Girl Brainwashed

Just a few weeks before my sixteenth birthday, I was baptized in a rectangular vat of water in the basement of a church building on Central Park West. I had no idea this event would become the great fault line in my life, but I did have a sense of foreboding.

“I don’t want to be brainwashed,” I told my best friend Kristy just days earlier.

“But don’t you want your brain to be washed?” she replied.

It was powerful rhetoric for someone seeking to make the right choice.

Now, inside that dark, cavernous sanctuary, I was surrounded by about fifty spectators there to witness the miracle. I felt nervous, awkward, like a bug caught in a spider web, with everyone staring. What should have felt like a quiet reunion with God felt like a spectacle. I didn’t want to be in that water, before these joyful strangers.

It was a disconnect more profound than I could name at the time, an evacuation of my will that no words could describe. From that day on, even the smallest decisions—who would be my friends, where I would go to college, whom I’d live with—would no longer belong to me. Not even my body, which would soon begin to cry out for help, was safe from their control.

When It Feels Like Family

“No one ever joins a cult. They just take too long leaving it.”

For years after I left, I wielded this clever phrase to convince others that I wasn’t weak, unstable, defective, or dumb.

That, despite my intelligence and my relatively unbroken childhood, it was understandable—inevitable—that I, along with countless others, including some celebrities, had signed my life away to the International Churches of Christ (ICOC).

I ask myself now, two decades later, not how this bizarre tragedy could have happened, but how it happened to me? To answer that, I need to go back to the summer before my senior year in high school.

Kristy, my best friend’s older sister, was cool and wildly talented. Like me, she sang and played piano, but she also danced and had acted in feature films. Her soft voice and hourglass figure made girls jealous and boys infatuated. One summer, while my friend was away shooting a TV series, Kristy and I became inseparable.

I wondered why Kristy would take such a liking to me. I felt like an ugly duckling next to her, with my big hair, my vintage clothes, and Doc Martens. But Kristy was warm and affectionate, always laughing and offering hugs, always finding something we’d said or done charming enough to turn into good-hearted entertainment for all to enjoy. She had a way of making whoever she was with feel like the center of the universe.

That year, I spent countless days and nights in the sprawl of the family’s Lincoln Center condo, lounging on the sofas among the four sisters, singing around their grand piano in the four-part harmonies Kristy would arrange on the spot, laughing together late into the night. Kristy’s mother always answered the door with her frosted lipstick smile and served up slices of Harvey Wallbanger cake, warm out of the oven.

When it Looks Like Love

It’s a wonder I ever returned home at all in those days.

My one-bedroom on the Upper East Side was quiet, and I spent most of my time alone there while my mother worked long hours at a language school downtown. My own sister had always frightened me with her volatile moods, and we’d been strangers under the same roof until she left for college and never returned.

At Kristy’s I felt loved, accepted for who I was, even admired for my quirks. My exotic looks and background were a marvel to her family. That I spoke German and French and read real literature made me that much more interesting, different from the Midwesterner transplants they’d grown up with in Sarasota.

Love. Though they never mentioned the word, I felt it every minute I was with them, as they invited me into a never ending feast of family stories. At Kristy’s there was always someone home. At Kristy’s memories didn’t fade or die. For the first time, I could look ahead to the future and imagine one day having a large, loving family of my own. I swore my own children would never be enemies, that they would share moments and reminisce all day long, and have enough love to give away to anyone who entered our home.

The kids at Dwight, my private school on the Upper East Side, couldn’t have been more different. They showed up to school in limos and Chanel skirts and spent weekends unsupervised in the Hamptons or among thirty-year-olds at expensive dance clubs downtown or bars on Third Avenue, and every break at Club Med. Because I’d skipped eighth grade, I was at least a year younger than my classmates, and it was exhausting and scary to try to keep up, like jumping onto a speeding train and hanging on for dear life.

When You Feel Important

Kristy had an edge too, a rebellious streak that came out when she broke curfew or smoked cigarettes in her room. We’d meet up with boys in a vacant penthouse in her building, hang out in friends’ lofts in SoHo, even steal cars from their parents and drive to college parties in Connecticut. I was fifteen, and they were all at least eighteen. I’d never felt so alive, so happy, so important. When Monday came and I had to return to school, I felt an emotional withdrawal that took days to recover from.

Very soon, Kristy’s family unit started to grow, as smiling Southern women started visiting their home, toting Bibles and tow-headed babies. They were the members of a worldwide network of fundamentalist Christian churches known as the International Churches of Christ (ICOC). Suddenly, they were a part of my surrogate home, spending hours in hushed conversation with Kristy’s mother in their formal living room, and eventually with Kristy and her sisters.

One night, lying beside her, I listened intently as Kristy told me about the crucifixion—an up-close account of a man named Jesus who, apparently, loved me so much he died for the absolution of my sins. I was dumbfounded by the details, but even more by a new, irresistible vernacular that included redemption, unconditional love, and grace, all words I didn’t know I wanted to hear. A warm wave of comfort washed over me as I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep under Kristy’s white down duvet.

Early the next morning, while Kristy still slept, I sat on the floor with her Bible propped against my knees, reading the Scriptures for the first time. The simple language of the NIV translation made the message feel immediate—like it was written just for me. As I read, it comforted me to know that each bed in the apartment was filled with people who wanted me there, who would wake up and seek my company. And now I had this book in my hands that hinted at even greater possibilities for love.

When You Find Answers

Until then, all I had to go on, spiritually, was a bedtime prayer our mother had taught us to say:
“Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

Those words felt dark and lonely, pointing to the stark unknown—an incantation of oblivion that haunted my thoughts as I drifted off to sleep. What would happen to my soul if I never woke up? Where would God “take” it?

My mother, at eighteen, had been baptized by Norman Vincent Peale, the famed Marble Collegiate minister and author of The Power of Positive Thinking. Her vow to Christianity lasted several years, until she married my father and adopted the tenets of Islam. By the time she had children, she wore a hijab and prayed toward Mecca five times a day. But once she left my father, she abandoned religion altogether. After that, there was no talk of Islam, her Judaic roots, or Jesus.

And so my sister and I were left to find our footing atop our mother’s spiritual debris, with no one to help us make sense of it.

For the first few weeks of senior year, most of my afternoons were spent in strangers’ living rooms on the Upper West Side, as they attempted to answer my questions with a series of lessons and conversations. I was naïve enough to believe these studies had been tailored to satisfy my curiosity, but in reality, they were part of a carefully scripted curriculum designed to convert the masses. I was on an invisible assembly line, one of countless would-be converts who were counted in weekly stats at leaders’ meetings that I myself would one day attend.

The ministers warned us that our radical obedience to God’s Word would provoke persecution, just as the Bible predicted, usually in the form of national news segments and articles. This scrutiny, they claimed, was proof we were doing something right. So when shows such as “20/20” aired investigative reports about the church’s controlling practices, members gathered to watch in celebration.

Gradually, my time was swallowed by church activities. I quit piano lessons and dropped school clubs. I stopped hanging out with friends on weekends, of course, since bars and clubs were not part of the “What Would Jesus Do” mindset. My days filled up with required events: Bible studies, devotionals, midweeks, Sunday services. Still, I kept up with my grades, studied for the SATs, babysat, and did everything else expected of me.

At 15, I was still a blank slate—dangerously blank. Now, by 16, I had been graffitied with doctrine and scripture. It was only a matter of time until my body would revolt.