Close Encounters of the Fundie Kind

[itaintmebabe]

I live in a small/medium-size ultra liberal midwestern city and there are virtually no fundies here that I am aware. But I have seen (Amish or Mennonite?) at one of our major hospitals. I would guess probably the latter since there is absolutely no where to park a horse and buggy. <--not being snarky, just telling it like it is. The women were very thin and did not look at all like us hefty midwestern "English" women. Either their Amish lifestyle kept them very trim, or they were still young girls but their Amish lifestyle made their faces look old. Not sure which it was because their dress wasn't a giveaway to their ages.

Did stop at an Iowa "Welcome" center on the border with Missouri once, that sold Amish food...jarred stuff, candy, etc. Big tourist trap, especially for chartered busses. Bought some dried fruit and jams. Saw an Amish boy and horse and buggy outside, but I think the people working in the store were English.

Have driven around the parts of my own state where Amish supposedly live. Never saw any.

About 20 years ago went to a zoo in a larger midwestern city and there were either Amish or Mennonite and they smelled awful! Worse than any zoo exhibit. I could hardly stand to be around them because of the intense BO. What about the cleanliness/godliness thing?

Have had frequent fundie sightings in a city I used to visit in the Rocky Mountain west. Once, maybe 7 years ago or so, my husband and I went to a Home Depot (they seem to like Home Depots!) and there was a fundy woman with a long skirt, long hair (I feel weird using that as a description since I have somewhat long hair myself, but I don't even own a dress or skirt, so I'll never be mistaken for one!). She had kids in tow, and it was a school day, so my husband and I were joking about how shopping at Home Depot was part of their home schooling. SOTHDA? School of the Home Depot Aisle. When we got back to the car, we saw a large white (they're always white) van, and it had a whole bunch of Jesus Fish Magnets on the back. We were cracking up, and I said "It's a whole SCHOOL of Jesus Fish!" Or more accurately, a whole HOME SCHOOL of Jesus Fish.

[2xx1xy1JD]

My suburb (in Texas, y'all) has a large fundamentalist (conservative? Not sure what the best term) Jewish community with several small synagogues in one area. So I see the large families walking on Fridays/Saturdays with head coverings, longer skirts, men in full suits and hats, etc. They always look SO hot in the summer; we are talking 100+ degrees for over a month usually.

Side note: we always see the "Eruv Up" sign on weekends at one of the synagogues and always wondered what that meant. I learned, in simplistic terms, it's like a Jewish force field :lol:

Eruv is basically a type of enclosure. If you are in a walled city, or even in a large city where the Jewish community gets permission to put an extra wire on electrical poles to completely enclose an area, then everything within the enclosure is not longer considered "outside" for the purposes of Sabbath laws that would otherwise prohibit Jews from carrying objects outside. The eruv needs to be checked each week before the Sabbath to make sure that no part of it is damaged/missing.

Force field would be cooler, though.

[singsingsing]

I live in Southwestern Ontario around many rural Mennonite areas and see Mennonites all the time at the mall and Walmart, etc. I was sitting waiting for my sister to come out of La Senza (one can only look at bras for so long) when two mennonite women with long skirts, long sleeves, head coverings, etc. walked by with their children. Daughters were dressed just like the women, long skirts and head coverings while the boys were wearing gap sweaters and jeans. I see this among the husbands and wives too, women are dressed conservatively and plainly while the men are dressed in a modern way.

We may or may not live in the same place. I can definitely concur with your assessment re: Mennonite girls in long dresses and headcoverings, and their husbands/boyfriends in 'normal' clothes. I see this all the time at the mall.

[Chicken bones]

Are you thinking of Orthodox/Hasidic/Ultra-orthodox jews?

Yes, thank you. My brain couldn't come up with the right words that day....long day with teething toddler.

Actually, this is ver long ago event, but I did attend a weeding at the Word of Faith (televangelist Robert Tilton) megachurch. Yep, he was another disgraced tv scammer in the heyday of the 80s tv evangelism.

[Lotus]

Where I live-way out in the sticks-I see Mennonites/Amish almost weekly at stores in town. The kids trailing behind Ma & Pa while shyly wanting to & sometimes succeeding without the parents noticing smile at me & my daughter. One Anabaptist woman who was alone at Wally World stood across from me in line & kept glaring at the people who walked past her. She looked mean. Another time I saw a women come out of the grocery store & walk back to the truck (driven by a worldly neighbor) with a bunch of kiddos. She was loading her purchases into the truck while the men just sat there. You could clearly see that she needed help. The boys jumped right in the truck while mom & girls struggled with the items. I love it when I see the Anabaptists!

