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How Does It All Start?


MandyLaLa

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How does one become fundie. I don't mean just saying you believe the nonsense but actually getting into the deep ATI, IBLP, VF type fundie? Did these families just wake up one day and start following? Do they let just anyone in?

No I have no desire to be fundie but it seems like it's a hard world to actually break into. Especially given that so much of it is homeschooling and home churches.

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For my stepsister who is koolaide in, quiverfullin with her brood of 9, it's kind of a sad story. She was raised in Boulder, Co, which is where old hippies go to die, my stepmom is fairly crunchy herself. My stepmom and her ex aren't really religious at all, she wasn't really raised in a church. She met her husband, who was raised middle of the road Baptist, "I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ" and all that, but they're really great people and not fundie in the slightest. Anyway, after they got married, they moved to Oklahoma for his job. A couple of months later she called my stepmom and said she hated it down there, that she didn't fit in at all, and the church people really scared her. She said she was thinking of leaving the husband and coming back home. Right after that, maybe a month or two later, she found out she was pregnant with their first. After he was born (I think he's 16 or 17 now), it was probably only a year or so untill she was fully in the koolaide, excited about leaving their family up to god and the whole 9 yards.

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For me (not that I got that deep into fundieness) a lot of it was low self-esteem and wanting to be accepted and 'good enough'. Like, if I had 10 kids and homeschooled them all while wearing a headcovering God would love me more.

I know for ATI the families are vetted before they can join.

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All I really know is the ATI site has an admissions section like you're applying for college or some super secret squirrel bullshit. The idea that people apply to drink the koolaid just boggles me. Do they actually turn people down? Does anyone know the admissions criteria?

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I wasn't raised VF/ATI etc etc but I was raised in the conservative homeschool community and some here might label my upbringing as fundie. At any rate, I feel that I have a good understanding of the thinking behind many various fundie lifestyles. As I read blogs of people who escaped out of ATI, I totally understand the mindset these people were trapped in.

For many people, in my observation/experience, the move to become "fundie" is usually reactionary, and often it's a reaction on the parent's part to either mistakes they made in their youth or mistakes their parents made or a general discontent with the culture at large or a combination of all three. Perhaps their intentions are good, but as the case with most reactions, the pendulum often swings too far in the opposite direction.

I'd say, as is the case perhaps with my family, the move toward fundie-ness is partially reaction and partially the influence of stronger personalities once you get a little ways into the movement. Maybe you start homeschooling and then start hanging out with this nice family and all the kids are well behaved and then you start getting sucked into their fundie behavior.

For the super crazies such as the ones that get snarked on the most here, I'd say that it's a combination of the reaction plus some really strong personalities that would rather react than think. In my experience, while these folks exist, for every crazy homeschool familiy (and my family was close some of them), there are at least 5 non-crazy ones, probably more (depending on how you look at it...because I think there are some ppl on here who think that anyone who believes Jesus is the only way is a fundie...and others don't think that. To some degree, extremism is all in your perspective...)

As a sidenote, having gone through homeschooling and now being on the other side and seeing all my friends now growing up, graduating college/joining the workforce/getting married, I think there was a lot more crazy in my generation since I feel that my generation was one of the first in which homeschooling was becoming more widespread, but no one really know if it would "work". Now that a lot of these kids have grown up, the mistakes of the homeschool movement are becoming evident, as well as the benefits. I hope that the future generations of homeschooling will be a vast improvement on the more pioneer generations. I know that, should I choose to homeschool my kids, I'll have a lot more balanced approach to it than my parents did, and i feel that my peers/friends will be/are being the same way. Even my friends who were pretty crazy fundie in their upbringing are a lot more moderate now, whether they homeschool their own kids or not. It used to be when I was going through school, if you went to a homeschool event in my area, everyone would be in frumpers with long, uncut hair. Now, at most homeschool events, the kids are all completely normal looking and normal acting, and the frumper-types are exceptions rather than rules.

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For many people, in my observation/experience, the move to become "fundie" is usually reactionary, and often it's a reaction on the parent's part to either mistakes they made in their youth or mistakes their parents made or a general discontent with the culture at large or a combination of all three. Perhaps their intentions are good, but as the case with most reactions, the pendulum often swings too far in the opposite direction.

Bingo. Lots of women in the fundie world have a mean case of Reformed Whore Syndrome. Even Michelle Duggar, to a lesser extent than most others. She wasn't sexually promiscuous or into drugs or partying when she was younger but she does tell that story about mowing the lawn in a bikini top an awful lot.

