{"id":2460,"date":"2023-09-14T18:52:15","date_gmt":"2023-09-14T18:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2023\/09\/14\/home-schooling-profiles-evangelical-faith-journalistic-ethics\/"},"modified":"2024-10-16T15:08:32","modified_gmt":"2024-10-16T15:08:32","slug":"home-schooling-profiles-evangelical-faith-journalistic-ethics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/niemanstoryboard.org\/2023\/09\/14\/home-schooling-profiles-evangelical-faith-journalistic-ethics\/","title":{"rendered":"A revealing profile of a family that defied their faith’s edict on home schooling"},"content":{"rendered":" \n
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\n \nA<\/span> reader\u2019s comment, a trove of first-hand documentation and a patient, collaborative approach. Those were three elements among many that helped Washington Post reporter Peter Jamison report and write a powerful profile of a family that turned away from their community\u2019s deep commitment to home schooling.
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\nJamison\u2019s \u201cThe revolt of the Christian home-schoolers\u201d<\/strong><\/a> profiles the Bealls, a young Virginia family. Parents Aaron and Christina had been home-schooled in an evangelical environment that adhered to a strict patriarchy, distrusted secular education and advocated corporal punishment. When they fell in love and married, the Bealls fully intended to follow that path. As the story summarizes the beliefs of their community:
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Public schools were places where children are bullied, or raped in the bathroom, or taught to hate Jesus.<\/blockquote>\n
\nBut as they raised their four children, the Bealls were beset by misgivings \u2014 first nagging, then powerful. Their 6-year-old daughter, Aimee, was struggling with kitchen-table lessons, so they decided to enroll her in a neighborhood public school \u2014 a decision met with everything from confusion to pity to suspicion from members of their family and community.
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\nThe story touches on broader topics: the surging national interest in home schooling, which intensified during the COVID pandemic; the commitment to home schooling among conservative Christians, some of whom see it as a way to raise a \u201cJoshua Generation\u201d of leaders who will gain political and cultural influence; and the trends in home schooling in recent decades.
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\nBut most of all, the piece is an intimate profile of the Bealls, who grew to question, grapple with and oppose the environment in which they were raised.
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\nThe story was sparked by a reader comment about an earlier piece Jamison did, which focused on a little-known political candidate in Maryland. He pursued it as part of The Post\u2019s occasional series \u201cHome School Nation.\u201d But the resulting story, which was featured as a Post \u201cDeep Read,\u201d wouldn\u2019t have happened without the Bealls\u2019 thoughtfulness and candor. That kind of cooperation is something journalists must be patient enough to earn.
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\n\u201cA huge part of my job is demonstrating to people like Aaron and Christina that I want to understand their story as well as I can and that I\u2019m willing to take as much time as necessary to do that,\u201d he told me in an interview for Storyboard. \u201cI like to think that by putting in the work \u2014 showing up for those early mornings when school starts, or nights when there are family events on campus; attending a child\u2019s musical on the weekend; sitting and talking for as long as they are willing to talk \u2014 I\u2019m \u2018anteing up,\u2019 so to speak, showing that I\u2019m committed to the process.\u201d
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\nHe also had access to years\u2019 worth of documentation, ranging from notes Aaron and Christina wrote each other during a parenting-seminar workshop, to emails, social-media posts and text messages as their quiet rebellion led to a rift with other family members. Access to such materials, Jamison said, also is earned through a candid and straightforward approach.
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\n\u201cOne way to encourage candor is by showing it,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s no way we can expect people to disclose the most painful details of their lives unless we\u2019re honest at the beginning, middle and end of the reporting and writing process about what we\u2019re up to,\u201d
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\nIn a Q&A followed by an annotation of the story, Jamison explained how it was conceived, reported and written; how he navigates the challenges of a story that touches on so many larger topics; and about reader reaction that \u201cwas like unlike any I\u2019ve received before.\u201d The exchange has been edited for length and clarity.\u00a0<\/strong>
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\nT<\/span>he story of the Bealls is part of a Washington Post continuing series about home schooling. How did this particular story come about?
\n<\/strong>It began, as good stories so often do, with another line of reporting. Last fall I was assigned to profile Dan Cox<\/a>, an obscure state delegate who had improbably cinched the Republican nomination in the Maryland governor\u2019s race. Cox, a MAGA candidate who denied the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, lost the general election in a landslide. But his candidacy was interesting, especially the extent to which his life and worldview had been shaped by home schooling. His father, an evangelical Christian pastor, was a pioneer in the early days of the home-schooling movement.
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\nTwo things became clear while I was reporting that story. First was that home-schooling parents have tremendous latitude in what and how they teach their children. The Cox family\u2019s home-schooling network, for example, teaches that a married woman should \u201cdesire to be under submission\u201d to her husband and promotes a history book stating that American government should \u201cacknowledge the Lord of Scripture and be reconstructed according to His demands.\u201d Second was that interest in home schooling has positively exploded over the last several years.
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\nKnowledgeable and well-meaning people have different views of what this means. Home-schooling offers an almost limitless opportunity for parents \u2014 many who feel their kids have been let down by more traditional academic settings\u2014 to tailor an educational program to their children\u2019s needs. But for the same reason, it can lead to educational neglect and to physical or emotional abuse. Little to no regulation is exercised over home-schooling in much of the country. The entire topic seemed like a rich vein to mine.
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\nAt the outset, I got lucky: Among the commenters on my story about Dan Cox was a person claiming firsthand knowledge of the Coxes\u2019 religious community of home-schoolers. I sent a message to the email this commenter had used to register on the Post\u2019s website \u2014 I wasn\u2019t sure who I was writing to \u2014 and about 90 minutes later heard back from Aaron Beall.
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\nWhat was the reporting, writing and editing process like?
\n<\/strong>After an initial phone call, Aaron and Christina agreed to meet me at a public library in Northern Virginia. They showed up with their 2-year-old daughter, Aurelia, and took turns watching her as we spoke for a couple hours in a conference room. The idea was to get to know them a little bit, and let them get to know me, and let them talk in an unstructured way about what was on their minds. For me this is an essential part of the process: When I\u2019m talking to people I suspect might have an interesting story to tell, I try not to be too intent at the outset on what exactly that story might be or how it will shape up in the writing.
