God’s Children

Alex Ronan | The Atavist Magazine | June 2026 | 1,948 words (7 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 172, “The Extremist in the Family.”

Note: This story contains descriptions of child abuse and death. It draws from testimony given by many of the named subjects and extensive court records.

In August 2016, the Kerr family gathered for a reunion in Minnesota, near the northeast tip of Lake Superior. Becky, the family matriarch, grew up there, and she had long dreamed of showing her grandchildren the area. Everyone stayed together in a big log cabin on a small inland lake. The grandkids made fishing poles and attempted—unsuccessfully—to catch something from the cabin’s dock. Nights ended with s’mores around a campfire. The Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro were on TV, and Becky’s son Joel, then 32, organized what he called the Kerr Family Olympics, complete with an opening ceremony; foot races, cornhole, and other games; and an awards presentation with plastic medals.

Joel was the middle of three kids, raised by Becky and her husband, Glenn, in a devout Baptist tradition. “If the church doors were open, we were there,” Glenn said. As adults, however, the children followed diverse paths. Joel left the family church in Michigan as a young adult, then left Christianity entirely before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. For his older brother, Aaron, 38, faith and family looked much like what the Kerr kids had been raised in, albeit a bit less conservative. Then there was Rachel, 29. Since marrying almost seven years prior, she had embraced an extreme form of Pentecostalism. Among other things, this meant that she increasingly rejected doctors and medicine in favor of prayer and trust in God.

For some families, such differences can lead to heated debates at the dinner table, but the Kerrs weren’t like that. They prioritized connection over confrontation. Besides, when they got together, it was increasingly difficult to fit around a single table. Joel and his wife, Emily, had twin boys. Aaron’s wife, Jennifer, was pregnant with their sixth child. Rachel, who already had two boys under the age of three, was also pregnant.

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Rachel first told her family she was pregnant that spring, saying that the baby was due in the fall. Becky was at Rachel’s home one day when her midwife came for an appointment and, according to Becky, failed to detect a fetal heartbeat. The midwife said Rachel must have had an early miscarriage, but Rachel insisted to her mother that she hadn’t. Becky was bewildered. When she later discussed it with her daughter, Rachel drew a line down the middle of a piece of paper. On one side she put evidence of a possible miscarriage, like the bleeding she’d experienced; on the other, she listed what she and her husband, Josh Piland, were doing to stand in faith for a healthy baby, such as buying a car big enough to fit three kids. She told her mom that God would not put death in her body.

At the reunion in Minnesota a few months later, Rachel was showing, so her family surmised that she and Josh were expecting again. Emily hadn’t seen much of Rachel since moving with Joel to California in 2009. When she sat next to her sister-in-law at a picnic table, Emily said that she was sorry to hear about Rachel’s miscarriage. Rachel told Emily that she was misinformed; she had not lost a baby.

Like Becky before her, Emily was stunned. “Alarm bells that had been ringing for years really started screaming,” she said. Was Rachel suggesting that she had been pregnant all along, or that the first pregnancy hadn’t occurred? Emily wasn’t sure, but she didn’t want to challenge her sister-in-law on something so sensitive. Instead, she congratulated Rachel and asked when she was due. According to Emily, Rachel replied, “The Lord is going to deliver this baby in his own time. It will come when it’s ready to come.” Then she got up and walked away.

The Kerrs’ story begins at Bob Jones University, which Glenn refers to as the “buckle on the Bible Belt.” At the fundamentalist Christian school in South Carolina, Becky majored in music education, and Glenn received an undergraduate degree in applied music and a master’s in Bible studies. When Becky first noticed Glenn, he was engaged in a theological conversation; she was impressed with the way he defended his beliefs. The next semester, Glenn was a teaching assistant in her music theory class. She often showed up early to practice piano in the empty classroom, and Glenn would listen to her play from his office. He thought she was beautiful, and he knew she was smart because he graded her papers. When the semester ended, he asked her out.

It was 1971, and per campus policy, the couple’s first date was chaperoned. The married couple who escorted them to a Sizzlin’ Steakhouse were Glenn’s friends, and they allowed him and Becky to sit at their own table. Along with sharing a love of music, they discovered that they were both one of five children raised in devout families.

Seven months later Glenn proposed. They married, and years passed without a baby. They were exploring adoption when Becky finally got pregnant with Aaron, who was born in 1978. Joel came five years later and was sensitive from a young age. Once, when Aaron got very sick, four-year-old Joel told his mom through tears, “I want to be sick so Aaron doesn’t have to be.” The Kerrs believed healing came from God, but that God worked through men and medicine. So they prayed for Aaron and took him to the doctor. He got better.

In 1987, waiting to be admitted to the maternity ward for the third time, Becky noticed a framed photo of a row of babies. “Oh, that must be the menu board where we choose which baby we want,” Becky joked, and then made her selection: a little girl with dark hair and dark eyes. A few hours later, the nurse put a dark-haired, dark-eyed baby girl on her chest. The Kerrs named her Rachel Joy.

