How did you leave fundamentalism behind (if applicable)?

[nolongerIFBx]

Honestly the Bible isn't the issue, it's all implications. Fundies take a simple verse and turn it into a life changing blog, they take a simple phrase, and turn it into a bunch of rules or "things the Lord laid on their hearts". The Bible says VERY little about a lot of the key points fundies harp on, it is all interpretations and people using guilt to lure you in. Living that way makes you feel like you will NEVER be good enough, modest enough, have enough children...(I have two under two btw, ten months apart and I LOVE them to death but WOW they are a handful.) You are just never enough. That alone is depressing.

I do think that you can read a verse and the Lord can "lay it on your heart" to act on that verse. (I do think you need to be a little cautious and make sure it wasn't just the onions on your pizza!)I just believe that God has a different relationship with each person and just because He might impress on one person to do X doesn't mean He wants every person to do X. He may want them to do Y. Because He doesn't need every person doing X, because then Y gets left undone. If He wanted us to be "cookie cutter" people, He wouldn't have made us all different. Neither would He have given us free will to choose whether to do X, Y or nothing at all.

[formerlyfundie]

If He wanted us to be "cookie cutter" people, He wouldn't have made us all different

And that is the exact conflict I had.

And I guess I said it wrong, I know that the Lord can convict us, and sometimes that is through scripture. You just have to be careful with it. I have always felt like a relationship with God (any God, Christian or not) is 100% personal, but it isn't like that in fundy world, everything is a show, and people fight about the LITTLEST things. I got into the most epic battle about skirt length once. I had on a knee length one and this other lady only wore floor length ones. Long story short she told me I was luring her husband's eye to my legs and I had to wear a blanket over my legs the whole time I was at her house! (she so calmly and discreetly pulled me aside to tell me, EMBARRASSING!) I cried the whole way home and then felt like the worst person ever for DAYS. She said the Lord laid it on her heart that anything shorter than a floor length skirt was a sin and was too worldly. THAT is more what I was talking about. That is nowhere in the Bible....at least that i know of. :doh:

[Austin]

Austin, I hope it wasn't my follow up comment that made you post this- I hadn't read your comment before posting. I love the term "god-goggles", and I got what you meant.

I had to give up religion for a good long time after I took my pair off. I found spirituality again, and am attending Church, as I do want my daughter to have some background, but it is a nice, liberal Lutheran church. I already see that she is not going to be content with a single answer for spirituality, and she is still so wee. I still have trouble trusting the people in religion, especially those in positions of authority.

Oh, no, not at all :) I just thought about it for a bit and thought that maybe since a couple of us were discussing having gone all the way to the other end of the spectrum where there's no belief or great uncertainty, others who were thinking about getting out of the fundie system might think, "Oh, gosh, I want to get away from this crap but I don't want to become an atheist!" (I'm not an atheist, but you know what I mean). I debated posting it because I'm sure I don't have that much influence, but in remembering my own journey, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't being a "stumbling block" to anyone. :D

[Brainsample]

By 2001, I had become fed up with what I saw happening in churches. I saw the motivating factors behind everything that was done and concluded that desire for power and control was king. We switched over to a home church for a while and that was no better.

. . .

Church was a weekly meeting to be delivered by something: depression, anger, greed, demons, oppression. EVERY WEEK!

. . .

At this point, I still believed in God and figured that some church MUST be doing better than the churches I had attended.

I strongly identify with this. I was so tired of the magical thinking and the primitive ego functions of the mindset of Pentecostalism. I never doubted the core of my faith, but I don't know what is happening with the church and don't know how to make church life work anymore. For some reason, it brought this watershed moment (or string of growing ones) to mind.

MEET Pastor

The man who pastored my small church (during the end of the hippie era which I loved in terms of the religious climate) left it when I was ten years old. It was not a utopia by any means, but I connected with it and loved what was going on there and didn't after that pastor left. I feel like he and his wife had the best character of all those who had served there, apparently taking an interest in all of the families there, including the children.