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\nWhile Aaron and Christina could point to positive aspects of their own experiences as home-schooled children, the overriding impression they conveyed was a negative one. A lot of this had to do with the faction of the home-schooling movement in which they were raised: Their parents were conservative Christians who saw home education as an antidote to the secularization of public and many private schools. As I hope comes across in the story, Christina and Aaron are a very bright pair. But Aaron had never found a way to pursue his passion for the sciences; he had never attended college. Christina had been taught throughout her life that a woman shouldn\u2019t seek a career outside the home, so she didn\u2019t.
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\nAll this was compelling, as was the firsthand knowledge the Bealls had of the Coxes\u2019 home-schooling network. But what immediately stood out to me as we talked was that three of their four children were not with us at the library that day. They were attending a public school. Aaron and Christina had essentially embraced what they were raised to believe was one of society\u2019s greatest evils: the public education system. How and why did that happen?
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\nThe reporting involved many interviews with Christina and Aaron and repeated trips to their home and their kids\u2019 school. (Public school officials in Loudoun County allowed me extensive access to the Beall family\u2019s elementary school.) The writing was difficult, simply because the Bealls\u2019 story touches on so many profound topics, any one of which risked derailing the central narrative if examined disproportionately. Where do parents\u2019 rights end and children\u2019s rights begin? Where is the line dividing education from indoctrination? What does it mean to turn your back on the community and belief system in which you were raised? All of these issues are present in what Christina and Aaron experienced. The challenge was to let these themes emerge as organically as possible, hewing to the narrative of what their family had been through.\u00a0<\/strong>
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\nThe story is accompanied by striking photos by Matt McClain<\/a>, and was edited by Lynda Robinson<\/a>. Tell me more about how much they contributed to the final result.
\n<\/strong>I\u2019m lucky to work with extraordinarily high-caliber photojournalists at The Washington Post, and Matt is no exception. His pictures are essential to the final product, and not just because they enable a visually appealing design for the story. The images he captured convey so much about the sometimes conflicting moods and emotions of the Bealls: the excitement of the school day, which for them is bound up in the excitement of discovering a new way of life; the closeness of their immediate family, but also their loneliness and ambivalence after severing themselves from the world in which they were raised. These photos aren’t just adornment. Alongside the text, they portray a reality that the reader is meant to see and feel.
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\nMy editor, Lynda Robinson, plays a big role in everything I write. We talk almost every day, and sometimes multiple times a day, during the reporting and writing of a story like this. Lynda has many strengths, but one of the ways in which she\u2019s most helpful to me is in intuiting the shape of a complicated story built on lots of material. I mentioned above how important it is to let a story\u2019s weightier themes emerge organically through a central narrative. This I learned from Lynda. In early drafts of this piece, I was tempted to get too discursive on subjects such as the dearth of regulation for American home-schooling or the psychological dynamics of evangelical Christians who \u201cdeconstruct\u201d their faith. But for the story to have any hope of reading as a cohesive whole, this temptation had to be resisted. Lynda made sure I resisted it.
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\nAre there any lessons you took away from this story that may help other journalists?
\n<\/strong>It\u2019s a clich\u00e9 that reporters should try to zig while others zag (or is it zag while others zig?), but I think the response to this story underlines the clich\u00e9’s basic truth. So many stories have been written about the not-very-edifyingly-named \u201cculture wars\u201d in education and about families\u2019 post-pandemic flight from the public school system. Many of those stories have been quite good and necessary. But I believe that one reason the Bealls\u2019 story resonated is that it\u2019s something that approaches similar themes from a totally different direction. Here are two people who grew up in very insular environments, with their parents exercising nearly complete control over the ideas they encountered. And ultimately, for them, the public schools meant broader horizons and a form of liberation. The Bealls live in Loudoun County, which has been an epicenter for the debates over topics such as Covid mask mandates and school policies toward transgender children. But as Aaron put it with characteristic eloquence, \u201cPeople who think the public schools are indoctrinating don\u2019t know what indoctrination is. We were indoctrinated… It\u2019s not even comparable.\u201d
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The Revolt of the Christian Home-Schoolers<\/h2>\n

They were taught that public schools are evil. Then a Virginia couple defied their families and enrolled their kids.<\/em><\/h3>\n
\nBy Peter Jamison
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\nMay 30, 2023
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\nROUND HILL, Va. \u2014 They said goodbye to Aimee outside her elementary school, watching nervously as she joined the other children streaming into a low brick building framed by the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Christina and Aaron Beall stood among many families resuming an emotional but familiar routine: the first day of full-time,\u00a0<\/strong>in-person classes since public schools closed at the beginning of the pandemic.
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\nBut for the Bealls, that morning in late August 2021\u00a0<\/strong>carried a weight incomprehensible to the parents around them. Their 6-year-old daughter, wearing a sequined blue dress and a pink backpack that almost obscured her small body, hesitated as she reached the doors. Although Aaron had told her again and again how brave she was, he knew\u00a0<\/strong>it would be years before she understood how much he meant it \u2014 understood that for her mother and father, the decision to send her to school was nothing less than a revolt.
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\nAaron and Christina had never attended school when they were children. Until a few days earlier, when Round Hill Elementary held a back-to-school open house, they had rarely set foot inside a school building. Both had been raised to believe that public schools were tools of a demonic social order, government \u201cindoctrination camps\u201d devoted to the propagation of lies and the subversion of Christian families.
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\nAt a time when home education was still a fringe phenomenon, the Bealls had grown up in the most powerful and ideologically committed faction of the modern\u00a0home-schooling movement<\/a>. That movement, led by deeply conservative Christians, saw home schooling as a way of life \u2014 a conscious rejection of contemporary ideas about biology, history, gender equality and the role of religion in American government.
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\nChristina and Aaron were supposed to advance the banner of that movement, instilling its codes in their children through the same forms of corporal punishment once inflicted upon them. Yet instead, along with many others of their age and upbringing, they had walked away.
