030 I Sarah McDugal: Why Your Divorce Became High-Conflict: A Protective Parent’s Guide

Posted on October 7, 2026 by | Leave a comment
A smiling woman with curly hair sitting against a neutral background, promoting her role as a guest on the Beautiful Kingdom Builders podcast, which focuses on high-conflict parenting and custody coaching.

This week, I spoke with Sarah McDugal, a Master Certified Professional Coach specializing high-conflict communication coaching for protective parents in divorce and custody court. Sarah shares her powerful journey from a conservative Christian upbringing to becoming an advocate for protective parents facing family harm. This episode explores the dynamics of abuse, faith, and the legal system, offering vital insights for anyone navigating these challenges.

We talked about Sarah’s personal story of escaping an abusive marriage, and how church culture and theology set her up for that and perpetuated the abuse by trapping her in the marriage. Sarah shares the four tools of abuse: isolation, deflection, manipulation, intimidation and the problem of moral injury in family harm cases. She shares the legal challenges faced by protective parents, resources for recognizing and responding to abuse, and the importance of language in understanding abuse.

Money quote: “Jesus wants you to be safe and loved.” This is the heart of Jesus for you.

Please enjoy this episode of The Beautiful Kingdom Builders podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Substack, and more!


TRANSCRIPT:

Rev. Ruth Perry (00:17)
My guest today is Sarah McDugal. Sarah is a master certified professional coach specializing in high conflict communication coaching for protective parents in divorce and custody court. And Sarah is trained in the Deceptive Sexual Trauma Model, the Association of Partners of Sex Addicts Trauma Specialist. She is a certified assessor for the Johns Hopkins Danger and Lethality Assessment.

And she’s co founder of Wilderness to Wild, Trauma Mamas, and Freedom Navigator. And so I’m very excited to have you on, even though the subject matter is heavy because it’s a necessary conversation. Thank you so much for being here today, Sarah.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (00:58)
Thank you, Ruth. I’m excited to be here. I’ve been looking forward to this all summer since we talked about it. And also I’m gonna apologize to everyone in advance. I had this epic summer. We did this lifetime dream of visiting a bunch of national parks and everything this summer. I was fantastic at twelve thousand and fourteen thousand feet. I felt great and I have POTS and all kinds of funky autoimmune stuff. So I don’t always feel great.

While traveling or anytime. But I felt great at all those high elevations. And then now I get home, I got slammed with this upper respiratory infection, and I am still my voice is wonky. So I apologize in advance. If I just spin out vocally, you’ve been warned.

Rev. Ruth Perry (01:41)
Right now I’m feeling like your voice is perfect for radio. It sounds really good.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (01:45)
Well, thank you. I can drop it into a lower register if I need to, but I it may also stop and cough like a maniac. So there’s that.

Rev. Ruth Perry (01:53)
Well, please do.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (01:54)
Thank you. I appreciate it.

Rev. Ruth Perry (01:56)
So my podcast, I like to have conversations about gender, justice, abuse, and healing in the Christian faith specifically, because I think these are important conversations that the church tries to avoid generally and is uncomfortable with. And your work intersects in all four of those areas. And so I’m really hopeful that people will follow Sarah McDugal, your website is Wilderness to Wild. I just wanna say that right now. Wilderness to wild dot com. Like look this up, follow Sarah. Okay.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (02:25)
I have two. I have two. If you’re trying to figure out if what you’re dealing with is normal or is more than just difficult, then wilderness to wild.com is your spot if you’re dealing with betrayal trauma. If your marriage is so difficult and it’s just not getting better and you’ve done everything you can to think of how to fix it, and maybe you’re thinking marriage is just meant to be difficult. Wilderness to wild is your spot.

And we start there with just helping you recognize red flags. Is this an abusive behavior pattern or is this someone being human and flawed? Now, if you have fled family harm and now you are forced to co-parent by the court system with the person who harmed your family, you need my other website.

And that is www.myfreedomnavigator.com. So those are the two. And they they speak to people in very different stages of life experience. Sometimes the people who start out at Wilderness to Wild end up needing my Freedom Navigator. And sometimes they don’t. But yeah, so those are the two that we can start with right straight off the bat.

Rev. Ruth Perry (03:31)
And I will put those links in the show notes. So be sure that you visit those places. Can we start with your story, Sarah? And just introducing you as a person of faith that I admire that has an important expertise and message for the church today. Where does Sarah start? Where do you…how much do you want to share about your own life?

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (03:53)
My well, like we were joking before we came online. Are we doing a one off or are we doing a series? Cause you know, we could be here a while. But I just a little bit of background.

I grew up in a very what we would now kind of refer to as fundy, conservative Christian home. A few caveats. My parents are loving, caring, wonderful people. Flawed humans and all of that, just normal humans, but deeply love Jesus and deeply loved us as kids. I was a missionary kid. And before and after being a missionary kid, I was also an army brat. And we did a lot of humanitarian aid work. We traveled a lot. We moved a lot. And we kind of joked that we were on a mission movement all the time.

Our family nucleus was the constant because we homeschooled, which meant we could pick up and move anywhere, and nothing got disrupted from our academic and educational point of view. so I grew up with this kind of looking back on it now, in kind of a bizarre mix, from the outside circles around us, I got a ton of influence from Gothard, extreme right evangelical influences. Even though we weren’t in ATI or the Gothards, you know, group necessarily, we were very much adjacent to that. The long denim skirts, the long hair, no makeup, no adornment, longer sleeves a lot of the time. My dad had a big old beard. Back then, when he wasn’t in the military, it was kind of weird. It was like either dress greens, clean shaven, or big ol’beard and suspenders is two completely different looks. And I’ve been to like 45 countries and territories. So I mean we traveled, we had this global mindset, this very much an awareness that, and and I think this is very, very healthy awareness that there are a thousand ways of doing things well.

Because people have culture and language and differences and distinctions and all of those things can be equally good. They’re just different from each other. and at the same time, I grew up in a theological and conservative fundy social environment where purity culture was strong. I mean, if you held hands with a boy, you were damaged goods. Nobody might ever want you for life. You know, kissing, that’s probably how you got pregnant. Not quite, but you know, just that whole environment.

Rev. Ruth Perry (06:20)
Yeah.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (06:21)
I grew up reading the covers off of Passion and Purity by Elizabeth Elliott, and I kissed dating goodbye, and all of the things. Just all of those things. homeschooled through 10th grade. I played piano and guitar and violin and sang. The picture of the perfect conservative homeschool family, lived way out in the country, did gardens, we ate really healthy.

And now looking back, there’s so many things I’m so grateful for. I am a late diagnosed autistic adult woman. And I look back and realize that the calm, slow pace of living out in the country and having a lot of quiet time and a lot of time for reading and slow hobbies and low entertainment that was sensory overload, those were saving graces for my childhood. If I had had a fast-paced, hard-run, heavy sensory childhood, I would not be the same person and it would not be in a good way.

So it’s a mixed bag as I look back at it. I never doubted that my parents loved each other. I never doubted that my parents loved us, or that we were a secure, safe, connected, caring Christian home family unit. I genuinely thought that when people got married, they just talked about stuff and worked it out. I didn’t know divorced people. I didn’t know volatile family home life. I didn’t know what it would be like to have parents yell or fight or disagree or be physically reactive or violent. None of that was part of my worldview at all, except for maybe news stories. And most of my childhood we didn’t have a TV. So I didn’t watch a lot of news either.

So I had this very trusting and innocent and almost cozy idea of how marriage and home life was supposed to be. I thought you just talked, you worked it out, you both wanted the same things. Why how can this be so difficult? And then I got married.

I went to Bible college and did not date much at all. I I mean I didn’t have significant dating relationships, did not get physical with anyone. I did the whole purity culture, everything. And then I married a theology student who said he wanted to be a missionary and to be a pastor.

That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to have four kids by the time I was thirty and be a missionary and go live like Marilyn Laszlo and I don’t know if you know who that is from from the Tyndale translation. She had gone off to Papua New Guinea and I’d grown up on everything from David Livingston to George Mueller to Amy Carmichael and you know, all of the greats.

And I just thought it was going to be very simple and straightforward. I married someone who had not come from that kind of home. And I did not know that I married a sex and porn addict who had a lifetime of compulsive deception and who was not the person that they presented themselves to be.

By one year in I knew in my bones that bringing children into this would be devastating to my children. And at the risk of being labeled a career woman instead of a family woman, I decided I wanted to wait on children. And it was because I was terrified to bring children into the home. I thought, hey, I chose this, right? So I’m stuck with it for life. I have to live with this, but I don’t have to choose to bring someone innocent into it. And I was not brave enough to state my reasons why that I felt like raising children with this person would be unsafe. And just bad all the way around.

I also didn’t have anyone talking to me. The ministries now that exist unraveling the harm from purity culture, the harm from pornified worldview, the harm of all of the traditional marriage books like Love and Respect and His Needs, Her Needs, that were considered the Bible in our home. And I I was one of the pastor’s wives that handed those out. God forgive me now and a thousand apologies to anyone who ever received one from me twenty five years ago or whatever.

So I was operating in this vacuum of knowing in my bones that things were not okay, but not having language, not understanding coercive control, not understanding betrayal trauma, not understanding deceptive sexual trauma, not understanding the escalating nature of sex and pornography addictions, especially when it’s operating in secret, in the dark and unchecked.

And so I pursued ministry work. I got a master’s degree, and I dealt with a lot of allegations from my then spouse that I just hated family and I just didn’t want to be a parent and I just didn’t have a motherly bone and whatever because I was scared to say I can’t raise kids with you. I think it will be harmful to children.

And then there came a time where the reproductive coercion was so strong that he told me straight up, if you don’t give me kids, I will divorce you and tell everyone that you were an unsubmissive wife. And I couldn’t think of anything worse at the time. So I felt that I had to go off birth control, and I had to try to get pregnant. And then it took a year and a half.

And I want to pause right now and state unequivocally that I would not trade my amazing and incredible children for anything in the world. They are the best part of my life. And I am so proud of them and everything that they have overcome and their incredible passion for life and for people and for caring for others and for learning. They’re amazing humans. And I’m so glad that I didn’t end up living my life without them. I mean, I’m so glad that I had them. But at the time it was very overwhelming because of the nature of the environment and the relational dynamics that made me feel so trapped.

And I don’t know if you’ve talked about moral injury much on the podcast, but a simplified description definition of moral injury is the injury to your soul when for example, if you’re a soldier and you’re following orders, so you’re doing the right thing, but the orders are to kill a child. So you’re doing the wrong thing. You’re doing the right thing, but you’re doing the wrong thing. And by doing the right thing, you do a wrong thing. And if you refuse to do the right thing, following orders, in order to avoid doing a wrong thing, killing a child, you’re stuck with the consequences of refusing to follow orders. You might be court-martialed, right? So you’re caught between doing a wrong thing to do a right thing and doing the right thing to do a wrong thing. And that is what they call moral injury.

Well, I find, so this is a little caveat because there’s this whole journey, obviously, that led me to what I do now, working with protective parents who have fled family harm, family violence, family betrayal. And then they’re now forced to share children with a person who is actively harming them and their children. There is a sense of moral injury that very often goes unnamed and unarticulated and unidentified when you are court-ordered to hand your children over to a person that you know is neglecting them, psychologically terrorizing them, sexually molesting them, physically harming them. You can’t prove it enough to override parental rights to their time. But if you don’t follow the court orders, you will lose your kids and the courts will flip custody to the other parent who is causing them harm. They’ll be there full-time instead of part-time. That causes moral injury to parents.

Back up to reproductive coercion. Feeling that in order to be a good wife, you must follow your husband’s directives to bring children into an already known abusive environment is a seed for moral injury because you’re being told that you’re doing the right thing by being submissive to his leadership, but in essence, you’re also by obeying, you’re doing the wrong thing by bringing a child into harm.

So these are heavy things to wrestle with, and it took me years to wrestle through. and so many parents don’t have someone to wrestle through these things with.

Just a quick caveat as well. I work primarily with women who are protective mothers, but there are times when the genders are flipped in these scenarios. And there are protective fathers who are up against the same dynamics in the system where they are fighting to keep their children safe and protected and not continue exposing their children to neglect and even overt harm. And the mom is the harming parent on the other side of it. And those dads need help and support and strategies to navigate toward freedom, just like protective moms do. So just throwing that out there, I recognize that there are both. And I do work with both when those cases are on the flip side.

But anyway, back to that, I ended up having two children, almost back to back. They’re 17 months apart. A son and then a daughter and for a while I believed that I must stay for the children. And then it came to a point where things came to a head and it was very clear that I must leave for the children.

And as those things, some simply harmful and others straight up criminal, came to light. it shattered our world as the pastor’s family. And my kids were not even in pre-K at that point. they were very little. And we started life over in went through four months of homelessness and joblessness for a a while, and Medicaid and food stamps and absolute uncertainty and CPS investigations because of things that had been done to my children and happened to them. And police investigations and legal processes and it took nearly a decade of custody litigation as a protective parent to finally stabilize an ongoing environment of safety for my children.

And just as a side note, they are now on the tail end of high school, touring colleges, planning careers, and thriving. And I couldn’t be prouder of them. But it’s been a long road. And the result of that was that I decided I didn’t want to see other protective parents going through what I went through.

And getting upside down in the court system and sh coming in hot as an activated mama bear protective parent, and not realizing that sometimes what makes the most sense to us as a protective parent, based on our parenting instincts, is actually what’s going to work heavily against us in a legal system where the person who tells the calmest and best story wins.

So now I work with those parents.

Rev. Ruth Perry (16:58)
Wow. Thank you so much for sharing your story, Sarah. That’s really it’s astounding what you have survived. And there’s just hearing it, I’m hearing two big aspects where you would think these institutions would be places that protect you and that

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (17:15)
Ha ha ha.

Rev. Ruth Perry (17:16)
are purveyors of justice and healing. So first the church where we learn our theology and we are formed in a culture. And then second, the court system where you would think they’re gonna look out for the most vulnerable and the victim. Can we start

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (17:30)
Right. Right.

Rev. Ruth Perry (17:32)
with talking about how your faith and your theology and your church trapped you in a painful and abusive marriage instead of liberated you from that.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (17:43)
Sure. I mean, let me see if I can distill that down into a couple of main points because we could have a lot of wandering conversation on that, I’m sure. As as could many of our listeners, I’m sure. First of all, I was raised not so much in my home where my parents very much worked together on things and were Teammates, but in the church environment and youth groups and programs and books, I was raised very much in the mindset that the endowment of male genitalia empowered a human to make wiser, better, and more credible decisions than someone without male genitalia.