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I think it is also attractive, in an insidious way, for its apparent simplicity. It's a formula, so it seems simple. Slide Tab A into Slot B. No big universe questions to sort through; someone has figured all that out for you. No decisions, as there is a answer already prepared for any dilemma. It all seems so straightforward. . . until it doesn't. :o And then it's hard to walk that all back, as Emerson noted, with our penchant for foolish consistency and all that.

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Guest Anonymous

Or in my case just attending a church with no female leadership. I'm still in denial about my fundie status (well according to most on FJ I am) even though homeschooling, submission, wearing frumpers, courtship, "keeping sweet", trying to convert the ebil feminists, bashing the ebil gubment, and blogging about all of that is not part of my daily life. :?

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I think there are two parts to it. First of all, it's a gradual process that starts off with just a few rules and ends with ridiculous legality. The second aspect is loads and loads of misinformation. Michelle Duggar was given two wrong facts. She was told that a fertilized egg is exactly the same as a baby, and she was told that the Pill causes miscarriage. I don't know why she believed these two completely wrong things, but because she did believe it, she was led to believe that she basically killed a baby. It's really easy to convince people to do anything to atone for a perceived sin that big. They don't call Evangelicals "Liars for Jesus" for nothing.

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I have two friends, one is a fundie and the other was a fundie but left and attends the same church as me. Both were raised Catholic but were non-practicing when they became teens. Both were pregnant when they got married and felt bad about it. They are both up-beat, intelligent women who have strong bonds with their siblings. Both had neighbors who were in IFB churches, became friends with neighbors, started attending IBF and became born again. They enjoyed learning the Bible for the first time, doing service in the community, becoming self-employed and having a close knit group of friends from church. The first ended up with 10 kids and the other who left had seven. My friend still involved has times when she questions areas of her faith, but she is not free to do so at her church or with her husband. She doesn't have many opportunities and I think she is resigned to her situation. Her pastor printed up the "rules" to live by. I think I still have a copy of it. I am a conservative Christian, attended services at her church and could barely stand to sit through the sermon. It was crazy. My other friend did the modest dress, homeschooling, but started to doubt all the "add-ons" to her faith: what to wear, eat, read, think, pray, fast, etc. So she got out and her husband stayed in. I guess that was traumatic and dramatic for everyone involved. But she knew she couldn't stay in a cult. I don't understand it myself; maybe someone else can figure out how they became so vulnerable.

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With our neighbors, they went from being former alcoholics and drug users who spent their evenings at Alcoholics Annoynomus to fundies who spent their evenings going to church and being judgmental. Took about two years.

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With our neighbors, they went from being former alcoholics and drug users who spent their evenings at Alcoholics Annoynomus to fundies who spent their evenings going to church and being judgmental. Took about two years.

Yes, I don't think it's uncommon for addicts to transfer their addiction to something else once they stop using. My first boyfriend was fundie-lite in high school (before I met him) and an alcoholic and drug addict in college and for several years after. He got clean (or mostly?) and became a semi-fanatical Catholic for a few years. Now he no longer considers himself a Catholic, though he's still a Christian... I just wonder what the next addiction is going to be. :(

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I think it depends and the reasons vary widely. Some are both into it, but some may see it as attractive until they don't know how to back out.

For women, having lots of cute babies that the husband goes out and works his ass off to support might sound like a lot of fun! And it seems so ideal to have a large brood of attractive, well-mannered little children gathered around you as you read stories! I know a lot of secular parents who had visions of parental bliss. I know I did. Knew it would be hard, but was more focused on the bedtime stories and the nice aspects. And that was when I expected to have to work outside the home. How nice it would be to think one could rely instead on a man to have all the pressure to work work work to make all the money!

For men, it's an attractive thought to prove manliness by being able to take care of a family! There's a lot of pride that can go along with proving one's worth by making the moolah needed to support a lot of people! Our society values people by how much money and property they have or earn! Go out, work hard, come home to an adoring wife and perfect children and dinner popping hot and on the table, cigars and slipped brought to you after dessert before you go to bed and rest before another hard day of work to outwardly prove your worth to the world. Sure beats the idea of having a wife equally as harried and exhausted from working a double at the Piggly Wiggly to pay for day care, eating something boxed for dinner.

I'm not a fundy, and I can see how these could be attractive to women AND men. I know if I went to work right now, we'd be strained to pay for child care, and dinner would never be fresh. And I do like that I can stay home with our daughter while my husband goes out and deals with stupid people for a living, and he likes that our child is being raised by one of us during the day. We value each other's contributions to the running of this household without seeing one of us as being more in charge. We could say he is because he brings home the proverbial bacon, or we could say I am since I have the ultimate final say in meals, how our home is done up, etc.. But we instead see our contributions as all valuable and equal.