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\nLike all rebellions, this one had come with consequences. Their decision to send Aimee to the neighborhood elementary school \u2014 a test run to see how it might work for their other kids \u2014 had contributed to a bitter rift with their own parents, who couldn\u2019t understand their embrace of an education system they had been raised to abhor. And it had led Christina, who until that summer day had home-schooled all of their children, into an existential crisis. <\/a>I was struck by how carefully structured these first four grafs seemed to be. You provide readers with a visceral scene in the first sentence \u2014 referring to the Bealls in the first sentence with \u201cthey\u201d \u2014 then add more context in each successive paragraph. How much did you work on the opening, both in your initial writing and later with an editor?<\/span>I tend to work a lot on tops, and this one took more work than usual. My editor and I knew this scene \u2014 Aaron and Christina taking the decisive turn away from their upbringing by sending their daughter into a public school \u2014 was the natural beginning for the story. The trick was in introducing the elements that give that decision its emotional weight (their background in conservative Christian home-schooling, their families\u2019 beliefs about public schools, and so on) without overwhelming the reader.<\/span><\/span>
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\n\u201cI never imagined sending you to the local elementary school instead of learning and growing together at home,\u201d she wrote later that day in an Instagram post addressed to her daughter. \u201cBut life has a way of undoing our best laid plans and throwing us curveballs.\u201d
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\nChristina did not describe on Instagram how perplexed she and Aaron had been by a ritual that the other parents seemed to understand; how she had tried, in unwitting defiance of school rules, to accompany Aimee inside, earning a gentle rebuke from the principal.
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\nAnd she did not describe what happened after their daughter vanished into a building they had been taught no child should ever enter. On that first day of school \u2014 first not just for one girl but for two generations of a family\u00a0<\/em>\u2014 the Bealls walked back to their SUV, and as Aaron started the car, Christina began to cry. <\/a>This is an elegant transition: From the public details of Christina\u2019s post to what she didn\u2019t<\/em> include. Do you recall anything specific about how these paragraphs were written, or what you wanted them to accomplish?<\/span>In my mind this moment sets an important tone for everything that follows. The Bealls\u2019 story is not one of triumphant self-realization. Yes, they are taking a step they hope will lead to a better life for their daughter, but they are also rejecting principles that were once central to their identities and risking estrangement from their parents. Christina\u2019s tears when they reach the privacy of their car show more about this messy emotional reality than anything I could say.<\/span><\/span>
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\nAcross the country,\u00a0interest in home schooling\u00a0<\/a>has never been greater. The Bealls could see the surge\u00a0<\/strong>in Virginia, where nearly 57,000 children were being home-schooled in the fall of 2022 \u2014 a 28 percent jump from three years earlier. The rise of home education, initially unleashed by parents\u2019\u00a0frustrations with pandemic-related campus closures<\/a>\u00a0and remote learning, has endured as one of the lasting social transformations wrought by covid-19.
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\nBut if the coronavirus was a catalyst for the explosion in home schooling, the stage was set through decades of painstaking work by true believers\u00a0<\/strong>like those who had raised Aaron and Christina. Aided\u00a0<\/strong>by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) \u2014 a Christian nonprofit that has been dubbed \u201cthe most influential homeschool organization in the world,\u201d and is based less than five miles from the Bealls\u2019 house in Northern Virginia \u2014 those activists had fought to establish the legality of home schooling in the 1980s and early 1990s, conquering the skepticism of public school administrators and state lawmakers across the country.
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\nThrough their influence, a practice with roots in the countercultural left took on a very different character. Among conservative Christians, home schooling became a tool for binding children to fundamentalist beliefs\u00a0<\/strong>they felt were threatened by exposure to other points of view. Rightly educated, those children would grow into what HSLDA founder Michael Farris called a\u00a0\u201cJoshua Generation\u201d\u00a0<\/a>that would seek the political power and cultural influence to reshape America according to biblical principles. <\/a>Much of this story is focused on the Bealls, but it also includes a primer of sorts on the rise of and backlash to homeschooling. How did you do research into homeschooling? Were there any particular challenges to overcome with that research, and\/or resources you found helpful?<\/span>I began researching the history of home schooling late last year in preparation for launching this series. From a quantitative perspective, the topic can be frustrating: Home-schoolers are, almost by definition, a difficult population to study, and credible research is hard to come by. Fortunately, there are some terrific scholars who match an encyclopedic knowledge of home-schooling with an acknowledgment of what can\u2019t presently be known. Two in particular I have found helpful are Milton Gaither and Robert Kunzman. (Gaither\u2019s book, \u201cHomeschool: An American History,\u201d<\/a> is a great place to start for those looking to learn more about this subject.) The backlash against conservative Christian home-schooling \u2014 led first and foremost by people who were raised inside the movement \u2014 has been chronicled by groups such as Homeschoolers Anonymous and the Coalition for Responsible Home Education.<\/span><\/span>
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\nHome schooling today is\u00a0more diverse, demographically and ideologically<\/a>, than it was in the heyday of conservative Christian activism. Yet those activists remain extraordinarily influential.
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\nOver decades, they have eroded state regulations, ensuring that parents who home-school face little oversight in much of the country.\u00a0<\/strong>More recently, they have inflamed the nation\u2019s\u00a0culture wars<\/a>, fueling attacks on public-school lessons\u00a0<\/strong>about race and gender with the politically potent language of \u201cparental rights.\u201d
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\nBut what should be a moment of triumph for conservative Christian home-schoolers has been undermined by an unmistakable backlash: the desertion and denunciations of the very children they said they were saving.
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\nFormer home-schoolers have been at the forefront of those arguing for\u00a0greater oversight of home schooling<\/a>, forming the nonprofit Coalition for Responsible Home Education to make their case.
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\n\u201cAs an adult I can say, \u2018No. What happened to me as a child was wrong,\u2019\u201d said Samantha Field, the coalition\u2019s government relations director.
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\nEarlier this year, Jinger Duggar Vuolo \u2014 familiar to millions of TV viewers from the reality show \u201c19 Kids and Counting\u201d \u2014 published a memoir\u00a0<\/strong>in which she harshly criticized Bill Gothard, a pivotal but now\u00a0<\/strong>disgraced figure in conservative Christian home schooling whose teachings her parents followed. Beginning a decade ago,\u00a0Gothard was accused of sexual abuse and harassment<\/a>\u00a0by dozens of women \u2014 allegations the minister vehemently denied.