Meet Dimmer Switch

By the mid eighties, he pastored a mini-mega Assemblies of God (AoG) church a couple of hours away but was then “called†to go to Bolivia. He came back into my life in my early twenties when he started raising support for the effort, and he expressed privately to my family and me that he was burned out of pastoring, essentially. He talked of the hypocrisy of how he had a remote dimmer switch for the audio and lighting that he carried in his pocket when he preached, altering light and sound to make people in worship services think that they were having a spiritual experience. At the time, I thought that this was virtuous because he was being so transparent with us (in retrospect, perhaps like a new suitor who is honest with you about the wife he's about to divorce???).

Meet Disappointment

In '93, they came home on a 4 year furlough to travel to the churches that supported them for a ministry update, a part of the AoG program, and my DH and I traveled to meet them, spending an evening alone with them. During that visit, the veil began to lift. I'd become old enough and educated enough that I could meet this pastor on a more fully adult level on my part.

I still absolutely loved them and enjoyed their company, but there were several awkward moments that evening when the conversation ventured into areas about which the pastor was not informed. That's fine – this is true even in academics because of knowledge of specialized subjects – no one knows details about every subject. But he pasted an uncomfortable, plastic, salesman-like smile on his face, and said nothing, and then someone else would break the awkwardness by saying something to transition the discussion. The third time that I brought up a topic that was outside of his comfort zone, he finally said, “I don't know much about that...†He did that a second time before we hopped in the car to make the long drive home at midnight. I then admitted to my husband that I appreciated the pastor's honesty, but he reminded me of a salesman. I was incredulous that I'd never noticed that about him before. I thought that if he were a new acquaintance, I don't think that I'd like him as much as I did through my childhood eyes. It was a disappointment. I'd grown up.

Epiphany: He's still using the dimmer switch

In '97, soon after we were exit counseled after leaving the cult and just before the pastor would have to decide if he wanted to spend another four years in Bolivia, we received an email saying that he was going to evangelize Russia and China through the internet. (What?) I'd done missions work in Russia, and they don't have money for food, let alone money for the paper they'd need to do what this guy said they were going to do there. Nearly everything the stated as a ministry goal seemed highly implausible to me, and I was not going to give money to something that didn't make good sense to me.

The way he described his recruitment into this new ministry disturbed me even more. Long story short, it sounded like those who recruited this man used classic, textbook thought reform tactics of mystical manipulation, milieu control, and sacred science to me. (Great men were given a prophetic word from God that he was THE man to oversee this new job that was going to save Russia using the internet...) He was relying on Cialdini's “Weapons of Influence†of commitment and consistency to get money.

Icing on the cake, my mother flipped out that I would not support them financially, so she sent me a tape of him preaching at a local church about the new ministry. They'd given her the wrong tape, so I never heard the sales-pitch sermon he gave about his new endeavor, but there was something on the tape that forever changed me. Of all the things he could have possibly said, he misquoted my favorite verse of the Bible, distorted it, and misused it to manipulate people to give money. He never really put away that dimmer switch, did he? And he seemed to be a sucker for other people when they used one on him, too.

Paradise lost.

Given that the only church that clicked for me like the hippie '70s with the dimmer switch pastor happened to be the Gothard cult, I was ready to lay down the Baudrillardian “hyper real†fantasy of finding THE church. However, there are a few splinters in my mind that would love to find that sense of belonging again, with even just a little of the ideal.

But apart from that, I have had great difficulty finding any church that is comfortable and pleasant. I'm through the post-cult PTSD now (which took years), but I can't sit at any church with this complementarian language which leaves me largely in wishful thinking/mystical land or snoreville or creepy,mind-numbing, Vineyard chorus ad nauseum musicfest. Or the people are bent on church discipline and have little interest in the needy. Or people can't be bothered, too busy and consumed with their lives. So I visit the okay places, but only with disappointment.

[jesslynn10]

Re: How did you leave fundamentalism behind (if applicable)?

