Marissa Butterfuss was just four years old when her family pulled out of the driveway of their Alabama home to join their new church in Oklahoma.
A pair of relatives were there, she said, warning them they were joining a cult, but they went anyway.
About five years later, in 2001, they were on the move again, heading with their Oklahoma congregation to Tucson, where God wanted their pastor to start a church, she recalled.
Marissa Butterfuss is a hairdresser at Maple Leaf Hair Company, 4811 East Grant Road #149, Tucson, Ariz., Oct. 5, 2024.
It would be another 15 years before Butterfuss left — both the church and her marriage to a devout member. Then, in 2021 she did something unimaginable in the sect: She married a woman.
“I tried so, so hard. I read the books, I listened to the tapes, I prayed that God would make me understand,” Butterfuss said during an interview with her wife Deedee. “When I was looking for a husband, I specifically was looking for someone who would be a spiritual leader. And when I met my ex, he was so devout.”
The conservative church viewed homosexuality as taboo.
“I don't think I really realized what a lesbian was,” she said. “Looking back, I realize that I had crushes, but I didn't realize that those were crushes until after I left the church.”
Butterfuss grew up in a church called Charity Tabernacle and the sect known as The Message, or The Message of The Hour. It’s a network of churches, not a formal denomination, whose members view the 20th-century American preacher William Branham as God's prophet.
Rev. William Branham
Branham emerged as a faith healer after World War II and moved to Tucson in 1963, leading to the city becoming a central place for Message believers. Branham died in a car crash on Christmas Eve, 1965, but his doctrine lives on in more than 1,200 recorded sermons.
Butterfuss’ father, Brad Farrer, heard a recorded sermon by David Musgrove, the pastor of the church he eventually joined, while driving trucks in the 1990s, Marissa Butterfuss said. He decided to join.
Farrer declined a request for an interview.
For young Marissa, the move to Oklahoma meant getting used to rigid new customs.
“I remember we stopped wearing pants and stopped cutting our hair,” she recalled of the rules for females. “We stopped making friends with people outside of the church.”
These are common norms in Message churches that took some getting used to, but on the bright side, the church was a welcoming community.
Charity Tabernacle, 4503 S. Mission Road, is part of the Seven Thunders branch of The Message, which views Branham as a prophet and Joseph Coleman, a New York City Message pastor who died in 2012, as an apostle.
When Musgrove announced he was planning to move the church to Tucson, Butterfuss said, it was partly to spread the Seven Thunders message. Musgrove declined to answer questions for this story.
Butterfuss’ father became a deacon in the church, and as she entered her late teens, she began planning for a traditional Message life. She would marry a man, have kids, and embrace church life.
She met the man who would become her husband at a Message convention in London in 2011. That wasn’t a coincidence: She went in part to look for a husband, and she found someone who even exceeded her own religious devotion.
He moved to Tucson, and they had a child, but the relationship was rough, Butterfuss said. And her pastor, she said, didn’t help. When she went to him for counseling, he told her to pray and that any man who would wrong her would stop.
“I felt like the church kind of abandoned me," she said.
Butterfuss sought a divorce, finalized in 2017, and that ended her attachment to Charity Tabernacle, the Message and her family.
Acting out against the church's strict rules on women's grooming, she went to cosmetology school.
“That stupid rebellious act ended up being great because I love doing hair,” she said. “But yeah, I lost all of my friends and my relationship with my parents. It was really, really rough.”
Marissa Butterfuss adds product to Dawn RussellÕs hair at Maple Leaf Hair Company, 4811 East Grant Road #149, Tucson, Ariz., Oct. 5, 2024.
After the divorce, Butterfuss said, she dated a man but wondered if it was more natural for her to date women. In 2019, she jumped on a dating site to try.
"I accidentally stumbled into a wife," she said.
Her first connection was with Deedee Butterfuss, who was living in California but planning to move to Tucson. They connected, first remotely and then in person.
Then an important test came: Marissa Butterfuss and her father met for breakfast, and she came out to him gradually, saying she was bisexual. At first he was accepting, she said, but a couple of days later, he'd changed his view.
“He told me that he actually couldn't accept," she said. "If I were to ever bring a girl home, they wouldn't accept her into the house."
That wasn’t the last word, though.
Marissa’s parents “told us the day before the wedding that they had left the church,” she said. “I felt like it was a wedding present.”
Added Deedee: “It was probably the nicest thing that anyone's ever done.”
It was a pandemic wedding with just seven attendees. But their dads, who hadn’t met before, sang a song together.