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\nFarris said it is not uncommon for children who grow up in oppressively patriarchal households to reject or at least moderate their parents\u2019 beliefs. However, he said such families are a minority in the home-schooling movement and are often considered extreme even by other conservative Christians.
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\n\u201cI view this as the fringe of the fringe,\u201d Farris said. \u201cAnd every kid that I know that has lashed out at home schooling came out of this.\u201d
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\nChristina, 34, and Aaron, 37, had joined no coalitions.\u00a0<\/strong>They had published no memoirs. Their rebellion played out in angry text messages and emails with their parents, in tense conversations conducted at the edges of birthday parties and Easter gatherings. Their own children \u2014 four of them, including Aimee \u2014 knew little of their reasons for abandoning home schooling: the physical and emotional trauma of the \u201cbiblical discipline\u201d to which they had been subjected, the regrets over what Aaron called \u201ca life robbed\u201d by strictures on what and how they learned.
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\n<\/a>The Bealls offered a wealth of documentation \u2014 emails and handwritten notes \u2014 as well as their own thoughts. How did you approach them, and what kind of interactions did you have to facilitate such candor and thoughtfulness?<\/span>Christina and Aaron are unusually reflective, and the documentation they provided \u2014 most of it preserved over time by Christina \u2014 was invaluable. Absent audio or video recordings, the kind of contemporaneous emails, text messages and other records they shared with me are as close as a reporter can come to reliably reconstructing exchanges and emotional states from years ago. In the beginning I had no idea any of those materials existed, but Christina prepared for one of my early visits by digging up some old photos and journal entries. As they shared more and more with me, Christina and Aaron proved very willing to illustrate or verify their accounts with these materials when possible \u2014 for example, the notes they wrote to each other during a 2012 parenting seminar that cited the Bible in support of hitting your kids.<\/span><\/span>
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\n<\/a>How did you facilitate that cooperation from them? You’ve mentioned being candid about your reporting process, but can you say more about that?<\/span>I can never fully explain why subjects choose to share or withhold certain things about themselves. Subjects like Christina and Aaron, who had been completely private people before I approached them, frequently have questions about how the reporting process works. Unless doing so would violate an ethical obligation, I answer those questions as straightforwardly as I can. This could concern anything from our publication timeline to how certain material might be used to how my perception of their story is evolving. At every step, those honest conversations are important.<\/span><\/span>
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\nAaron had grown up believing Christians could out-populate atheists and Muslims by scorning birth control; Christina had been taught the Bible-based arithmetic necessary to calculate the age of a universe less than 8,000 years old. Their education was one in which dinosaurs were herded\u00a0<\/strong>aboard Noah\u2019s ark \u2014 and in which the penalty for doubt or disobedience was swift. Sometimes they still flinched when they remembered their parents\u2019 literal adherence to the words of the Old Testament: \u201cDo not withhold correction from a child, for if you beat him with a rod, he will not die.\u201d <\/a>This is a powerful detail. Did you see Aaron or Chistina flinch while recalling this edict? How did you record this detail?<\/span>It took a while for Aaron and Christina to become comfortable speaking with me about the corporal punishment they had experienced as kids, and ultimately, only Aaron did so in detail. His memories, recounted more fully later in the story, are harrowing, but he relayed them calmly and with precision. This is one of the harder parts of my job. Journalistic rigor and fairness demand that we ask people to describe what are obviously traumatic experiences in as much detail as possible and then, later, that we return to double-check and verify those details. If there is any smooth or comfortable way to do this, I haven\u2019t discovered it.<\/span><\/span>
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\nThe Bealls knew that many home-schooling families didn\u2019t share the religious doctrines that had so warped their own lives. But they also knew that the same laws that had failed to protect them would continue to fail other children.
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\n\u201cIt\u2019s specifically a system that is set up to hide the abuse, to make them invisible, to strip them of any capability of getting help. And not just in a physical way,\u201d Christina said. \u201cAt some point, you become so mentally imprisoned you don\u2019t even realize you need help.\u201d
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\nChristina had felt no urge to escape when, at the age of 15, she listed her \u201cRequirements for my husband\u201d in neat, looping script on a ruled sheet of notebook paper. <\/a>One aspect of this story that stands out throughout is how well-executed the transitions were. It\u2019s not the flashiest subject, but in a story with so many layers, it\u2019s essential to guide readers through the Bealls\u2019 changing beliefs. For example, the sentence that begins, \u201cChristina had felt no urge to escape \u2026\u201d,<\/em> which moves the story from Christina\u2019s present beliefs to her earlier ones. How much work did you put into writing transitions?<\/span>Thank you for noticing! I think a lot about transitions, especially in longer or more complex stories. My goal is for the copy to always have some degree of momentum \u2014 propelling the reader toward what comes next \u2014 even as the pace varies from passage to passage and section to section. We all know that sinking feeling when you\u2019re reading a longer piece of journalism that slows to a crawl or to a standstill, and I try at all costs to avoid that. It\u2019s natural for a story to slow down in places, but those are also the places where I try to be particularly vigilant about not losing readers. Transitions are a useful device for preserving momentum, but they have to make sense. No amount of artfulness can mask the fact that the pieces of a story don\u2019t fit well together; a sound structure must come first.<\/span><\/span>
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\n\u201cMust want me to be a full-time homemaker & only have an outside job if required or instructed by my Potter,\u201d she wrote, referring to biblical verses that liken humans to clay in the hands of God. \u201cMust believe in \u2018full & unconditional\u2019 surrender of our # of children to God Almighty.\u201d And: \u201cMust desire to homeschool our children.\u201d <\/a>How did you learn about this list and get to view it?<\/span>The list was among the documents Christina unearthed during one of our early interviews to show me how she looked at the world as a home-schooled teen. To her great credit, she seemed to instinctively grasp very early in the process that this type of supporting documentation would be helpful for my story, which of course it was.<\/span><\/span>
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\nThe list is a blueprint of what she had been taught about the proper ambitions of a woman: to bear and raise children while shielding them from what those around her called \u201cgovernment schools.\u201d She felt both hopeful and nervous when, several years later, her father, Derrick Comfort, came home with news: He had just met with a young man who had been raised with those same ideals \u2014 and who wanted Christina to be his wife.
