Interview with Shelly Snow Pordea on the IFB and Let Us Prey
Last October, I got to meet Shelly Snow Pordea at the Tears of Eden RetreatCon in St. Louis, and after months of working together on the editorial board, it was so wonderful to finally talk in person and give her a big hug.
Shelly is one of the most organized, creative, problem-solving people I know, and we love having her on the team. She’s also been through a lot of spiritual abuse and religious trauma personally, and when I realized she was part of the Independent Fundamental Baptist church, which was featured in the recent documentary Let Us Prey: A Ministry of Scandals, I knew she would have a lot of insight to share with all of us.
Cait West: Hi, Shelly! I’m thrilled you’re sharing more of your story with us today. I just finished watching Let Us Prey in one sitting, and the range of emotions I experienced went from recognition of similar teachings to extreme sorrow and anger about what has happened to so many children in the IFB. I know you also watched the docuseries too. What was your experience watching it like?
Shelly Snow Pordea: For me, it hit very close to home. I know a number of people in the film and attended college with Kathy, her sister, and brother-in-law, Victor, who was convicted for sexual abuse. Watching the brave women on screen who weren’t afraid to name names and speak loudly about the abuse was inspiring in so many ways. Having had my own story of childhood sexual abuse that was “handled” by IFB leaders, I could only feel as if these courageous women are truly speaking for us all. They are making real changes in our society, and I am so here for it. I’ve heard a lot of people say that they had to take the series in snippets—that the expanse of the abuse was hard to digest. For me, it was validating to see. I was mentally “bought in” to the ideals of the IFB for longer than I’m proud of. But when you’re seeing things that you're trying to make sense of and drawing lines of connection that you’re trying to explain from the inside, it can be maddening. So, when I realized that I believed the IFB to be a cult, and it felt like no one else could see it, I was devastated. This docuseries, to me, is just proof that others do see it. I wasn’t crazy, and that fact alone is healing a deep part of my trauma.
CW: Can you share a bit of your experience with the IFB?
SSP: It’s hard to sum up my experience without feeling like I would ramble or overshare because I was born into the IFB. But I’ll try to keep it short! My parents met in high school and were married by the time they were nineteen. During their teen years, the pastor of the church my dad and his parents were attending had started following Jack Hyles and a few other preachers within the movement. It was the late sixties, early seventies, and the world was kind of volatile, to say the least. In 1979, my parents moved our family to Hammond, Indiana, for us to be pastored by Jack Hyles and attend the schools there. My dad was trained at Hyles-Anderson, and my brother and I were enrolled in the Hammond Baptist school system. I attended from kindergarten to fourth grade. By the time I went to fifth grade, my dad had finished his training, and we moved back to our hometown of St Louis, Missouri, where my dad took a secular job and became the volunteer music minister in a small IFB church.
By the time I completed high school, a lot of drama had happened in our home, my older brother had run away, and I sunk myself hard and fast into the rule-following that was expected of me, even though I had a fair share of “rebellion” in my teen years. You know, sneaking out to attend a New Kids on the Block concert, secretly attending movies, and wearing pants behind my parents’ backs. I repented from my “wicked ways” at a Youth Conference where Jack Hyles draped a large American flag over the pulpit and admonished us that we were the generation that could “Take America Back,” and the following year I attended Hyles-Anderson from 1993 to 1996. From there, my husband (who had not grown up IFB) and I signed up with the mission board out of First Baptist and moved to Romania in 1999. That was kind of a clean break for me. Though we were receiving support through some IFB churches, among other places, there wasn’t a presence of IFB overseas, and I got to see how different people lived out faith and their everyday lives. I learned a different view of religion and its place. It was probably another ten years before I completely disavowed the IFB, but that distance is certainly what started me on my journey.
CW: Wow, I don’t think I realized how many years you spent in the IFB. That must have taken a lot of time to deconstruct what you were taught and figure out what you believed as an adult. Can you speak into what the IFB teaches about women specifically, and how you see that related to spiritual abuse?
SSP: The IFB is steeped in patriarchy and holds the1950s as its ideal era for women. Expectations for women in the IFB definitely indicate this—skirts and dresses to the knee or lower, women and girls are encouraged not to work outside the home, and education is limited to emphasize domesticity. Subservience is not only expected, but enforced most of the time. I have been unassociated with the IFB for a long time, but when I was still in, it was not uncommon for screaming preachers to use the words whore, Jezebel, slut, and tramp in the pulpit, belittling women for things like wearing open-toed shoes. For real. I saved some audio clips on my computer just to revisit every once and a while so I can remind myself, “Yep, that happened. It was as bad as you remember.”
So, you can imagine the psychological gymnastics girls and women had to play, and how ripe for abuse they were. When you're taught that you're the “weaker vessel” because the almighty made you that way, and your sole purpose in life is to complete a man, you relinquish your rights willingly. And so much manipulation and control take place even among the most caring men because they sincerely believe they have a moral obligation to make all the decisions.
CW: You mention how Romania was a new chapter for you. I experienced a similar thing when my family moved to Hawai‘i and I realized that other people lived differently from my sheltered upbringing. What did you learn in Romania that expanded your thinking on religion?
SSP: Oh, wow, so much! I was only twenty-three when we moved, and I had all kinds of ideas about what the world would be like. I don’t think I was prepared for any of it!
As far as the religion piece goes, there were no IFB churches around that we knew of, and the culture of the country and their view of the spiritual and religious is just very different. I didn’t hear preachers yelling about stuff in church, there was a national religion (Greek Orthodoxy), and religious icons and superstition were treated with reverence, but not a lot of dogma.
For example, I remember one of the first conversations we had about theology with some of the staff when my husband was hired as a pastor in the church we ended up being in for over a decade. We were talking about Genesis and evolution, and one of the pastors said, “Yeah, I think the Big Bang happened. How are we to know the amount of space and time that took place between some of these introductory verses in Genesis?” My mind was blown. Here were a bunch of Baptist pastors discussing possibilities rather than being emphatic about things I’d seen churches and families literally split over.
Looking back, my husband and I can see parallels in our experiences that make us understand each other and each other’s culture deeply, you know? Him having grown up during the tyrannical rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu and me in the IFB under Jack Hyles may sound like an exaggeration or false equivalence, but practically, in my opinion, the situation of control we experienced are entirely analogous. I think after the revolution in Romania, the citizens became pretty determined to embrace nuance and reject dogma. And that spilled over into every aspect of life. I moved there only ten years after the revolution, so I got to see ideologies unfurl, and a rebuilding of sorts. I didn’t recognize it then, but I do now. I was doing the same thing.
CW: That is such a beautiful way to think of deconstructing harmful ideologies and beliefs—unfurling and rebuilding. We are all doing that in our own ways after experiencing control and abuse, and I’m so grateful for the freedom we now have to heal! Thank you, Shelly, for sharing more of your story with us and for all the advocacy you do for other survivors.
Cait West is a member of Tears of Eden’s Editorial Board. She focuses on writing about the patriarchal movement and how patriarchy influences Spiritual Abuse. Find her at caitwest.com and on Instagram and Twitter at @caitwestwrites.
