to interactions with others, authors rely on
narrative inheritances (the stories and myths that
families share about events, which are beyond
an author’s personal experience). Families
construct stories as “one of the chief
mechanisms ...for defining who they are as a
family, including what they believe, what they
value, and how they should act” (Daly, 2003, p.
777). These stories include renditions of family
trees and familial histories that each generation
may retell, as well as stories that circulate within
the family about its current generation. Stories
that families construct are always somewhat
mythological, “selective, manipulative, and
political,” and they often construct a sanitized
family void of such complexities as alcoholism
and family violence (Daly, 2003, p. 778). The
authors’ narratives continue this lineage and
provide insights into authors’ relationships with
their parents (Craib, 2004, p. 67). Nonetheless,
these memoirs may differ slightly due to their fit
within the genre of disaffiliation narratives.
Each author’s subjectivity is dynamic and
complex beyond what a memoir can represent
(Andrews, Day Sclater, Squire, &Tamoubou,
2004 Marcus, 1995, p. 47). Bloom (1998)
termed this complexity nonunitary subjectivity.
She asserted that claiming an individual is static
and unitary “masks the critical roles that
language, social interactions, and pivotal
experiences play in the production of
subjectivity and ignores the multiple subject
positions people occupy, which influence the
formation of subjectivity” (p. 3). The “narrator”
is, therefore, attached to multiple, mobile,
subject positions (Smith &Watson, 2010, p. 63).
Even so, Smith (1998) warned, “Any
autobiographical practice that promotes endless
fragmentation and a reified multiplicity might be
counterproductive since the autobiographical
subject would have to split itself beyond
usefulness to be truly nonexclusionary” (p. 434).
Therefore, any recognition of nonunitary
subjectivity must be limited enough to grant
credence to the author’s text.
As nonunitary subjects, authors were
simultaneously influenced by loved ones,
religion, and surrounding society. These
influences led many authors to depict their
parents’ actions were normal within the religion,
yet abnormal when compared to wider society.
The religion and surrounding cultures acted as
contradictory “tool kits,” through which authors
evaluated their families. A tool kit “is a dynamic
and changing system of meanings and symbols
that provides a means for examining the flow of
family experience in context” (Daly, 2003,
p. 774). Tool kits also form authors’ standards
of evaluation (what one believes to be normal):
“In formulating stories that describe their family,
people think about how the plot enacted by their
family members measures up to what ‘should’
have happened” (Vangelisti, Crumley, &Baker,
1999, p. 338). These standards shift throughout
one’s lifetime, especially when one has new
experiences (such as exiting a religious
organization), which allow for the utilization of
new cultural tool kits.
Narratives of Parental Actions and
Conceptions of Normality
Andrews (2002) found that some people socially
position their parents to offset blame for a harsh
upbringing (p. 14). Authors used dynamic
standards of evaluation to assess how they
believed social conditions confined their
parents’ actions. In the remainder of this article,
I discuss how the authors presented their
parents’ compliance and noncompliance with
social circumstances (specifically, religiously
based demands and practices) in relation to their
standards of evaluation.
Authors often based prior standards of
evaluation on religious doctrines and norms
because several religious organizations in this
study (especially the FLDS and CUT) isolated
members from nonmembers and mainstream
media. As such, Rhoda Janzen explained that
she and her sister had “inferred that non-
Mennonites were capable of anything. The
world seemed especially hospitable to serial
killers in unmarked white vans” (2010, p. 54).
Other authors (especially former FLDS
members) detailed that they feared outsiders
because of both isolation and community
narratives that labeled outsiders as evil. For
example, Brian Mackert (2008) claimed that he
was taught that non-church members “hated us
and wanted to destroy us because we were
22 International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 6, 2015

God’s chosen people” (p. 14 see also F. Jessop,
2009, p. 16 Wall, 2009, p. 153).
Nonetheless, authors reevaluated their families
after glimpses of the outside world. Mackert
imagined his father’s detachment in comparison
to the affectionate fictional fathers on television:
“If this was the norm, why was it that my own
father hardly even acknowledged my existence
unless I was in some sort of trouble?” (2008, p.
163). Flora Jessop saw a family camping and
prayed that they would adopt her: “I wanted so
desperately to see what it was like to have a real
family, a family with one dad and one mom. A
family who loved each other, who were nice to
each other” (2009, p. 94). Likewise, Scheeres
claimed her parents were abusive to the extent
that she viewed fictional families as more
authentic than her own:
When the Brady kids got in trouble,
their parents didn’t hit them or tell them
they were counting the days until they
moved out. They got grounded, not
whupped. They got talked to, not
threatened. There were no stomach-
churning wait-until-your-father-gets-
home pronouncements....
...In our minds, they were the real family
and we were the fakes. (Scheeres, 2005,
p. 266 italics in original)
Scheeres presented her parents’ abusive actions
as abnormal given her social environment.
Whether authors understood their parents’
actions as normal based on their standards of
evaluation related to their emotional
dispositions. For example, Scheeres’s and
Beck’s accounts were of parents who were
abusive. Yet, Scheeres (2005) wrote of a
standard of evaluation that denoted that her
parents’ abusive behaviors stemmed from an
abnormal lack of love. Whereas Beck (2005)
wrote of love for her father because her standard
situated him within social conditions that limited
and normalized his actions (which she
characterized as heinous).
Indeed, many authors represented that abuse and
neglect were normal within their religious
communities. For instance, Carolyn Jessop
explained that she did not inform her father that
her mother beat her and her siblings because “It
wasn’t considered abuse it was considered good
parenting” (2008, p. 13). Even
her use of the word abuse reflected how her
standard of evaluation transformed after she left
the FLDS. Similarly, Flora Jessop attested that,
in FLDS families, “terrible violence and chaos”
was commonplace (2009, p. 21). She
emphasized that she sensed that her father
sexually assaulting her was wrong, but not
abnormal. Elissa Wall explained that life in the
FLDS “was the only thing I knew and the only
way I could imagine living” (2009, front matter
[“The Prophet’s Will”]).
Although families from different religious
communities preformed their roles in relation to
different social norms, doctrines, and social
constraints, all religious organizations in the
study (with the possible exception of female-led
CUT) either adhered to traditional gender roles
or were moderately to extremely misogynistic.
FLDS families, for instance, had one father and
one or more mothers. FLDS mothers interacted
hierarchically, with the priesthood head (father)
as the family authority. This hierarchy meant
some mothers witnessed their children’s abuse
or discipline at the hands of their sister-wives
and husbands. Brent Jeffs, for example, stated
that his mother used “time-outs and other
nonphysical forms of discipline,” but that he and
his siblings experienced harsh discipline from
her sister-wives (2009, p. 30).
Most authors understood these social conditions
and sympathized with their parents, whom they
represented as nonunitary subjects. Authors
formed complex understandings of how their
parents “did family” and “did religion,” which
demonstrated their love, despite any parental
shortcomings.
Nonunitary Subjectivity and Parental
Action
Lalich detailed how individuals respond to the
social structure and interpersonal relationships in
“cults.” In Bounded Choice, she explained that
individuals commit acts that outsiders would
consider crazy (such as mass suicide and
murder) because the acts are “consistent with an
ideology or belief system that they trust
represents their highest aspirations” (2004, p. 2).
International Journal of Cultic Studies ■ Vol. 6, 2015 23