And I absorbed the idea that I needed to be compliant even with bad ideas for the sake of A submission or B good image. So that other people would not think that we are not something that we are.

Now I know that those who teach this concept intentionally often say, of course, any woman should obey Jesus rather than her husband, but those waters get very easily muddied when you’ve been taught to gaslight yourself out of all of your strong instincts. As an autistic woman, I have some pretty terrific superpower in pattern recognition.

But I was told for years that I was just being suspicious, that I was being prejudicial, that I was being judgmental, that I was not giving people the benefit of the doubt, that I was just catastrophizing, although not using that psych word, but just making things worse. And even though each of those times would come in the end where the pattern recognition had been accurate.

Anytime there was a new opportunity to anticipate what was likely coming, it was brushed off. And I was told to basically butt out and mind my own business. I also remember being told by a youth leader that had extreme prominence in my circles that I needed to make sure that I married someone essentially whose umbrella was bigger than mine. Because it was going to be very important that I be smaller than my husband. Theologically, psychologically, intellectually, emotionally, personality, et cetera.

And so I was I was overtly, bluntly, straight-forwardly instructed that I should not marry someone like my father. Now, in my childhood home, my dad is the quiet one, and my mom is the bubbly social one. My dad’s, I’m certain, on the autism spectrum. My mom got her formal ADHD diagnosis at the ripe old age of 73. And yes, you know, I was used to a home where it worked. Mom was socially engaging, dad was a quiet thinker.

I tend to be actually a lot like my dad, but also enjoy people. And I was told you can’t marry a shy or quiet person. You must marry someone bigger and louder than you. I was not taught to look at character.

Like so many girls in the 70s, 80s and 90s, I was taught to look for strong public leadership. Essentially, I was taught to imbibe the halo effect, where if someone is really good at a microphone, you assume that they must also have great integrity and great compassion and great follow-through and great service and work ethic because they’re very good at this one public thing.

And I believe that that did an entire generation of young people a disservice. So recap your question for me because I have rabbit trailed myself into forgetting your question.

Rev. Ruth Perry (21:19)
Well, you’re answering it beautifully. I asked about what was the theology and the church culture. Yeah.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (21:24)
Yes. Okay. Okay. So that, pre-marriage and then post marriage, power of a praying wife. Shut up, say nothing, and pray. Don’t confront, don’t bring up issues, don’t have conversations about things, just get new lingerie, cook a great dinner, get naked, and be quiet. Along with love and respect. Emerson Eggrich’s stuff. Where he says, you know, don’t bring up anything negative to your husband. Don’t criticize. He gives the illustration of him leaving wet towels on the bed and is disrespectful for his wife to ask him to stop leaving molded towels on the bed. You know, don’t let the linens mold. She’s being a disrespectful wife.

The fact that his dad was in his sermons, you know, that his dad was physically violent to his mother and he blamed his mom instead of placing responsibility on his dad for attempted strangulation of his mom as he describes things. Things like Gary Thomas’s book, where he talks about making your no sound like a yes. And so all of these, I don’t know that we would have defined them as theologies, but they were relational maxims that were taught with such fervor that I think they would qualify as relational theologies. The theology of marriage was very much one of inequality and one that silenced half of the partnership in a systematic way.

I remember my little sister lived with us when we were newly wed, and having to mediate a massive argument between her and my husband. And it finally came out that the problem he had with her was that when she asked him a question that disagreed with him, she looked him in the eyes, and that was disrespectful. She should have looked down at the…

And I look back at stuff like that and I am just appalled at the impact, the negative impact that would have had on her.

I look back at the time that he was in seminary doing his grad degree, and I realized there was a massive tuition subsidy for seminary spouses. And I was like, hey, we’re here for another year. Can I get my master’s degree too? Like no one in my family’s gotten a master’s degree. I just, and I was down on the floor, sitting on the floor beside him at his desk, begging permission. To make the decision for myself as a twenty four year old adult to go back to school. And he made me promise that it would only be used for self fulfillment and never take me out of the home.

So all of those theologies of hard and rigid, gender-assigned roles, regardless of who is good at what, of recognizing or failing to recognize that the Holy Spirit speaks to both adults and honestly to children as well, that we should each have our own thriving, direct, connected relationship to God.

That we should each answer to our own consciences first and foremost before any other human. And that when Jesus said to call no man Lord but Him, that also includes the marriage relationship. Neither one is to Lord it over the other, and that goes in both directions.

I look back at those theological roots and I think that for me, the one thing I’m so grateful for is that my own childhood home lived out none of that crap. It gave me a glimpse of what could be, even though we were immersed and just swirling around us, was all of this other stuff that definitely gave me a negative impact. That I saw what mutually supportive, loving teamwork could actually look like.

And now what I teach my kids is it doesn’t matter who makes a decision. What matters is if both people are living with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. If that isn’t there, there’s something very wrong, and you both need to get yourselves to some help. Focus on that. And like 99.9999% of everything else is going to work itself out if you are living each for the other with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control. The fruits of the spirit are what we should all be striving for. Be a good human.

Rev. Ruth Perry (25:28)
Amen.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (25:29)
Vows don’t make a jerk human into a good partner. And vows aren’t, I’m not saying this against marriage. I’m just saying vows aren’t required to make a good human into a good person to live with. Whether that’s a roommate or a family member or a sibling or whatever. If you are working to allow Jesus to be central in your life in a way that does not lord it over anyone else, that controls yourself based on your conscience, and where all the power you have, in whatever way you have, is being lent to others to empower them wherever they are weak.

We’re gonna be okay. And our homes will be safe places for Jesus to be hanging out right there with us instead of hanging his head and crying at how we misuse his name.

Rev. Ruth Perry (26:15)
Amen. When you were sharing your story, you said that part of the reason why you didn’t recognize how dire your situation was is you didn’t have language for abuse. Can you share some of that language that is helpful to recognize

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (26:27)
Yeah.

Rev. Ruth Perry (26:28)
that you’re not living in a healthy relationship?

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (26:31)
Absolutely. So I’m going to, there are plenty of terms. Coercive control, betrayal trauma, infidelity, financial infidelity. There’s a lot of these catchphrases. But instead of just dwelling on those catchphrases, which could be interpreted many different ways, I would love to give you four tools.

So in an unhealthy relationship, you will see these four things. And this could be a church parishioner relationship, a parent adult child relationship, a sibling or friendship or a boss employee, or in a marriage. They span the options.

The first tool that an abusive person will use is isolation. This can be seen in triangulation, pitting people against each other, or pulling you away from the mainstream outside world, telling you that everyone else is dangerous except them, or telling you not to read books unless they’ve approved of them, don’t get knowledge from anywhere else, or dating relationship. Maybe it’s you and me against the world.

Baby, when I am angry like the Hulk, you are the only person that can calm me down. I can’t live without you. That isolation also often shows up in families that bounce from church to church. As soon as the isolated partner and the children start to make friends, the controlling partner will decide it’s time for a new church. They don’t like this pastor. There’s something wrong. We’re gonna move, we’re gonna go somewhere else or packing everyone up and moving them to the opposite side of the country away from support community, relatives, friends, people who would see through the rest of the relationship. So isolation comes first.

Second is deflection. And deflection is, don’t know if you’re if if your kids liked Star Wars or sci-fi,

Rev. Ruth Perry (28:12)
Yes, I do.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (28:13)
but mine, big, big deal in our house. so deflection is like a shield that has a force field where everything slides off of it. It just bounces everything off. So all the bad stuff, when I have my when I have my deflection shield up, all the bad stuff slides off me and onto you.

Or anyone else. It’s quintessentially, you know, go back to the 1950s, the devil made me do it. But it can be if the child would have stopped crying when I told them to, I never would have hit them. Or if you hadn’t talked to me that way, I wouldn’t have shoved you into the wall. Or if my parents hadn’t beaten me as a child, I would be able to have conflict resolution conversations with you. But I can’t because childhood trauma. Because you whatever you did. Because I had a bad day at work. Because my mom is mad at me and I took it out on you. Because whatever.

The refusal to operate with self-control and then the deflection. That my reason for acting wrongfully is not because I chose to do the wrong thing. It is because you or someone else created an environment. So that was my only choice was to take it out on the vulnerable person or persons around me. So we have isolation, we have deflection.

The third one is manipulation. And it’s the exact opposite of that. You have a force field shield on deflection. Manipulation is all the good stuff comes to me. Everything comes to me. If we did a great job, I did it. If the family looks good at church today, I’m great. If you got a raise, I’m spending the money. If you know whatever it is, it creates this sense that no matter what negative thing happens, they’re the ones that come out smelling like roses.

So we have isolation, deflection, manipulation, and the fourth one is where we assume that abuse starts, and that’s intimidation. That’s the my way or else. And generally, there’s a fear-based operation under this. If we don’t do things the way the controlling person wants, there will be a price to be paid. Now, a lot of times you think of intimidation as, my goodness, you know, up in your face, physical violence, and it can include that.

But intimidation can also be I know that if I don’t clean up all of the children’s toys from the living room floor, there will be silent treatment through dinner and everyone will suffer. So I scramble to make sure the house doesn’t look lived in before my partner comes home, just so that they will talk to us between now and the kids’ bedtime. It can be the withholding of interaction. It can be refusing to cover bills. It can be whatever the fear-based punishment or cost is, even if it’s not violent or aggressive. That’s intimidation. And we usually think intimidation starts, I mean abuse starts down here where we start to see the intimidation, or it’s been going on so long privately that it’s now becoming public. But the abuse actually starts back here at isolation and then it’s not my fault. And then I’m the best. And now do it or else.

So those four tools are used in, you will see some mix of them, all or some, employed in any abusive relational dynamic. And when we look at abuse, I want to make sure that we point out that abuse is not an incident or an event. You may have a physical violence episode. And that may be someone you’ve never seen before and you will never see again. That’s not an abuse. That is an assault. It’s a crime. It may be a felony. It may need criminal prosecution. They should go to jail. Harm was done, but that’s not abuse. Abuse is the overarching pattern of one person using the power they have to coerce or control another person to their harm.

So it kind of shifts how we look at that. And when we are dealing with parents, especially godly, conscientious Christian parents who have decided that the only possible option that lies ahead of them is to file for divorce, to separate, to try to build a home that is safer and that is.

Free ideally of all of these things, we see those behaviors follow them into the court system. And the parent who has been so good at the public image presenting a glossy public presentation is also the one who is most skilled at presenting that continued glossy public presentation to the court system.

Then you have the protective parent who is exhausted, terrified, emotionally fragmented, trying to remember all the stuff that they have just put away in their minds in order to survive, in the process of losing support because their church doesn’t understand, their family may not understand, their friends are telling them they’re being crazy or they shouldn’t be doing this. They’re losing their community or what they thought was community.

Their kids are traumatized, and now, especially if they were a stay-at-home parent, they’re working one, two, three jobs trying to apply for state subsidies and supports and interventions. Their kids are now going back and forth, and they recognize that there are problems that are continuing, and they’re being painted as the problem parent because they fled for safety. And that creates so much, not only an insane level of legal expense on just the price ticket side of things, but also exhaustion, fatigue, anxiety, overwhelm for the protective parent.

Because these behaviors do not stop just because you exited the home. They will continue, they may morph and shape shift. But they continue. And it is so important to know if you are that kind of protective parent, especially if you’re the conscientious one. You’re showing up and you’re telling the truth and you’re just seeking safety and you’re thinking, why isn’t this justice system here to give me justice? And you don’t know what the system expects of you.

You don’t what they’re looking for. So you keep giving them what you think makes you look like a good parent because you are trying to do the right things by your children. And then it backfires against you. And we have countless conscientious, loving, exhausted, overwhelmed, protective Christian parents who waited longer to leave than any secular person might have because of their theology of the seriousness or permanence of marriage. And so when they finally decided that leaving is the better, safer, wiser option, they are going against everything they have ever been

Rev. Ruth Perry (34:39)
And then they’re faced with a justice system that’s more concerned about making you go away than caring for the vulnerable and caring for the victims of these abuses.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (34:50)
Yes, exactly. Very much so.

Rev. Ruth Perry (34:52)
Well, I feel like we could keep talking forever that we’ve just scratched the surface on this. But what I really

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (34:57)
We have truly. It’s just a just a tiny little sliver.

Rev. Ruth Perry (35:00)
Yeah. And I hope that if anybody resonates with our conversation today, I do hope that they look you up, Sarah. And if they need coaching from you, please seek out Sarah. She’s a good person with a good heart. And

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (35:13)
You’re so sweet. Thank you.

Rev. Ruth Perry (35:15)
I am just really grateful that you would share your time today. I want to give you the last word and I also want you to express again where people can follow you and find your work. And make sure that they do that.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (35:26)
So I guess I just want to say, whether you’re a mom or a protective dad, if you are facing this kind of journey, an unwanted divorce, an unwanted fracture in your family that you never wanted, but you have realized is necessary for safety and in order to be able to thrive with your children.

First of all, you’re not alone. And second, you can do this. It’s gonna be hard. It will be the hardest thing, it will be the second hardest thing that you’ve ever done. You’ve already done the hardest thing, and that is surviving in an abusive marriage in the first place. If you can survive living in one, you can survive leaving one. But you have to remind yourself of that quite a bit.

And if you are going through this and you are just twisted in knots with the expectations of the court system, wondering what to do next, how to protect your children, how to find a lawyer who genuinely fights for your kids, how to recognize the steps in the playbook that your co-parent keeps using so that you’re not blindsided and flattened by things that happen over and over again every single time. That is what Freedom Navigator is here for.

And I would be, I I will give Ruth a link for a free 15-minute consult. Anybody who’s dealing with this, I will give you a free 15-minute consult, hear a little bit about your case, and let you know whether you belong in our support group, our strategic support group that has weekly sessions and templates and tools and tactical guides for the court system, the whole works. Or if you need more one-to-one support because you’ve got a really gnarly case. Both of those options are available. And I’ll be happy to meet with you and no charge because I know that this kind of journey is also financially very, very stressful. So I will give Ruth that you can hop on my calendar and I will talk to you and help you figure out what is the best fit for what you need.

And also, if you are not at that spot, but something’s just not right, and you’re just not sure what it is, something’s not right. I want to invite you to go over to Wilderness to Wild and take our free explainer course. It’s a series of free videos that goes through 18 different areas of life. It talks about and it shows those the red flags of when something’s really unhealthy versus when it’s healthy.