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\nAaron was shy and cerebral, a self-taught web developer who had grown up in Fairfax County, Va., had never attended college and, at age 26, still lived with his parents. He barely knew Christina Comfort, the oldest of eight children on her family\u2019s 10-acre farm on Maryland\u2019s Eastern Shore. A graduate of\u00a0Patrick Henry College<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 founded by Farris in Virginia to cater to Christian home-schoolers \u2014 she taught math and writing to her siblings and did chores around the farm. She prayed while riding a lawn mower\u00a0<\/strong>for God to send her a husband. <\/a>The lawn mower is such a specific detail, the kind that sticks in readers\u2019 minds. Do you recall how it was revealed?<\/span>This story, like any other, involved exhaustive fact-checking at the tail end of the process, before publication. Christina and Aaron were very patient with me on this front and, as often happens, I caught a number of things that I hadn\u2019t gotten quite right. One had something to do with the stage in Christina\u2019s life when she was living as a young adult on the family farm. In fact-checking, I asked Christina if she had any other concrete memories of this period, something that evoked her general mood and outlook, and this is what she shared: riding the mower, praying for a husband.<\/span><\/span>
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\n\u00a0<\/em>The Comfort and Beall families were both active in a religious community led by Gary Cox, an evangelical pastor and pioneer of Maryland\u2019s home-schooling movement. Christina was a graduate of Cox\u2019s home education network, Walkersville Christian Family Schools, while Aaron began attending Cox\u2019s church in rural northern Maryland as a teenager. The minister exerted a powerful influence over his congregation and students, teaching that children live in divinely ordained subjection to the rule of their parents.
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\nCox \u2014 who still operates a home-schooling organization, now called Wellspring Christian Family Schools \u2014 declined repeated interview requests.
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\nLast year his son,\u00a0Dan Cox<\/a>, a home-schooled Maryland state delegate who denied the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, won the Republican gubernatorial primary. He went on to lose in a landslide to Democrat Wes Moore.
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\nDuring Aaron and Christina\u2019s \u201ccourtship\u201d \u2014 a period of chaperoned contact that served as a prelude to formal engagement \u2014 they seemed ready to fulfill their parents\u2019 hopes.\u00a0<\/strong>Eating calamari in Annapolis or touring Colonial Williamsburg, they talked about what their future would include (home schooling) and what it would not (music with a beat that can be danced to).\u00a0<\/strong>But signs soon emerged\u00a0<\/strong>of the unimaginable rupture that lay ahead.
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\nOn a spring afternoon in 2012, the couple sat in a small church in Queenstown, Md. In preparation for marriage, they were attending a three-day seminar on \u201cGospel-Driven Parenting\u201d run by Chris Peeler, a minister whose family was part of Gary Cox\u2019s home-schooling group. The workshop covered a range of topics, including the one they were now studying: \u201cChastisement.\u201d
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\n\u201cThe use of the rod is for the purpose of breaking the child\u2019s will,\u201d stated the handout that they bent over together in the church. \u201cOne way to tell if this has happened is to see if they can look you in the eyes after being disciplined and ask for forgiveness.\u201d
\n
\nBible verses were cited in support of corporal punishment. But Christina\u00a0<\/strong>had misgivings.
\n
\n\u201cI really don\u2019t think I can be a parent,\u201d she wrote to Aaron in the margins of the handout. \u201cIt just feels like you have to be, like, hardened.\u201d
\n
\n\u201cYES! YOU! CAN!\u201d Aaron\u00a0<\/strong>wrote back. <\/a>This document from a decade ago is a powerful snapshot into the Bealls\u2019 growing disquiet with the environment they were raised in. How did you learn about it and come to see it?<\/span>Christina had kept a binder with worksheets and handouts from this parenting seminar, which took place 11 years ago. They initially shared it with me, I believe, to illustrate the parenting philosophy that was passed down to them, specifically the emphasis on what was interpreted to be a Biblical decree that one should hit disobedient children. But those handwritten notes are what make it a truly fascinating document. It is essentially a live conversation about their misgivings, preserved on the page.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThe use of the \u201crod\u201d \u2014 interpreted by different people as a wooden spoon, dowel, belt, rubber hose or other implement \u2014 was a common practice among the conservative Christian home-schoolers Aaron and Christina knew, and one they had both experienced regularly in their own families.
\n
\nThe elder\u00a0<\/strong>Bealls and Comforts did not respond to repeated requests to discuss the discipline they used with their children and the decision by Aaron and Christina to embrace public education. Aaron\u2019s older brother, Joshua \u2014 who Aaron said still home-schools his children \u2014 did not return calls. Aaron\u2019s other siblings could not be reached for comment. Christina\u2019s siblings, some of whom have also left her parents\u2019 home, either declined to comment or could not be reached. <\/a>You\u2019re transparent about which potential sources didn\u2019t respond to interview requests. Why is it important for that to be included for readers?<\/span>We must acknowledge what we don\u2019t know, and a big part of that is acknowledging who we weren\u2019t able to talk to. That is especially the case in a story like this, which describes scenes whose veracity can only be confirmed or disputed by those who were present. I wish Christina’s and Aaron\u2019s parents had spoken to me, and I tried repeatedly to persuade them to do so \u2014 by phone, email and through visits to their homes. I very much wanted to hear them explain why they made the parenting decisions they did, and how they had been affected by Aaron\u2019s and Christina\u2019s rejection of conservative Christian home schooling. But it was their choice, not mine, and they ultimately chose not to talk.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nAaron actually shared Christina\u2019s qualms. He knew that the term parents in the movement casually used for discipline, \u201cspankings,\u201d did not capture the childhood terror of being struck several times a week \u2014 sometimes more, sometimes less \u2014 with what he describes as a shortened broomstick\u00a0<\/strong>for disobeying commands or failing to pay attention to his schoolwork.
\n
\nThe memory of waiting as a small child outside his parents\u2019 bedroom for his mother to summon him in; the fear that his transgressions might be enough to incur what he called \u201ckiller bee\u201d spankings, when the rod was used against his bare skin; his efforts to obey the order to remain immobile as he was hit \u2014 all these sensations and emotions seeped into his bones, creating a deep conviction that those who fail to obey authority pay an awful price.
