Q&A with Lana of My Musing Corner

I had the opportunity this week to interview Lana of the blog My Musing Corner. Lana is a blogger, a cult survivor who left the Bill Gothard branch of the Independent Fundamental Baptist organization, and a missionary in Southeast Asia.

I asked her about her childhood, and about her experiences and life now as a missionary.

1. First of all, can you explain to my readers who Bill Gothard is and his beliefs? Some readers may not be familiar with him.

Bill Gothard is an evangelical leader in the  fundamental Christian homeschool community. He teaches that couples should not use birth control and have many children. He also teaches what he calls the “umbrella of authority” where women and children must submit to their father/husband, and girls must wear only dresses and not cut their hair. He teaches that rock music is evil because it came from pagan Africa. For this reason, the only type of music allowed in the home was classical music.

Everything is about outward appearance. A big emphasis in his teaching is character, such as first time obedience and cheerfulness. Gothard also teaches that we should carry out Old Testament laws, including no pork, and the Old Testament’s rules about when a couple cannot have sex (during a woman’s period, 40 days after giving birth to a son and 80 days after giving birth to a daughter). 

2.  You have talked about on your blog about when your family first joined ATI when you were 6 years old. What attracted your family to Bill Gothard’s teachings? Were your parents Christians before they joined? If so, what denominations/groups were they a part of before? 

My parents both grew up Southern Baptist. Bill Gothard has a seminar called the Institute of Basic Life Principles. This seminar is for any conservative families, not just people apart of ATI. My parents never intended to get involved in the legalism; they attended the seminar because it promised to give them tools on how to raise a godly family and taught anger management. We showed up to our first seminar in pants, and my parents had to go buy us dresses the next day.  Anyway, we slowly got into the legalism from there. It was not overnight. 

3. In a past post on sheltering and the way fundamentalists homeschool their children, you said that you didn't know homosexuals existed until you were 16 years old. 

What did you mean by that? Had you never even heard of homosexuality until that time, or had you simply never met a gay person until you were 16? 

Finally, Someone Who Understands What I Am Talking About....

Some days, something happens to me as a blogger, that makes me think that all this time and energy I put into the blog each week is really worth it.

Recently, I posted a guest post from Jonny Scaramanga, creator of the blog Leaving Fundamentalism, about the A.C.E curriculum we both grew up with.

This past week, a comment was made on that post from someone else who personally experienced this atrocious curriculum as a child/teen. Here's what she had to say. Lana is a blogger (author of My Musing Corner), and a cult survivor, her parents were followers of the Bill Gothard/ATI branch of the Independent Fundamental Baptist organization.

Read the full comment here, she talks about where ACE fails in 28 different ways, it's a great read, you can read the comment in it's entirety on the post, or I've made it into a document on Google Drive, for ease of reading,  you can read it in that format here.

The Google document is accessible to anyone, no Google log in required. I'm only including some of the objections from her 28 point list here in this post, because the list, plus my comments would make for what could be the longest post I've ever published on the blog:


1. "You leave out one word of a Bible verse, and its five points off a test. "

She's right about points docked off of tests for failing to remember a Bible verse. In each book (the books are known as "PACE's"), there's a verse that they tell you to learn, and try to help you remember it with various exercises throughout the book, such as segments where the verse is given to you with words missing, and you must fill in the blanks. 

I don't know how it went in her home schooling family, but in the A.C.E school I was in until the 5th grade, the teacher would dock points for misspellings, no matter how minor, my mom was more flexible about that.

10. "The dinosaur and evolution comments are laughable." 

Jonny's aforementioned guest post talks about one of the ridiculous claims regarding creationism vs. evolution. ACE claims that a creature pulled from the ocean in 1977 of the coast of New Zealand could be a species of dinosaur. The creature was actually an animal called a basking shark. The confusion was cleared up in 1978, yet an ACE book published in 1989 was still claiming this. 

ACE also claims that the Lock Ness monster exists and is a type of dinosaur called a plesiosaur. (I wish I was joking about this)

12. "There are racist comments in there."