In those different 18 areas of life. And I talk a lot more in depth about those four tools and another four relational dynamics that are present in any abusive relational system. So you can kind of dig into that. There’s the transcripts, all of it is free. It’s there for you at no charge. And you can dig in and see if you recognize yourself and what steps you may need to take.

In order to get good Christ-centered, faith-familiar, and evidence-based, data-driven help. If you’re a helper, a clergy member, a teacher, a counselor, or therapist, I’ll give you a link to that too.

I have a provider toolkit for those who are helpers to help you know how to support clients who are facing these kinds of situations. Because very often those are outside the scope of traditional counseling or traditional pastoral therapy. So I’ll give Ruth those.

And really, though, it just boils down to Jesus wants you to be safe. He wants you to be loving and to be loved. And he wants you to not have to live in fear in your own home. So whatever you need to do to reach that. Jesus is walking by you on the way.

Rev. Ruth Perry (38:57)
Amen. Thank you so much, Sarah. God bless you.

Sarah McDugal/FREEDOMnavigator (39:00)
Thank you.

Did you enjoy this episode? Please subscribe, rate or review us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Substack, and more! Your support means the world. God bless!

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029 I Lisa Sharon Harper on The Very Good Gospel and Fortune

Posted on September 30, 2026 by | Leave a comment
Portrait of Lisa Sharon Harper, a speaker, writer, activist, and artist. She is featured as a guest on The Beautiful Kingdom Builders podcast. Books by Harper, 'The Very Good Gospel' and 'Fortune,' are displayed in the image.
Buy Lisa Sharon Harper’s books! The Very Good Gospel and Fortune and find more resources at lisasharonharper.com

Several years ago, I read Lisa Sharon Harper’s book, The Very Good Gospel, and it rocked my world. She asked the simple question: was the evangelical gospel presentation good news to her enslaved great-great-great grandmother, who had lived a life of subjection and oppression, who had been repeatedly raped and whose children had been stolen from her, time and time again? Would hearing that she was a sinner and that God had to punish her for her sins, but Jesus took that punishment for her and if she believed that, she could go to heaven when she dies sound like good news to someone who had suffered so much in this life? And then Lisa Sharon Harper fleshed out very good news, of God’s plan of redemption and healing for all that was broken by the Fall, a vision of shalom and wholeness and peace for all of God’s creation. I highly recommend you read The Very Good Gospel!

So when Harper’s book, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World–and How to Repair It All came out, I bought it immediately. But it sat on my nightstand for over a year as I worked up the nerve to be heartbroken for her family, and for all of the families that have been wrenched apart by racism in our country. It was another powerful read. Lisa Sharon Harper is a prophet of reconciliation and healing and I pray that those who have “ears to hear” will recognize that in our conversation.

In this episode, we talked about Harper’s faith background and journey to understanding justice. We talked about the biblical concept of shalom and its relevance today; about the historical roots of systemic racism in Christian theology, and how Plato and Aristotle have influenced Western theologians, leading to justification for colonization and slavery. And we talked about the biblical view of equality and justice in Paul’s writings, and the our future hope of reconciliation and new creation as Christians.

I hope you enjoy our conversation, and then be sure to follow Lisa Sharon Harper’s work and continue to learn from her.

Buy The Very Good Gospel and Fortune. Find more resources at https://lisasharonharper.com

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Please enjoy this episode of The Beautiful Kingdom Builders podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Substack, and more!

TRANSCRIPT:

Rev. Ruth Perry (00:17)
My guest today is Lisa Sharon Harper, who has maybe more than anyone else, impacted my own faith as someone who I’ve read and followed for a long time. And so I’m just brimming with gratitude today that you would come on my podcast. And I just want to say right out from the gate that this is something that I know about you, is that you love people.

And that your ministry is coming from a good place. You’re a good person with a massive heart. And you coming here today is just another sign of the goodness of Lisa Sharon Harper. And so I’m thrilled that you would come on today so I can introduce you to my audience.

Lisa Sharon Harper (00:53)
O my goodness. Thank you so much, Reverend Perry. I mean, it’s actually a real honor to be with you and your community today. And I am honored to be a part of your story, any part of your story. Thank you so much for reaching out and I’m excited to be in conversation with you.

Rev. Ruth Perry (01:09)
Well, I had you on to tell your story, but let me just say why you’re such a big part of my story before we start. I’m probably the evangelical church’s golden child. I couldn’t have been a better evangelical. That was how I was raised. Not in the Bible belt, but very influenced by the evangelical culture in my formation years.

I went to a Christian college, Gordon College, to study music so I could do music ministry in the church because I didn’t think women could have this kind of ministry that I have today.

Lisa Sharon Harper (01:40)
Come on.

Rev. Ruth Perry (01:41)
And while I was at Gordon College, they advertised a spring mission trip to go build a house for Habitat for Humanity. And I signed up because I thought the student leader was really cute and maybe I’d get to know him. But they had too many people sign up, so they put half of us into a mission trip to Washington, DC to learn about racial reconciliation. And I did not know that I didn’t know so many things. And I’m continuing to learn. That was 24 years ago. White evangelicals do not know a lot. And one of the

Lisa Sharon Harper (02:11)
Yeah. Yeah.

Rev. Ruth Perry (02:12)
biggest lessons that I learned that week was to listen better. And I learned that most white evangelicals are only listening, of the people that they are friends with and following, one percent is non-white. And so the first

Lisa Sharon Harper (02:24)
Yeah.

Rev. Ruth Perry (02:24)
thing I did 24 years ago is I tried to diversify my algorithm. And I was just listening to all male pastors and book writers. And I started, I don’t remember exactly when I found your ministry, but I followed you and I devoured

The very good gospel in twenty sixteen. I just read Fortune this this summer.

Lisa Sharon Harper (02:48)
Good.

Rev. Ruth Perry (02:48)
But The Very Good Gospel really changed my theology in profound ways.

Lisa Sharon Harper (02:52)
Mm-hmm.

Rev. Ruth Perry (02:53)
And so welcome. Can you tell us, Lisa, a little bit about your faith background and I’m especially interested in hearing about where you came from and how you came to your first pilgrimage, because pilgrimage is a big part of what you do. So could we start there today?

Lisa Sharon Harper (03:07)
Well, that’s really great. First of all, I wanna say I see your Ruby Woo lipstick. Hello. Speaking of pilgrimages, we did this for those who don’t know. We used to do a pilgrimage called the Ruby Woo pilgrimage. It was a women’s empowerment pilgrimage for evangelical women. And we did three of them and they were amazing. And actually we were gonna keep it going, but then COVID happened and you know.

So but my story, I can’t start my story at myself. It has to begin with my ancestors. And the reason for that is because there’s a larger story than just my decision to follow Jesus at the altar in 1983, August 21st, around 9 30 PM at a Sunday evening camp church meeting. That’s where, white evangelicals will begin the story, right? Because that’s the date that I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior.

Or what I like to call the date I jumped the broom with Jesus. But if I’m honest, and also for us to appreciate that moment and what came after, we have to go back because my family is a black family in America. And we actually have a deep and long history with the Episcopal Church in America, the black Episcopal Church in America.

If you’ve read Fortune, Fortune Game McGee was born and raised in 1687 on the eastern shore of Maryland. And her family line goes in a few different directions, and one of those directions goes to two historians have traced her progeny to James Fourten, who changed his name to Fortin, we believe, when he went up north, in order to avoid slave catchers who were looking for Fortunes because they were usually escaped enslaved people. But he became one of the richest people in Philadelphia, regardless of race. He was one of the richest people in Philadelphia, and he helped to fund the abolitionist movement.

He also helped to start the black stream of the Episcopal Church, when Absalom Jones founded St. Thomas’s Episcopal African Episcopal Church here in Philadelphia, the church I now go to. And so he helped to put the seed money up for that. He was one of the founders of that church. And so our history in the Black Episcopal Church goes way back. So my mom, when she grew up, she grew up going to the Black Episcopal Church, to St. Simon’s Church, which is really just a few blocks down from where I live now, in in South Philadelphia. and that was one of the five major black Episcopal churches here in Philadelphia.

My great-grandmother went to St. Simon’s and then other black Episcopal churches. but my mom actually stopped going to church in the 1960s because she was so disillusioned. It was her job in the 60s, with SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to organize churches, to get churches in Philadelphia to host Stokely Carmichael when he came into town. He was the leader of SNCC at the time, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And it was her job to get him pulpits to speak in. And nobody would have him speak after he spoke on black power. When he got up on the bed of that truck I think it’s Broad Street Park down in Mississippi, Money, Mississippi, near Money. And he said, We need to get us some black power. We need to be able to break any political machine that wants to come against us. White America took that as a existential threat. And the black church even in the United States at that time was not fully engaged in actually trying to stay out of trouble.

So when my mom was calling around to churches, there was only one church in all of Philadelphia that would take Stokely Carmichael and place him in the pulpit. And that I believe was the Church of the Ascension. And so my mom was disillusioned and she left the church. And really the Civil Rights Movement became her church. And so I didn’t grow up in church.

So when I found Jesus, I grew up asking the question of who is God and what is prayer and, Who’s this Jesus guy? I thought that Luke was the main man in the Bible because that is the name of the church that where I was I was baptized, Saint Luke. And we went there like every other Easter on a good year, you know. but obviously he’s not the main man. He did write one of the main texts, but he’s not the main man. And so it was in the context of a white evangelical parachurch ministry, Young Life.

And then subsequently a white evangelical little country church, Wesleyan Church in Cape May, New Jersey, where I began to go every week to the youth group and and they discipled me over the course of a year, where I began asking the question of who is Jesus? What is prayer? How do we touch God? How do we reach God? How do we communicate? And that was where I found Jesus. And I ended up walking down the aisle at a Sunday evening camp church service on August twenty first, nineteen eighty-three.

And very soon after that, was handed a tract that told me that I needed to vote for Reagan, even though I was only 14 years old, I couldn’t vote. Where am I who am I gonna vote for at 14 years old? So I got that tract and I took it home to my sister and I shared with her, you know, if Mondale wins, I think it was Mondale, We’re all gonna be rounded up into concentration camps, because that’s what the track said. Mondale is the Antichrist and he’s gonna round up all the children and put them in concentration camps. Well, you know, just come to think of it, there is a leader that we have right now that is rounding up children and putting them in concentration camps. Maybe we should think about the Antichrist in that direction. Hmm, somebody said, hm.

Rev. Ruth Perry (08:24)
Yep.

Lisa Sharon Harper (08:25)
So anyway, right. So I for a long period was deeply like yourself, deeply embedded in the white evangelical church. was in campus mostly parachurch ministries, but also the church. I mean, I went to a United Methodist church before quote before they said before they went liberal. The UMC went liberal.

And I was in Campus Crusade for Christ, back when it was called Campus Crusade for Christ in the 1980s. I was in Intervarsity in grad school and then went on staff with intervarsity in the 1990s. And so I was on staff with intervarsity for 10 years and deeply committed to that evangelical vision of the world.

I had no questions and no qualms, except that by that time I had begun to understand that this race thing is for real and we need to deal with it within the evangelical church. I had not done major reading on it. I’d only read, interestingly, evangelicals’ take on it, which obviously doesn’t give you the whole story. But it was the experience of pilgrimage in two thousand three that changed everything for me.

I had already been leading in racial reconciliation in Greater Los Angeles with Intervarsity, now on staff with them for several years. And we did a pilgrimage called The Pilgrimage for Reconciliation. And it retraced the Cherokee Trail of Tears for the first two weeks and the African experience in America for the last two weeks. We were on the road for a month. Most people don’t do that now. It was a million-dollar project, it was crazy.

And it was Intervarsity. Intervarsity did this. they made this investment because back in the 1990s they actually did get deeply invested in racial reconciliation, but they found that people were beginning to complain that it was pulling them away from the real work of Christianity, which is evangelism. And so they were trying to figure out what’s the relationship between the two. There is a relationship in scripture, and you see that most clearly in ironically, Luke.

Luke four, when Jesus shows up on the scene and it’s his inaugural address and he says, Why have I come? Here’s what I why I’ve come. And he reads from Isaiah sixty one, I have come to proclaim good news to the oppressed, to the captive, release for the captive. the blind will see and the year of the Lord’s favor, which is economic like an economic overturning. It’s where the high are brought low and those who are low are brought high. There’s an evening of the playing field economically in the Jubilee.

And so that was Jesus’s inaugural address. And so I was struck on this pilgrimage that this biblical concept of shalom incorporated that vision that we see in Luke. It held both. It held both the good news of Jesus and the reality that all things must be reconciled, not only back to God, but to each other. That the fall, the fall itself was not only a break between humanity and God, it was a break between all things. All things. And so God’s vision is not so small that he and she only imagines that only humans can be reconciled or should be reconciled to God. God’s vision is expansive. It is eternal. It is infinity. It is all things being reconciled to all things, including our relationship with God.

And and the relationship between the genders and the relationship between us and the rest of creation. No whales need to be saved. No manatee need to be saved. No elephants need to be rescued from zoos. No lions are emaciating in captivity. You hear what I’m saying? You hear what I’m saying?

Rev. Ruth Perry (12:00)
Yeah.

Lisa Sharon Harper (12:00)
And there’s no climate change because in that vision we are stewarding the wellness of all the relationships in creation and the wellness of the systems that govern us, all of us. They govern us in ways that bless all. There is no cursing on the first page of the Bible, which is where this is all grounded. And so that pilgrimage really challenged my simplistic, incredibly narrow view of the gospel that I inherited from Intervarsity and Campus Crusade, mostly Campus Crusade, that four spiritual laws, right? And it challenged it.

It blew it up. And that’s where for the next thirteen years I really wrestled in the scripture through this concept of shalom. And that’s where The Very Good Gospel was born. It was born out of that wrestling. And it was born out of me speaking on it for thirteen years in various ways. And then finally people just started in my last few years, they said, Where can I read this? Where can and I’d have to point them to like ten different books that I was getting it from.

And then finally I just heard God say, Write the book, it’s time for you to write the book. So I wrote it.

Rev. Ruth Perry (13:06)
I feel like the well, I don’t feel like the evangelical culture is individualistic and it does emphasize authority and give hierarchy to some and put others under other, you know.

Lisa Sharon Harper (13:19)
Yeah.