The family moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the early 1990s. Becky and Glenn both worked when the kids were growing up, she in a series of office jobs and as a court reporter, he as an instrument repairman, teacher, missionary, and Bible translator. The Kerr home was a warm one, where sourdough bread and snickerdoodles were baked fresh and music from the piano filled the house. The family spent a lot of time together, especially at church: Becky taught Sunday school and volunteered in the choir, and Glenn served as a pastor and later as a deacon. “It was Sunday school at nine a.m., service at eleven, oftentimes a potluck or something with the church in the afternoon, afternoon choir practice, evening service,” Joel said. Not to mention Wednesday services, youth programs, and Christian summer camps.

Among the Kerrs, Rachel and Becky were particularly close. “I couldn’t have imagined a better mother-daughter relationship,” Becky said. Rachel grew to be spunky and sweet, creative and smart. Missie McGovern became best friends with her in the sixth grade. They sat together at youth group, played on the same volleyball and softball teams, and hung out at each other’s houses. “She was like sunshine,” Missie said. Rachel was also a rule follower. Even in her circle of very devout Christian girls, her efforts to live a sin-free life stood out. Once, in middle school, Missie was chasing another kid and said, “I’m gonna kick your ass!” Rachel gasped—cursing, after all, was a sin. Missie apologized for offending her. Alecia Chapin, a high school friend who described Rachel as a “total goofball,” said that while some girls in their conservative milieu pushed boundaries—wearing tank tops cut a little low, for example—Rachel never did. “I don’t think Rachel even knew an envelope existed to push,” Alecia said.

Rachel dreamed of going to her parents’ alma mater. She liked to sew and draw floor plans for imaginary houses, and she intended to major in interior design. When she arrived at Bob Jones as a freshman, in 2005, she found a place that regulated every aspect of student life, from where women wore jeans (not around men) to how male and female students interacted (only in mixed groups and with strict supervision). Her roommate that year described Rachel as an “impressionable” person who was “always making sure to do everything just right.” She believed what she’d been taught about relationships: that a wife submits to her husband, the spiritual head of the household, just as he submits to God.

As a sophomore, Rachel did a yearlong study-abroad and missionary program in Peru. While there she wrote down a prayer describing her ideal husband. “I specifically prayed for a spiritual warrior,” she later explained. “I asked for a Joshua.” She didn’t mean that her future husband needed to have that name. Rather, she wanted his character to resemble that of Joshua in the Bible: a man of courage and devotion whose faith had been tested and found strong.

Rachel was familiar with what a test of faith looked like because of Joel. Her brother had met Emily, his future wife, when they were both teenagers. Though homeschooled by fundamentalist Christian parents, Emily never considered herself a true believer. When the two started dating, she was already more liberal than Joel, and she challenged his beliefs, particularly regarding gender roles. Later, in college, when he encountered people from a wide range of backgrounds, Joel again found himself questioning aspects of his conservative faith.

Joel and Emily married in the Kerrs’ church, when Joel was 20 and Emily was 21. By then, Joel’s views had changed so much that the couple omitted the bride’s promise to honor and obey her husband from their vows. Soon after, they decamped to a more liberal congregation. Eventually, they stopped going to church altogether. Joel couldn’t bring himself to tell Glenn and Becky. “There’s nothing worse in that community that you can say to your parents,” he explained. But he also couldn’t lie, so when Glenn asked him one day if he’d been going to church, Joel told his dad that he wasn’t a Christian anymore. It was “super traumatic” for everyone, Joel recalled. His parents tried to be understanding, but Glenn continued talking to Joel about his relationship with God until Joel finally asked him to stop.

It came as a surprise to Joel when Rachel returned from Peru to find that Bob Jones didn’t feel right anymore. “I was pretty miserable spiritually,” she later said. “It was almost like I was a completely different person. My freshman year I took comfort in the rules, but by my junior year I started feeling as though the rules did not make me closer to the Lord.” After finishing her junior year, she dropped out and moved back to Grand Rapids, where she took classes at a local college, worked at a chiropractor’s office, and lived alone. She told Becky about dating a non-Christian man—though only after the fact, perhaps because she feared her parents’ disapproval—and one evening she surprised Aaron by ordering an alcoholic drink when they met up for dinner at a restaurant. (Like many conservative Baptists, Becky and Glenn don’t drink.)

Joel never thought Rachel would follow in his footsteps and abandon her faith, but he was glad to see her examining the role of the church in her life. “I remembered what it had been like for me to start asking questions, and seeing that for her was amazing,” he said. “It filled me with hope.” To Emily, it seemed that her sister-in-law was “trying to understand what she wanted” and “experiencing freedom, really, for the first time.”

Then Rachel met Josh.

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