Non-Missionary Kids Singled Out For Selective Abuse

The first of the following letters was written by Howard Beardslee after the disclosure of horrific abuses of US Embassy and State Department children who were "allowed to attend" the Mamou Alliance Academy, the only American school in West Africa at that time. The "non-missionary children" were singled out for selected, specific abuse.

The second is a letter written by an alumni of a fundamentalist school in response to the last paragraph of Howard's' letter, about the "us/them" or "in-group/out-group" mentality and spiritual abuse.

Dear Friends:

Thanks for the article and subsequent reports about the Mamou Alliance Academy. There are times when English is lacking words to express things like this. The ones that might apply have been used in situations that then trivialize words one might wish to use. What does come to mind is: despicable, inhuman, depraved, den of iniquity, sadistic and animalistic. There must surely be many more.

For what it's worth, I have tried to find a way to understand how people could act in such ways. I do think the fundamentalist culture, with its puritanical views of sex, provides a psychological way of looking at it. Sex is dirty, sinful, bad; people should not "touch" themselves "there", etc. It is as if those of us brought up in that kind of environment were in a pressure cooker with the lid locked on and the fire turned up as high as it could go. In the case of some of the houseparents and staff in Mamou, they had created an impermeable wall around them so they could let go, with scarcely a fear of being caught, and they did! All of the repressed sexuality came pouring out. Undoubtedly there was a great deal of what we call projective identification; thinking of themselves at that age and identifying those feelings with you children. Perhaps some were slapped, or worse, for "playing" with themselves when they were little kids.

From a theological point of view, I have said from the beginning that this resulted from horrendous theology: Some appear to believe that they "have the truth and scripture tells us to be in the world but not of it". So anyone outside the missionary community were "worldly" "satanic" etc. I often think of the words of Job to his interlocuters: "Undoubtedly you have the truth and it will die with you". My parents were members of an Alliance church, and as a kid, in our little store -front church in Nutley, NJ I remember thinking: " Wow here in this town (25,000 people) we are the only Christians! There were Pentecostals in town, Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, etc. but WE were the only ones in the fold. How's that for a kid that was totally deceived/brainwashed!

Howard Beardslee
Parent of Mamou alumni and Psychotherapist

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Dear Howard:

I have not attended an Alliance church for ten years, or any other church for about five years, but I was still very enmeshed psychologically with the church, and it was impacting me. My therapist asked me what would happen if I separated internally from the church. I had no answer for her, but later in the car I did. I imagined myself stepping out of/away from the church, and felt as if I was stepping into a vacuous void filled with darkness. I began to cry. I realized that I had been taught, both explicitly and implicitly, that the church was God's only special place, and that the most "set apart" and special of all God's places was Mamou. Everything else held evil and darkness. Dorothy Adam (the nurse at Mamou) literally said that. She told us we were God's special people and he had chosen to put us in the best of all places in the world. It was also taught in many other ways. As a child I took that all in and believed it.
In the car that day, I began to put light and grass and blue sky into what I had been told was dark and evil. And I stepped into that place within my mind, and was able to "leave" the church. I realized that of course what I had been taught was exactly the opposite of what was true. Contrary to what I had been taught, there was much darkness and evil at Mamou; and the world outside Mamou held a lot of wonderful light and goodness. It was an important step in my healing from the spiritual abuse that we experienced.

Regards,
Bev Shellrude Thompson
Survivor of Mamou Alliance Academy

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