Until recently I never realized there was such a thing as a Christian who wasn't also a Fundamentalist. When I was being raised in a Christian household, attending a Baptist church 3 times a week and never missing a week of revival, camp meeting or youth group meetings on Saturdays, the word Fundamental was brandished about like a sword, cutting through all the evil and untruth in the big scary world outside our bubble where Satan's minions waited to trip us up on all things worldly.
"We are Independent, Fundamental, Bible Believing Christians!" Our pastor would shout. Our fathers would answer back with perfunctory "Amens!" Our mama's would nod in enthusiastic agreement.
Surely Fundamentalism was a good thing, right?
I admit, as a kid growing up and even as a young adult heavily involved in my church, I never really knew what it mean to be a Fundamentalist. At some point I came to realize that being Fundamentalist meant we believed in the Bible as the inspired, literal word of God. Literal, meaning everything in there besides the parables of Jesus, were to be taken as the absolute, infallible truth.
Okay, I could accept that, I thought. After all, I sat through hundreds of Sunday Schools where my teacher beautifully illustrated stories from both the Old and New Testaments, bringing them to life, making them seem as real as anything. I spent my entire life listening to pastors read scripture and then tell us in great detail what each passage meant in its literal form, had listened to them as they told us what "those other" denominations believed and why they were wrong. I memorized long passages, believing that someday my right to consume God's Word (only the 1611 King James Version was the "inspired one") would be forcefully ripped away from me, and then the only connection to God I would have would be what I'd managed to "hide in my heart."
As I matured, my curiosity and thirst for knowledge led me to delve deeper into scripture on my own. I read the Old Testament in fascination--the history, the violence, the passion and shocking wrath of God was enthralling. The imperfections of David, the man after God's own heart, spoke to me in ways that no pastor or teacher had ever been able to illuminate, usually because they focused more on the victorious King David, and less on the very human, humbled and flawed man. If they did speak about his imperfections, it was to admonish us about our own sinful ways and remind us that a wrathful God waited with impudence to exact his swift and terrible punishment upon us for our human failings.
This literal interpretation of every word in the Bible eventually clashed with my very human, very natural God-given ability to think; to reason as it were, that nothing written in scripture was actually penned by God's own hand. We can't even credit one book of the Bible to Jesus himself, who walked among men and lived as one of us. It began to nag at me that if God wanted us to have his pure, unadulterated words, he would have written them himself, wouldn't he? Because he's God after all, and God knows how imperfect humans are. God knows that our own ideas, biases and life experiences color everything we touch. Naturally then, a mere sinful man writing letters or journals or historical accounts of Jesus would only be able to write those words from his very human, imperfect perspective.
I first began to question the infallibility of scripture when I studied Paul's letters to the church. The more I read, the more I disliked Paul. Paul, above other writers of the new testament, seemed the expert on wisdom and authority concerning families, marriage, and a woman's place in the church and in society. The more I studied, the more I saw him as the author of Christian patriarchy, objectifying women as nothing more than spiritual hindrances, their sexuality scorching the loins of men with desire that would, in the end render them inadequate servants for God. Taking a wife was deemed the only way for a man to free himself from the sin of fornication; yet marriage was a weakness that kept a man from engaging himself in the full service of the Lord. From Paul I learned that I had nothing of value to say, and that even my questions about church or scriptural matters were so inferior I wasn't allowed to ask them of anyone besides my husband. From Paul I learned that the best I could hope for in life, was to be a submissive wife and mother to my poor husband, who due to my overpowering sexual prowess, was already reduced to a lesser man. My job was to make my husband's life easier, to support him in whatever endeavor he chose and to always, always stay in the shadows to make up for the way I had interfered in his service to God. My Fundamentalist church heartily embraced these views and took them a few steps further by imposing rules on women that even the Paul couldn't have dreamed up.