Rev. Ruth Perry (13:20)
And so reading The Very Good Gospel was the first time that I had all of those hierarchies plateaued and recognized where is the resistance in evangelical culture to caring for the planet? Like there’s so many things in evangelical culture that are contrary when you really think about caring for God’s good creation, where we would prioritize capitalism over caring for our vulnerable and marginalized and poor.

People in my area, they had a community wide revival this every year, but this past year the speaker, was talking about false gospels and the very first one is social justice. What is the resistance in evangelical culture to breaking down these hierarchies and to living with the ethic of shalom and abundance for all. Where does that come from, Lisa?

Lisa Sharon Harper (14:06)
Okay, let’s talk.

Rev. Ruth Perry (14:07)
Yeah.

Lisa Sharon Harper (14:08)
Well, that’s a great question, and there is a very clear answer to that. Where does it come from? Randy Woodley, another mentor of mine and dear friend, theologian and practitioner, he traces it back to Plato and Aristotle. And and actually now that I’m reading a bunch of scholars for my own dis p PhD work, a lot of people are doing that. They’re tracing it back to Plato and Aristotle. they had this thing called dualism, right? So Platonic dualism. And in a dualistic worldview, things are either/or. They are light or dark, they are good or evil, they are either or. There’s not gradations, there’s not story. and there’s not nuance.

Rev. Ruth Perry (14:45)
Nuance, complexity, yeah.

Lisa Sharon Harper (14:48)
There’s not flesh, it’s not human, it’s actually a very mechanized, a mechanized worldview. And so the way that dualism has worked, and what Randy talks about is that once you have a worldview where things are either or, and that is your central worldview, and you then apply that to all kinds of things, including the body and the spirit, right?

So there’s either body or spirit. There’s not gradations and there’s not nuance and there’s there’s not and and then you add to that Aristotle’s hierarchies of human belonging, where Aristotle was actually Plato’s student and his accolate. And ten years after Plato wrote The Republic, Aristotle writes on politics, which is actually a compilation of his various lectures right and and writings. But politics he actually says explicitly if you have been conquered you have proven that you were created to be enslaved.

He literally says this. So he is the one who takes that dualistic worldview and puts it on steroids and then begins to bifurcate humanity. Because before that, they were saying, well, humans are above the animals and da-da-da. But now you have some humans are above other humans, right? So the civilized are above the barbarians, right? That was what Aristotle was thinking. That’s the worldview.

They didn’t have a white-black worldview yet. That was the enlightenment period. But then you get down to the enlightenment period and they’re taking that thinking forward, and that’s where you get the Doctrine of Discovery, is in that period, right? So the quote enlightenment period is also from the perspective of those who were conquered in that time, it was the age of conquest, not the age of discovery. It was the age of conquest. And there were ways that the church was complicit in that, the doctrine of discovery.

comes from the church. It actually is founded in the Catholic Church that declared that taking the logic of Aristotle that gave permission for explorers who went out all over the world and discovered land, right, that had uncivilized, unchristian people on it, okay, you can go and take that land and you can enslave the people according to Aristotle. Not according to scripture. According to Aristotle.

And now you get scripture interpreted through the framework of Aristotle. And then you have to ask, all right, what is the authority here? What is the authority that that Pope, Pope Nicholas V, right? What’s the authority he was resting on? Well, he was resting on the authority of Aristotle in order to interpret the Scripture in a certain way, but you can’t when you just look at the basic makeup of that scripture, you can’t do that. Genesis was written by recently enslaved people.

You’re not going to get a justification for slavery from recently enslaved people. Jesus comes from a lineage of serially enslaved people. At the time that Jesus was born, the year that Jesus was born, 500 people were crucified per day, when a centurion marched through the Northern Galilee territory and cru s basically squashed an attempted uprising against Caesar because they were being occupied. So this general crucified five hundred people per day. Five hundred.

So that was happening the year Jesus was born because people were trying to rise up against the oppression, the imperial opp impression against them. And that comes down, it trickles down. Our lead authority then becomes secular philosophy, not actually the scripture, and certainly not Jesus, who proclaimed in Luke 4, this is why I came. And so now we’re interpreting Jesus through the lens of Aristotle, through the lens of of of Romanized Paul.

Right, who actually goes through his own, we see him go through kind of a conversion over the course of his life in terms of who he says is in and who’s out, right? So why does the church so complicit in it? Because the church is all up in it for like the last six hundred years. The church has been all up in it.

Rev. Ruth Perry (18:56)
Yeah. And I hear a lot of fear mongering because now I’ve moved to the South and I live in the Bible Belt. I think it’s nine years this month. Eight years ago I came to a Red Letter Christian revival that you came and spoke at and you prayed for me because I was having a hard time adjusting to living in this area where there’s a lot of Christianity but a lot of blindness. It seems to be, what’s the word? Like intentional blindness.

Lisa Sharon Harper (19:24)
Yeah.

Rev. Ruth Perry (19:24)
We’re in a community that has black neighbors. But how well do we know their story of being here in this town?

Lisa Sharon Harper (19:32)
Well, I think when you move it forward into the American context, particularly the American South. I did some research recently in the course of you know PhD studies on the history of the Southern Baptist Church. I’m no Southern Baptist Church scholar, but it doesn’t take much to do some basic history. And Reverend Richard Furman was the Southern Charleston Baptist Church, the first Baptist Church in Charleston, back in the 1840s. No, 1820s, 1821, 22, when Denmark VC attempted an insurrection. And it was going to be one of the largest rebellions in the South up to that point. There had actually, up to that point, been like a thousand possible attempted rebellions and rebellions across the South from the 1700s forward. This was not an unusual thing.

But Denmark VC was highly organized and he was going to have a major uprising. And it was squashed because someone, another black person actually ratted him out. And so he was beheaded along with the people who were rising up with him, and their heads were put on stakes all over South Carolina. And Richard Furman, the pastor, he went against the tide at the time. The tide at the time, in light of of DeMarc VC’s attempted insurrection, was to say, maybe we need to incrementally do away with this slavery thing. That was literally what people in South Carolina were saying. Maybe we shouldn’t have this anymore. Maybe we need to, you know, do away with this. Richard Furman, who had seven slaves of his own, he rose up and said, No, we need to entrench it further. We need to get more heinous with them.

Of course, he didn’t use that word, and he is actually one of the people who actually created the more heinous slave codes that came out as a result of that. And he gave the theological biblical exegesis or the argument support or apologetic for slavery. He gave that. And that ended up being the same apologetic that they then used during the Jim Crow era. So that one pastor gave america about about 150 years of evil. And it was only about 20 years that he convened the very first convention of the Baptist Church in the South, there in South Carolina.

And of course the Southern Baptist denomination was born about twenty years later, when the Northern Baptists were now saying, Well, wait a minute, we shouldn’t have this slavery thing and and no, you can’t send missionaries overseas if they hold slaves. And the Southern Baptists, armed with Furman’s theology said yes we can and so they broke off from the Baptists and actually in that period every single denomination in the country, every denomination experienced a split along the lines of slavery. Every denomination did and so when people say well they were just a person of their era no they weren’t they made a choice.

Because there were a good number of people who actually were not for it because of their faith. and the abolitionist movement, headed like spearheaded by the black church, was among them, right? So was leading that charge and and they understood clearly that you cannot you cannot enslave another human being you cannot subjugate the image of God on earth and then claim to follow God. You just can’t do that. So, how do we have what we have today? Richard Furman created this apologetic for slavery. And who did that benefit?

Who does that? It benefits the slaveholder. It benefits the slaveholder’s bank account. That’s what it benefited. They got to have free labor and justify it. And they didn’t only have free labor, they created slave farms. I mean they dug into, they got blood on their teeth for the depth of evil that they participated in. And they did it through the cover that they got from their theological apologetic for slavery. And with blood dripping from their mouths, they then went and preached the gospel in church. They never repented for that.

They went to war to protect it and lost. And then once the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments were passed, they began to understand, you know, there’s consequences for what we’ve done. But then once the compromise of 1876-77 happens, what do they do? They bring back out Richard Furman’s theology.

And they used that as the theological cover for Jim Crow, which literally just continued the culture of the plantation, the white men walking into the homes of black men and and and black families and literally in front of the children and the husbands raping the wives at will. Stringing up and lynching nearly six thousand people over the course of ninety years, not even a hundred years. Six thousand people.

With impunity because it was the theology was so pervasive across the South that it permeated into the judicial system, into the policing, I mean police was actually created in order to entrench it. Right? So how do we have what we have right now? Like how is the church, especially in the South, willfully ignorant because they are doing what they’ve always done. They are spinning the story.

They have spun the story. They have omitted their evil. Why is it that most white people in Tulsa, Oklahoma have no idea that the Tulsa massacre ever happened? Because they were not taught it. They went silent on this day or several days when they went blood dripping from their mouths. And they never told their children that they did that. Now their children don’t know. And they’ve only picked up their politics and so they’re, you know, dedicated Republicans.

Rev. Ruth Perry (25:14)
And more upset about having to take down Confederate statues and the Confederate flag and more upset about transgender people. There’s so many inconsequential

Lisa Sharon Harper (25:22)
So stupid. Stupid stuff.

Rev. Ruth Perry (25:24)
things that they just stay angry about

Lisa Sharon Harper (25:26)
Yeah.

Rev. Ruth Perry (25:26)
so that they don’t have to face the truth. But the truth sets us free.

Lisa Sharon Harper (25:29)
Exactly. It’s like, why? What is it? Like, why can’t people just say, We were so wrong. We were just so wrong. And that’s okay. We’re not lesser human beings because we were wrong. We were just wrong. And we did wrong. And now, you know, things need to change.

I mean this is I think this is literally the big question of the day. But here’s what I think about that. I think that the reason why it is so hard for white Christians to face slavery, like really face it, what it really was, and the reality of it is because repentance is a small death. You know, I talk about that in The Very Good Gospel. It’s a small form of death. It’s death to self. It’s death to the rightness of the self. it’s death to ego. It’s it’s death to the vision of dominance.

And if you believe, which I do believe this this is a core belief of people of European descent, and I say that specifically European descent because i it’s not held within indigenous peoples around the world. But a core belief of people of European descent is that to be well you must dominate. And I think that comes from Aristotle, Plato.

Dualistic thinking, either/or winner/loser thinking. You know, everybody’s trying to figure out we how do we dig our way out of this? I really do believe the answer is in our faith. It is repentance, it is confession of the truth. And by repentance what I mean is not just saying I’m sorry, but to literally give reparations, to repair what was broken, to repair the imbalance of power, to share power.

But I think that there is this fundamental belief in people of European descent that power cannot be shared, that either you will dominate or you will be dominated. Because that was the experience in Europe for millennia, right? Like they literally did go for millennia, multiple millennia, dominating each other. That was the thing. But there are people groups, there are regions of the world like where domination was not necessarily the thing. It wasn’t the goal. It wasn’t it was just to live and to live in harmony actually. Again, that’s something that I learned from my mentor and friend, Randy Woodley, that the ethic of indigenous people is actually harmony. It’s not winning. It’s harmony. And so we can all learn from that. And by indigenous I don’t just mean

Native American, I mean people who are indigenous to their land all over the world. I mean the Sami people up in northern Europe, and the Celtic people, and people of every African nation, the Aeroba, the Igbo. I mean, these are ethics that are held almost nearly universally within indigenous peoples. And it is when you break the relationship with land, when you leave your land in order to go out and dominate the other, that’s when that is broken and that’s what Europe did. That’s why you I think Europe has a unique responsibility for people of European descent have a unique responsibility for the ethic of domination that permeates our world today. Because y’all won. You won.

Rev. Ruth Perry (28:43)
Yeah.

Lisa Sharon Harper (28:44)
Yeah.

Rev. Ruth Perry (28:44)
So good theology restores and reconciles and leads to abundance and healing and beautiful things? the fruit of poor theology is bad. And we can see the fruit. Today we see it in the concentration camps and the people being unlawfully detained and held and people dying in our streets, and we see it in USAID being cut and millions of people that are gonna die from that, and the Palestinians that have been genocided, and I mean there’s so many examples of ways that poor theology has led to death and destruction. And the

Lisa Sharon Harper (29:16)
Yeah.

Rev. Ruth Perry (29:16)
fruit is there to see if you can be open to seeing it and experiencing that death of repentance. Can you make a biblical case for Shalom and this theological framework of abundance and no hierarchies and all of The Very Good Gospel. Yeah.

Lisa Sharon Harper (29:31)
Yeah. Talk about The Very Good Gospel. I mean, here’s the thing is that, you know, one of what I’ve learned about Shalom is that as I talked about earlier, we were created for overwhelmingly good relationship and relatedness between all things. That’s what we were created for. And that meant that there was blessing and no cursing. And I believe that the scripture in the first chapter of Genesis is through an epic poem explaining to us what we were created for and how we were created to be in relationship with each other.

And we get another account of creation in Genesis two. It’s much more intimate. It’s God’s hands and the muck, right? It’s, you know, literally God creating human from the earth. And and we see a much more detailed, it’s not epic poetry anymore now, it’s story. And in that story, we see that the climax of the story is actually the flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone, and the first creation of community on Earth, which is Ish and Isha, and that the human now has community and we are bound to each other.

And then you see the fall. And in the fall, what happens is that each of those relationships that God had just declared overwhelmingly good, a chapter and a verse ago in chapter one are all torn down. That’s the fall. They fall down. Those relationships fall down. And they fall one by one, starting with the relationship between us and ourselves, when we run and we hide from God, that’s shame entering into the world and and our relationship with God falls in that same moment, you know, when we’re hiding from God. And then our relationship between the genders just crashes to the ground when the man points at the woman and says, She made me do it, right? And now the woman is going to yearn for her husband, even though being with her husband is going to make her come to near death and and death in some cases in childbirth, right?

And even after having that child and suffering all of that pain, she will forget the pain and still go back to her husband and have to have pain all over again. This is the fall. This is the natural consequence of when we come out from under the covering of God. When we come out from under the call to steward the overwhelming wellness of all the relationships on earth. And how did we do that? We didn’t listen to God.

God said, don’t eat of the fruit of this tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And I don’t necessarily think that this is something that happened in history. When I now read the scholars, they actually believe that there’s lots of different understandings of what that means and what were they trying to communicate? But one thing I do know is they were trying to communicate truth.

So it may not be fact the way we understand fact and history today. History didn’t exist back then. History is again an Enlightenment era discipline, the way we understand it today, the recording of things that happened as they happened, through you know a particular lens. But back then they were not trying to record what happened, they were trying to share truth.