Now take this sort of thing and place it in the midwest, where it can be more boring and fewer ways to set one's self or family apart. When fancy cars and electronics aren't as common as ways of one upping the neighbors, what have you got? Why your penis and vagina and the idea of having an ideal family! Unless you were raised in this cult, I doubt many people jump into it expecting it to go so far. But once you're in, it's easier to get pulled in deeper and deeper, acclimating to the changes so that you don't even see it happening. Before you know it, where you were once wading in the shallow end, the Kraken has pulled you under, and if you are lucky, you might have been given an oxygen tank that buys you a bit of time, but not much. Before you know it, you're slaving away with Davy Jones and no way to get out. The wife can't go to work because there are more kids than daycare could be paid for, so the husband has to work more. All your friends who aren't in this life were alienated, and if you try to do things different, those few who accept you won't accept you either. Unless you want to be shunned from the fundy side as well as by your old friends, you better stay with it. So you do what you can to keep some acceptance.

It's how cults work. Pull people in slowly, then strangle them until they can't get away. Make it happen gradually and you'll even be able to get people to drink poison and kill themselves. That's literally happened multiple times. Heaven's Gate and Jonestown are the most well-known cases. Make the cult sound attractive, present it just right, while withholding the realities at the start so no one knows how bad it is, then slowly boil them alive. Beginning Scientologists hear that Xenu was made up by those wishing to smear Scientology. Then, when you're in far enough, you are informed about Xenu and told you had to prove yourself worthy, and that non-believers simply don't understand because they don't want to understand. But by then, you've been slowly brainwashed enough to not even realize that what you once would have scoffed at, you're instead sitting there in glassy-eyed amazement not even questioning it because if you do, you'll be sentenced to auditing and you don't want to be considered a suppressive person and cast out the way you were talked into cutting off all your friends who said anything negative about Scientology. They tried getting me to cut off my friends, and one who wouldn't let himself be shaken became my husband, and he said one of the darkest moments of his life was when he was sitting in his car on the phone with me as I told him I'd joined Scientology, and he was afraid.

This doesn't mean I take tons of pity on people who don't get out, especially in the earlier days when kids are fewer. It's hard to get out, and can be harder when you've got a family. But for their sakes, you need to.

Of course then you get those who decide that it's great being king of the castle and they like being able to beat on their wives, egomaniacs, and you've got women who become afraid of losing their children is they leave, women who don't know how to leave, who believe themselves not worthy of anything better. That's when there are major problems. I feel sorry for those women. I don't feel sorry for the likes of Kindull and other bloggers who clearly have the ability to get out but who choose to stay and raise their children to be homophobic bigots "for god" (I don't think of her as being abused, I think she thoroughly enjoys her status and placing the responsibility for support on her husband, and if money gets too tight, I think she enjoys getting to play the martyr for her family and to get to be self-righteous). I feel sorry for Selene, living in a house without running water or heat, smoking herself and her kids out with a wood stove in such poor condition that she has to lay on the floor with the baby with the windows open to let the smoke out just to have some heat when it's snowy outside. That's a woman kept prisoner not only by too many kids and a clearly poor education, but by her own family, including a mother who thinks it's "hilarious", that bitch who writes Above Rubies. If my internet wasn't so incredibly slow right now, as it gets when the weather starts getting overcast and rainy, I'd find the article where the ARBitch talked about the family being flooded out of the bottom floor of the house, the new flooring Selene's husband just put in being buckled and destroyed from the flood, their furniture overturned and bobbing up and down, ruined in the flooding. ARB really said this was hilarious to see. Selene is both ridiculed and praised for her hardships. That's mental abuse. And then she doesn't have access to the internet that she could use to find help, that is, if she even knows how to use the internet and could use it without being watched like a hawk.

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Or in my case just attending a church with no female leadership. I'm still in denial about my fundie status (well according to most on FJ I am) even though homeschooling, submission, wearing frumpers, courtship, "keeping sweet", trying to convert the ebil feminists, bashing the ebil gubment, and blogging about all of that is not part of my daily life. :?

Well you did say that patriarchy and sexism is fine as long as you agree with it. That isn't much different than my parent's attitude when they joined ATI.

Edited: We wore pants and shorts, we wore regular bathing suits (even bikinies when we were small), my parents had gone to college and wanted us to do the same, my mom worked outside the home for a good chunk of my childhood, they didn't bash the ebil gubment, and didn't believe in courtship. Yet they bought into the idea that women weren't as capable as men to be leaders, especially when it came to religious things, and we ended up members of a harmful cult. It's a slippery slope and once you agree that women aren't equal to men, it isn't that hard to slide down into fundidom.