First of all, we were taught that a man's sexual failings were our fault. Therefore, we were given a strict dress code to be followed at all times. Women were forbidden from "dressing like a man" because of some scripture in the Old Testament that said women should not wear "that which pertaineth to a man". Fundamentalist interpretation of that: Women could not wear any kind of jeans, slacks, shorts or pants. No sweat pants, no pajamas, nothing in which we would actually put on "one leg at a time". There were rules about the skirts and dresses too. Nothing above the knee, and preferably something well below our knees. We could not wear anything tailored to fit the curves of our bodies, even loosely. Neck lines could not be low enough to reveal the fact that we had breasts at all, much less low enough to show a millimeter of cleavage. We were not allowed to wear sleeveless blouses or dresses unless we covered our shoulders with a sweater or shawl, and if your bra showed through the armhole of your sleeveless dress, well, you had better get yourself to the altar post-haste and repent. Skirts/dresses could not have slits that went above the knee, and we were to eschew all things "modern". Modern was a word that could take on a different meaning on any given day, so something that was acceptable yesterday might become "Modern" and not acceptable the next. It was okay for us to wear makeup, but not too much. We could have shorter hair, but not too short. In most matters such as makeup and grooming, we were instructed to defer to our husbands or fathers, giving us the notion that as females, we were far too ignorant to discern the proper way to dress and groom ourselves.
There are so many rules and regulations (called "standards" by our church) I could talk about. However, I don't want to get marred in all the legalistic mumbo jumbo that serves no purpose other than to muddy the waters of faith.
As I matured, experienced real life a bit more, and came to finally understand the shallow, unfulfilling nature of the faith with which I had been raised, I grew disenfranchised with my church and its beliefs.
It didn't happen overnight. I once bought a pair of jeans to wear out in the thicket behind our house to pick blackberries. I remember dropping my denim skirt to the floor, stepping into those well-worn, secondhand blue jeans and feeling a little guilty at being so comfortable in them. I bought a pair of shorts to wear outside when my girls were splashing in the kiddie pool and was mortified one day, when some church folks dropped in unannounced and "caught" me wearing them. I went from gleefully chasing my daughters around the yard with buckets of water to feeling deeply ashamed and apologetic. I immediately went inside to change back into a skirt.
In small ways over time, I began to step outside my spiritual comfort zone. I began to feel comfortable wearing jeans to the grocery store, and eventually didn't feel ashamed if I ran into a fellow church member while dressed in "non approved" attire. I felt no further or closer to God, but I was beginning to feel more freedom to just be. I struggled often with the anxiety of having spent so much of my life following the rules, trying to be a Good Christian, trying to be a Godly Woman--a Proverbs 31 Woman yet somehow always falling short. I would never be able to please God, it seemed.
I was a young mother of two daughters. The wife of a deacon, youth leader choir director. I played the piano sometimes, sang in the choir helped out with the kids at church. I read my Bible every day. I lived in a state of prayer.
But I was lonely, unfulfilled and unhappy. How could that be? I would wonder. If I am reading my Bible, praying, and NOT breaking the rules, shouldn't I be happy and good enough for something or someone?
It didn't help that I was married to a Fundamentalist man who was raised by a Fundamentalist pastor. His father, a verbally abusive, angry, volatile man was never fond of me. I came from a poor family. My sisters were notoriously imperfect, as was I. My mother, in my father in law's opinion, was often without style or class. My husband grew up in a family with a fairly charmed life. After we were married, his life changed very little. He worked, walked in the door to a home cooked meal every night, then sat on the couch watching TV until midnight. I cared for our children alone. He played with6 them, hugged and kissed them. I did all the work. He insisted I also work, at least part time, but that didn't mean he would take any part in helping me find reliable, safe childcare for our daughters. Childcare was always MY problem because the kids were MY job...but then, I made no money caring for his children and unless I made money, I was not considered to be earning my keep. So I worked, I did all the housework (which was never done to his satisfaction) I did all the budgeting, shopping, cooking. His day would be over at 6:00 when he came home. I worked until 6:00 and came home, cooked dinner, bathed the kids, put them to bed and then crashed, often after refusing his sexual advances and then feeling shamed for days as he pouted and gave me the silent treatment for having been to tired to have sex with him.
From the outside, our marriage seemed ideal. I did love him very much, but in retrospect, I had no idea why I loved him. He was honestly not always very kind to me and was an extremely selfish man.
My true exodus from Fundamentalism began in 1997. I worked for the department of health at the time. My job was visiting mothers of newborns at the hospital, teaching them how to care for their infants and giving them information on how to sign up for government assistance once they were discharged. The mother-baby unit was on the 6th floor of the hospital at that time. One floor down, cancer patients languished on the Oncology unit. My pastor and his wife were often sitting in the ICU waiting area, either alone or with other family members, waiting for the next ten minute visitation time with their 37 year old son who was dying from a glioblastoma. Their son, an evangelist, gifted pianist and father of two boys, was, in my mind at the time, as good a Christian as anyone could hope to be. Yet there he lay, losing more of the battle with each passing day, his family clinging to every second they could glean before he died.