\n
\n\u201cFor a long time, I\u2019ve wondered why I was so unable to think for myself in this environment,\u201d he says today, attributing the shortcoming to \u201clearning that even starting to think, or disagree with authorities, leads to pain \u2014 leads to physical and real pain that you cannot escape.\u201d
\n
\nNow, on the threshold of parenthood \u2014 Christina would become pregnant within two weeks of their wedding on Sept. 29, 2012 \u2014 the couple\u2019s reservations about \u201cchastisement\u201d could no longer be ignored. As a wedding gift, they said, Aaron\u2019s brother and sister-in-law had given them\u00a0\u201cTo Train Up a Child,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0by the popular Christian home-schooling authors Michael and Debi Pearl.
\n
\nThe Pearls advocate hitting children with tree branches, belts and other \u201cinstruments of love\u201d to instill obedience, and recommend that toddlers who take slowly to potty training be washed outdoors with cold water from a garden hose. Their book advocates \u201ctraining sessions\u201d in which infants, as soon as they are old enough to crawl, are placed near a desired object and repeatedly struck with a switch if they disobey commands not to touch it.
\n
\nThe Pearls have defended their methods, saying they are not meant to encourage brutality and, when properly applied, reduce the frequency with which parents must later discipline their kids.
\n
\nAaron and Christina did not follow the Pearls\u2019 advice when their first child, Ezra, was born. Nor did they take on authoritarian roles with their second, Aimee, or third, Oliver. All were home-schooled, albeit in less isolation than their parents: Christina joined co-ops with other Christian mothers in Northern Virginia.
\n
\nBut by the time the Bealls had Aurelia, their fourth child, Aaron \u2014 now a successful software engineer whose job had enabled the family to buy a four-bedroom house in Loudoun County \u2014 had begun to question far more than corporal punishment.
\n
\n\u201cWhen it came time for me to hit my kids, that was the first independent thought I remember having: \u2018This can\u2019t be right. I think I\u2019ll just skip this part,\u2019\u201d he says.
\n
\nBut if that seemingly inviolable dogma was false, what else might be? Aaron gradually began to feel adrift and depressed.
\n
\n\u201cIt\u2019s like having the rug pulled out from under your feet,\u201d he says. \u201cAll of reality is kind of up for grabs.\u201d
\n
\nHe scoured Amazon for books about evolution and cosmology. Eventually, he found his way to blog posts and books by former Christian fundamentalists who had abandoned their religious beliefs. He watched an interview with Tara Westover, whose best-selling memoir,\u00a0\u201cEducated,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0detailed the severe educational neglect and physical abuse she endured as a child of survivalist Mormon home-schoolers in Idaho.
\n
\nAnd in the spring of 2021, as he and Christina were struggling to engage Aimee in her at-home lessons, he suggested a radical solution: Why not try sending their daughter to the reputable public elementary school less than a mile from their house?
\n
\nChristina could think of many reasons. They were the same ones Aaron had learned as a child: Public schools were places where children are bullied, or raped in the bathroom, or taught to hate Jesus.
\n
\nBut she also suspected that Aimee could use the help of professional educators. Just as important, she had learned all her life that it was her duty to obey her husband. She was confounded\u00a0<\/strong>and angry, at both Aaron and the seeming contradiction his suggestion had exposed.
\n
\n\u201cI guess I\u2019m just honestly confused and wonder what you think,\u201d she wrote in an email to her father in May 2021. \u201cI\u2019m supposed to submit to Aaron, he wants the kids to go to public school. \u2026 You think that\u2019s a sin but it\u2019s also a sin to not listen to your husband so which is it?\u201d
\n
\nAt first, Christina\u2019s and Aaron\u2019s parents reacted to the news that they were considering public school for Aimee with dazed incomprehension. Did Christina feel overwhelmed, they asked? Did she need more help with work around the house? As long as Aimee was learning to read, she would be fine, Aaron\u2019s mother assured them. Christina\u2019s father sent a YouTube video of John Taylor Gatto, a famous critic of America\u2019s public education system.
\n
\nThe dialogue took on a darker tone as Aimee, with Christina\u2019s hesitant agreement, began school that fall. By then, Aaron had told his parents he no longer considered himself a believer.
\n
\n\u201cThis is absolutely devastating,\u201d his mother, Linda Beall, wrote in a long email to Christina.\u00a0<\/strong>\u201cI hurt so much for you Christina!!!\u201d
\n
\n\u201cI don\u2019t think Aaron is going to be wrestled into heaven with good arguments,\u201d Linda added. \u201cI think this is likely about his response to hard things in his life. I think he needs to come face to face with God himself, and bow before Him in recognition of his own sin, and need for a Savior.\u201d
\n
\nDespite the sympathy expressed in the email, Christina bristled at the suggestion that her husband\u2019s crisis of faith stemmed from his reluctance to face \u201chard things\u201d in his life. She knew that reexamining his religious convictions and traumatic memories had perhaps been the hardest thing Aaron had ever done.
\n
\nAimee, meanwhile, was thriving at Round Hill Elementary. By the third quarter, her report card said she was \u201ca pleasure to teach,\u201d was \u201cslowly becoming more social and more willing to participate in class\u201d and showed \u201ctremendous growth\u201d in her reading skills, which had lagged below grade level at the beginning of the year.
\n
\nFor several months after that first week of classes \u2014 when she had come home wearing a paper hat, colored with blue crayon and printed with the words \u201cMy First Day of First Grade\u201d \u2014 Aimee had had a stock response when her parents asked her how she liked school: She would suppress a grin, say she \u201chated it,\u201d and then start laughing at her own joke. <\/a>I like the detail of the hat. Did you see it, or were you told about it later?<\/span>The hat was in a photo taken of Aimee during that first week of school.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n\u201cYou should have asked to go to school,\u201d Aimee, who knew her mom had been educated at home, would eventually tell Christina. \u201cIt affects your whole life.\u201d
\n
\nNow it was Christina\u2019s turn to question her belief \u2014 not in Christianity, but in the conservative Christian approach to home schooling. She began to research spiritual abuse and the history of Christian nationalism. Ideas she had never questioned \u2014 such as the statement, in a book given to her by her dad, that it \u201cwould be a waste of her time and her life\u201d for a woman to work outside the house\u00a0\u2014\u00a0<\/strong>no longer made sense.
