Though Tara Westover states in a short preface to Educated that her book is “not [a story] about Mormonism” or any other religious belief, it remains undeniable that much of the memoir concerns the work Westover had to do throughout her life to delineate the line between devoutness and delusion within her own family. Her father’s anti-government, self-sufficient, end-times outlook on life was radical, hateful, and dangerous, and was rooted in fear. He also trumpeted a warped sense of superiority over “gentiles”—which to him meant any person who visited a doctor, immunized their children or sent them to public school, or did not observe his own stringent rules about modesty, observance of the Sabbath, and rejection of popular media and entertainment. As Westover tells her story, she suggests that there is a fine line between devoutness and delusion—and that for isolated populations, it can be particularly difficult to discern the difference between the two.
Tara Westover describes her father, Gene Westover, as a man with “the solemnity of an oracle,” and indeed, to his children, he seemed to be the only one with the power to interpret and embody the word of God. Throughout her memoir, Tara illustrates the blurry divide between devoutness and delusion that ruled her childhood home—and influenced her own warped perception of the world for many years. Tara’s father’s devoutness often takes strange and twisted forms. For instance, when Gene closely studies a Bible passage that reads, “Butter and honey shall he eat […] That he may know to refuse the evil, and choose the good,” he throws away all of the dairy in the Westover home and goes out to buy fifty gallons of honey, believing that the Lord has commanded that butter, and by proxy all dairy, is “evil.” Throughout the book, Gene’s devoutness blurs with his delusions about the role of the Illuminati in the government, the “socialist” agenda of public schools, and the evil of doctors and hospitals. Because of his delusions, which he both couches and hides within his devotion to his fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible and the Book of Mormon, Gene’s children grow up without immunizations, birth certificates, educations, or adequate medical care. His warped beliefs spread throughout the family, and seep into the minds of his wife and children—enabling patterns of abuse and neglect always disguised as piety, compliance with the word of God, and adherence to the teachings of sacred religious texts. As the years pass, the fact that many of Gene’s strange beliefs are completely divorced from the church he and his family belong to becomes evident to many people in their small county—except for his own spouse and children. As Gene begins construction on a giant church-like structure of his own—using the proceeds from Faye’s lucrative essential oil business—his desire to isolate himself and his family from their larger community and from common sense itself becomes crystal-clear.
Gene is not the only one in the Westover family beholden to a set of delusions disguised as religious devotion—Tara’s mother, Faye, also subscribes to a bizarre and flimsy set of beliefs, which she nevertheless clings to fiercely. A midwife by trade, Faye places her belief in the power of essential oils and a practice of her own making called “muscle testing”—checking the outcome of a question through hand motions she believes are controlled by divine forces—to heal even the most life-threatening injuries and guide her family through increasingly difficult problems and predicaments. As Gene does the work of isolating himself and his family from the rest of society intentionally, believing that when the “Days of Abomination” arrive their clan alone will be able to survive on the fruits they’ve canned, the land they’ve amassed, and the self-sustaining world they’ve built, Faye becomes more and more convinced of the corruption and evil of institutions meant to protect and nurture her large brood. She pulls Tara out of dance classes after Gene remarks that the recital costumes—large sweatshirts that hang to the knee, specifically picked so that Tara could participate while still dressing modestly—were whorish and obscene. She treats her son Luke’s third-degree burns—and later, Gene’s—with tinctures, oils, and a homemade “anti-shock” potion called “Rescue Remedy” rather than conventional medicine or hospital visits. Every time a member of the family narrowly escapes infection, illness, or death, Faye echoes Gene’s belief that God has been in charge the entire time. As the lines between delusion and devoutness blur, Faye loses her ability to see the abuse festering within her own home. She disowns Tara for speaking out against Shawn’s physical and emotional cruelty even when presented with direct evidence of it—she has lived so long in a circus of delusion that she is, like her husband, eventually unable to separate fact from fiction.
In Educated, Tara Westover recounts how her family found themselves trapped in a vicious cycle of their own making. They isolated themselves from society because of their devout religious beliefs, and in turn, their adherence to these fringe, extremist views further isolated them from society. In charting the ways in which her parents fed one another’s delusions in the name of supporting each other’s religious devotion and holiness, Westover demonstrates what a powerful force belief truly is—for better or for worse.
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Devoutness and Delusion ThemeTracker
Devoutness and Delusion Quotes in Educated
Dad had always believed passionately in Mother’s herbs, but that night felt different, like something inside him was shifting, a new creed taking hold. Herbalism, he said, was a spiritual doctrine that separated the wheat from the tares, the faithful from the faithless. Then he used a word I’d never heard before: Illuminati. It sounded exotic, powerful, whatever it was. Grandma, he said, was an unknowing agent of the Illuminati.
God couldn’t abide faithlessness, Dad said. That’s why the most hateful sinners were those who wouldn’t make up their minds, who used herbs and medication both, who came to Mother on Wednesday and saw their doctor on Friday—or, as Dad put it, “Who worship at the altar of God one day and offer a sacrifice to Satan the next.” These people were like the ancient Israelites because they’d been given a true religion but hankered after false idols.
“Doctors and pills,” Dad said, nearly shouting. “That’s their god, and they whore after it.”
Dad picked me up soon after on his way home from a job. He pulled up in his truck and honked for me to come out, which I did, my head bent low. Grandma followed. I rushed into the passenger seat, displacing a toolbox and welding gloves, while Grandma told Dad about my not washing. Dad listened, sucking on his cheeks while his right hand fiddled with the gearshift. A laugh was bubbling up inside him. Having returned to my father, I was taken by the power of his person. A familiar lens slid over my eyes and Grandma lost whatever strange power she’d had over me an hour before.
“Don’t you teach your children to wash after they use the toilet?” Grandma said.
