Asella:
He started screaming into the phone that I was un-Christian for not listening to his “truths” about me and how I shouldn’t talk back to him because he cuts me down out of love. I asked him if he spoke to his own daughter this way, and he said yes. Then he told me to talk to a priest and tell him about our conversation because the priest would surely agree that I’m un-Christian. After he said what he wanted to say, he hung up on me. … I have never seen him get angry like that, but when I spoke to him on the phone I got a taste of how terrible he can get, and it left me wondering if maybe the reason his family doesn’t stand up to him is because he gets so violently angry.
Oh, absolutely it is. You are quite right, your husband’s father taught him nothing like how a Christian man treats his wife. This, in retrospect, I should have surmised from your first post.
[An aside to unmarrieds reading this: Mark well how your fiance’s parents’ marriage works. This is the model your fiance had. Everything else is theoretical.]
This leaves you with the job of picking your battles
very carefully and sticking to your guns. By all means, see a priest. If your husband won’t go with you, then go alone. The priest may tell you that calling your FIL was a mistake, but only because it is a mistake to try to teach a pig to sing. (You only frustrate yourself and annoy the pig.) As hopeless as it is for FIL to bring you into line by the method of direct attack, trust me very much that you will have even less luck in the other direction.
Your FIL sounds like he needs to cling to the mythology that he alone is properly dedicated to the pursuit of perfection and that everyone else is a screw-up who exists to make his life miserable. I will wager that he finds the entire world, not just his immediate family, an almost hopeless “fixer upper.” Without his control on things, he imagines that your whole family will wind up in the ditch. If it helps you any, imagine if you will that his guns are even more relentlessly trained on himself than on the rest of you, in an on-going interior criminal trial. His life must be utterly exhausting, the poor foolish man.
This isn’t to say that he isn’t tormenting you, just that only God is likely to ever reform the man by direct revelation. My analogy that cast him as a murderously-jealous member of the Sanhedrin of Jesus’ day is not far off the mark. We all carry our sin; it is my guess that that is his sin to contend with. I hope you can get your husband to move away from him and his toxic hold on his family. Good luck to you, you are going to need it. And for crying out loud, never, ever let your husband talk you into accepting any gift from your in-laws that you are not in a position to reciprocate. You will have no gift from your FIL that does not have strings. Don’t let it be the home that you sleep in.
