Letters to the Editor
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Different for an adult
It's one thing to be a fundamentalist as a child, but quite another to be a fundamentalist as an adult.
The loss of faith as an adult, even a young adult, is an awful experience. Imagine your most sincere beliefs slowly decaying in your hands. You do everything you can to save them, but nothing works, and over the period of a few years everything is gone.
The loss of fundamentalist faith also entails the loss of fundamentalist friends. So almost everyone you've ever known outside of your immediate family is estranged from you -- and worse than that, you have become the enemy. You are the one who has betrayed Christ. You are the dog who has turned again to his own vomit. Some fundamentalists who stray from the fold literally lose everyone -- all friends, all family.
Along with the loss of fundamentalist faith is the loss of any feeling of purpose. One year you are part of the kingdom of God, one of the chosen, filled with insight and spiritual wisdom, and the next year you are nothing and have nothing -- except the realization that you were wrong about that which was most important to you.
All of this takes years to get over, and I suppose some of us never do get over it completely. There's the counseling and the anti-depressants, and those help. But like the amputee sensing a phantom limb, a quarter of a century after my fundamentlist days I continue to have a vague spiritual sensation -- like something should be there -- but nothing is.
So I'm glad the author of the book ended up with funny stories and interesting experiences, and that her fundamentalism was just a part of growing up. But for many of us the whole experience is devastating, and is more like death than growth.
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I have to disagree with Mishima666's post...
Frankly, there's nothing I feel more grateful for in my life than having managed to escape the raving evangelical traditions I was raised in. Sure, it hurt, it led to years of therapy, and it estranged me from most of my family -- but my life is my own now, my thoughts are my own, and I'm no longer obliged to waste my life wallowing in that bottomless morass of guilt, sentimentality, histrionics, denial and separatism which characterizes fundamentalist and evangelical movements in all of the Abrahamic religions. These people contradict every value they claim to stand for.
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Evangelicals vs Fundamentalists
Just an observation. fishanthrope said it was refreshing to get away from the Evangelicals. Mishima666 said it was devastating getting away from the Fundamentalists. As the article said, there's a big difference between Fundamentalists and Evangelicals, and maybe this is a good illustration.
As for me, I gave up on organized christianity soon after my dad did, during my college. It was from the Presbytarian church, and they were all pretty moderate and mainstream to begin with. No big pain, no big relief. But those Sunday sermons were pretty boring; they ought to supply bedsheets and pillows in the pews. At least in churchschool, we got to use crayons and eat dates.
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it's abuse, plain and simple
A family is raising a small child in an environment in which s/he is taught:
(1) that if they are not "saved" they will be separated from their mother and father and sisters and brothers for all eternity when they die in a ghastly inferno where demons will gnaw their flesh and torture them;
(2) that at any moment the trumpet of the Lord could sound and "rapture" the saved into heaven -- and doom the unsaved (or even just naughty) child to Hell;
(3) to not make long terms plans for their life, whether those plans include education, or marriage, or love, or passion, or hobbies, or anything, because "the End is near" and it will all be over soon anyway;
(4) that they, a small child, are intrinsically evil, dirty, filthy, and full of sin, unworthy of any love, save the Lord's.
How is this not abusive? I lived this scenario. From age five until well into my teens, I awoke every night with nightmare visions of the Second Coming and my punishment in Hell. I never thought I'd graduate high school, or kiss a girl, or have a career because my family said that Russia would nuke Israel and cause Armageddon "any day now".
I suffered from anxiety disorders, GI problems, emotional distress, and developed OCD from the constant vigilance demanded of me; when trains would pass by our house a few blocks away, the whistle sounded to me like a trumpet and sent me running underneath my bed, trying to hide from Jesus himself.
You see, throughout all of this, I refused to go along with my family's views and did not buy them on an intellectual level. I never "accepted Christ" or "became saved". But as with any child, one absorbs familial-generated fear and terror on a subconscious, primal level that will mar you for the rest of your life.
I understand that freedom of religion is ingrained in the American psyche. But no family should have the right to terrorize their children 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. That's abuse, and the sooner clinicians understand that religion-based abuse is every bit as real and destructive as physical abuse, the better.
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Evangelicalism vs. Fundamentalism
The article -- and, by inference, the book being discussed -- promulgates definitions of "evangelical" and "fundamentalist" that do not map to my own religious experiences or, indeed, to accepted definitions of the terms. The words are not opposites, and can be accurately applied to the same congregation. They often are.
"Evangelicals" typically believe that salvation is something that must be gained somehow (let's sidestep the faith/works question here), and that consequently the news of their faith must be spread to the unchurched in order to save their souls. It is the evangelical impulse that fuels Christian missionary work, for example; in some evangelical views, all are Hellbound if they are not explicitly saved, and it falls to the faithful to communicate this message.
"Fundamentalists" are those that seek a more basic, stark, black-and-white treatment of faith; this is typically characterized by a large helping of alienation from popular culture. Christian fundamentalists have given us such hokum as the young-earth theory (to which Rosen alludes w/r/t the Grand Canyon) and the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy, for example. Fundamentalism is (of course) also not limited to Christianity.
It is therefore possible to be evangelical AND fundamentalist -- in fact, I daresay that within the Christian faith, all fundamentalists are evangelicals, but not all evangelicals are fundamentalists. Music choice and worship style aren't indicators; some fundamentalist churches use modern instruments and music styles, for example, while some congregations with evangelical roots may prefer a less elaborate, more traditional approach to worship.
I cannot be sure what Rosen may have meant when she described her Biomom's faith as "evangelical," but at least some clues exist in the quotes provided. In particular, the references to speaking in tongues and miracle cures strongly suggest that Rosen has confused "evangelical" and "Pentacostal." Tongues and cures are among the "gifts of the Holy Spirit" that Pentacostals emphasize. True, Pentacostal Christians are also typically evangelical, but so, too, are fundamentalists. I daresay, in fact, that the Pentacostal congregation attended by Rosen's Biomom was probably both evangelical and fundamentalist as well as Pentacostal, whereas Rosen's own was merely evangelical and fundamentalist.