Real-Life Fundie Encounter

[GenerationCedarchip]

I had share because this was just a little scarier than your usual fundie encounter. I was at a luncheon and got seated at a table with a bunch of engineers. I knew at least one of this group was fundie because I've encountered him many times before. Nice guy, but definitely reformed fundie and not afraid to speak it openly.

We're chatting and then out of nowhere fundie man comes up with, "I think this is a very scary time for our country. After all, I think we all know that deep in his heart of hearts Obama is a Muslim and we never know when he's going to declare common cause with the more extreme Islamic element out there." And all the heads around the table start nodding, and the fundie version of history starts coming out as one by one everyone else at the table starts to agree with him. I felt like I was eating lunch in the Twilight Zone! :?

And the scary part? These guys are educated with either master's degrees or doctorates, and they run in pretty powerful circles. I can snark on Dougie preaching the wonders of College Minus but I'm seeing more fundies like this with education who are low-profile(or no-profile) online and getting into positions of influence IRL.

[infooverload]

Never ceases to amaze me that people with education will lower themselves to be social accepted by what they precieve to be the "King Pumba" in a situation. Honestly like you say I expect that crap from people who are drowning themselves in the Fox News kool-aid, but not educated people. I have to ask was this table filled with middle aged white guys perhaps?

[Jana814]

Never ceases to amaze me that people with education will lower themselves to be social accepted by what they precieve to be the "King Pumba" in a situation. Honestly like you say I expect that crap from people who are drowning themselves in the Fox News kool-aid, but not educated people. I have to ask was this table filled with middle aged white guys perhaps?

Same here! How weird for you! I'm not sure what I do if I was a in a situcation like that.

[fatcat]

The most 'fundie' person I know in real life (which isn't very fundie compared to the people discussed here, but still) consistently gets the highest grades out of anyone in our year for the subject I'm doing (I'm doing a postgrad degree). He will be perfectly normal most of the time, but then will try to explain to everyone why evolution can't be true. Somehow it just seems... unfair.

It's alarming when everybody in a group agrees with something except you.

[GenerationCedarchip]

Never ceases to amaze me that people with education will lower themselves to be social accepted by what they precieve to be the "King Pumba" in a situation. Honestly like you say I expect that crap from people who are drowning themselves in the Fox News kool-aid, but not educated people. I have to ask was this table filled with middle aged white guys perhaps?

Actually, no. There were 2 middle-aged white guys there, but also 2 younger(late 20s/early 30s). And then the remaining 3 were either African-American or Asian. All were men, though. I was the only woman at that table.

I probably shouldn't have been so shocked,but it just seemed to come out of nowhere. Then again, I find a surprising number of highly educated fundies and fundie-lites in the DoD and FBI. They don't get as much press and I don't know any who are bloggers, but there are more than a few churches with large, affluent and very conservative congregations in the DC area.

[FeministShrew]

I swear, I would have had to say, "Praise Allah!" and then piously bow my head & continue eating like nothing happened. But I'm evil that way. :nenner:

[GeoBQn]

Not quite that extreme, but something like that happened to me when I was a freshman in college, interning for the theatre group I was in all through high school. We were waiting in the hall for something before rehearsal, conversation turned to the topic of abortion, and all of these funky artsy theatre geeks start talking about how abortion is WRONG. Later, a cast member who was a year younger than me and overlapped with my time and I commiserated, "Damn, when did everyone in the group become pro-life?"

[Burris]

And the scary part? These guys are educated with either master's degrees or doctorates, and they run in pretty powerful circles. I can snark on Dougie preaching the wonders of College Minus but I'm seeing more fundies like this with education who are low-profile(or no-profile) online and getting into positions of influence IRL.

They're skilled in an art - sometimes only one - to which they've been well-trained. Beyond that, they tend to have no more knowledge, nor fewer prejudices, than the average individual.

[RosyDaisy]

I agree, Burris. This is what it's like for the fundies in my family and in my community.

[GenerationCedarchip]

They're skilled in an art - sometimes only one - to which they've been well-trained. Beyond that, they tend to have no more knowledge, nor fewer prejudices, than the average individual.

True. It just seems like I'm encountering more and more of them now. Even when I was growing up back on the fundie farm, I was conscious of there being very educated/accomplished people in our church but it was also clear that we were a tiny minority in the world at large.

Nowadays, it seems like fundies and their philosophy is infiltrating into more corners of society. I used to think that I was just hypersensitive to anything that smacked of fundie influence because I had left fundie-dom. Lately I'm starting to think that there really is more of it, though, and I wasn't imagining things.