Miriam Anderson - Pulling Back the Curtain
When the Great and Powerful Oz is revealed to be some wimpy, powerless, sub-normal little guy!
If you haven’t had a chance to take a look at Dead Domain’s heartbreaking interview yesterday with 17 year old Miriam Anderson I suggest you do so now.
Have to say that Dead Domain has turned into something of an excellent interviewer. He seems to have developed that skill in a direction I’d not anticipated. It’s outstanding that he’s given all three of these siblings a forum to express themselves in.
I had to watch the interview in small bits and pieces because this one just ‘hit’ a bit differently. This is a young woman just under the legal age of 18 on the run from her abusive family, who should never be forced to return. What she goes on to describe as her relationship with parents Steven and Zsuzsanna Anderson (Faithful Word Baptist Church NIFB) is all that extra horrific because it is covered with a special dose of patriarchy that neither brother Isaac or John got to experience.
This is hard complimentarianism, not the soft soap, back peddled, easy, soft complimentarianism preached by some of the big lights of high demand non-denominational Evangelical-hood world. Women do everything practical in that particular world, at least they do before constant childbirth and long hours of work take their toll and a physical or mental breakdown happens. Somewhere on that hard path of making oneself crazy if you’re a woman, your oldest daughter ends up shouldering a lot of responsibilities beyond their age. Eldest daughters end up parentified by the time they should only be worried about passing middle school exams, and figuring out which pop star they have a crush on. They raise their younger siblings and provide much of the labor needed to run the home. Those poor girls get lumbered with increasing chore loads as their mother has ever increasing numbers of children. They lose large chunks of their childhood.
This is the big lie of Quiverfull, and one of the biggest unspoken tragedies of that life – the parentification and neglect of older children. Children in your household still need you and your participation as a parent just as much as teens as they did as toddlers, just in different ways. You don’t stop helping your children when they graduate school and fly the nest either! Kids raised Quiverfull do not get these needs met because their mothers are busy with the younger children and trying to keep the household from devolving into a “Hoarders” type situation.
Add in the generalized hateful poisonous nature of Steven Anderson’s self-invented New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist theology and of course it makes sad sense that Miriam, Isaac and John along with everyone else suffered physical abuse wrapped in the label of “discipline.” Abuse is abuse no matter what label or name you give it.
Just take a look at Anderson’s Facebook page today. Doxxing his own brother’s phone numbers and calling for abuse of him. False claims about the circumstances of Miriam of being on the run from him, transphobic slurs against a very kind and accepting Dead Domain mixed with threats against all three of his children who have spoken out about the abuse. The desperate abuses of a bad liar and coward.
During my examination of my many reporters notebooks from my ten years writing for Patheos and going through my article archives I noticed something peculiar I’d not noticed previously. That many of the articles quoting Steven Anderson were profoundly… silly… In one accusing women trying to do crafts with children during Sunday School of heresy because some of them had used a template with, wait for it, evil sinful long haired Jesus instead of clean shaven NIFB approved butch cut Jesus. Another one he claims that the message of the famous 23rd Psalm is to buy a gun along with random ammo-sexual fantasies about having to protect your family.
I am struck by the idea that this is a very frightened little guy, puffing himself up to seem all powerful and wise in an attempt gain power. The Great and Powerful Oz am I! As the curtain is pulled aside and that small scared guy running the machine that generates the image of something greater. This is Steven Anderson.
In the wake of the abuse allegations I think we’re starting to see more folks realizing he’s just a tiny frightened guy hiding behind a larger than life fake persona.