Hello, again.
A brief re-introduction.
There’s been an influx of new readers over here and I want to say thank you. Thank you to
for recommending me on her newsletter and for being such a strong advocate for those of us who have left high-control religions. Thanks to each and every one of you for reading along.It’s a strange compulsion to want to put your thoughts into words. I don’t know where it comes from, and personally don’t care to know, but I do know that I’ve always had the compulsion.
I started this Substack in the wake of my childhood pastor telling me that “God will judge” me for standing up to his attempt to celebrate white supremacy. Something broke in me that day. For years, I’d swept my experiences under a rug that I hoped no one would ever trip over. I hoped that if I just buried that part of me, I could live a “normal” life. You can’t hide the things that shape you.
After this encounter with my ex-pastor, I had to ask myself some serious questions: who was I protecting? Who was I really defending? My silence started to feel like complicity. I had to bear witness to my experiences and say, somehow, some way, “this isn’t good!”, “this is the wolf in sheep’s clothing we were all warned about.”
That said, I don’t write to debunk Christian Fundamentalism. I write because, as Flannery O’Connor says, “I don't know what I think until I read what I say”. I’m trying to understand my own experiences and what happens at the intersection of Fundamentalist Christianity and culture writ large. After all, Fundamentalism is merely a reaction to cultural trends.
That said, let’s get some of the facts out of the way:
I went to not one, but two Christian colleges: The Crown College of the Bible and Bob Jones University.
I attended Temple Baptist Church from ages eight or nine through twenty-three.
I was home schooled through IBLP/ATI with Bob Jones University curriculum. (Bill Gothard once tried to recruit me to work at IBLP headquarters and boy did I dodge a bullet.)
I was raised on a steady diet of Focus on the Family and James Dobson’s teachings, like most Evangelical kids in the 90s.
I probably experienced literally everything you’ve read about people raised in Fundamentalism.
Here’s another fact:
These things don’t define me. They’ve shaped me, but they’re not the only interesting things about me.
Which is how I can write about The Fly and how it’s a covert film about abortion. Or why I’ve written about Wal-Mart and it’s place in rural America. It’s all part of this larger learning and un-learning and re-learning process. Thanks for coming along for the ride.