\n
\nHer loss of faith in the biblical literalism and patriarchal values of her childhood was coming in the way the movement\u2019s adherents had always warned it would: through exposure to people with different experiences and points of view.
\n
\nThose people just happened to be her daughter and her husband. <\/a>This seems like a keen observation, that the different viewpoints came from those in Christina\u2019s immediate family. Do you remember when you were struck by that insight, or when you decided to include it in the story?<\/span>I can\u2019t recall a specific moment when it occurred to me. I think this description evolved out of thinking about Christina\u2019s words immediately below this \u2014 that she is unable to simply dismiss Aaron in the way she had been taught to dismiss anybody else who questioned her beliefs. At some point it just struck me that this was a remarkable twist on a threat she had always been warned about. The ones who challenge her ideas about child-rearing and education are not some interloping strangers. They are two of the people she loves most and knows best.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n\u201cThis is the guy I\u2019ve been married to for eight years,\u201d she recalls thinking. \u201cI know him. I know his heart. I know what kind of parent he wants to be to our kids. These easy answers of \u2018Oh, you\u2019re just not a Christian anymore, you just want to sin\u2019 \u2026 didn\u2019t work anymore.\u201d
\n
\nAs Aimee\u2019s first year at Round Hill Elementary came to an end, Aaron and Christina were more convinced than ever that they had made the right decision. But they were also\u00a0<\/strong>at a loss for how to heal the tensions with their parents.
\n
\nIn a 2022 email intended for a pastor at her church but\u00a0<\/strong>sent by accident to Christina, Linda Beall blamed her daughter-in-law for their deepening rift, saying she had taken undue offense at good-faith efforts to advise and support the family through Aaron\u2019s loss of faith.
\n
\n\u201cSo she is again flipping the script from the reality that we love them and her, want to support them, and have only tried to do that again and again, but have been assaulted every time we engage. And I have given up trying [because] it all gets flipped and used against us,\u201d Linda wrote. \u201cI really can not remember one conversations we have had since this unfolded that has not escalated things. So when she beats up \u2018everything\u2019 I say, never offers forgiveness, why would we want to engage again?\u201d
\n
\nAround the same time, Christina sent Aaron\u2019s parents a series of text messages lamenting what she said was their unwillingness to reconcile and explaining that she had changed her opinions about the way she and Aaron had been raised.
\n
\n\u201cThere has been so much pain but I am so excited to now understand and see past the ways that people control and manipulate me,\u201d she wrote. \u201cAnd you may not believe it but I still love Jesus.\u201d
\n
\nAaron and Christina had decided that, in the fall of 2022, all three of their school-age children \u2014 not just Aimee but 5-year-old Oliver and 9-year-old Ezra \u2014 would attend public school. Aurelia, then 2, would remain at home.
\n
\nDespite Aimee\u2019s positive experience, Aaron and Christina were anxious, both for their children and about how their parents would react. One afternoon in June, Christina sent a text message to her mother.
\n
\n\u201cI need to tell you that all three kids are going to school in the fall. I\u2019m sorry, because I know this will be upsetting and disappointing to you and dad,\u201d Christina wrote. \u201cI figured you should hear it from me first.\u201d
\n
\nThree hours later, her mother texted back.
\n
\n\u201cDearest Christina, it is not at all upsetting or disappointing to me,\u201d Catherine Comfort wrote. \u201cYou and Aaron are outstanding parents and I\u2019m sure you made the decision best for your family.\u201d
\n
\nEven Aaron\u2019s parents finally signaled a grudging degree of\u00a0<\/strong>acceptance. <\/a>What has the reaction to the story from general readers been like? Have you heard any reaction from the Beall family?<\/span>The reaction from general readers was unlike any I\u2019ve seen before, at least to my own stuff. The story was among the most read on The Post\u2019s website for several days, and I got hundreds of emails, many of them long and thoughtful. Some of the most heartbreaking were from adults who had grown up in households similar to those in which the Bealls were raised. These readers said they recognized for the first time that they weren\u2019t alone in trying to live with the tangled emotional legacy of this type of upbringing. There were many, many messages expressing admiration for the courage Christina and Aaron had shown in rejecting the approach to home schooling that had defined so much of their lives. There was also a strong response from home-schoolers who said the story did not capture the ideological breadth of the movement \u2014 basically that we had ignored the secular and less doctrinaire world of home-schooling families, which seem to account for a substantial amount of the movement\u2019s growth over the last several years. Subsequent stories in The Post\u2019s Home-School Nation series have examined those types of home-schoolers, and future pieces will as well. But I firmly believe that understanding the world of conservative Christian home schooling is indispensable for understanding the modern home-schooling movement. These are the parents who, while they did not originate the concept of home education, developed the movement\u2019s political infrastructure and fought some of its most important legal battles. Home-schooling simply would not exist in its current form, and with its current popularity, without them. Christina and Aaron hoped their story could help illuminate this world, and I think they were both gratified by the enormous and mostly positive response. But I also think that it\u2019s more than a little strange and unnerving to be the subjects of a widely read piece of journalism. It\u2019s an experience most of us, myself included, have never had and likely will never have. I try never to forget or underestimate the risks people take and the costs they incur\u2014 in time, mental bandwidth, exposure of their lives\u2019 most intimate details to strangers \u2014 by participating in something like this.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nIn February, Linda and Bernard Beall walked into the gym at Round Hill Elementary one cold Saturday afternoon to watch a school performance of \u201cThe Lion King.\u201d Ezra had a part in the chorus as a wildebeest.
\n
\nSitting on plastic chairs in the dark and crowded room, the pair gave no outward sign of the remarkable nature of their visit. When the performance was over, they hugged their grandkids in front of the stage and exchanged halting small talk with Aaron and Christina. Then they drove off, with no discussion of a visit to their son\u2019s house a few blocks away.
\n
\nAbout 10 minutes remained before the Bealls would have to pile into their minivan, and the children needed to get dressed \u2014 in their pajamas.