That was the goal of these texts and the moment of telling the stories and songs and the poems. And so the question I’m asking then is what is the truth that is being communicated through that Genesis 2 and Genesis 3 account? Well, the truth that is communicated is that God is God and we are not. That we are created in relationship with God and each other and the earth.

And that that relationship is broken when we grab at our own peace at the expense of the others. When God said, don’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that knowledge was not just head knowledge. It’s literally kinetic in the body knowledge, experiential knowledge. So then I’m asking, how are they experiencing evil? How are they experiencing good and evil? Well, they’re experiencing it by not trusting God. First and foremost.

When God said, Don’t eat of the tree, that that command in itself gave them an opportunity to trust God and not eat of the tree or not trust God and eat of the tree. They chose not to trust God, and that broke relationship with God. And you can’t have shalom without God.

Because God is the author of Shalom. So after that, the natural consequence when we don’t trust God and God’s way to peace is that we lose peace. ‘Cause all that we can get for ourselves is broken peace because we are not God. So that’s when we see all of those relationships fall, and it’s like a snowball that grows like a becomes an avalanche, right? And it starts with that shame entering the world, but it ends with colonization and imperialism just fourteen chapters later.

Right, so you go from shame entering the world in chapter three to the relationship between humanity and creation and men and women and the agenders breaks and and then death enters the world and we’re driven from the garden and then the relationship between families breaks because of you. By the way, they are named Adornment and Shadow. So right there and it’s amazing, right? In Genesis 4, this is like what page 4

Rev. Ruth Perry (34:28)
man. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Lisa Sharon Harper (34:32)
of the Bible, patriarchy enters the world. And it’s a break. It’s so far from naked and unashamed and clinging to one another. Now you have adornment and shadow.

on the fourth page of the Bible. And that is not God’s prescription for goodness. That is the consequence of grabbing peace in our own way. And then you see the Tower of Babel and the confusion of languages, which leads to ethnic enmity. And just a couple of chapters later leads to colonization. One king trying to exact his will over several smaller kings. And that’s where you get the first mention of the word war.

First mention of war. You know, fourteen chapters after Tov Meod, very good. So Shalom, the biblical concept of Shalom is grounded in that first chapter and second chapter of Genesis, where we see what overwhelmingly good related in relationship looks like. And it is restored to us when we follow God and God’s way. It’s the ethic, it’s how we live in the world together. It’s whether we are living our lives in ways that mend the broken relationships rather than capitalizing on them.

Rev. Ruth Perry (35:45)
It’s so powerful. I’m just thinking about the journey you went on as you wrote Fortune and

Lisa Sharon Harper (35:47)
Fortunate. Yeah. Yep.

Rev. Ruth Perry (35:51)
looked into your family’s history here in America and in the South, and all the ways that the world was designed and the systems were constructed to keep those relationships broken and to keep people under oppression. What was the spiritual and emotional impact of that journey for you.

Lisa Sharon Harper (36:10)
My goodness. I have to tell you, it was incredibly hard to write that book. I mean, it was incredibly hard for multiple reasons. Number one, it took thirty years of research. and I did not start the research thinking I was gonna write a book. I was really started the research as a black woman just trying to figure out who am I. I didn’t know the names of my great grandparents, except for one. I knew the name of one great grandparent and met her, like knew her as a as a child. but didn’t know anything beyond that.

So started the research with my mom. My mom actually is the one who went to the National Archives and was searching for this person and that person. And then in the early 2000s, I started to join her in that effort and started asking questions in the early 90s, but really joined her as an as a genealogist for our family in the in the early 2000s. And I was just boom, like I was overtaken by, wow, this is incredible. You know, a Gen Xer, I am the first generation to be able to know where we come from as African Americans because of DNA. Like that is a science that my mom did not have, my grandmother did not have. They did not know that we come from the Yoruba people and the house of people of Nigeria. When you trace it back through my matrilineal line, my mom’s mom’s mom, going back a thousand years, that’s where we were. We were with The House of People in northern Nigeria. We were with the Yoruba people in southwestern Nigeria.

Like when I first did my DNA and and it came back, obviously the thing that’s a little bit ironic about the whole DNA thing is that that technology is advancing all the time. It’s getting better and better and better and crisper and crisper. And so, the DNA story that shows up in our little pie charts when you when you send away for it and it comes back, it it changes. It gets more and more detailed and and even corrected over time. But I’ll never forget the first day that I got mine. I got it and I wept because it was clear to me in my body.

In fact, I don’t think it was only me that was weeping. I think it was all the ancestors who make up me, who literally, literally are me. My DNA is their DNA. I think they wept with me in that moment because it was a deep, deep weeping, because it was the first time that we knew where we were from. There is a healing work that comes when you are able to be grounded on land, know what land you are from. Because in that you don’t only know the land, you know the story, you know part of your people’s story. So I don’t know the ancestors’ names that came over. I haven’t d deep enough research like, you know, Alex Haley to go back and find my Kunta Kente.

But I do know Hannah Reynolds is the farthest back I can go on my mom’s, mom’s, mom’s matrilineal line. And so her ancestors stretch back to the Yoruba and Hausa people. I do know what happened to Nigerians. And to the Senegalese, which are also mixed up in my in my DNA, that Sambo Game, Fortune’s father, was from Senegal and it shows in a DNA. There are several people in our line that were Senegalese.

So that’s a story. That’s actually a traceable story. I can learn what happened to the Senegalese. I can learn, what ships they were brought over on. We actually know that now.

And so without knowing their names and their micro stories, I can know the macro story of what happened to my people. And that grounds me. That can ground me. Because until then, and let me just say this is really important, until I had that story, my experience of being a black person in America is very similar, interestingly, in this way to being a white person. That my

value, my purpose is only defined then by my blackness or your whiteness. And whiteness and blackness were created in order to define who has power and who doesn’t. Who has the power to own land and who doesn’t? Who has the power? Who has the right not to be enslaved and who doesn’t?

Who has the right to vote and who doesn’t? Like who has the ability to exercise agency in the world and who doesn’t? And theologically then speaking, who is human and who isn’t? Because what it means to be human is to exercise agency. To exercise dominion in the world. That’s agency. And so as a black woman who wasn’t able to trace my family.

I then needed to prove my worth. I needed to prove my worth based on what I could produce. Because that was how black worth was delineated in a black-white construct. In the antebellum South and in the Jim Crow era, we became as valuable as we could produce. You could produce less, you are less valuable. Literally, you take less money in the trade.

And so to be a valuable black person, I needed to be able produce my bales of cotton per se, right? And for people of European descent, being named white meant that you were placed automatically by virtue of the color of your skin and your ancestry in Europe. Particularly northern Europe.

That you were dubbed of the noble class. In other words, you got the opportunity to become a member of the noble class based on how much money you could gather, how much money you could accumulate. And the way to do that here was by owning enslaved people, right? That was the explicit, like explicit understanding. And so.

The question of whether or not you are a worthy white person. Whether you’re living into your whiteness, living up to your whiteness, or are you a failure as a white person? You know? I think a lot of the people who were out there on the mall on January 6th in 2021 are people who have failed at whiteness.

Right? They are not the ruling class. And they resent that. And they are looking at the other to say, you’re the reason why I’m not the ruling class. I need to subjugate you so that I can rise. Because that’s the logic of domination that permeated Europe. And so when I was writing Fortune, it was hard to write because one, it’s hard to actually have access to these ancient histories, these ancient in our terms in America, hundreds of years, especially for black people. And so I had to find ways to get around that by legitimately studying the meta histories in order to understand at least the circumstances within which my ancestors lived. But it also was really hard the closer I got to my generations because the facts are there and you actually know what happened. And now I as a writer, in order to communicate them clearly to you, I almost have to relive them.

And so it was incredibly painful. It was just an incredibly painful time. I’ll never forget. I’ll never forget. And actually this is ironic ’cause it’s the first chapter. It’s not a latter chapter. And the first chapter as I was researching for it. I’ll never forget the moment when I was doing the research on Fortune and Sarah and their families and how Fortune had several daughters that were also indentured.

And so did Sarah. One of her daughters, she was indentured, and she had children who were also indentured. And it’s like, what’s there happening? Because the law didn’t say that that indentured servitude was supposed to be generational like that. The law was very specific. You’re indentured if you are a servant and you have sex outside of marriage with somebody and you have a child in your indenture. Then you are indentured for a further three to seven years and your children are indentured for XYZ time. And this shifted over the first maybe first decade of these laws being passed around 1700. But it eventually shook out to say that if the father was white then your child would be indentured for twenty one years. And if the father was black, like if if a servant got it on with a a black enslaved man, then her children would be indentured for thirty one years, right? And I started doing the math on

Fortune’s children and how long they were indentured, and then Sarah’s children and how long they were indentured, because they actually do turn up free eventually, right? And it’s like twenty-one years. Twenty one. Which meant they were being raped regularly by their indenturers in order to gain free labor for another twenty one years for the family.

So they were generationally raping and impregnating each generation. And I when I saw that, because I was like, why is Sarah surrounded by women and there are no men in her picture? Like, why is there never a husband? And she was taken to court to be indentured, and her children were also taken to court in each generation to be indentured. And

why are there never any men? Is she in a brothel? Like I really was like, what’s going on here? And then I just started really no, no, no, she’s not in a brothel. She is in like really distinguished homes. Like the Fuchs family on the eastern shore of Maryland. They were gentry class. Like they were literally with William the Conqueror back at the time ten sixty-six, when he came they were at his right hand at that point.

They were indenturing Sarah. Right? Then she has children and they are indentured for twenty one years.

And the DNA. I traced it like when you could do this, you can’t do this now. They actually stopped this right around the time I was doing my research. They connected us DNA wise to the Fuchs family. Like I had Fuchs DNA in me. And that’s when I realized, my God. Well now they capped it. You can only go back five generations now. Right. They won’t let you see beyond five generations of your DNA. Who does that benefit?

Who does that benefit? So it was emotionally difficult to do the research. But I just felt and knew this is necessary because you have to know the truth to tell the truth. You’ve gotta seek the truth to know the truth. So I had to keep going. And I’m glad I did. And what I found in that research was that the remedy

Is right there in the center of our faith. It is the resurrection, it is the cross, it is Jesus who gives us the power to reverse the fall. Jesus conquered death. Jesus began to reverse the relationships between men and women. And we see that even in Paul’s epistles, who in some cases is saying, Don’t let women speak, but actually, in most cases, he is

lifting up and championing the women who are in the ministry, naming them first between their husbands and it like the women were the leaders, actually. you know, he names Junia, who is an apostle, he names her as an apostle, a woman. What does that mean? It means that she was leading the church an entire city. Like that’s that is a reversal of Lamak with his two wives.

Right? We see Paul again, pushed by his faith in this Jesus, this this brown colonized man who beat death, he then writes to an enslaver telling him to free his slave because his slave Philemon is now equal.

He says in Galatians that if you have been baptized in Christ, there is no longer slave or free, male or female, Jew or Greek. In other words, your lens that empire has given you, really, the lens of dualism, the lens of either or, the lens of domination, it gets washed in the water of baptism. It gets washed away. And all you you see when you come up is the image of God, the call of each and every person to exercise stewardship of the world, to be able to exercise agency in the world. And that means that slavery must go. That means that subjugation must end. That means there is no longer Jew or Greek. There is no longer slave or free. There is no longer male or female. And that doesn’t mean that these people don’t exist. It means that the logics of domination do not exist within the kingdom of God. So you cannot be a citizen in the kingdom of God and operate according to the logics of domination.

You just can’t.

Rev. Ruth Perry (48:02)
And our hope is that Jesus is going to return and we’re gonna live in a new creation where all of the divisions have been healed and everything that the fall broke is going to be restored. And so we can get on board now in that ministry

Lisa Sharon Harper (48:15)
Come on.

Rev. Ruth Perry (48:16)
of reconciliation. Why wait? You know, this is what we look forward to. We don’t want to be at enmity with our neighbors. We want to love them and want for them what God wants for them.

Lisa Sharon Harper (48:24)
And let me just say, we don’t want to be at enmity with God.

Rev. Ruth Perry (48:27)
No.

Lisa Sharon Harper (48:27)
You don’t want to be at war with God. Because when you participate in the subjugation of the image of God on earth, you are actually waging war against the kingdom of God on earth. Because the image of the king in ancient times was a marker of where the king rules. And the image of God is in each of us.

So when you subjugate another human being, you are subjugating the image of God. I think that’s how God sees it. I think God understands that you are waging war against God. So what is it going to take then for us to lay down our arms against God? I think it’s gonna take repentance. It’s gonna take baptism.

Rev. Ruth Perry (49:05)
I think that’s where we need to end today. I want people to sit with that or reflect on that. I want people to read Fortune and The Very Good Gospel

Lisa Sharon Harper (49:10)
Yeah.

Rev. Ruth Perry (49:14)
and to follow you. Where’s the best way to follow you, Lisa?

Lisa Sharon Harper (49:17)
The best way to follow is on Substack.

Rev. Ruth Perry (49:19)
Okay.

Lisa Sharon Harper (49:20)
Now Substack will get you linked to everything else, right? So my Instagram page is also a great place to be. And also of course Facebook, all the socials, LinkedIn, all the rest. But Substack is where you’re gonna find my writing. It’s where you’re gonna find out about things that are happening and offers and so Substack at Lisa Sharon Harper and you’ll find everything you need there.

Rev. Ruth Perry (49:39)
Thank you so much for coming on my podcast and sharing such an important and powerful message today. God bless.

Lisa Sharon Harper (49:45)
God bless you. Thank you.

Did you enjoy this episode? Please subscribe, rate or review us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Substack, and more! Your support means the world. God bless!

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028 I Detra Thomas on Reclaiming Identity: A Journey from Patriarchal Faith to Personal Freedom

Posted on September 23, 2026 by | Leave a comment

When Brandon Stanton of Humans of New York released a fifteen-part series telling Detra’s story in 2022, I was riveted. I kept refreshing HONY, cried tears of empathy and recognition, and couldn’t stop thinking about Detra long afterward. So I was delighted when she accepted my invitation to TBKB podcast to share her story with you.

In this episode, Detra Thomas shares her powerful journey of escaping a patriarchal, abusive marriage rooted in religious conditioning. Her story highlights the importance of faith, resilience, and finding one’s true foundation in God. If you’ve wondered how common The Pastor’s Wife story is, take it from Detra: she hears from women who have walked the same horrible path all the time. Patriarchal religion is DANGEROUS for women and children. The fruit is rotten and the tree needs to be removed from the roots up.