[Hane]

My ex-inlaws lived in Lancaster, PA, and there are many Amish folks at the tourist locales.

What I found more interesting, though, were the slightly-more-modern Mennonites I saw there. Their cars were painted completely black--very noticeable in the days when more cars had metal bumpers, and these black cars had black-painted bumpers. The women all wore pastel-flowered bib-style dresses, cut from similar patterns, but somewhat-below-the-knee-length instead of ankle-length. They all wore little white prayer bonnets, and most of them wore sneakers.

I saw one young pregnant woman walking through a general store. She had this prim, smug, holier-than-thou expression on her face, as if she were advertising, "Look at me! I'm The Right Kind of Christian and I'm Married and Pregnant!"

[Lotus]

That's exactly how the crabby woman looked at Walmart! Yep. Passing judgement on all of us. Just looked at my siggy Bathroom Baby. Wow. What ever happened to that lady who kept her baby in the bathroom? I read her blog for a while but then lost the link.

I saw one young pregnant woman walking through a general store. She had this prim, smug, holier-than-thou expression on her face, as if she were advertising, "Look at me! I'm The Right Kind of Christian and I'm Married and Pregnant!"

[jjmennonite]

I live in Southwestern Ontario around many rural Mennonite areas and see Mennonites all the time at the mall and Walmart, etc. I was sitting waiting for my sister to come out of La Senza (one can only look at bras for so long) when two mennonite women with long skirts, long sleeves, head coverings, etc. walked by with their children. Daughters were dressed just like the women, long skirts and head coverings while the boys were wearing gap sweaters and jeans. I see this among the husbands and wives too, women are dressed conservatively and plainly while the men are dressed in a modern way.

My cousin's husband explained it as 'Our women are the ambassadors for our church' like it is their honour to be so. I don't see my Holdeman Mennonite cousins all that much, but it is definitely a cultural experience for my daughter to go to family reunions. Playing volleyball with the 'girls with the big flowered dresses' was fun for her. I figure volleyball is so popular because it is 1 sport you can play in a dress.

I went to Mississippi (Gulf Coast) with MDS (Mennonite Disaster Service) for a week of house building a few years ago - just before I registered with the old Yuku board, and was quite enamored with my Mennonite heritage after that, hence my name. As a single woman, I was housed with the other single women - a group of mostly 19 year old old order (horse and buggy) Mennonite girls. We had so much fun. It may have been equally educational for them and me, but we shared a lot of stories and laughter that week.

I found out I am old enough to be a mother of 13 - one of the girls was the youngest of 13 and I was the same age as her mother. When we were having this conversation, she told me 'No, really ? You look WAY younger than my mother' . I blurted out 'I suppose having 13 children would be pretty hard on your body.' Then tried to mitigate that comment with 'And I dye my hair'. But then it appeared the comment was not unacceptable, as looking younger did not = better to her.

We were about 2 miles from the beach, and we walked down there a few evenings after work. One day a vehicle pulled over and the woman thanked us for all the work the MDS had done since Katrina. She would never have identified us as Mennonites were it not for my friends' 'big flowered dresses'. I am still moved to tears by that encounter - but then I am rather sentimental, at times.

BTW, you can say 'look at the fundies' as loud as you like - I doubt any fundies identify themselves as such. We never used that word, when I was one.

[MrsYoungie]

My last encounter was actually really funny.

We were spending the weekend at a Jewish summery camp - specifically, a Labour Zionist one. Once there, we met a family who were introduced to us as "Christian guests from a nearby farm who were interested in visiting a Jewish camp". We had a chance to talk to them - they looked like Duggars, and had decided to give up urban life and jobs. They had an interest in the Holocaust and Jewish things, so when they discovered this camp, they just had to go and show the kids some Real Live Jews!

What results was a visit that I can only describe as friendly mutual bafflement.

The camp director is a friend of ours, and it's safe to say that nothing in his background as a Yemenite/Israeli/Canadian living in a Jewish suburb of Toronto had familiarized him with fundie culture. He agreed to host them, but honestly had no clue what they were all about.

The fundie family was equally bewildered by the camp. Whatever they imagined Jews to be, a bunch of kids and teens at a socialist summer camp doing Israeli folk dancing in shorts clearly wasn't it. I basically got to act as an ad-hoc cultural interpreter that evening.

This wasn't Camp Naivelt in Brampton by any chance, was it?

[2xx1xy1JD]

This wasn't Camp Naivelt in Brampton by any chance, was it?