For me it became an experience of extreme spiritual dissonance. I was to believe that God was just, that he rewarded the faithful and punished the unfaithful. Yet what I was witnessing was the opposite of that. I was witnessing a God that made no sense. I was taught to believe that God can heal, God answers prayer and that when two people agree about something, in God's name, they will have it. Thousands of people prayed for this young man who lay in that hospital bed, his brain ravaged by disease, his memory fading more and more, each organ in his body forgetting how to work, shutting down, marking him out from his sons' lives, his parent's lives, the lives of many who had prayed for his healing.
I was told I was bitter. Angry. Wrong for believing God did not answer these prayers. I was given long rationalizations for why things happened as they did, despite the united prayers of people all over the world. I did not accept those rationalizations.
I did not think God mean or unkind either. I began to understand prayer in a whole different light--a light given to me by the Fundamentalists who taught me since childhood that God is never-changing. He is the same, yesterday, today and forever. They taught me that God has a will for every life. So I reasoned that if God has a plan for every life, and if God is never changing, we could not "change his mind" about when someone could die by praying for it not to happen. Instead, I began to believe that the purpose of prayer was to help us accept what was to be.
Months after my pastor's son succumbed to his illness, a young lady in our church announced she had a brain tumor. Already having had many a theological clash with my husband at home, things came to a head when our pastor asked every member to go to his/her knees and pray for Iris's healing. I did not bow on my knees in unison with them. I did not pray for healing. Instead, I kept my seat and prayed for Iris and her family. I prayed that God would give them strength and courage to cope with her struggle. I prayed that God would give them peace as they learned whatever he had to teach them, and that they would find acceptance in his will.
My husband was livid. In the weeks and months to follow my marriage devolved until finally, grasping at straws, my husband decided to file for divorce and petition the court for custody of our daughters. I later learned that this was his attempt at "bringing me back to my senses" at the advice of a pastor/counselor at our church who advised him that threatening to take the children away would put me back in my place.
In reality, it only helped me to realize that I was merely an object of possession and control for my husband and a second rate human to my church.
I fought him for custody and won.
Thus my true journey away from Fundamentalist ideals began in earnest. It has been nearly 17 years since my divorce. I now look back on my younger self and marvel at who she was. I was so convinced in my early adulthood, that I was on THE right path. I just knew that I was doing all the right things, "Living Right" as I was always taught.
Life brought me some rude awakenings though, through the emptiness of shallow spirituality that was hemmed in by rules and regulations, giving me no guidance for how to live, only severe threat of punishment for the things I shouldn't do. It was several years after my divorce, in a career of service to others that I began to understand that a Christian life is not made up of things we have to avoid. Being Christ-like is not about aiming for Christ's perfection. It is learning to accept the grace to be imperfect. It is what we DO for others that counts, not what we deprive ourselves of.
I do not worship in a brick and mortar church. I do not read my Bible every day or try to talk others into believing in God the way I believe in him. I wear what I want. I drink what I want. I sin boldly sometimes, always knowing in my heart when I've done wrong, but also knowing God never called me to be perfect.
In my past life of attending three services a week, reading the Bible, praying and avoiding the very appearance of sin, I felt empty, unfulfilled and so lonely. I'm sure my Fundamentalist acquaintances likely consider me to be "enjoying sin for a season" when they see that I am joyful and satisfied with my life. Don't doubt it, I do enjoy my sinfulness at times, but my life is so much more now than a daily battle against being human. It is a life of acceptance, a life in which I am free to be imperfect and still be a child of God. It is a life where my own humanity allows me to empathize with, love, and show compassion for my fellow man.
Christ did not come to condemn. I wonder then, how so many Christians, who claim to follow him have decided it is their job to do just that? How can we adequately love our fellow man while judging him as inferior and worthless? Jesus said he came to show the world salvation, not to condemn us all for being the humans we were created to be. If we truly are following his example, we will loosen the chains that bind us to our spiritually-limiting rules and regulations, and cling instead to his commandment, to love one another.
After all, love is the most fundamental principle of the message Christ came to give.
