I wept for my sisters

As a male in the church, it was sometimes easy to forget the plight of women.

They are rendered powerless, disrespected and often victimized in the COG.

Single young women and wives had been raised since childhood to understand they were “subservient” to men. They were to be seen but not heard and relegated to birthing and raising many children starting at a very young age.

COG women often subtly voice their frustrations at weepy “women’s conferences” where minister’s wives preach how it’s “God’s will” for them to be powerless and stripped of authority in the church.

Several times growing up in the COG, first WCG and then UCG, I witnessed terrible things happen to my sisters (both those figurative and literal) in the church.

Double standards towards women

One of the earliest was an incident at a UCG summer camp where a girl I knew had been caught holding hands with a boy she liked. Both were separated by camp councilors and whisked away to be interrogated by church ministers.

Later that day, I found the girl weeping just outside the camp grounds surrounded by a few friends. She said the camp’s head minister had dragged her into a dimly-lit room with the blinds drawn and lectured her about not “pairing off” with boys or doing anything to “tempt men” into doing something “inappropriate.”

She said the minister treated her harshly, yelled at her and intimidated her while trying to convince her she was supposed to “behave modestly” and keep her “feminine wiles” in check.

This was in contrast to the mild slap on the wrist her guy friend had received. He was a well-known “ladies man” among our age group, and the ministers deemed the incident hadn’t been his fault somehow. He was seen laughing it off later, while she had been devastated by the experience and threatened with expulsion from the camp.

Lack of power

At UCG camps, women were expected to be treated like proper ladies, complete with dinner escorts and the like. The ministry was against pairing off, but at the same time, wanted all of the youth to marry within the church, so they were put in situations where relationships might form.

The young women of the church were at a stark disadvantage in this situation, since women did and still do outnumber guys among the youth in the COG. Girls without escorts were made to feel unappreciated and outcast.

The camps also tried to instill into them the notion of subservience and a lack of worth compared to men. These girls were often featured in camp videos, their eyes wide and wild, talking about how they wanted to grow up and marry a COG minister, have a truckload of kids and be a stay-at-home mom.

Career aspirations and independence for women were never considered part of the equation.

Marriage of the very young

The COG’s childhood indoctrination and stringent prohibitions against even kissing before marriage, not to mention premarital sex, caused many church couples to get married at extremely young ages.

All church-sanctioned marriages had been approved by a COG minister through a counseling process, where women were given books about subservience to their future husbands and the wonders of having many children.

Many of my female friends got married at 21 or younger, most of them not even close to the emotional maturity required to handle the responsibilities and commitment of marriage. So many of these church-blessed marriages have fallen apart within just a few short years, and the women are left in the cold after the inevitable divorce and often do not remarry as they are considered “marked” or “damaged goods.”

These situations are created by COG prohibitions against dating and marrying outside the church. So many of these young men and women feel pressured to get married long before they’re ready, because they don’t want to be “left behind.” Being unmarried at 25 is considered “spinster” status in the COG.

Creepers and terminally single males

There weren’t many men to choose from anyway, and the remaining single, unattached males tended to be older and mentally unstable, as they had been trapped by COG dating prohibitions to keep their sights within the church. They sunk into loneliness, depression and instability as their opportunities and years passed them by.

The “terminally single males” as we jokingly called them tended to be 35 or older and socially awkward with the tendency to stalk. They would single-out women they liked at dances and social gatherings, despite their obvious disinterest, glare at them, make them uncomfortable and even sometimes make crude or harassing remarks.

These “creepers” were pervasive across COG groups, and the ministry did nothing about them. After all, they were men and tithe-paying members. Drop-kicking them out of the congregation would hurt the COG’s bottom line.

There were hundreds of tales of older men stalking and hitting-on women half their age or younger. These women are powerless and often frightened to bring this before COG pastors, who would simply be negligent to do anything about it anyway.

Sexual predators

Though, socially-awkward creepers are one thing. This issue doesn’t even touch upon the actual, full-fledged sexual predators replete throughout the COG. It went beyond the sexual improprieties at Ambassador College and extended long beyond the years when Garner Ted Armstrong had fallen from grace after sexual assault charges. Sexual predation in the COG is worse than ever.

A website setup by some young UCG males in 1998 was YACOG, a social networking site for COG teens and young adults. As one can expect, this was a breeding ground for predators who would send offensive messages to young women, stalk their personal details through their profiles and even attempt to setup sexual encounters with under-aged girls.

The site to this day is still infested and its administrators haven’t figured out how to crush the problem these 13 years later.

One illustrative example of a sexual predator online and in real life was a COG member we’ll call Mr. H.