No, Camp Naivelt was part of the United Jewish People's Order, which is non-Zionist. My mother attended its sister camp in Quebec, as my grandparents were heavily involved in the UJPO.

The camp we were at was part of Habonim Dror. When I worked there, the Communist Manifesto was still in the package of educational reading material for the staff, but I'm not sure if that is still the case.

Add "inability to understand summer camps that don't have an ideological agenda" to the things about my childhood that I didn't realize were odd until I was an adult.

[badmath]

I think one of my new co-workers may be a fundie lite. She always wears long, denim skirts and has really long hair. At first I thought she just had no fashion sense, but it's gotten to the point where I haven't seen her wear anything but a long skirt all year-round... even in the depths of winter and heat-waves of summer. I don't really talk to her or interact with her very much, because she works in a different section... but I must do some investigating and figure out what exactly her deal is!

[2xx1xy1JD]

If we include Mennonites, I actually have a really cool story:

This is an article about what my old subdivision was like when it was still trees and farmland.

http://www.yorkregion.com/news-story/14 ... velopment/

The land was owned by a Mennonite family, the Bakers, who had a farm and sugar bush (woods with maple trees). Well, one day, we were walking to synagogue and taking a shortcut through the woods, when we saw an old couple dressed like Mennonites. They came over and introduced themselves, explaining that they had been the owners of the woods and the land. They had come back for a visit, and wanted to talk to some of the folks who were living there now. It was quite awesome, like a living history lesson.

I should also mention my first fundie encounter. I was almost 16, and working in the mailroom of a bank. The mailroom supervisor was an evangelical, heavily into Jim and Tammy Faye Baker. There was another employee there, a rather simple-minded fellow, who would call her "mother" sometimes. Another employee was an atheist member of the Communist Party. He had constant arguments/debates with the supervisor, all of which consisted of one saying yes, the other saying no, no matter what the topic. Previously, I had only known Catholics and nominal mainline Protestants, so this was completely new territory for me. The supervisor was oddly enthusiastic about the fact that I was Jewish, which sort of creeped me out. She also disapproved of Europe (I was working to earn money for a trip there), and when I naively said, "what about all the cathedrals and the Vatican?", she informed me that didn't quite consider Catholics to be Christian. My crazy co-workers were the most interesting part of the job.

As for Orthodox/Hassidic Jews - yeah, that's not worthy of being called an "encounter" here. It's just daily life. Every time someone here mentions "obsolete" rules from Leviticus, I'm tempted to take Google Maps and point out how I live within walking distance of a supermarket with a huge selection of certified pork-and- shellfish-free products, a facility for testing cloth for forbidden mixtures and a ritual pool for immersing after menstruation or seminal emission. :D

[Arete]

I've lived or worked in areas with high concentrations of Hasidic Jews, mostly Lubavitchers. Other than the fact they are a lot more covered in clothes than the rest of us during the nasty humid summers, they are just another part of the mosaic around here. There are really not any Quiverfull types around here that I have been able to identify. We are a very densely populated state so it's kind of hard to be able to isolate and grow your crazy in a bubble around here. Even the Lubavitchers don't freak when a shiksa like me comes in to a kosher place for a falafel and Israeli salad fix. Then again, I've never tried talking about Jesus to them. :roll:

[Arete]

My first unpleasant fundie "encounter" was as a kid when our community of Greek Orthodox were targeted for conversion by Jehovah's Witnesses. They were actually taking the phone book, picking out Greek names, and sending Greek language speakers to the addresses. The area churches made sure the word got out and proselytizers were met at the doorbells they rang with absolute contempt. Nothing polite about it, but the pushback got them to back off.

[darthnbjenni]

I'm the most liberal person I know in SC.

I married a man that attended Bob Jones Academy and had to join the Army to escape. His ex-w, and the mother of my SD, lives in her fundie compound with her parents and 8 or 9 siblings. My SIL also voluntarily attends Bob Jones University.

My SD came to my house in October, saw my monogrammed pumpkin on the porch and proclaimed "that's the devil's handiwork". I then handed her a witch costume to go to a Halloween party, ha.

[jjmennonite]

If we include Mennonites, I actually have a really cool story:

2xx... Mennonites are a bit like Jewish people in that there are many different kinds and only a few of us dress fundy. I am culturally Mennonite but don't 'practise' any Christian religion. A lot of Mennonites, perhaps the majority, dress just like anybody else. I can recognize most Mennonite names, so if I know somebody well enough to ask about it, I usually find they have parents or grandparents that go/went to Mennonite churches.

