Page 62 of The Confidant
“I know,” she said, her voice quiet and full of emotion. “But that doesn’t make it right.”
Dad nodded and sat up straighter. “We feel terrible for how we treated you and Bash. Back then, we weren’t at a place where we could understand the pain you were going through and be there for you. You must have felt so alone during that time.”
He took off his glasses and wiped at his eyes. I had to grab a tissue from the corner table because I was suddenly emotional, too, thinking about how hard it had been trying to tell my parents about what I was going through—essentially having an existential crisis—and not having them even get close to understanding me.
Having them tell me I was making my research up and just looking for things to be upset about.
“How sad is it that we couldn’t even have an open and honest conversation with our own children?” Mom shook her head and scoffed unhumorously. “That we put an organization above our own boys? Trusted it blindly.” She met my gaze again, sadness in her green eyes. “I’m so ashamed of that.”
“You lived in a bubble for fifty years,” I said, looking at my mom and then my dad. “It’s hard to see things objectively when you’ve been warned your whole life not to even look.”
That if you crack open the door, you’ll find darkness and misery and lose the ability to discern what’s truth and what’s made up.
“It’s just ridiculous they had us so scared that we couldn’t even look into anything. We couldn’t even listen to our own sons,” Mom said.
“Fear is a powerful tool,” I said.
“That it is,” Mom said with a sigh. “Fear of things that can’t actually be proven is how they keep you in.”
She looked to Dad in a way that told me she was remembering what they’d been through the past weeks and months.
“So how did everything actually go down for you guys?” I asked, so curious since different things brought different people out of the fog. “You said it was my interview with Pastor Caldwell that pushed you over the edge?”
“Yes,” Dad said. “After you told us about it, I was upset and confused. Then I remembered the email you sent your mom and me after our first conversation about you leaving.” He shook his head. “And I clicked that link to the essay you told us about—the one that had so much research compiled in one place.”
“You read theQuestions for The High Priest?” I asked, surprised he’d even clicked the link to the document I’d come across in my research that outlined so many of the dark parts of the church’s history: the secret blood oaths and rituals, the way Samuel Williams manipulated multiple women to have sex with him, the real reasons why the early church had always been in trouble with the government.
“I was scared to open it at first,” Dad said, "since I knew it had to have some disturbing information in it—I’d heard whisperings of it at church before. But I pushed that fear aside for an hour or two, and let’s just say, it was quite the eye-opening experience…”
“It’s a lot, isn’t it?” I agreed.
“It is,” Dad said.
And yet, at the same time, it still only scratched the surface of all the ugly parts of the church’s history and ways it had lied to and controlled its members.
“I basically didn’t sleep for a week because there was just so much to research. Your mom noticed something was off, and after I told her that I wasn’t sure God was even real anymore, she decided to look into it.”
“I basically had nothing to lose at that point.” Mom shrugged. “My sons and my husband were all out of the church—three men whom I knew to be thoughtful in all the other areas of their lives—so I decided I’d better see what this thing was actually all about. And…” She stopped and blew out a big breath. “Talk about getting TKO’d out of the church.”
Dad nodded. “We went to church two more times after that, just to give it a chance to convince us back.” He placed a hand on my mom’s knee and looked at her for a moment, like he was remembering the journey they’d gone on together. “But as I’m sure you know, once we realized we couldn’t trust the founder—when we found out Samuel Williams was basically just an experienced conman, pulling off the biggest con of his life—we knew we’d been duped, and everything unraveled pretty quickly after that.”
Which was how it had been for me, too. Once you saw the man behind the curtain, you couldn’t just unsee everything.
“Does anyone at church know why you stopped attending?” I asked, curious how that had all gone down since my parents had been very prominent figures in the congregation.
“We had a short conversation with Pastor Caldwell at the end of January where we asked him to take us off all of the committees we served on, explaining that we wouldn’t be participating in any church-sponsored events anymore.”
“How did he take it?” I asked, my jaw dropping at how bold my parents were.
“He was shocked but said he hoped we would reconsider,” Dad said.
“And that he’d pray for us,” Mom added.
“I guess that’s nice of him,” I said.
“We told him we hoped he and Megan would still consider us friends. But…” My dad drifted off.
“They haven’t invited you to a game night recently,” I guessed, knowing from the online support groups I was in what usually happened when people came out about their faith transition.
