G. Elijah Dann

We ex-fundamentalists are like a bunch of PTSD sufferers comparing notes about how we got shell-shocked. We’re all a bit…twitchy.

I could feel that twitch in the back of my mind as I read Leaving Fundamentalism: Personal Stories, from Wilfrid Laurier University Press, edited by University of Victoria Research Fellow G. Elijah Dann. Because I know the feeling that runs through the stories in this book, the feeling you’ve been damaged by that world view, that maybe you only just escaped with your sanity.

Virtually all the writers have the same basic biography: firmly believing their church doctrines, convinced they have a personal relationship with God, often planning to “do God’s work” through some sort of ministry. They commit to fundamentalism via an emotional appeal, and believe they will now overcome sin and live victoriously.

Aaaand then the cracks appear. Sin is not overcome – and it’s the believer’s fault, no matter how devout and prayerful and committed they are. Or what fellow believers say in public and how they behave in private create a huge contradiction. Or – the very worst crime – the believer asks a question.

In fundamentalism, all questions are viewed suspiciously, and the questioner may be considered “rebellious,” lacking faith, relying too much on human reasoning rather than just accepting the doctrines as a package. I know the experience well.

And so the questioner leaves. Some of these writers retained their belief in a version of God even when they left fundamentalism, or they adopted other forms of spirituality. But others who were most thoroughly trained in the fundamentalist “all or nothing” mentality ended up deciding, “Well then – nothing.” (That would be me.)

But none of these departures was taken lightly, and all these writers marked their leaving with a painful, seismic upheaval in their life. There was Jacob Shelley, whose wife’s parents actually cut off all contact with her because they “weren’t at peace” with her marrying him. They don’t even know their only grandchild as a result. Julie Rak, married with two children, recognized that she could no longer pretend to be a straight woman (no amount of prayer, Bible study, or fundamentalist rationalization was going to change her real nature), and ended up divorced from her husband, leaving her family.

I experienced an eerie “I’ve been there” sensation as I read of Jeffrey W. Robbins’s fears, as an adolescent being taught all about the Rapture and the Tribulation. He knew he wasn’t entirely “right with God,” and lived in almost daily terror that he was going to come home and find his house empty and all his family raptured to heaven while he was left behind to face the hellish events of the End Times. I experienced my own version of this, sometimes waking up in the middle of the night and listening for the breathing of my family members, so I would know they hadn’t been taken, know I wasn’t alone. I had countless sleepless nights, lying in the dark in terror.

Robbins now views such teachings as inhumane, and thinks the films that portray the supposed Tribulation are essentially horror films. Others consider these teachings, trying to terrify impressionable young people into fundamentalism, tantamount to child abuse. I’m inclined, now, to agree.

This book will give non-fundamentalists some astonishing insight into how otherwise rational, humane people might plunge into such an anti-rational, harsh world view, and why it’s so hard for them to escape.

But for former fundamentalists, reliving their – our – own traumatic experiences through these stories, the understanding will go much deeper. We will think to ourselves, in relief and empathy, “I was not alone.”… (más)