Except for when I asked another soccer mom about her Mennonite name and she was a practising Mennonite and proceeded to proudly tell me how her son was a minister and had left x church for y because x had 'embraced gays'. And then she spouted that bullshit 'Love the sinner, hate the sin'. GRRRRRRRRRRrr They had even adopted 2 girls from China - fundies in disguise.

Kaitlyn Regher, Vic Toews - both Mennonite name. I have not actually met Vic, but I am not proud to be related (all Mennonites are related, we interbreed, my parents are 2nd cousins once removed).

Sorry for the thread derail. That is a VERY cool story.

[Chibi Author]

Several years ago, I was outside the library with a couple of my fellow ungodly teenaged friends, chatting with this one stereotypical swaggy douchebag-wannabe guy - dyed black hair, jewelry, tight shirt and jeans, and was one of those jerks who was actually fun to talk to; you know the type - that my best friend had a crush on (they didn't actually work out, but that's not the point). Douchebag-wannabe (DW) was surrounded by several of us girls, laughing, chatting and having a blast, when this one guy from my "friend's" fundie-ish church walked out of the library, and shot DW one of the dirtiest looks I've ever seen. He didn't glare at any of us girls - just the lone guy.

To this day, I still think he was jealous that the guy was talking to GIRLS and actually having FUN while doing it. The church in question seriously pushes courtship, and pre-marital purity. The summer before the glaring incident, my 'friend' had invited me to this church for a week-long teen bible school thing. You know, play games, listen to the nice preacher, have snacks. One of the nights I remember, the preaching part of it was all about remaining pure before marriage, and how you need to save everything for your future spouse, etc. AND then the preacher talked about how he got married right out of high school, before going into the army. I believe he said that his wife was 17, which seemed rather odd to be telling a bunch of high school students, pro-courtship or no.

Anyway, it's just ... a shame, really. The fundie-lite-ish teenager was utterly adorable (tall and blond, too - don't judge me, I was 16), and could have been a major heart breaker if he'd ever been given the chance. But no.

[Flossie]

Having never met an Amish person, I was wondering if someone here knows if Amish Bed Dating is a real thing. Also, do they really paint their front gate or door blue to advertise that they have a daughter of marriageable age?

it's the season for replacing the ones the snow plows destroyed over winter

For some reason that struck me as hilarious, even as I could understand the necessity of frequently replacing something important that gets damaged every winter.

[browngrl]

There were a bunch of fundie lite/fundie types in my med school class. My friends and I called them the moral majority - they could always be counted on to offer the Godly viewpoint during class discussions. One of the fundie guys actually said "AIDS is God's punishment on the gays". It was a pleasant surprise to meet many of these people during our last reunion - they had mellowed into normally religious people and stepped away from the patriarchal precipice.

NOTE: I have edited this post to remove an anecdote that in retrospect I should have not posted. Sorry.

[meda]

Having never met an Amish person, I was wondering if someone here knows if Amish Bed Dating is a real thing. Also, do they really paint their front gate or door blue to advertise that they have a daughter of marriageable age?

For some reason that struck me as hilarious, even as I could understand the necessity of frequently replacing something important that gets damaged every winter.

There are many different sects of Amish, what customs they have depends on their Ordinung. The Amish in my area, Schwartzentrubers,are considered the "fundies" of the Amish world......low amish, very plain, fellowship with very few other Amish communities, no air tools, etc. They do practice bed courtship. Other more liberal groups do not. It's considered very old fashioned among some other Amish. As far as I know, the painted door thing is a myth. There is a group, the Baylor Amish, that paints house doors a light blue as custom, but it has nothing to do with marriageable daughters.

[Salamander]

There were a bunch of fundie lite/fundie types in my med school class. My friends and I called them the moral majority - they could always be counted on to offer the Godly viewpoint during class discussions. One of the fundie guys actually said "AIDS is God's punishment on the gays". It was a pleasant surprise to meet many of these people during our last reunion - they had mellowed into normally religious people and stepped away from the patriarchal precipice.

That reminds me of a course I took on insects when I was in college. At the beginning of the segment about evolution, the professor took a moment to say that creationism is nonsense, it has no place in a science course, and we wouldn't be covering it in class. Nobody objected, but since I attended a liberal university in a very liberal part of a liberal state, I was surprised he felt the need brought it up. His irritation when mentioned it made it sound like he'd had issues with past students objecting to the study of evolution in his classes. :?

