chris hiosis - Arz-e-Pak

The Cult ofMasculinity 75
prova! ofher new community. She feared that she would displease
God. She kept down her longings for freedom and escape from
the claustrophobic community. She was told to blame these feelings
on Satan. She wanted to be "a good. Christian woman." The
infusion of Christian jargon and cliches into her vocabulary. the
inability to speak with others who might have validated her
doubts and anxieties. left her unable to articulate or confront her
feelings of dislocation. No longer sure what she felt or believed.
she worked harder to obey.
Pughe soon believed that God would punish her ifshe failed to
carry out the demands of the men who spoke for God. those who
now defined right and wrong. And the more she struggled with
her inner turmoil. seeking to please God. which meant pleasing
the male hierarchy that now dominated her life. the worse she felt.
All these anxieties. however. remained unnamed. unrecognized.
She began working at the GangWay Ministries for youth at the
church and was involved in Kennedy's Evangelism Explosion program.
designed to teach people how to spread the Gospel in 20
minutes. The continuous dialectical training. much ofit numbing
in its boredom and repetitiveness. made it hard to articulate her
doubt. Her life was filled with church meetings, new lessons to be
learned and lectures. Solitude and reflection. along with thought
itself. became difficult. Her head was spinning with slogans,
cliches and religious jargon tht gave believers the illusion of
knowledge.
I meet her late in the afternoon in her office in New Jersey,
where she now is a family therapist. "It is a fear-based model,"
she says. "The idea is to make people afraid and to then proceed
to share the Gospel. I began training ministers from around the
world. We were training ministers [on] how to train their youth
to go out and proselytize. We used to go cold turkey onto the
beaches. We used to go to shopping malls. There was a pamphlet
with questions. and you had to ask all ofthem. You would go up
to people cold. and you'd always stan with the two questions.