\n
\nIt was Groundhog Day, a damp night in February, and a low fire glowed in the hearth of the Bealls\u2019 living room. Aaron and Christina sat on the floor playing card and board games with their kids, while Ezra sat on the couch, wearing headphones and absorbed in a game on his laptop. <\/a>You spend some time describing the family here. What made this a scene you wanted to capture and share with readers?<\/span>I think this scene and the one that follows, at Round Hill Elementary, reveal a lot about how far the Bealls have come. Reading to kids in pajamas has such intimate connotations. It’s usually something you do with your immediate family or close relatives. Yet in this instance, the kids are wearing their PJs to school, and being read \u201cbedtime stories\u201d by their teachers. I just thought that was a remarkable example of how much trust Christina and Aaron had come to place in public schools \u2014 institutions they had been taught to fear. Many parents in the movement they came out of would think the whole idea of a \u201cfamily reading night\u201d inside a public school is nuts, but as you watch it unfold you can see that it\u2019s not, and that the Bealls have assumed their place in the school community. The scene beforehand at their home as they\u2019re getting ready to leave is the first in which the entire family is brought together and shown interacting. It comes near the end of the story, but this seemed like an important moment to pause and \u201cintroduce\u201d them all as a group.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nSoon they would be leaving to attend their elementary school\u2019s \u201cFor the Love of Reading Family Night,\u201d held in the school library, where students were encouraged to come dressed for bedtime.
\n
\nAs Oliver rose to change (Ezra, the oldest,\u00a0<\/strong>would not deign to put on his jammies), Aimee told her parents how her second-grade class had learned that day about Punxsutawney Phil.
\n
\nAaron looked at her in bewilderment.
\n
\n\u201cPhil?\u201d he asked. \u201cAm I out of the loop?\u201d
\n
\nHis daughter stared back at him in disbelief.
\n
\n\u201cHe\u2019s famous!\u201d Aimee said. She explained Phil\u2019s role in predicting the length of winter.
\n
\n\u201cI knew about groundhogs,\u201d Aaron said. \u201cI just didn\u2019t know about Phil.\u201d
\n
\n\u201cHe\u2019s\u00a0really\u00a0<\/em>famous,\u201d Aimee said.
\n
\nChristina smiled at her husband.
\n
\n\u201cHome-schooler,\u201d she said. <\/a>I love how much is captured by this exchange of dialogue, specifically about Aimee\u2019s grasp of the secular world. How conscious are you of \u201chunting\u201d for dialogue while reporting?<\/span>\u201cHunting\u201d implies a degree of single-mindedness \u2014 searching for one type of thing \u2014 that I don\u2019t think we should bring to the reporting process. But in some ways it\u2019s an apt metaphor, because most of a hunter\u2019s time is spent waiting. And that\u2019s exactly what happens on a story like this. There were entire days of reporting, in Loudoun County and elsewhere, that didn’t yield details I ultimately included in the story. You keep showing up, you keep watching and listening, and you hope that you observe something interesting. Good dialogue is always the prize. Stories like this can\u2019t live without it.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\nThese were the gaps Aaron and Christina had become accustomed to finding as they learned about a world whose boundaries extended far beyond the one in which they had been raised. There were so many things they had not learned, and perhaps would never learn.
\n
\nStacks of books on the living room\u2019s end tables testified to their belated efforts at self-education: popular works by the biologists Neil Shubin and Robert Sapolsky, as well as\u00a0\u201cRaising Critical Thinkers\u201d<\/a>\u00a0by Julie Bogart, a leading developer of home education materials who has criticized conservative Christian home-schooling groups. Aaron and Christina were still young, but they knew enough about the demands of life, work and family to understand that they could not recover or reconstruct the lost opportunities of their childhoods.
\n
\nBut they could provide new and different opportunities for their own kids. They were doing so in Loudoun County, one of the hotbeds of America\u2019s culture wars over public instruction about race and gender. To the Bealls, who truly knew what it was like to learn through the lens of ideology, concerns about kids being brainwashed in public schools were laughable.
\n
\n\u201cPeople who think the public schools are indoctrinating don\u2019t know what indoctrination is. We were indoctrinated,\u201d Aaron says. \u201cIt\u2019s not even comparable.\u201d
\n
\nThere were still moments when they were\u00a0<\/strong>condemned by an inner voice telling them that they were doing the wrong thing, that both they and their children would go to hell for abandoning the rod and embracing public schools. But the voice was usually silenced by their wonder and gratitude at the breadth of their children\u2019s education.
\n
\nThat breadth was on display as the Bealls jostled into the school library with other families. It was the second day of Black History Month, and the shelves were set up with displays of books about the Underground Railroad, soprano\u00a0<\/strong>Ella Sheppard and Vice President Harris. Where the walls reached the ceiling a mural was painted, with Mary Poppins and Winnie the Pooh.
\n
\nAaron and Christina stood shoulder-to-shoulder, surveying the room. This was the belly of the beast, the environment their parents had worked to save them from.
\n
\nBut they weren\u2019t scared to be inside this school, and were now familiar with it. On Tuesday mornings, Christina volunteered here, helping Aimee\u2019s class with reading lessons.
\n
\n\u201cLet\u2019s go out this way, guys,\u201d she said, leading the way through an exit when it was time to disperse from the library to listen to the teachers read stories aloud.
\n
\nThe hallways were long and wide, with plenty of room for small legs to gather speed. Soon Aaron and Christina were watching as their children, who knew the way to their classrooms, ran far in front of them. <\/a>As you wrote this final paragraph, what impression did you want to leave readers with?<\/span>There is a naturally occurring motif in this moment: Aaron and Christina are, in both a figurative and a literal sense, being led by their children. They both grew up in homes that placed an enormous premium on obedience and parental authority. And of course they haven\u2019t completely jettisoned those concepts\u2014 no responsible parent can\u2014 but they have recalibrated their interpretation of them. They are not necessarily seeking to dictate their kids\u2019 course in life, or shield them from challenging ideas, and they are allowing them a degree of autonomy that they didn\u2019t enjoy themselves. Through this process of watching their kids learn and grow, Aaron and Christina are learning and growing. They are re-evaluating their ideas about the world. I don\u2019t know that all this is conveyed to the reader in this last paragraph, or even that I want all this to be conveyed. But that\u2019s what I think about when I hold this image of them: the kids running down the school hallway, Christina and Aaron following.<\/span><\/span>
\n
\n* * *
\n
\nTrevor Pyle<\/strong> was a newspaper reporter in the Pacific Northwest for several years, and now is a communications officer for a regional nonprofit.<\/em>\n\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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