[Flossie]

The Amish in my area, Schwartzentrubers, are considered the "fundies" of the Amish world......low Amish, very plain, fellowship with very few other Amish communities, no air tools, etc. They do practice bed courtship. Other more liberal groups do not. It's considered very old fashioned among some other Amish.

That's surprising to me because it seems shockingly progressive in some ways and kind of icky in others. On the one hand, sexual compatibility (to me) is very important in a marriage. On the other hand, if the young lady is supposed to be a virgin when she marries, isn't putting the young man in bed with her just asking for trouble? I suppose if they can't stop themselves and a pregnancy results, it's not a problem if they want to marry. But what if he rapes her? Even if a pregnancy doesn't result, would the young lady be considered 'less than' in her community? What happens then?

[yewchapel]

SD?

I was going to say that I haven't had any fundie encounters, but then I remembered my uni's Christian Union! I naively joined thinking it was just for Christians in general....it wasn't. One of the key members (he is vice-president) is a homeschooled pastor's son (not SOTDRT, I think he did his A Levels at a regular college in preparation for uni) and attends a double-predestination Calvinist, cessationist church - like an independent or Southern Baptist church but they are non-denominational. He's a young-Earth creationist and doesn't believe that Catholics are Christians, but he's also a socialist, almost communist. It's all a bit of a puzzle to this socialist Anglo-Catholic!

But even that church is probably fundie-lite - no one there is concerned with 'modest' dress and drinking alcohol is a-OK although I think they use grape juice for Communion, but only because they think it's just a memorial meal. I haven't met any frumpertastic fundies and I don't think I've even seen a Plain dresser or ultra-Orthodox/Hasidic Jewish person in real life. I went to school with some closed/exclusive Plymouth Brethren and all the girls wore headscarves and long skirts. They didn't have TV, weren't allowed to eat with us (there's a verse in the New Testament about not eating with non-believers) and had to be excused from RE lessons and hymn singing/prayers in assembly. But they still went to regular, CoE-influenced UK state schools and made friends with kids from all religious backgrounds, they weren't cut off from normal life. UK schools have uniforms so I rarely saw what they wore normally, but it was just long denim skirts and normal tops, 'modern modest' with no obviously 'fundie' clothes apart from the headscarves (which were just triangular kerchiefs).

[Stephanie66]

We saw "Christian Tours" (I honestly thought it said Chris Ian Tours because the t-doubling-as-a-cross was missing on the back of the bus) at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History yesterday. If we could have found parking and I wasn't exhausted, I would have loved to be behind the tour group, just to hear what they said. Jesus riding on dinosaurs? Fossils left by Satan to confuse us?

[Hane]

My cousin's husband explained it as 'Our women are the ambassadors for our church' like it is their honour to be so. I don't see my Holdeman Mennonite cousins all that much, but it is definitely a cultural experience for my daughter to go to family reunions. Playing volleyball with the 'girls with the big flowered dresses' was fun for her. I figure volleyball is so popular because it is 1 sport you can play in a dress.

I went to Mississippi (Gulf Coast) with MDS (Mennonite Disaster Service) for a week of house building a few years ago - just before I registered with the old Yuku board, and was quite enamored with my Mennonite heritage after that, hence my name. As a single woman, I was housed with the other single women - a group of mostly 19 year old old order (horse and buggy) Mennonite girls. We had so much fun. It may have been equally educational for them and me, but we shared a lot of stories and laughter that week.

I found out I am old enough to be a mother of 13 - one of the girls was the youngest of 13 and I was the same age as her mother. When we were having this conversation, she told me 'No, really ? You look WAY younger than my mother' . I blurted out 'I suppose having 13 children would be pretty hard on your body.' Then tried to mitigate that comment with 'And I dye my hair'. But then it appeared the comment was not unacceptable, as looking younger did not = better to her.

We were about 2 miles from the beach, and we walked down there a few evenings after work. One day a vehicle pulled over and the woman thanked us for all the work the MDS had done since Katrina. She would never have identified us as Mennonites were it not for my friends' 'big flowered dresses'. I am still moved to tears by that encounter - but then I am rather sentimental, at times.

BTW, you can say 'look at the fundies' as loud as you like - I doubt any fundies identify themselves as such. We never used that word, when I was one.

So true about the wide range of Mennonites: In Lancaster County, I saw everything from the "big flowered dresses" to girls in shorts and tee shirts wearing white prayer caps.

My daughter went to a counselor who had attended a Mennonite college because it was close to her home. She said that she had wonderful opportunities to do social aid work in depressed areas while she was here, as it was considered very important for the students to learn how to do good. I was truly impressed. THAT is Christianity.