Much-needed educational work, but without redemption.

This much-needed book would be great, if it was only to reveal the ugly reality of the SBC. But she sadly used it also as a weapon against the remaining members of her family and most tragically against IESOUS Himself. How beautiful would it have been to see her come to salvation outside the evil triangle of Catholics, Baptists (and Freemasonry).

PROS

+ Much needed report from a survivor of s**ual abuse. It has to be added that the SBC played a central role in racial segregation while opposing interracial marriage, has still a strong prevalence of Freemasons in their rows (membership in a Masonic Order is officially a matter of personal conscience!), has a very strong prevalence of Calvinists, predominately supported the abortion rights movement, and was the breeding ground for one of the biggest frauds in 'Christian' history, Billy Graham (who had a strong tendency towards universalism; key figure in the ecumenical movement; close collaboration with the Vatican and the Pope; unfriendly takeover of Halley's Bible Handbook and deletion of Jesuit references; advised his friend Nixon to end the Vietnam conflict in a blaze of glory; trained female pastors; great admirer of the 33° Mason Norman Vincent Peale; taught theistic evolution; promoted the Alpha Course). She sadly failed to give a more complete picture of the SBC.

+ This book does a great job in describing the s** abuse not only of her, but provides also a general picture, although being relatively vague considering the vast information she collected through her rather secular ministry. She adequately describes how the SBC maliciously and systematically covered up cases for now several decades.

+ She did well to give us a background of her upbringing, but went way too deep in the realm of gossip, when giving us dozens of ultra-detailed accounts of her ugly exchanges with her family members. A few accounts of each problematic aspect would have sufficed.

CONS

- She most certainly never experienced the real IESOUS, which is bitter because she should have seen it at some point clearer than anyone else, that her environment of a fortune-telling grandmother killed by her own husband, of a Billy Graham- and Oral Roberts- addictive father, of a Franciscan mother, and of abusing Baptists is certainly not where the true IESOUS is to be found.

Did she really hope that while she was used as a caulbearer and proforma priest for the confessions of her mother, who wanted her also to continue with fortune-telling, that she would find in that setting the true IESOUS?

If she had found IESOUS, there would certainly not have been additional suffering for decades, but forgiveness towards her family and restoration for herself. And she would have probably shed light on the SBC decades earlier.

Quote: "So when I hear people say "Jesus never fails" and "put your trust in Him," sometimes I just want to scream."

Quote: "Even G-d abandoned me. It wasn't a matter of unbelief, for unbelief would have been a mercy. Rather, it was as though G-d had become something monstrous at least toward me — an uncaring and rejecting G-d who was prone to sadistic whims."

Quote: "[Her husband] I have faith in lots of things. I have faith in you. I have faith in us. I have faith in science. I have faith in the future. I have faith in humankind. I have faith the sun will come up. Christians don't have some monopoly on getting to define what faithDis and isn't. I'm a person of faith too. It's just different. I realized Jim was right. He was indeed a person of faith, and he had lived his faith day in and day out the whole time I'd known him. Meanwhile, I was the one still floundering in the paradox of being a person of faith who wished not to be. How many times had I prayed that G-d would please cease my belief? Too many. At least Jim had a faith that made some sense."

Quote: "After all, G-d had turned Lot's wife into a pillar of salt when all she did wrong was to glance backwards at her home."

Quote from 2020 (X): "So... if Mary's consent wasn't possible, given her age & the authority figure of an omnipotent g-d, does this mean that Jesus was a child of rape?"

- She believes in Visitations from the dead:

"I dreamed of Mom and Dad. Their presence was so real that, when I first awoke, I could have sworn they were sitting on the edge of the bed, smiling at me. It felt more like a visitation than a dream, and even now, I half-believe they were really there. [...] How could I tell her that I talked with ghosts? Yet, there they were. Even in death, Mom and Dad had both returned to me. It was an extraordinary gift."