Visit detrasstory.com to read HONY’s series on Detra, and purchase her signature cigars! And be sure to follow Detra on Instagram as well.

Please enjoy this episode of The Beautiful Kingdom Builders podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Substack, and more! 

TRANSCRIPT:

Rev. Ruth Perry (00:15)
My guest today is Detra Denise. She was featured by Brandon Stanton on Humans of New York four years ago. And I remember the day that your story was published, I kept refreshing Humans of New York and I was so impatient. I was spellbound by your story and just really astounded and amazed by it. And so I’m so thrilled that you would come on my podcast, Detra, today. Thank you so much for being here.

Detra Thomas (00:40)
Thank you for having me and thank you for reading the story. You’re not the first person that has said they kept hitting the refresh button and it always kind of makes me giggle inside because I always wondered if it’s the runaway pastor’s wife smoking a cigar in Harlem or just exactly what it was. and it wasn’t until he let me read the story like two or three days before it came out and I sat down and read it and I was bawling by the time I was done. And he was like, is it that bad? And I said, No, I had no idea I had done all that. because when you’re living it day to day, you’re just trying to get through. And so his story really gave me a perspective of, hey, I’ve been hard at work here, and I’ve been doing some good things. Yeah, I was tired and didn’t know if I was gonna make it, all that, but yeah, his story really helped me. But I always get tickled when people say, I was hitting the refresh button over and over and over just to see what was gonna happen next.

Rev. Ruth Perry (01:33)
It spoke to me on multiple levels, but I related to your story as a pastor’s daughter myself in the Baptist faith, a different denomination but similar backgrounds. And I related to a lot of the influences that you mentioned. And it related to me just the whole process of undoing patriarchal faith and building your own identity from scratch. And so I think a lot of people that follow my Facebook page and my blog and now my podcast have a similar background where they’re coming from a patriarchal faith and they’re reckoning with the damage of that and trying to heal from it. And I think sharing our stories is so important. So can you take us back to the beginning to Little Detra? And where did you

Detra Thomas (02:16)
Ha ha.

Rev. Ruth Perry (02:17)
grow up and what was your faith background and your childhood like?

Detra Thomas (02:21)
I was born in Arkansas and that’s where I lived until a little bit after I got married. We lived in Memphis, Tennessee, three and a half years, which is just right there by Arkansas. But Arkansas was where I was born and raised. And I’m the oldest of four children. My dad was a pastor, mom was stay at home. She worked very hard. She worked diligently to clothe us and feed us because, there wasn’t much money and she was as I got older and she began to teach me, my mother was incredible at finding deals. My favorite sweater came from Salvation Army. She paid a quarter for it. It was absolutely beautiful. But my mom wasn’t just trying to find an article of clothing to put on my body. She was trying to find something that complimented me. And she had that eye. So, I didn’t realize how poor we were till much later in life.

But I grew up in the church. I when I was fourteen, my dad assigned me a class to teach. He assigned me a bus route. I was, I would go type the letters to the visitors. I I would drive him on visitation, I would drive him to visit the hospitals. He hated being alone. He’s he is a narcissist. So that’s how I grew up was, in ministry. I had every church members’ phone number memorized, he’d snap, Detra, get so and so on the phone. I would call the number, usually the wife would answer and I’d say, hey, so and so. Daddy wants to talk to brother so and so, hand the phone.

And I remember when I went to college and I came back home after a few weeks, and I have a sister and two brothers under me, and he said, I really miss you. He said, I tried to get my sister to call somebody and she goes, Well, what is the number? And he goes, Well, it’s two four seven two what? Two what? And he just said, I’m just doing it myself. So I had that ability, so I was very involved in church work and loved it.

Went to college at a little bitty tiny Christian college and had a full scholarship to sing. And we practiced. We would show up a week before college and spend eight to ten hours a day rehearsing. And then we traveled in a van around Arkansas and some Texas, states that kinda touched and were close. We would travel every weekend.

So I carried 18 to 20 hours while doing 78 concerts a year. Plus, because I was so poor, I worked in the student center. So I was very, very occupied and still was in full-time ministry, even though I’m in college, it’s full-time ministry. And married a guy from that college. And what was interesting is all of our parents had gone to that college. So our moms and dads knew each other, his dad was a pastor.

So I just perpetrated the life I had had, and I was born to a man who pastored in the Baptist Missionary Association of America, the BMA of A, BMAA, but he was an independent Baptist at heart. So he would go to all the independent Baptist conferences, like Jack Hiles. and that was the mentality he had, authoritarian. So I’m a firstborn. Firstborns relate to authority. So I didn’t have any trouble with this, and just fingers were snapped and I did and jumped how high and that’s how I was raised.

So my mom and dad, when I was 10 years old, went to IBLP, Bill Gothard’s Seminar, Institute and Basic Life Principles. So I was raised under that. And even though for the scandal that that is, the horror that is, there are some nuggets of good things in there. And I managed to take some of those good things, that have helped me in my life. There are some horrible things.

So that’s how I was raised. A woman is born for the man, whether it’s her dad to be under his authority and do what he says, and then the man she marries, and I can’t do anything unless I have their permission and blessing. So it was that’s all I knew.

Rev. Ruth Perry (05:57)
So you had a deep purpose and meaning in your ministry of the church. And you love the church from an early age. And it sounds like you’re a real go-getter and a overachiever and a overperformer. And that’s the kind of personality of someone that attracts a narcissist, I think. They’re looking for those real bright lights that have so much to offer the world. But what did you want to be? When you went to college, what were you dreaming for your future?

Detra Thomas (06:23)
My plans were to go back and teach at this little Poduk ACE school, and and in fact, my third year, the the pastor of that church and the principal of that little school showed up at my college. I didn’t even know they knew where I was, to say, Detra, hey, we’re waiting on you. And I had just gotten engaged. I said, Well, I’m getting married. So that was my plan. I had no aspirations because I was told I couldn’t have any.

Rev. Ruth Perry (06:47)
Yeah.

Detra Thomas (06:47)
Anyway, that was it.

Rev. Ruth Perry (06:48)
So what was the courtship like with your husband?

Detra Thomas (06:51)
When I went to college my dad told me I could never be alone by myself with a guy. So there was no dating. and courtship wise, I mean he just came to me and a he well actually called my dad one summer and asked if if he could date me and my dad said, Well you’ll have to ask her.

And he knew that I couldn’t single date. And I worked in the student center. He’d already graduated. So he would bring chips and dip, and he’s a little black and white TV. We’d sit in the student center, eat chips and dip, watch TV and me taking care of people. And that was kind of our courtship, that there wasn’t any dating. There wasn’t any.

Rev. Ruth Perry (07:23)
And then how long between meeting him and getting married?

Detra Thomas (07:26)
I met him my freshman year. Well I met him actually on senior day in April of seventy-eight. And then we got married in eighty-one. So he was in his third year when I entered. And he finished college, went on to be on staff at a church. I got married after my third year. And then I took my last year. It took me two years to finish that last year, but three years.

Rev. Ruth Perry (07:49)
So you get married and how quickly does the mask fall?

Detra Thomas (07:53)
In three weeks I wanted it out. It didn’t take long. And I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong. All I knew is everything in me was screaming. Everything in me was wanting to run. Everything in me was just like something. This isn’t right. The sentence I kept saying in my head is this isn’t what I signed up for.

And as I tell the story, I put my laundry basket on my hip. He’d come home for lunch, he went back to the church and I went to the central area to do laundry in our apartment division. And I was just I was like, God, I gotta figure out what to do ’cause, this is bad. I can’t handle it. And as I just pondered it out and focused on that entirely.

I just could, remember my dad telling me over and over, when you get married, you gotta marry somebody who can conquer you because you’re too strong. And I was a firstborn. I would ask questions. I never rebelled a day in my life, but when you’ve got a bullshit meter in you and you kind of cock your head and you’re like, something’s not right, and you just out of curiosity, not trying to be judgmental or critical, you ask a question. These type of men don’t like that.

And so that’s how I was raised. I couldn’t call my dad because he had told me I had to be conquered. And I believed every word that came out of my dad’s mouth. I haven’t spoken to my dad in eleven years, but I can tell you, I love my dad. I’m not mad at my dad. My dad is just who he is. And I’m not gonna be around who he is and what he does to me when I’m in his presence. So

And then, the week before I married, my mom told me, Hey, marriage is forever. And just so you know that if there’s trouble between the two of you, we’ll take him, but we won’t take you. And so I knew there was no reason to call for them to come get me. So, in my little worldview and praying about that, when I put everything together, the problem was me because scripture talks about submitting. And I realized, okay.

I just need to submit and be his wife, not a wife. He seemed to have some little nuances that were interesting. And I just thought I need to submit and be his wife. And so for 32 and a half years, that’s what I did. I gave it my all. I loved this man. I loved being his wife.

If you do a study on personalities and strength and weaknesses, we were almost 100% a perfect blend. My strengths were his weaknesses, his strengths were my weaknesses. And we were a great blend. We worked well together. We produced great things together. And I loved him. I loved the work in the church. I loved him.

The problem was in his mind there was never anybody but him. And when he would plan things, like at the church, he would plan things. He would just say, This is what we’re gonna do. And I said, Well, who’s gonna do that? Well, I don’t know. And I can remember one fourth of July, he decided that he wanted red, white, and blue bunting hung between all the columns in the church and the auditorium.

And I was like, well, and because I still wanted to make him a success, I said, well, let’s go to Walmart and buy the fabric. And on Saturday, I don’t remember, probably I made 10 buntings that were probably eight foot long apiece, and got the fabric cut, sewn together, and then he hung them. But that’s what I did because I loved him, and he was a creative. He had the ventriloquist puppets. He was a singer. He could play instruments. I felt so favored to be married to a man that creative. I didn’t know I was creative. I didn’t know I was talented. Because from a young age, my daddy snapped his fingers and said, Sing a special, play the piano, teach a class, run the bus route. It was what was in aid in me. I didn’t nobody ever told me I did a good job.

I did not know. So I assumed I was very favored to be married to this man and help him achieve what he would mouth but had no intentions of ever doing, if it wasn’t for me.

Rev. Ruth Perry (11:32)
I think that it’s so sad that you could have had a really beautiful marriage, but because of your theology and the theology that you grew up in, the culture that you both grew up in, it conditioned you to have this dynamic instead of a healthy dynamic. Not just that you were conditioned when men snapped their fingers that you would jump and ask how high, that was your training that you received, and that’s how you functioned. But then your husband was also conditioned in the same culture where men got to snap their fingers and got to expect people to jump.

Detra Thomas (12:03)
He was. Now his dad was totally different. The dynamic in his home was different. His mom was a school teacher, so she had a job outside of the home. They had a TV, we didn’t have a TV. So the kids could come in, watch TV, they got to go to the kitchen and fix whatever they wanted to fix. There was no snacking in my house and I’m not saying that in a negative way, but mom cooked three meals a day and and occasionally, she would fix us a snack, but we weren’t allowed free reign in the house. Our house was orderly.

And so we were raised both pastors’ kids and different, but still that I know his mom has told me she would find out that they were moving to another church because one Sunday he ran out from the pulpit, by the way, this is my last Sunday, we’re gonna be moving to Sunso. He never talked over anything with her. No, she and I did not discuss that much, she would just occasionally say something. And I loved my in laws. They didn’t like me. But I loved my in laws. She was very controlling and she was something.

And when I would go, my father in law, he would ask me the same three questions every time. When I got there, he would ask me the exact same three questions and when he I answered them, he was done with me. And for years, my first Christmas with them, I we had Thanksgiving with my family, Christmas with his, and we would rotate every year. Now all the other holidays, his mother required us to be at their house.

But the first Christmas I couldn’t wait, and they had this beautiful regular Christmas dinner, they had beautiful tree. My dad was a scrooge about Christmas, and I remember after the meal, his dad saying, Okay, I want a picture of my kids. Well, my house, when I got married, he was now my mom’s kid. That’s how that was, and we had already had that, so I got in the picture and he said, No, Detra, I said my kids.

And I remember I’d been married probably 10, 12, 15 years, and he was chairman of the Bible department at this little college. And I went and saw there were no pictures of me. There were pictures of my children, the man I was married to, everybody else in the family, but none of me. And I don’t know, I got real sassy one day. And I said, Let me tell you something. You either get a picture of me in this office, or I’m gonna pick out a picture of me and I’m gonna blow it up and frame it and put it in here. And the look on his face, he goes, No, sister, no, sister, don’t do that.

Don’t do that. But every year how he would frame it is I want all of my family under the tree and he would take pictures. And one year there was a guest there and the guest said, Hey Detra, he called. I said, I learned I’m not part of this family. So there he would take a picture of me and the man I was married to and my children, but I was not allowed to be in any pictures with anybody else.

Rev. Ruth Perry (14:35)
That’s so heartbreaking.

Detra Thomas (14:36)
It is, and I was just happy to be a part of, when I would go, what do you want me to do? How do you want it done? How do you want things in your kitchen handled? What can I do to help? All those type of things. I just look back and think, well, I’m not gonna tell you what I think because I’m gonna use New York language and I’m I’m not gonna say what I really think.

Rev. Ruth Perry (14:55)
We’ll fill in the blanks for you.

Detra Thomas (14:56)
Thank you. They’re a bunch of blankety blank blanks, that’s what they are. And just mean. Just mean. And there was no reason for it. The last words that she told me I kind of put my foot down and said, unless and things change, I’m not participating with them, I’m not inviting them to anything. But her words to me were, I don’t like how many children you’ve had. I don’t like that you homeschool them, but I don’t like that they’re on the road. If I had my way, things would be a whole lot different. And I was like, who do you think you are to think you get a say?

And how I raised my family. Was your mother-in-law in your business telling you how to raise your family? She wasn’t. Her mother-in-law was deaf. But I guarantee you, she would have told her to get lost, But it was just the constant gaslighting. And if you love me, this is what she said. If you love me, Detra, you will do this. And I would do it every time and tell her, mark me down as I love you.

I didn’t know what gaslighting was. But when you love so hard, and I’m happy with breadcrumbs, I really am, and I’m trying to change that. But when you’re happy with breadcrumbs and you look back and see they even didn’t want to throw you breadcrumbs. It is heartbreaking. It is heartbreaking.