He was a young man, late teens/early twenties, who was an infamous stalker of UCG women, teens and young adults. He would send them salacious, sexually charged messages, harass them before and after church, made lewd and suggestive phonecalls, and do things that would usually get people arrested.

However, his victims were afraid to speak out against him, because he was a “member in good standing,” his profile’s gallery was full of pictures of him and prominent church pastors shaking hands and smiling, and he outwardly was one of the pious and self-righteous church sheep ever produced, and that hid a very dark side that was gaining fear and infamy throughout the young people in UCG.

Mr. H is still a member in good standing, as the ministry has done nothing about him.

A horror story related to Mr. H was recently left on one of our posts by a current member of COGWA:

I will say that I completely agree 100% with Silence/et al, who point out the creepers/stalkers. I know exactly who you are referring to with Mr. H – I have had my own experiences with him, and after he sent salacious messages to a MINOR, I had him reported.

Mr. H was not reprimanded by the COG for this.

The comment continued to detail other encounters with sexual predators in the church:

In addition, there was a man locally who not only stared at me, and touched a friend of mine, he literally chased a me and another YA woman around a Feast site (the hall and the downtown area) – we were LITERALLY running away from him, and hiding in buildings, after he had been told to stay away from us. He actually tracked down where one of us YAs worked and stalked her there! However, when he touched my daughter a few years later, I smacked him, and soon, he was no longer allowed in services. I was very frustrated with how long it took to him oustered. We were on the edge of reporting him to the police, and had it been me who he had stalked at work, I would have! So, I must say, I completely agree that creepy 40 year olds (altho this man was older) have DEFINITELY been a HUGE problem in the COG. Whether they still are, I don’t know..I’m no longer of “their ideal age” However, if my daughter ever experiences them, they’ll have to deal with me – and it won’t be pretty. I am not likely to wait for a “proper course of action” at that point. Just saying. I love COGWA so far, but there are things I’m not likely to exercise patience regarding.

Another comment mentions similar experiences:

I’ve felt so alone on this subject for years. I’ve seen things similar to what you described with the harassing messages, touching, chasing and other stalking and generally unacceptable behavior. It’s good to hear the one guy was thrown out, because I’ve never heard of that happening before. I’ve seen situations that have reached critical mass, including a rape accusation, that were either ignored or covered-up entirely by the ministry.

A rape accusation

During my teen years, my sister felt isolated and unwanted among her peers. She was more pious and judgmental than many of her friends and she tended to drive them away. She was concerned she would never get married. Since then, she’s married the first guy she ever dated after just a few months of knowing him and has had two children by him.

But during her adolescent years, she was alone, and very loyal to the COG. At a Feast of Tabernacles site one year, she befriended a girl her own age we’ll call Ms. L. Since my sister had very few friends, she became quite attached to Ms. L and they started sharing their lives with each other after the Feast had ended that year.

One evening, my sister received a frantic email from Ms. L.

The panicked message claimed she had been raped at the FOT by male member attending services. The message was very detailed and seemed very authentic, and even “named names” without spelling out exactly who it was (the COG is still comparatively small, so it’s hard not to know people by rough description).

Ms. L was terrified that her parents would find out, and worse, the ministry would find out because the man she accused of raping her was close to a minister’s family. She seemed alone and only had my sister to reach out to.

Unfortunately, my very brainwashed sister, instead of keeping her confidence and urging Ms. L to go to the police, told our parents instead, who instantly went to Ms. L’s pastor with the story.

The pastor called my family back in two hours and said the whole situation was a lie perpetrated by Ms. L, who would be punished accordingly by her parents. Apparently, Ms. L “admitted” to having made the whole story up and was shamed into confessing her deception.

Somehow, an extremely serious and realistic rape allegation had been swept under the rug in record time, without law enforcement getting involved or any further investigation.

Ms. L sent a heart-wrenching letter to my sister afterwards, about how betrayed she felt by her. My sister lost another friend that day and we never saw Ms. L again.

Regardless of what truth may have been behind Ms. L’s allegation, the way it was handled was appalling. Rape victims suffer a wide range of emotional damage, distress and trauma. To simply force a “confession” out of a frightened, troubled girl and call it a day is one of the most horrible things I’ve ever encountered in the COG.

Remember, you are strong

To those women still trapped in the COG or are recovering, please remember that you are beautiful, you are strong and you are worth something. And I know that you are certainly not alone.

Free yourself from the stringent prison that is the COG. There’s a big wide world of possibilities out there the COG doesn’t encourage or want you to know about.

Come to think of it, that advice applies really to anyone.

Peace.