Coincidence or cause? I don't know. But the turning point for many groups (see my earlier post on the "fundies" of my youth compared to todays fundies) seems to have happened greatly with the promotion and implementation of the religious-based homeschool culture.

Thoughts?

I think Homeschooling can be a gateway into serious fundamentalism. I can't adequately describe the internal pressure to conform and present perfect children that I felt while in the thick of our conservative christian homeschool community. By my third year of homeschooling, it was the number one focus of our schooling (character building). I was a woman on a mission.

[jesslynn10]

I still absolutely loved them and enjoyed their company, but there were several awkward moments that evening when the conversation ventured into areas about which the pastor was not informed. That's fine – this is true even in academics because of knowledge of specialized subjects – no one knows details about every subject. But he pasted an uncomfortable, plastic, salesman-like smile on his face, and said nothing, and then someone else would break the awkwardness by saying something to transition the discussion. The third time that I brought up a topic that was outside of his comfort zone, he finally said, “I don't know much about that...†He did that a second time before we hopped in the car to make the long drive home at midnight. I then admitted to my husband that I appreciated the pastor's honesty, but he reminded me of a salesman. I was incredulous that I'd never noticed that about him before. I thought that if he were a new acquaintance, I don't think that I'd like him as much as I did through my childhood eyes. It was a disappointment. I'd grown up.

Wow! That just brings me right back to my Pentecostal days! " The pasted smile. The salesman like smile" You just described almost every pastor I ever knew. The longer they have been in the "ministry" the bigger the plastered fake smile and the more jaded they were inside! I always got a "snake like" feeling every time I saw that smile!

[jesslynn10]

Thank you for sharing your experience. I relate so much.

The last statement you made has a lot of truth in it for me. I would rather, to be frank, retain a faith in God. Not in a religious sense as I seriously doubt that I will ever be able to be involved in organized religion again, but just in a spiritual sense. I would like to have someting to believe in with regards to life and what happens to our energy when we die, if anything. It's hard for me to accept, after growing up evangelical, that I will never see my momma and papa again, or that when I die, I will not see my husband and children again. I feel very conflicted about this and more than a bit sad.

My personality is that of a resolver, so I tend to try very hard to make things "work" if possible. But as I grew older, I began to refuse to sacrifice intellectual honesty or authenticity for some semblance of certainty. So I remain in this true agnostic state, where I just don't know. For now. :)

I do know I can't *make* myself believe. As I stated in my story, I don't know where I am or where I'll end up on this journey, but I would agree that once the god-goggles are off, it's really, really hard to put them back on.

I understand. I'm not sure either. I could never go back to Christianity but I am more open to other forms of universal spirituality than I was when I began this journey. I went to a silent retreat at a Catholic Monastery last summer and that was a beautiful experience for me.

[nolongerIFBx]

And that is the exact conflict I had.

And I guess I said it wrong, I know that the Lord can convict us, and sometimes that is through scripture. You just have to be careful with it. I have always felt like a relationship with God (any God, Christian or not) is 100% personal, but it isn't like that in fundy world, everything is a show, and people fight about the LITTLEST things. I got into the most epic battle about skirt length once. I had on a knee length one and this other lady only wore floor length ones. Long story short she told me I was luring her husband's eye to my legs and I had to wear a blanket over my legs the whole time I was at her house! (she so calmly and discreetly pulled me aside to tell me, EMBARRASSING!) I cried the whole way home and then felt like the worst person ever for DAYS. She said the Lord laid it on her heart that anything shorter than a floor length skirt was a sin and was too worldly. THAT is more what I was talking about. That is nowhere in the Bible....at least that i know of. :doh:

Actually- I think we're on the same page. :D It is absolutely fine with me if the lady you mentioned above believes that God wants her to wear floor length skirts. It was not okay for her to insist that you do the same. If she had such strong feelings, her invitation to her home should have included a dress code.

OTOH- if someone shows up for dinner at my house in a string bikini, I might have trouble following my own belief! :lol: