Hell is for Children: A Jesus Land Review

What some people do to their children in the name of their allegedly loving “god” ought to be a crime. When I saw the review of Julia Scheeres’ memoir Jesus Land on DailyKos (written by Mrs. Kos), I knew I was going to read it. In fact, I reserved a copy at the nearest bookstore the next day, picked it up, and added it to my “stash.” I wanted to read it for a number of reasons. Like me, the author grew up in the 80s, during the Reagan era, and in a household so hyper-religious as to make my own look downright secular. But the book also promised a rare “behind the curtain” look at the foot soldiers of the religious right; not just into their politics (in a letter to missionaries, the author’s mother praises Ronald Reagan as a “Christian leader” who “leads the country toward The Light”), but behind the closed doors of their homes.

It didn’t disappoint. Two days after picking it up, I finished it. Scheeres’ compelling voice, as she unwinds her tale of how she and her brother — David — survived the brutality of their home and the “christian boot camp” their parents sent them to, draws me to their side and keeps me there. Maybe it appealed to the parent in me. I found these two kids (though I’m roughly the same age group as Julia and David Scheeres) facing all manner of horror, and I couldn’t leave them alone in it.

Scheeres was brought up by devoutly christian parents (Calvinists, actually), a white family who adopts two black boys, and ends up making them sleep in the basement, between beatings (including one with a two-by-four, in which David suffers a broken arm). The irony greater than the fact that Scheeres’ parents profess a religion of non-violence (the mother’s terse advice to her children on the virulent racism they encounter in rural Indiana, back in the 80s is “turn the other cheek”) it that they both belong to healing or “caring” professions; dad is a surgeon, and mom is a nurse.

David and Julia are the heart and soul of this story; actually maybe one (David) is the heart and the other (Julia) is the soul. Either way, they’re bound together in the crucible of adolescence in a place where kids just aren’t allowed to be kids, and they cling to each other for the sake of support and survival. Together they suffer through many things that would break most adults; forced labor (gardening), beatings (reserved mostly for the two black boys), sexual abuse, lack of privacy (being listened to via intercom at any moment), psychological abuse (forced listening to religious music).

And things only get worse when they’re sent away from home by their parents, to a “christian reform school” in the Dominica Republic called Escuela Caribe, which is little more than a far-away dumping ground for children devout parents no longer want (and perhaps never did). The school is actually part of a network, with locations in Indiana and Canada.

It’s here that the story gets truly harrowing, and also where the only mild criticism I have for it comes into play. There are moment’s when it seems to stray into the realm of parody, like the “praying-to-dead-babies” scene, that sound like something right out of The Handmaid’s Tale. There are moments when the narrative seems to veer off into caricature in describing the adults who run this “christian boot camp.”

That is, until you remember that we’ve all seen these people. We’ve seen them blocking the entrances to women’s clinics. We’ve seen them outside Terri Schiavo’s window. They don’t need caricatures. They’re real enough as it is. Imagine being a child, far from home, left in their care, in a place where they have all the power and control (and I do mean control; there’s a right way and a wrong way to fold underwear at Escuela Caribe). Where they make all the rules.

Besides, Scheeres states at the beginning of the book that only the names and identifying details of the people have been changed. She also has a website, where she’s posted supporting documents, including a “point chart” from Escuela Caribe. A website for alumni of New Horizon’s Youth Ministries, to which Escuela Caribe belongs, also contains statements from alumni and former employees that tend to back up what Scheeres writes.

Not that I’m skeptical. I believe what Scheeres writes about actually happened. I just don’t want to believe it. What sane human being would? I’d rather not believe that places like that even exist, but I’m glad that Scheeres writes about her experience. If I’ve learned nothing else from Zach’s story, I’ve learned that telling stories like this one changes things because it wakes people up, making them realize that places like this do exist and that children are really sent to them by their parents. It can inspire people to action, and make it more difficult for these places to continue operations as usual.

From what Scheeres writes, Escuela Caribe is a lot like home, only moreso; with more forced labor, more forced listening to christian music, more control (newcomers must ask permission to stand, permission to sit, permission to walk, permission to talk, etc.), more beatings, along with public humiliation, forced exercise and sleep deprivation in the bargain. It sounds a lot like Zach’s experience, but on steroids. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure that more than a few gay & lesbian teens — charged with the “sin” of homosexuality — have probably been sent to such places for years.

Maybe Julia and David’s parents could leave them in that place and forget about them, but I couldn’t. At least not until I knew that they’d made it through and escaped that place. And they did, though after finishing Scheeres’ memoir, I doubt that anyone really ever escapes such place, and puts an experience like that behind them behind them.

I hesitate to say Scheeres’ story is “heartbreaking,” because that sounds so cliché. Yet, it is heartbreaking. Living through it must have been so, and so is reading it, to a lesser degree. Reading through the punishments and humiliations Julia and David had to go through because of their family’s religion, there were a lot of things I couldn’t thinking about; like the style of parenting that requires parents to “break” a child’s spirit (usually to teach absolute obedience to authority). And in thinking of that, I remembered a refrain from a hymn that I heard at some point during my own gospel-drenched youth, called (I assume) “Broken Things.)

Broken things, broken things;

God has uses for broken things.

Broken things, broken things;

God uses broken things.

At the time, the lyrics left me a little confused. If this god used ”broken things“ who did the breaking? And why did he require the breaking? After reading Jesus Land, I have an idea of the answer to the first question, but I’m no closer to an answer on the second.

I do know that, however broken and for whatever purpose, people can put themselves back together again. Julia and David did, despite the best efforts of their parents and the Escuela Caribe staff. They survived the crucibles of racism, religion and adolescence to emerge poised on the precipice of adulthood, having having escaped the hell that was planned for them as a supposed ticket to heaven.