Rev. Ruth Perry (16:02)
Yeah, as you were describing their family dynamic, I’m thinking to myself, Well, that doesn’t sound like the fruit of the spirit. These are

Detra Thomas (16:09)
No.

Rev. Ruth Perry (16:09)
Christians. Where’s the love? Where’s the joy? Where’s the peace and the patience and the kindness and the gentleness? None of that.

Detra Thomas (16:16)
Well, it was a pastor’s home, and I never heard God mentioned or talked about except for prayer before a meal. Never one time. And it was kind of crazy. I guess there was one time she mentioned a health issue and she did mention God one time. Other than that, there wasn’t. And that’s what he was raised in, so he was conditioned his own way, and then our Baptist ranks was very misogynistic, very misogynistic.

So he was going in the flow of what he was raised, plus he had his own nuances of… I don’t know that you can look it up then, but when I went and saw the lady after 32 and a half years of marriage, we talked, she mentioned sociopath, and I looked up sociopaths, and there’s two kinds. My dad was one and I married the other.

And so I would always think, I love that the man I’m married to is not like my dad. Well, they’re both sociopaths, but they’re one is my dad’s authoritarian. I married the charming one, the passive aggressive will kill you slowly day after day while smiling at you, so it was and then also the man I was married to, if you look up a psychopath, they have no emotions. They have no emotions for trauma or broken bones. He had none. And I would try to talk to him about that.

In fact, he had a full length mirror in his our walk-in closet and he was a cartoonist. And because I would talk to him so much about this, because I can’t comprehend this, I can’t comprehend that you don’t care about a broken bone or somebody hurt or you don’t care. In fact you get angry because it has now interfered with what you wanted to do. And I would have to walk a tight rope with him if the children got hurt.

He drew like two little bubbles coming out of his head, and in the big bubble it said, think about others. Because he couldn’t. He literally could not, except when he looked in that full-length mirror and had that bubble there. So

Rev. Ruth Perry (18:00)
Wow.

Detra Thomas (18:01)
And then you put the name of God in the middle of all that. It’s a recipe for a woman who’s naive, a woman who has been raised to enable, a woman who has been raised to believe that God will not bless her or protect her unless she obeys this man, a woman who is a firstborn who relates to authority, and a woman who, with her whole being, wants to please the Almighty. That is a recipe for total destruction.

And I look back and I don’t know how it all came to be, but I was begging God to show me, and it just happened that night. And was I trying to escape that night? No. But that’s what happened. And I’m grateful. I am grateful.

Rev. Ruth Perry (18:41)
This was after thirty two years of marriage. Is that right?

Detra Thomas (18:45)
Well, thirty two years I talked to somebody, but thirty four years when I escaped. Yeah.

Rev. Ruth Perry (18:49)
Can you name some more of the ways that you experienced abuse in your marriage before we talk about your escape? Because I think a lot of people still have misconceptions about what abuse is. We only understand if it’s violent. But there’s a way to be violent without bruising someone.

Detra Thomas (19:05)
Yeah. There were little things. We first got married, I’ve talked about this on many podcasts. He gave me a list of foods that he had to have snacks, a certain one, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. What we had on Monday was repeated on Thursday, Tuesday was repeated on Friday, and I had to sit beside him and eat, and I didn’t want to. And I would tell him I don’t want to. And he informed me that I was his wife and I would do what he said.

When I wanted to try a different hairstyle, my mom had always kept my hair really short. It started getting long because when you gonna cut your hair? I said, I thought I’d grow it out. He goes, You’ll wear your hair how I tell you to wear your hair. And then years later, like 20 years later, I asked him for permission to grow my hair out,

And I said, if I do it with a style, and he agreed. And I was pregnant with child number five. And so I’m I’m growing it out. And it’s probably about this length. And I really didn’t know much about styling hair, but I can fix it and it’s fine. And then it hits humidity and it starts doing all the curls.

Rev. Ruth Perry (19:57)
Yeah.

Detra Thomas (19:57)
And the church ladies were doing a baby shower for me. And so I was telling the women, I said, I’ve been trying to grow my hair because he he really likes it short. And no one thought a thing of it when I said he gave me permission to grow it long. Nobody batted an eyelash at this. And I said, but I’ve decided, I can’t keep it straight. See, I thought curls like this was simple.

That’s out of control, It means I can’t control my hair. I thought it was simple. And I said, So I think I’m gonna go back short. He just knows best. And the head deacon’s wife leaned in and said, We’ve been wondering what you were doing. So it wasn’t just you. Well, this solidified the fact that I don’t know what I’m doing. If my hair has a curl in it, it is simple and I have to obey him. So it wasn’t just him, it was along the way these churches had this mindset, so it was just crazy.

When I look back at it, my dad wasn’t trying to be abusive, He was doing best he could do with how he was raised. My mom willingly admitted all her neurosis, she would say, Detra, I have this, this, and this. But she would acknowledge and own it, and she worked on it, and so it was just this crazy hodgepodge of all these people, this worldview, this religious group weaving together something for someone who just wanted to make everybody happy, and that is I think you you coined me well, overachiever. I just wanted everybody to be happy. That’s all I wanted. So, you can die making everybody happy, and I almost did, yeah.

Rev. Ruth Perry (21:25)
Absolutely. I think they say eighty one percent of autoimmune diseases are in women, even though autoimmune diseases don’t impact one gender specifically. It’s just because women are carrying so much more stress and they’re absorbing the family stress, the stress of others.

Detra Thomas (21:40)
Okay, well, autoimmune, I’ve done a lot of research into that because I have several things. Best I can tell, it is repressed rage.

Rev. Ruth Perry (21:48)
Yeah.

Detra Thomas (21:49)
It’s an anger that you’re never allowed to express because you wouldn’t be a good Christian. All those things. It’s repressed rage. And I don’t think I’m an angry person at all because I swallow it all, but I have learned to forgive, but I think that it is your body creating signs to let you know you’re not handling this well. In other words, you had a fifty thousand dollar emotional event and you only give it fifty-five dollars. We’re telling you the rest of it’s coming due. And that’s what happens. You keep building up these emotional million dollar events and you don’t because you can’t. You’re a woman, one. You’re not a good Christian if you do, two. And three, you can’t do it because there’s nowhere to put it. Nobody’s gonna believe you. No one’s gonna believe you.

Rev. Ruth Perry (22:30)
So what was co parenting like with your ex husband?

Detra Thomas (22:33)
I would tell you it was good because we were a united front, which divided parents is when you get into a lot of trouble. And I liked order in the home and he followed that.

He was raised that there was order with the children, children obeyed, so that wasn’t an issue between us. And we did spank our children, they had to bend over the end of the bed and we spanked their rump.

I you would have to talk to my kids. I don’t think we we were abusive with with it at all. In fact, my second son told me with my baby girl, he goes, She did not get enough spankings, mama. She gets by with too much. But with the more children you have, if these children have learned to be obedient, they kind of follow in line. But I didn’t allow name calling. I didn’t allow kicking and hitting. Now if you want to wrestle, go outside and wrestle. And if someone taps out, you better be.

So we had this healthy playing and interaction and yeah, with seven kids. I had different personalities. I had one that was, kind of sneaky and come to find out he would cry and he’d be lying about stuff. But for the most part the kids got along. I I didn’t I didn’t

identify this horrible behavior, but co-parenting, we did well together, I thought was one of our strong suits. Now he did not like adult children at all. And I would have to step in and say, you can’t do that. Our oldest one joined the Marines and when he graduated from boot camp in San Diego, churches gave us money so the eight of us could fly out there.

So we flew out for family day and then graduation, and then he flew back with us the next day. And when I awoke, so by this time, the man I’m married to is in his 50s, and he couldn’t stand it if the children got any attention. And I would tell him, What? This doesn’t detract from us. Nobody’s taking anything away from you. You’re still an incredible man. I’m just building you’re an incredible man. But they’re adding to us, and he couldn’t handle it.

But the morning after we got back, I awoke to the bed empty and I could hear gut sobbing. Gut sobbing. And I run out to the living room. He’s on the couch, bent over, just sobbing. I think in 34 years, I may have seen him cry two or three times.

And I just ran over to him, I wrapped him up, and I’m like, what’s wrong? What is wrong? I mean, I’m fixing to go handle whatever it is. I said, What’s wrong? And he’s sobbing and he goes, I know this is wrong, which he knew it because I would tell him, what this is wrong. He said, But I’m crying because I didn’t get any attention yesterday, and Matthew got it all.

And I just felt a chill. I mean, I just literally a chill ran over me, and I let go of him. I’d run into this with him, but this was the first time it had been something of this magnitude, and I still cannot comprehend that this six foot six, fifty-something-year-old man is gut sobbing because his son, one of 400 graduates at a Marine, got all the attention and he didn’t get any. I don’t have I don’t have, I can’t…

Rev. Ruth Perry (25:18)
That’s mind blowing.

Detra Thomas (25:18)
It is mind-blowing. And it it is one of the examples of his complete narcissistic, whatever you want to add to that worldview where nobody is allowed to breathe. Nobody is allowed to breathe. And I am thrilled that I am away from that. I’m thrilled.

Rev. Ruth Perry (25:37)
Tell us how you got away.

Detra Thomas (25:39)
I went to see my doctor in Springdale, Arkansas. He was a doctor kind of outside the box, and I just believed God had him in my life for this particular reason. And I began to tell him a little bit about my marriage. I’d been seeing him for 20 years or so. And I said, I’m praying that God will just kill me. And then nobody has to know. None of these people in the churches, my mom and dad, my kids, nobody has to know. Because he didn’t treat everybody else the same.

And I remember my doctor saying, change your prayer. And I quickly looked up and I said, What? He goes, change your prayer. Now I thought I was being quite brilliant, intellectually, philosophical, spiritual, by asking God to just remove me. One move, and you solved the whole problem. And so I was quite shocked. And I said, Change my prayer. He said, Yeah, your body hears you.

And this was the first time I had a clue our words had power like that. And I said, Well, I am dying. I can tell that I’m dying. He said, Change your prayer. And so I left there and I was like, God, if there’s another way, I don’t know what it, I don’t know what it is. It didn’t occur to me to leave. And then as I began to talk to people, four people who had been married over 15, some over 25 years, never been divorced, said, get away from him.

Now, if you want to talk to people who’ve been divorced, get away. That’s another element. I’m not saying that would be wrong, but these are people who didn’t really, quote, believe in divorce, like me, and they’re saying, get away from him.

And so I prayed and I said, God, I don’t know how to leave. In fact, I had a plan in my mind that I was gonna take the suburban, he called that my vehicle, I was gonna put everything in the back I needed to survive, and I was gonna go to the police station and ask how long I could park my car in one spot and where were the best places in town. And I’d picked out parks that had showers where I could get a shower.

I was gonna have a cooler. I was gonna have my clothes. I was gonna sleep in the back seat with a pillow and a comforter so I could see my children. Now I look back at that and laugh because my kids would have been so embarrassed. my mom’s living in her car going around town. I just wanted to see my kids. that was it. I just wanted to see my kids, but I needed away from him. And that was my plan. That’s what I came up with.

And then I just said, God, if you’ll cause a fulcrum, I will do it. Because I can’t on my own. I don’t know how to walk away. I don’t know how to do this. Because there was so much at stake. And so we were driving back and he pulled one of his charming, passive-aggressive husband, pastor, get under my authority moves.

And I’ve been researching psychopaths, sociopaths, and religious abuse. And I was like, it’s just like all the blinders are falling off of my eyes and the fog is leaving my brain. And I’m like, Are you kidding me? And then I reverted back to a true firstborn who believes that God is true and faithful and who doesn’t put up with all these lies. And and I was like, and that’s when I looked at him and I said, You are a son of a bitch.

And I meant it contextuously. I meant it the son of a bitch. And I had had all I could handle. And in fact, I had told him at one time, I’m willing to give my life if you can figure out how mean you are. I’ll give my life. And what? He was willing to accept that. And when I figured out he knew what he was doing, he wasn’t gonna change, and I was like, I’m not giving my life for someone who’s willfully doing this.

This isn’t what God requires of me. So when I called him a son of the bitch, that was the fulcrum. And he was like, I’m fixing to pull over and tell you something. He finally had a sin he could nail on me. And so he was so happy. He pulled over, got in my face, and it was this just feeling inside, this is it. And I got my purse and got out, opened the door, started walking down the interstate.

And I was crying, I was praying, I I had all the emotions you could have, relief, fear, what’s gonna happen, all those things. And I just said, God, I need help. And there was a car pulled over, you know how long it takes to stop on the side of the interstate? Her brake lights were already off. And I saw the car in the distance, and I was like, God it’s probably a serial serial killer, but I don’t care.

That was literally my prayer. I was like, I don’t care. I’m getting in the car. I just wish I knew I could trust them. And when I said that the passenger door opened and this woman got out, and I could just tell she wasn’t a teenager. It was dusky dark, but her hair was past her shoulders, it was blown back in the wind, and she’s walking very purposefully towards me, and we have a distance to cover. The closer she gets, the harder I’m crying.

And she just meets me and turns and slides an arm around my waist and gets my hand. And ma’am, do you want to ride? I said, I do. And she said, God said to stop and pick you up. And I said, I told him I needed help. And for me and my journey with Christ, which has been strengthened so much more because of all of this, I knew that that was true because I had been begging God.

For a year and a half, you gotta show me what to do. And I would never have left. I wouldn’t have done any of these things. But she said, God said to stop and pick you up. I didn’t know this woman from Adam, I’ve never seen her. And she got me in the back and the reason she was walking purposefully is she could see him. He got out of the car when he saw her and he was running to get me. And when she opened the back door to put me in, I didn’t know he was coming. He grabbed me from behind, grabbed my arm. And I turned around and I just looked at him and I and I was done. And I said, I’m gonna call the police, let go of me.

And he goes, Well, I’m gonna call and he did this. I’m gonna call the police and tell them that you’re with somebody I don’t know. And I wanted to say, as usual, you don’t make sense. And I said, Call ’em, just call ’em. Let’s call the police. Let’s have this out here on the side of the interstate. You call the police, and I’m gonna tell them who you are. You call the police.

I don’t know. And he let go of me. She put me in, closed the door, and I am sobbing, distraught. Because it’s like, how am I a woman that’s on the side of the interstate getting away from my pastor husband that I’ve adored? Him trying to grab me. And he told them twice. He goes, She’s fine. We’ve had a fight, but she’s fine and she’s going with me.

