Leading with the heart and the mind: Two books offer help to those wanting to leave behind fundamentalist Christianity
Many people ask me if I was raised with the kind of fundamentalist, extremist, orthodox religious beliefs I write about. I was not. As I explain in Breaking Their Will , my religious upbringing was a "watered-down version of Judaism." Therefore, other than exposing the problem of religious child maltreatment and explaining how it happens, there is little I can do to help people who struggle with the emotional and psychological tangles left by a fundamentalist religious upbringing.
But now there are two books that reach out to those individuals, albeit in very different ways. Both are written by women who grew up in fundamentalist Christianity, so they know firsthand how such teachings can be woven throughout the fabric of a child's life and leave him or her with persistent feelings of guilt, shame, fear, and self-doubt that often extend far into adulthood.
[image error]In Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion (Apocryphile Press, rev. 2007), psychologist Marlene Winell explains how her faith was "central to my life for many years. . . .The benefits were real, especially as an adolescent." Winell grew up with parents who were missionaries in Asia. Despite where her family was located, Winell was "largely sheltered by the American subculture in Taiwan and had little contact with the Asian culture around us. Our family was in a foreign, heathen land for the purpose of teaching, not learning. Sadly, I remember strong sights, sounds, and smells in the Buddhist temples [that were] associated only with pity and disgust."
Things began to change for Winell when she attended high school in Southern California where she read modern poetry and philosophy. Then she attended University of California at Irvine, which, like most other college campuses in the 1960s, was exploding with free expression about everything from the Jesus Movement to the Vietnam War. "Encountering other ideas gave me new options," writes Winell. "As I became armed with alternatives, I was more willing to confront the problems in my religion, such as sexism, the notion of original sin, and the dichotomy of [being] 'saved' and [being] 'damned'. Allowing myself some intellectual integrity was an enormous relief." However, breaking from her religious past also was accompanied with "confusion, fear, anger, and grief." Winells writes that her departure became "a long and wrenching process, which tore at the fabric of my existence."
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Dr. Marlene Winell
In trying to help others who are thinking about leaving, or have already left, fundamentalist Christianity, Winell discusses what lies ahead. She explains that the process involves five phases: Separation, confusion, avoidance, feeling, and rebuilding. To bring things down to a real level, she frequently inserts quotes by others who have struggled with the transition. For example, a man named Daryl says that he feels "like a scared, lonely, abandoned little kid . . . who must be a real 'bad boy.'" He explains that this view of himself is connected to what he was taught when he was very young, that he was "nothingness in the eyes of God."
In her chapters devoted to healing, Winell invokes the "healing the child within" model, one that was originally developed for adult survivors of childhood trauma. She stresses the need for readers to develop a new relationship with one's inner child. For instance, she suggests that they start a log chronicling how they spend each day, noting what kinds of feelings come up, and even buying a doll. "This may seem corny or unnecessary," notes Winell, "however, it can be a very powerful tool in heping you feel that your child is real." Winell also teaches people how to fight the internal critical voice of the "idea monster" and to allow good and bad feelings to come to the surface.
[image error]Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light (Oracle Institute Press, rev. 2010) is written by Valerie Tarico, a counseling pychology scholar who consults with churches and secular groups on the subjects of morality, psychology, and spirituality. She also operates WisdomCommons.org, an interactive website that allows for discussion on these topics.
Like Winell, Tarico struggled with religious doubts while growing up in her Evangelical Christian community in Scottsdale, Arizona. "When I first started having misgivings about my faith, I did what any good Evangelical would [do]: I prayed. I was fifteen at the time, earnest and devout." And there were plenty of opportunities to pray, since Tarico's life as a youngster was steeped in faith. In addition to church services, she belonged to the Evangelical Girl Scouts, attended Bible study classes, and went to Christian camps and other youth programs. She even participated in the "I found It!" campaign, an Evangelical 1970s billboard media blitz. Yet Tarico had doubts, terrifying doubts. "I remember kneeling one night on the floor of my bedroom, crying, pleading for God to take them away, and then crawling into bed with some sense of relief."
Tarico attended Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, "a bulwark of conservative Christian education" since 1860, as she puts it. Still, as Tarico continued to question the Christian doctrines she had been brought up to believe, she began to psychologically fall apart. She developed an eating disorder—a youth minister advised her to pray on it—and she "plunged into absolute despair and self-loathing." After a failed attempt to take her life, she was hospitalized for a month. When she returned to school, her need to seek reason and scientific knowledge continued to chip away at her religious mindset until "there weren't many [religious] conclusions that made much sense. I no longer had clean answers about what was true, but my old ones clearly contradicted both morality and reason. The only hope I had of pursuing goodness and truth was to let those answers go."
Dr. Valerie Tarico
Unlike Winell, Tarico chooses to take the fundamentalist Christian reader (it appears that this is her ideal audience) not on an emotional journey, but an intellectual one. She examines traditional Christian doctrines the way a scientist might go about inspecting a meteor that dropped from an unknown galaxy. "When one examines the evidence related to Evangelical beliefs . . . when one examines all of [its doctrines] together through a lens of empiricism and logic, the composite suggests some kind of reality that is very different from the ideas that dominated my thinking for so long."
In conducting this examination, Tarico scrutinizes various aspects of Evangelical Christianity and biblical literalism. For instance, Tarico points out that Evangelical doctrines were inherited from Protestant orthodoxy, and before that, from Roman Catholic orthodoxy. "Evangelicals often deny this heritage and pretend they are only distant relatives. But don't be deceived. After all, children rarely like to acknowledge how much they are like their parents." Providing context to these ideas—describing their place in history—runs counter to Christian orthodoxy, which tends to presume that nothing of theological significance occurred before its appearance and anything afterward is the work of apostate cults.
In another example, Tarico points out that the Bible codifies sexism, anti-homosexual attitudes, and racism, and this creates a quandary for the scriptural literalist. Evangelicals "have little choice but to embrace these three attitudes, thus arguing that inequality is God's will" or to adopt the position that these ideas are acceptable. "The one stance pits them against morality and the other against reality." Tarico explains that no worshipper must feel obligated to choose either. Instead, the author says that believers could use critical thinking and a moral compass when reading scripture. For instance, she suggests that people inquire whether a passage reflects societal progress. Tarico encourages readers to question other fundamentalist Christian concepts, such as the idea of "one truth," the value of human suffering, the existence of miracles, the "fall," heaven, hell, and the idea that child reach a pre-set age of accountability.
Despite their differences, both Leaving the Fold and Trusting Doubt try to connect to readers who, to some degree or another, still clutch to the fundamentalist Christian beliefs of their childhood, fearing what will happen if they let go. Will they have no one to talk to? What will happen if they do not discover a "truth" that is as clear-cut as the belief system they grew up with? Will they go to hell? What if their doubts about faith are wrong?
The overall compassionate response from both authors seems to be the same: You have the strength and the intelligence to know how you feel and to think for yourself. You, more than anyone else, can determine what religious or spiritual beliefs add meaning to your life and which ones do not. What's more, even as there is a burgeoning fundamentalist Christian movement underway in America, more and more Christians are realizing that this is a dangerous path, one that is unhealthy for us all.
In this way, both Leaving the Fold and Trusting Doubt make a point that should resonate with anyone wanting to make the break away from religious fundamentalism: You are not alone.
