‘I was raised in a patriarchal cult. At 25, I escaped.’
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Cait West spent a lot of time at home growing up. She was home-schooled and wasn’t allowed out. She didn’t have boyfriends or hang out with friends. She wasn’t allowed to.
On the surface, this isn’t particularly remarkable. After all, some parents are strict. But for Cait, it was much more than that.
Cait was a ‘stay-at-home-daughter’. But that didn’t just mean staying home as a child. For Cait, who was raised in an extreme religious community founded on patriarchy, being a stay-at-home-daughter meant staying home beyond adulthood.
“We often think of cults, as (having) one leader, and then people who follow that leader inside of Christian patriarchy,” Cait told Mamamia’s No Filter podcast.
But within this movement, the fathers of each family are the cult leaders, broadly guided by official church leaders.
The grassroots movement spread through small publications at first. When Cait was a child, audio tapes and magazines were widely circulated, including a publication called Patriarch Magazine, that her father got his hands on.
“(There’s) this perception that it’s fringe, but really it’s very popular, and I saw it spread a lot through the homeschooling community,” says Cait.
Cait’s family were originally part of the Presbyterian Church of America.
“Which surprises a lot of people, because people think that Presbyterians aren’t fundamentalists, but there is a branch of Presbyterians who are, and my family is very reformed, very Calvinistic, built that belief system that God foreordained everything, and you’re either predestined for heaven or hell.
“As I became a teenager, we joined a new orthodox Presbyterian Church in Colorado, and that denomination is very similar to the PCA, but our pastor was very much a leader in both the homeschooling movement and the Christian patriarchy movement.”
The movement believes that girls need to keep themselves sexually pure before marriage. Boys, however, have a sexual drive that they can’t help.
“In the world I grew up in, I took it a step further to be enforced by fathers and to go even beyond sexual purity to emotional purity,” says Cait.
“So you had to not sin with your feelings either. You had to not give affection to anyone until you were betrothed to get married.
Content retrieved from: https://www.mamamia.com.au/escaped-cult-story/.