"Mom's presence was palpable, as though her shoulder were brushing mine, and I felt such peace."

- Despite her trauma regarding her mother, she clearly failed to distance herself from Catholicism, but rather seems to be close to it.

"I loved her [her friend] for it, and I also envied her. When I learned that she prayed to Mary, I wished that I, too, could pray to a woman."

"I stopped at the Joan of Arc statue on my way out and lit a candle for Mom."

"... the Southern Baptist Convention was—and still is—the largest non-Catholic faith group in the country. [what a telling viewpoint]"

"... she gave me her cross necklace, and another time, her blue rosary beads. Mom had been raised Catholic."

She also quoted the Catholics Bruce Springsteen, Desmond Tutu (Anglican-Catholic) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and over and over compared the guilt of the RCC as small in comparison with the SBC (although possibly with good intentions).

- She describes herself as a 'fanatic for Halloween'.

- She endorsed the wearing of Amulets and her life centers around the practise of yoga.

"... whether I could hack it in law school. But wearing a locust encased in plastic amber as a good luck amulet, I aced the first exams."

"So, I dropped out of the PhD program and instead began training as a yoga teacher"

- She repeatedly rejected the concept of Eternal Hell and of Original Sin.

"She [her daughter] had grown up wholly unchurched, yet she was filled with empathy and kindness. She was and is goodness incarnate — original sin be damned."

- Constant use of foul language (e.g. 9x ...sh*t, 2x pissed ...)

- She stated that she changed several times her counsellor, but did not reveal if she was a Christian. This is strange for a book of 12 hours - to find literally no information on her counseling.

- She actively supports and celebrates h**uality.

"This was still two decades before Ellen DeGeneres would take the landmark step of coming out as g*y on a television sitcom. "

"If we wind up building a movement that recognizes only "good survivors"—those who are white, cis, heteros**ual, faith-filled in the "right" way, and "nice"—then we will have built it on the same authoritarian theological and ideological foundation that brutalized us."

- She is a serious Feminist and does not accept biblical authority regarding the prohibition of female elders (while the Bible indeed stipulates female deacons).

"I took comfort in recalling that Charlotte Brontë, the author of one of my favorite books, Jane Eyre [the first major feminist novel], had also rejected a marriage proposal when she was twenty-two."

"I felt called to be a pastor."

"... they [the SBC] now use biblical proof texts to justify female submissiveness and male headship."

She endorses in this book a very long list of feminists, e.g.:

Barbara Kingsolver (Feminist novelist, essayist, and poet)

Charlotte Brontë (s.a.)

Cynthia Ozick (Feminist writer and novelist)

Ellen DeGeneres (Feminist musician)

Emily Dickinson (Feminist poet)

Flannery O'Connor (Feminist novelist, writer and essayist)

Gloria Jean Watkins (aka Bell Hooks, Feminist author and activist)

Joan of Arc (RCC saint, Feminist)

Judith Herman (Feminist psychiatrist, political activist, intellectual, and writer)

Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Feminist author, historian)

Linda Ronstadt (Feminist musician)

Mary Oliver (Feminist poet)

Sarah Stankor (Feminist writer)

Zora Neale Hurston (Feminist author, anthropologist, filmmaker)

- It seems as if she believes in INCARNATION and several souls.

"With each new language, you acquire a new soul."

"With each of my demises, seeds from the prior life were blown into the next one, where they took root and rebirthed me into a new life, nourished in the dirt and decay of the prior incarnation."

- Although she warns the reader that not all details might be accurate, it is still questionable how she would have such a photographic memory to supposedly remember details from 5 decades ago, including childhood accounts of her sister shoveling spinach on her plate, specific prayers of her father et al.

- Endorsement of MLK (regarded the virgin birth of CHRISTOS as 'mythological story'; repudiated the doctrine of the deity of IESOUS; rejected that CHRISTOS was raised bodily from the dead ...).

- The audiobook, although being brand new, is a patchwork of several recordings and snippets.

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