And that’s when I said I was gonna call the police. So the woman got in the car and he he’s six foot six, like I said, she’s sitting in the passenger seat, and he bends down and he gets in front of her in her face, and he goes, I don’t even know who you are. And she just very calmly said, I’m a doctor with the Choctaw Nation. So she gives credentials, but she doesn’t tell her name. I look back on it, she was very smart, I’m a doctor with the Choctaw Nations. Those are credentials.

And he said, Well, I’m gonna follow you. She said, You do whatever you need to do. And he gets out, she closes the door, she tells her daughter to start driving. And I’ve since found this woman on the internet with help. I’ve been able to call her and thank her. Her daughter and I visited a little bit on the internet. I just remember when I could stop crying enough to pay attention to what was going on.

They had music playing. I don’t know if it was a CD, if it was the tape, if it was the radio, but it was quite unusual. It wasn’t any Christian music with the rock or the pop or anything. It was an old hymn. And I just remember the hymn that was playing was Jesus, Jesus, precious Jesus, how I’ve trust you or in or. Jesus, Jesus, precious Jesus. for grace to trust you more.

And for me, it was like an invitation. Teacher, you’ve trusted me this far. Keep trusting me. Now her daughter told me, What I remember about you is you sang in the car. And I said, I did what? I do not remember singing, but if it was hymns, that’s just what I do. I sing.

I was so embarrassed when she told me that. I was like, I don’t know how many songs I sang or hymns I sing. But they took me to a hotel. And what happened is he did follow us. And they said they needed gas. And so we pulled over to gas station. He pulled over. And then all of a sudden he just leaves really fast. What I found out later is he went home and began making phone calls and preparing.

One of the accounts I got is when one of the children walked in the house. He was just sitting on the sectional drinking a glass of iced tea, just as if nothing had happened. And anyway, they took me to a hotel. I called one of my sons. I knew his number by heart. I didn’t have my phone. And he said, Mom, I’m gonna get you a hotel. Because the kids had known for a year and a half it had been hellish. I got the blame for that, but it had been hellish.

So that was my escape. And my oldest son was in Oklahoma doing a job and he heard about it. He called, he goes, get in your car. You come to me. So he said, Nobody’s at home. Garrison’s gonna pick you up. He’s gonna get you some lunch, you get your clothes, you drive to me. And so I was with him in the hotel for a while and he lived in New York. He took me to New York.

It was supposed to be a few weeks. It’s been eleven years, but in that moment I lost everything I’d known except the foundation on which I built my life. And I had found that foundation to be unshakable. Unshakable. And people call it deconstruction. And I didn’t hear that term until I was in it. And then I was inundated with messages from people, all this stuff and I didn’t choose to join anything. I was like, I’m not interested in joining another group. But I began to hear the word deconstruction and I understand the concept, but for me, I wanted to say blow the shit up. Blow it up because what matters is your foundation. If you don’t have a foundation that’s solid, that’s where you start. Blow the rest of the shit up because what’s true is going to stay there.

It’s not gonna go anywhere. But it’s like a baseball, The rubber bands, one’s true, one’s a lie, are all melded together. when you try to pull one out, you’ve got a part of another one. So just blow it up and see what the foundation is. And if you’ve got a strong foundation, which I did, somehow it was built on the one true living God.

And then I just started building, and as I in New York prayed, God, can you protect me in 2020 when crime’s going up in Harlem? And, I said, God, I need to know if you can protect me. And these Harlem Cigar Men offered me protection. Who would have dreamed? Who would have dreamed that is how God would step in? And I remember I was somewhere

I’ve been in New York for several years and was at the Harlem Cigar Room. This was before the story, Humans of New York story came out. But I was smoking cigars and and I was at a art show. It was part of the homeless thing I’d been a part of and I’d been invited. I had somehow inspired this art show.

By a photographer who took a picture of me when I was homeless that changed my perspective of myself. And I told him, and he thought maybe I could use my skills in the homeless. And he did a whole art show of people who were homeless, and they were absolutely gorgeous. Smiling, and he invited me to the opening of that, and then I was a part of a panel. So I’m gonna I’m gonna say what I really think here. I’m sorry if it’s offensive, but there was some little Christian old woman who came up to me and

I call them little banny hens, I can’t believe you smoke cigars. That’s how she said it. And rather than knocking her out, I just literally wanted to take my fist and knock her out. I’m sorry, but this is the real. And I thought, how dare you sit in judgment?

Of what you think is best in life or best for me. how dare you? Especially after the journey I’ve had to walk and the prayers I’ve prayed and the answers that have come and this little snitty woman telling me that, with her little tag. I can’t believe he smoked cigars. And I decided to be nice. And I said, Well, let me tell you how I smoked my first cigar.

And I told her, 2020, almost died, the sidewalk cafes, I’m alone, I’ve been working from home, nobody. And my son is worried, crime’s going up in my prayer. And I said, I’m walking twice a week through the sea of men smoking cigars, and they start chatting. And one day they said, We want to offer you protection.

And I said, I called my son and I said, Hey, fly up here. He loves cigars. And I said, I smoked cigars, accepted the protection. And they told my son, you don’t worry about your mama. We’re going to take care of her. Nothing’s going to happen to her. And he started paying my membership. And I smoked cigars. When I got done, this lady, her whole demeanor changed. And she said, That’s one of the most beautiful stories I’ve ever heard.

And I decided to remain because she’s coming from the world, whatever she thinks, and what she’s raised. And I had never smoked anything until I smoked a cigar. I would have wouldn’t have been like her, I would have thought, if you want to smoke cigars, that’s fine. But it is one of the most beautiful stories. It is. And she changed. But I didn’t appreciate her little snide puckered mouth,

Standing in judgment. I can’t believe you smoke cigars attitude. Not even giving it a chance. Here’s my deal. Be curious to at least ask a question. Don’t assume that you know what the other person has been through or why they’re doing something. Ask. Say, well, I’ve never smoked a cigar. What led you to smoke your first cigar? Ask. Be open. Allow room for something other than what you think and your little shriveled up brain cells.

And that I think has been the biggest thing for my journey is as I’ve prayed and asked God, I need a step and watch these steps open up, I would even tell you the homeless shelter was part of that, the things I learned there. And plus, it was a volunteer in the homeless shelter that wrote Brandon. So if it wasn’t for that lowest point in my life, I wouldn’t be at my highest point right now.

So when you can step back and look back and see what I prayed, what has happened, it is a most incredible, crazy, arduous, beautiful journey of the intimacy of the Almighty saying, I’m looking for the heart that’s turned towards me. Her heart is, let me do this right here. And as a result, Brandon wrote the story and I can’t tell you the number of women who write and tell me one of my favorites is a woman wrote me and she said, Detra, my car is packed. And when I get through typing this, I’m gonna push send and I’m backing out and I’m leaving. And she wrote me a couple more times, and evidently a very powerful man, rich man. She was trying to escape doing different things, and we communicated a little bit. And then I wrote her and I didn’t hear from her for a year. And I thought she was dead. And she wrote after a year and she had made it.

Another woman wrote to me on Messenger, and she was a pastor’s wife from the world I knew. She said, Detra, I’m praying for you. And I’ve had some pastor’s wife write me, I need to know everything. And I was like, no, bitch, you don’t. I don’t even respond to them. But this one, I thought, I want to know what you’re praying. I figured I was on the prayer list of every church, across America there. And I said, Well, what are you praying? And she told me what she was praying strength for me, protection for me. It touched me. This woman was not being judgmental of me. She was asking God to bless me.

And then she said, I don’t have your courage, Detra. I don’t couldn’t live in a homeless shelter. And that’s when I began to get a glimpse of there were a lot more women from my world who wanted out and couldn’t. That woman is dead. I think about her often. She’s dead.

Another man wrote to me, and he said, Detra, I read your story, and he wrote a little novella about him and his siblings in the church. And when people write me, I at least do a red heart just to let them know I’ve seen your message. When it first happened, I couldn’t answer individual thousands of messages, but I’ve answered a lot. And his was so poignant, I messaged him.

And I said, listen, thank you for sharing your story. And I’m so sorry. I am so sorry for what happened to you and your siblings. And I said, but I want you to remember this. healing begins with one new thought. It’s not like New Year’s where you make all these resolutions. It begins with one new thought. So start with your one new thought.

And when I sent it, you could tell it was bubbling over here, and I waited, and he said, I cannot believe you’ve written back to me. I’m crying. And he said, I remember from your story you’re mess you’re missing several of your children. And I want you to know, I’m sorry for that, but you’re now mothering thousands of us. And I just started sobbing because I do so miss my five children. I so miss my five children.

And the fact that there are other children who need a mom, who has courage to say, I’m not putting up with this, means a lot to me. I get messages every day from all over the world. I get about 200 private messages a week, most of them from creepy men, let’s be honest, but from women all over the world and some men.

And I’ve just said, God, use my life to tell your story in a way that people know it was you. And that’s what I want, So this, me living in this hotel, I closed on my house Wednesday. I did not mean to become a sobbing mess. is a new season of

I want to show women don’t be afraid of fear. So many women write I got hurt, it was a pastor, da da da da. And they’re holed up somewhere, they’re scared. You can’t be afraid of fear. You just can’t. And the world thinks I’m so brave. I am not. I’m not. I’m just willing to keep my feet moving forward and not be afraid of fear. And so my plan is I’ve got a little bit of time here.

And I’m gonna record an album with my band. I want my original song so I can do a pop-up show when I travel. And I’m gonna pack the back of my truck in a way that I can travel. And then I wanna go visit different states for a month.

One to figure out where I want to live, but also to take the women with me and say, hey, we’re gonna go and right now the plan is Texas for the month of October. One of my followers, we’ve already talked about it. She’s got a place that wants me to do a show. There’s a cigar lounge there. She has a place, a two bedroom cottage, I can stay free for the month. Very interested in helping women like I am. And I will say in a month’s time, we’re gonna build a community.

And I’m not gonna go out on the sidewalks and say, Would you be my friend? We’re just gonna see what happens. I’m gonna go to coffee shops, I’ll go to cigar lounges, and people will just start conversations. And at the end of the month, I wanna have a dinner party with some of the people I’ve met. And just introduce them to each other because I seem to have this habit of meeting people who don’t know each other but are great matches, they just work well together.

And then go to another state and do the same thing and tell women, look, can’t be afraid of starting over. Is it scary? Yeah. Is it hard? Yeah. But it’s doable. And in the process, these adventures, my goodness, the most incredible people I’ve met. I have met the most beautiful, incredible souls and hearts that have just enriched me.

And let me tell you they’re not sitting on the pews of churches either. But they’re kind hearted, they’re generous, they’re honest, they’re authentic, they’re true. They’re not the gossipy little people sitting in the pews.

Rev. Ruth Perry (43:22)
You don’t have any patience with organized religion anymore, do you?

Detra Thomas (43:26)
No. I do not. I don’t have any patience with it. I don’t have any use for it. In fact, I did go to a church for nine months after I got here and was ministered to greatly, mainly because I’m going asking God to show me. Brandon mentioned that church. I didn’t want that church mentioned. He did it at the last minute when he sent that chapter out. He changed it. And I didn’t like that. And that church got a lot of messages. And I hated that.

But no, I so what I did is I I applied for work at Starbucks and they hired me, and they’re open seven days a week. But how simple it is to be open on Sundays. But I needed a job and I was just like, you know what, God, this is my whole lot, this is all I’ve known. And they want to know when I’m available and I’m just gonna tell them I’m available at all times. And I’m asking you in your omnipotence to set my schedule. Because I go to church, I don’t know, is it just because my heart wants to out of duty, what it is, but I need you to guide me through this. I’m yours. I’m not Starbucks’, so you set my schedule. I didn’t have a Sunday off for two years unless I asked for one.

And that’s when I was able to go, my goodness. God is more real to me than any pew. God is more real to me than any hymn. God is my foundation. And then when I would go to a church, I would be in bed with a migraine for two to three days at a time. Or this is too much information, but hey, I’m a I’m a crazy woman these days. My bowels would not move for three days. So would have migraines, my body couldn’t function. And I realized that my body was telling me, you can’t do this. You can’t do this. It just, it hurts me in ways.

So no, I don’t. The last time I was went to a church, I went to a funeral. One of my cigar guys, his sister was murdered. And I told myself, it’s fine, it’s it’s a funeral. I had to call off work the next day. I was in bed, couldn’t move just at a funeral. But Church buildings hold such memories for my body. And so no. But as far as the one true living God and his word and what he does in life is the most exciting, intimate, beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced.

Rev. Ruth Perry (45:26)
It’s really beautiful just hearing how God has been with you through this whole story and how real God is to you. And your story is just enthused with your prayer life and what a conversation looks like with God, that you can just tell God what’s going on and ask for help and God cares about you. And I think it’s so beautiful and I’m just so grateful that you shared your story with us today, Detra. If people go to your website, they can read Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York posts there and they can find what you’re up to and recordings of you singing. Can you tell us what your website is?

Detra Thomas (45:59)
It is www.detrasstory.com. Detra has an S on it, detrasstory dot com. And I’ll get with my webmaster and try to become more active updating that now that I’m kind of gonna be on my own. I’m not really good with IT stuff. I’m gonna have to learn. I’m thinking about maybe in the States I’m in, I could find an intern, a kid who’s good with social media and IT, who could do social media for me where I am and pay them something. Because I hit record and talk and do that, that’s about all I know to do. And I really want to get back

Rev. Ruth Perry (46:31)
Yeah.

Detra Thomas (46:31)
to a writing post about people, but the last year has been so stressful for me trying to work and survive working. But I want to get back to writing about the journey and and just the people I meet. To me it is the treasures God has made that stands in front of us. And sometimes those treasures are so broken that they block all love. They can’t receive any love.

at all. And all that comes out of them is control and manipulation. And I just move on. I no longer feel obligated here. they’ve made their choices. I move on. But let me tell you, God has made such wonderful treasures who have been battered and broken. And they sometimes it’s just a smile or a kind word or a hug and that’s all they needed to go on for another day, And I think that’s what we are asked to do, provide that love and unconditional, hey, I think you’re an awesome treasure of God and just do those little things and it makes a big difference.

Rev. Ruth Perry (47:28)
Thank you, Detra, for sharing your story with us today and being a blessing to me and being a blessing to so many people. And I pray God’s blessings on you.

Detra Thomas (47:36)
Well thank you for having me. I’ve enjoyed meeting you. Thank you.

Rev. Ruth Perry (47:39)
God bless.

Detra Thomas (47:40)
All right.

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