*Sherri Shepherd has opened up about how the Jehovah’s Witness religion broke up her family and caused her parents to divorce.
She even recounts the time she was forced to stop speaking to her father because he dared to question some of the religion’s policies after she was punished by the church for committing a sin.
“I was told as a young girl we had to stop talking to my dad even though he lived in our house,” Shepherd said in an interview with ABC News correspondent Paula Farish on the “Journeys of Faith” podcast.
She added: “He worked three jobs to take care of us and I remember my two sisters telling him, ‘We can’t talk to you anymore.’ I saw him breaking down and crying,” Shepherd said.
According to the report, her father had been “disfellowshipped” from the religion because he was too inquisitive and not a true believer.
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Sherri Shepherd opens up about life as a single working mom https://t.co/f2OnO7g8Dg pic.twitter.com/jsuFBJGhZw
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Shepherd says when her sister read her diary and learned she had lost her virginity, she ripped out the pages to show them to her mother and church leaders.
After being interrogated by three male church officials in front of her father about losing her virginity, Shepherd was deemed the ultimate sinner and those close to her were barred from communicating with her because she had “committed sexual sin.”
“And my parents got divorced because of that, and that was another thing that kind of drew me away from the Jehovah’s Witnesses,” she said.
“I think that was the last straw because in the Bible it says, ‘the greatest of these things is love,’ and you telling me that the man that I love, who’s giving everything to take care of me, I can’t talk to?” she questioned.
“It was a very strict upbringing that I had,” she said.
In her late teenage years, she quit the faith and got saved at a “black Pentecostal church.”
“When you’re a Jehovah’s Witness you don’t go into churches because ‘churches are of the devil,’” she said. “But I tell you, I had such a sense of peace when I was in that [Pentecostal] church.”
At age 19, after her mother’s death, is when Sherri says she became a Christian.
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