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Guest Anonymous

No, I told you what you wanted to hear. It's my life, and my choice of where to worship. It's about serving God, not who is in charge. I am a single, independent, college educated 43 year old who has attended this church for many years. So, no I'm not in danger of falling down the slippery slope of fundamentalism. But you don't seem to get that. Now, if you will excuse me, it's time to feed the feline headship and head off to my sexist, fundie church.

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You may not, but others might. You support women not being treated equally to men in church. You are no better than the fundies we snark on.

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No, I told you what you wanted to hear. It's my life, and my choice of where to worship. It's about serving God, not who is in charge. I am a single, independent, college educated 43 year old who has attended this church for many years. So, no I'm not in danger of falling down the slippery slope of fundamentalism. But you don't seem to get that. Now, if you will excuse me, it's time to feed the feline headship and head off to my sexist, fundie church.

You're 43?

Dayum!

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Yes, I don't think it's uncommon for addicts to transfer their addiction to something else once they stop using. My first boyfriend was fundie-lite in high school (before I met him) and an alcoholic and drug addict in college and for several years after. He got clean (or mostly?) and became a semi-fanatical Catholic for a few years. Now he no longer considers himself a Catholic, though he's still a Christian... I just wonder what the next addiction is going to be. :(

Interesting. The people I can think of in my life who either are fundie/fundie-lite or used to be have had issues with addiction or otherwise "crazy" pasts. They are either looking for something else to be addicted to or for a way to be "saved" from themselves. What I don't get is why they find judging others so easy.

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No, I told you what you wanted to hear. It's my life, and my choice of where to worship. It's about serving God, not who is in charge. I am a single, independent, college educated 43 year old who has attended this church for many years. So, no I'm not in danger of falling down the slippery slope of fundamentalism. But you don't seem to get that. Now, if you will excuse me, it's time to feed the feline headship and head off to my sexist, fundie church.

Actually I think it is a lot about who is in charge? How can you worship and serve god in a places that believes in gener segregation of duties.

Here is a teat, if it makes you uncomfortable to put the words African Americans in place of women, it is a good sign that it is gender discrimination and bigotry,

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Karen from thatmom has talked about it in her pod casts. She talks about how homeschoolers generally fall into 2 categories. Those who homeschool for religious reason and those who don't. So much of the 'values' spread through meet up groups, conventions, and books. The need to fit into the 'mold' they see of the good homeschool family. I also could see why a homeschool family would feel the need to justify there choice to homeschool. I think the criticism they receive from non-homeschooling parents pushes them farther into the fundie world.

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Well, I can't speak to the question of how it all starts - but this morning, here's what Mr. MtL and I decided we can do, in the spirit of applying all I've learned here at FJ:

- Effective immediately, I will refer to my spouse as Good HeadShip Lollipop.

- It's high time we begin the quiver-filling process. He'll have his vasectomy reversed; I'll make myself Instantly Available At All Times. (I'm 58, but hey, you never know, right? I could still pop out a dozen or so little blessings in the next few years...)

- Said blessings will all have names beginning with the letter X. Our top choices so far: Xerxes, Xenia, Xerox, and Xylophone. Other suggestions gladly considered!

- I will forget everything I learned in college and graduate school, quit my 35-year career, and prepare for my new life as the keeper of our SOTDRT. Lesson number 1: always use "it's" as a possessive. It's the fundie way.

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Guest Anonymous
You may not, but others might. You support women not being treated equally to men in church. You are no better than the fundies we snark on.

And I really don't care what other people think....especially self-proclaimed former fundies.

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It's probably different for everyone. I've never been fundie, but I have slowly found myself living a life that I didn't go looking for and even talking the talk of that life. For me, it was low self esteem, a need to be loved and marrying a narcissist who knew exactly how to get what he wanted, first by saying all the right things (what I wanted to hear) then tossing in tidbits of the crazy here and there until eventually, that's all it was. I didn't see it coming, didn't see it happening, and didn't have a clue. Not until that fateful day, whenever that was, that I woke up and asked myself how the hell I got there and how the hell did that become my life. Overall, people with low self esteem are probably the most likely to get involved in something like being a fundie, but only if someone takes advantage of that and leads them into it.

There are also those who are looking for answers, as humans have done since the dawn of time, and is unsatisfied with any he or she encounters until getting involved in a church or religion that not only has the answers, but has rules about how to live. No fear of doing the wrong thing if you just follow the rules. No fear of burning in hell if you just do what Pastor so and so says.

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Guest Anonymous

Actually I think it is a lot about who is in charge? How can you worship and serve god in a places that believes in gener segregation of duties.

Here is a teat, if it makes you uncomfortable to put the words African Americans in place of women, it is a good sign that it is gender discrimination and bigotry,

So now you're pulling things out of thin air. I have no idea where you're getting the African American thing from...you're own imagination perhaps?

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