Dad shifted the truck into gear. As it rolled forward he waved and said, “I teach them not to piss on their hands.”
I waited for the screen to flicker and die. I was trying to take it all in, this last, luxurious moment—of sharp yellow light, of warm air flowing from the heater. I was experiencing nostalgia for the life I’d had before, which I would lose at any second, when the world turned and began to devour itself.
The longer I sat motionless, breathing deeply, trying to inhale the last scent of the fallen world, the more I resented its continuing solidity. […] Sometime after 1:30 I went to bed. I glimpsed Dad as I left, his face frozen in the dark, the light from the TV leaping across his square glasses.
He seemed smaller to me than he had that morning. The disappointment in his features was so childlike, for a moment I wondered how God could deny him this. He, a faithful servant, who suffered willingly just as Noah had willingly suffered to build the ark.
But God withheld the flood.
“Shouldn’t we drive slower?” Mother asks.
Dad grins. “I’m not driving faster than our angels can fly.” The van is still accelerating. To fifty, then to sixty.
Richard sits tensely, his hand clutching the armrest, his knuckles bleaching each time the tires slip. Mother lies on her side, her face next to mine, taking small sips of air each time the van fishtails, then holding her breath as Dad corrects and it snakes back into the lane. She is so rigid, I think she might shatter. My body tenses with hers; together we brace a hundred times for impact.
It is a relief when the van finally leaves the road.
Reflecting on it now, I’m not sure the injury changed him that much, but I convinced myself that it had, and that any cruelty on his part was entirely new. I can read my journals from this period and trace the evolution—of a young girl rewriting her history. In the reality she constructed for herself nothing had been wrong before her brother fell off that pallet. I wish I had my best friend back, she wrote. Before his injury, I never got hurt at all.
A few days later Dad came home with the most frightening machine I’ve ever seen. He called it the Shear. At first glance it appeared to be a three-ton pair of scissors, and this turned out to be exactly what it was. The blades were made of dense iron, twelve inches thick and five feet across. They cut not by sharpness but by force and mass. […]
Dad had dreamed up many dangerous schemes over the years, but this was the first that really shocked me. Perhaps it was the obvious lethality of it, the certainty that a wrong move would cost a limb. Or maybe that it was utterly unnecessary. It was indulgent. Like a toy, if a toy could take your head off.
Shawn called it a death machine and said Dad had lost what little sense he’d ever had. “Are you trying to kill someone?” he said. “Because I got a gun in my truck that will make a lot less mess.” Dad couldn’t suppress his grin. I’d never seen him so enraptured.
I’d always known that my father believed in a different God. As a child, I’d been aware that although my family attended the same church as everyone in our town, our religion was not the same. They believed in modesty; we practiced it. They believed in God’s power to heal; we left our injuries in God’s hands. They believed in preparing for the Second Coming; we were actually prepared. For as long as I could remember, I’d known that the members of my own family were the only true Mormons I had ever known, and yet for some reason, here at this university, in this chapel, for the first time I felt the immensity of the gap. I understood now: I could stand with my family, or with the gentiles, on the one side or the other, but there was no foothold in between.
I came back to Buck’s Peak when I was sure the strep was gone. I sat by Dad’s bed, dripping teaspoons of water into his mouth with a medical dropper and feeding him pureed vegetables as if he were a toddler. He rarely spoke. The pain made it difficult for him to focus; he could hardly get through a sentence before his mind surrendered to it. Mother offered to buy him pharmaceuticals, the strongest analgesics she could get her hands on, but he declined them. This was the Lord’s pain, he said, and he would feel every part of it.
“Everyone has undergone a change,” [Dr. Kerry] said. “The other students were relaxed until we came to this height. Now they are uncomfortable, on edge. You seem to have made the opposite journey. This is the first time I’ve seen you at home in yourself. It’s in the way you move: it’s as if you’ve been on this roof all your life.”
[…]
I had to think before I could answer. “I can stand in this wind, because I’m not trying to stand in it,” I said. “The wind is just wind. You could withstand these gusts on the ground, so you can withstand them in the air. There is no difference. Except the difference you make in your head.”
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. Marley had written that line a year before his death, while an operable melanoma was, at that moment, metastasizing to his lungs, liver, stomach and brain. I imagined a greedy surgeon with sharp teeth and long, skeletal fingers urging Marley to have the amputation. I shrank from this frightening image of the doctor and his corrupt medicine, and only then did I understand, as I had not before, that although I had renounced my father’s world, I had never quite found the courage to live in this one.
I flipped through my notebook to the lecture on negative and positive liberty. In a blank corner I scratched the line, None but ourselves can free our minds. Then I picked up my phone and dialed. “I need to get my vaccinations,” I told the nurse.
My parents said he was justified in cutting me off. Dad said I was hysterical, that I’d thrown thoughtless accusations when it was obvious my memory couldn’t be trusted. Mother said my rage was a real threat and that Shawn had a right to protect his family. […]
Reality became fluid. The ground gave way beneath my feet, dragging me downward, spinning fast, like sand rushing through a hole in the bottom of the universe. The next time we spoke, Mother told me that the knife had never been meant as a threat. “Shawn was trying to make you more comfortable,” she said. “He knew you’d be scared if he were holding a knife, so he gave it to you.” A week later she said there had never been any knife at all.
“Talking to you,” she said, “your reality is so warped. It’s like talking to someone who wasn’t even there.”
While they plotted how to reconvert me, I plotted how to let them. I was ready to yield, even if it meant an exorcism. A miracle would be useful: if I could stage a convincing rebirth, I could dissociate from everything I’d said and done in the last year. I could take it all back—blame Lucifer and be given a clean slate. I imagined how esteemed I would be, as a newly cleansed vessel. How loved. All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs, and I could have my family.
