted, exclaimed, proclaimed, this was nothing but a “diabolical attempt… to assassinate his character.” One Man against the devil. McDonald was later briefly jailed after his second divorce from Anna, for failing to pay child support for his three children, a sentence which according to him was only more evidence that the judge and his rivals were working together to disarm and discredit him, the communists are out to get me, it’s me versus them, do you see how the world hates me, do you see now what I’m talking about, oh how alone I am in my righteousness.

When you grow up in this system what can you do? What do you do?

What does a person do when she has witnessed so much cruelty and despair, yet never been asked or allowed to speak about it, to recall it, to try to understand, to learn, even to heal from it? What becomes of a person when almost no one asks what this place and this people did to her and to her family and friends, when no one thinks to question what the outcome is of such a place? What fruit grew from this, from you? These are the things about which almost no one inquires. Denied permission to record in the public memory what we have witnessed, we carry the stones of memorial in our bodies, documenting all we’ve suffered as a matter of historical record, an archive of the minutes of torment written into our very blood.

The body keeps the score, as a recent book title says:

The modalities of our memory are these: migraines, rashes and other skin disorders, digestive disorders, dental cavities, depression, insomnia, anxiety, allergies, cancer. When our voices are silent, when we cannot find the words, our bodies cry out, communicate in their own language that brutal history which our tongues have been forbidden from telling. In this way, on the evidence of all the layers of familiar bodily sensation, that deep cognizance of the gut, on the evidence of these two or three witnesses, they who hurt us will surely be condemned. Until then, some of us may even resist medical treatment, therapy, other forms of help, in this way we protest the erasure of the voice of our body, our only witness to that principal pre-existing condition that is the patriarchy. I tell you, if we become silent, our flesh will cry out. On the strength of all our corporeal testimony a matter shall be confirmed.

Valerie Hobbs is a professor. She broke through the boundaries of the dominionists. But she reveals what it was like, what it is like, what it will be like – until the kingdom of God breaks in and slays it. It will. It is happening even now. In the pages of this book. Dominionism is patriarchalism and misogyny. Marth Nussbaum, in her book Citadels of Pride, defines some terms. Sexism: A system of beliefs holding that women are, in specified ways, inferior to men. Misogyny: An enforcement mechanism: the misogynist digs in on behalf of entrenched privilege and is simply determined not to let women in.

Hobbs describes the worlds of sexism and misogyny. Descriptions put muscle and flesh on definitions.

Every patriarchal community establishes for itself a certain amount of formal education they consider acceptable for women. This can fall anywhere from zero schooling to so much as a postgraduate degree or elite professional qualification. But what does not vary is the primary purpose of a woman’s education: to fulfil her duties of hearth and home and ultimately, to serve men, to attract and engage her husband, to hold his attention, to present herself as a shining trophy for him to carry about as he carries out his all-important work. And this shall be a sign unto all men that, having subdued their women, such men are kings, consummate governing authorities, fit to subdue and rule the world. So it is that a woman raised by the patriarchy who dares to step beyond the bounds of acceptable education will inevitably schlep along with her the unwieldy baggage of false guilt and fear. She may pursue a degree but always with an internalised anxiety. She may get a paid job and secure her own financial independence but always with an eye towards the door. This is the internal push and pull that a woman must grapple with within herself, even if she has already physically removed herself from a place of control and harm. Even when she has set her face forward, there will always be someone and something pulling her back into the cage she was groomed for.

A young man who had his patriarchalized heart set on Valerie finally realized he could not get what he wanted. She had said No. The young man’s professor at her Christian college advised the young man to “let her go.” Her words are the last words:

You should let her go, our professor allegedly told him. Perhaps he meant this as a solution to John’s internal anguish. She’s already gone, now for your own sake you need to let her go. Still, this too doesn’t seem right. His letting or not letting has nothing to do with it.

No, the fact is this: I Left. Subject + verb + zero object

Valerie is living into redemption. That’s the only word that fits:

Regardless of where I am now in my life, the joy and contentment I have located, the anger I have learned to accommodate, the rage that no longer rules over me, I want to sit awhile here in the sinking sand of so much suffering, in all our grief, in our every sadness, our affliction and our wandering, the bitterness and the gall. For this, I put on sackcloth. I lament and wail. In the face of so much enforced forgetting, I will hold onto the memory of all our devastation. I will meet its angry eye. I will not look away.

No Love in War can be read, and wept through, by those who need someone to help them tell their story. But don’t expect to be entertained. Her book is a real life Kafka-esque story.