One of my best friends in high school grew up in a conservative Christian household, and her life was a strikingly similar (if less extreme) version of what's s

One of my best friends in high school grew up in a conservative Christian household, and her life was a strikingly similar (if less extreme) version of what's stated here. She's 17 and doesn't have a key to her house. Her parents read and question her about her texts, Facebook account, and internet history. In middle school, she read popular fiction (Harry Potter, Inkspell, etc.) in class because only Christian-themed books were allowed at home. Her parents usually refused the permission slips on PG and PG-13 movies. She's not permitted to ride in a car unless the driver is a relative or adult friend of the family (which seriously impedes social life in a quiet suburb). Shortly after her 17th birthday she was granted permission to date, then bowed to her parents' pressure to break up with one of our mutual friends because she liked him but it wasn't going to result in marriage. Before that magical threshold, she wasn't allowed to be alone with me (or any other male friend), even in a public place. Her parents expect straight As. The only exception was the test on evolution in freshmen biology. That one, she was required to fail. She is occasionally upset by her parents inteference, but is on the whole a firm believer in piety, strict parenting and plentiful spanking. She instinctively rejects any suggestion that a parent's judgement could ever be wrong (like when friends complain about their parents), or that any of what was taken from her could be considered a right. The Saudi Arabian Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice (morality police) came up in the news one day, and that struck her (to my horror) not as Orwellian, but as a brilliant idea and something we need here. And now, having been trusted with exactly 0 important decisions in her life, she's moving away to college this fall (secular, fortunately). I hope she has a moment like Marwa's. I hope she realizes the signficance of the fact that she has keys to her room, the password to her computer, and the PIN to her phone. I hope she realizes that she can Google and text and email without fear of retribution, that no one will tell her that her 15 minutes of internet time are up or demand to know why she checked out that book or called that boy. But if I had to put money on it, I'd say she'll raise her children the same way. Aggressively protecting the sexual and religious purity of daughters isn't unique to the Muslim world. Some would call it responsible parenting. But I think it's important, before we write this off as a "those people" problem, that not-otherwise-outwardly-crazy Christians do it too.