Rachel Dolezal was raised in a cult-like home where her father spoke in tongues and believed in miracle healing and she and her siblings were banned from watching TV and reading books, her brother claims

Daily Mail, UK/June 16, 2015

By Daniel Bates

Rachel Dolezal was raised in a cult-like Protestant home by a hard-line father who ordered her not to read books and spoke to her in tongues.

The race faker’s dad Larry and mother Ruthanne were former hippies turned evangelists who believed that Christians could see into the future and miraculously heal each other, according to her brother Joshua's memoir. 

Larry read an entire chapter of the Bible before each meal, even if it meant their food went cold, and refused to buy a TV for the house.

Joshua claims that he and his sister were both born at home in Troy, Montana, and delivered by their father who put on the birth certificate that Jesus Christ was the sole witness.

He also says that his father's take on The Bible was filled with apocalyptic doom and he would tell them that even close friends would 'deceive every one his neighbor, and they will not speak the truth'

The account is the fullest insight yet into the mind of Rachel, 37, who has been forced to resign from her post as leader of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington amid the row about her posing as a black women for years even though she is white.

It also puts the spotlight onto Ruthanne and Larry, who have until now claimed they are innocent victims of their daughter’s ‘malicious’ lies.

They claim that Rachel is trying to ‘destroy her biological family’ and that she has been lying about her identity for years.

A different story is laid out in ‘Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging’ in which Joshua, 39, tells how he gradually moved away from his family’s unforgiving beliefs and found his own identity.

He is now an associate English professor at Central College in Pella, Iowa and did not respond to an email asking for comment.

In the memoir he says that his mother was a child of the 60s and that at 15 she was learning Joan Baez songs on her guitar and putting daisies on her dress - until she found God.

His father spent his youth working at a lumber mill in Libby, Montana when he met up with an old friend who introduced him to the Bible.

Larry moved to Seattle where he lived in a commune and one night when he was meditating upstairs one day he 'felt a peace steal over him'.

Joshua writes: 'Suddenly his lips were moving and he could hear himself whispering in words he did not understand.

‘Then he knew what it was and he heard a voice again saying: 'I'm filling you with my Holy Spirit now, and then I will teach you about it in the days ahead'.

‘Now when he opened the Bible the words came alive. He had a testimony, a story to tell...he didn't care if people mocked him for a fool or just lowered their heads and shouldered buy. He believed.’

Joshua described that when his father spoke in tongues in front of him it sounded like 'jibberish'.

On another occasion Joshua writes: ‘Glancing through his (Larry’s) Bible once I was surprised to find nearly every passage highlighted or underscored multiple times, with occasional exclamatory notes.

‘It was the palimpsest of his mind as a much younger man, when he wrote my mother twice a day from Seattle, where he had begun speaking on tongues.

‘I have seen photos of him then with shaggy hair, a purple silk shirt with pearl snaps, and sandals on his feet'.

Home life in the Dolezal family revolved around God 24 hours a day and Joshua’s memories include crowds of people hushed in prayer in his living room.

He describes the their church of 60 people, the Troy Christian Fellowship, as a place of 'loud preaching and tambourines jangling' where worshippers swayed with their arms in the air as the Lord's spirit apparently moved them.

Joshua recalls how during one fire and brimstone sermon a preacher told them: 'The love of a father is a jealous love, jealous for its own flesh and blood the way God is jealous for his chosen ones, ready to let loose his wrath on them if they waver in what they know is the truth'.

His parents saw their home as a 'refuge from the outside world' and his father banned television apart from during baseball season when he would borrow and old black and white TV set to watch games.

In the living room there was a wooden rocking chair, a piano and in the hallway was a bookcase with volumes such as The Wind in the Willows and All Creatures Great and Small.

Joshua and Rachel's father read only the newspaper and the Bible as he considered other reading 'frivolous'.

Joshua writes that he and his sister were ordered out of their beds and told to do weeding if they were indoors too long with a book - his father once exploded with rage when he found him thumbing through children’s classic ‘White Fang’.

Joshua goes into detail about the things his parents believed; that some Christians were capable of miraculous healing and could interpret what others were saying into tongues.

He recalled one breakfast as his father read extracts from the Book of Jeremiah that 'shame slithers in my belly as I listen'.

In words which resonate for different reasons, his father said: 'Take heed every one of his neighbour, and trust not in any brother, for every brother will utterly supplant, and every neighbour will walk with slanders.

‘And they will deceive every one his neighbour, and they will not speak the truth'.

Joshua’s relationship with his father was strained from the off, even in their mutual love of baseball.

They began playing catch when he was around four in their garden but their games took a sinister turn whenever he missed a ball.

Joshua writes: 'My father was not a patient man and the longer it took to hunt for a lost ball the sharper his return would be, upping the odds I'd miss and have to chase it down the hill into a ditch.

'We'd keep at it until dusk, calling it quits when we could no longer see.

'I know these marathon games of catch, though they often felt like failure, were my father's best attempt at love’.

Elsewhere Joshua writes that his father was impossible to impress and would tell him: 'You're only as good as your next bat'.

By eighth grade Joshua was being made to work picking berries in a field for 10 hours in the heat of July to earn the $200 to buy new school clothes for the coming year.

He recalled how his mother called him a ‘survivor of the holocaust on the unborn’ due to her anti-abortion views, a cause to which he signed up by taking part in a high school debate.

Over one dinner of a garden salad, creamed cabbage and grilled elk steak, Joshua wrote: 'As is customary, my father reads an entire Bible chapter before the meal, beginning where he left off the previous day.

‘When he reaches the final page of Revelation he will begin with the first chapter of Genesis.'

By the time Joshua was in his 20s, he writes that he has had enough of his father’s teachings.

On a visit home he could not stand it when, after a reading of Deuteronomy from The Bible, they began to talk about politics.

oshua writes that 'the stridency of the verses soon grates on my ears, and my father's voice becomes a wave breaking over and over against my face.'

The conversation turns to the Middle East and Larry 'snorts and tells me I have my head in the sand. This will infuriate me'.

Larry further angers Joshua with 'something about Islam and end-times prophecy, wars, rumours of wars, imminent apocalypse'.

Joshua writes: 'Heavy clouds will pass between us, anger flickering over our faces. Sharp words will crack the air.'

The memoir mentions how near the end of Joshua’s senior year his parents adopted the first of four black children as they were ‘determined to show their commitment to the pro-life cause’.

But Rachel, who was named after the Jewish matriarch who wept for her exiled descendants, was already on her own path and met her now ex-husband Kevin Moore whilst she was in Mississippi at Howard University doing a fine art degree.

Joshua writes that at the time Rachel, who has already begun posing as a black woman, was sorting boxes for UPS and that he was the sorter and she the loader.

For now there seems little chance that the Dolezals will ever resolve their differences.

Ruthanne and Larry have claimed that Rachel is responsible for a sexual abuse case which was brought against Joshua in 2013.

According to court filings from Colorado, Joshua has been charged with committing a ‘pattern’ of abuse involving a person who was a minor at the time of the incident, an individual Rachel has said was a member of their own family.

Appearing on NBC's Today show Rachel showed no sign of reconciliation and reiterated her claim that a black man she knows in Spokane is her father - and not Larry.

Rachel insisted that she is black and said: 'Overall my life has been one of survival and the decisions I have made on the way have been to survive'

To see more documents/articles regarding this group/organization/subject click here.