Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion

by Marlene Winell

Rather than attending to the process of self-awareness and personal growth, you simply channel the Holy Spirit in your life. Being happy and being a good person are due to the power of God — an appealing shortcut.

“But it’s okay,” I told myself, “This is only part of what I am saying.” Whoever he is, it’s okay that I still love him. Whoever he or she is, telling the truth is important for both of us.

Understanding how mind control mechanisms work is about insight, not blame. It’s about reclaiming your power to make your own intelligent choices.

What do you have to be saved from? Well, as it turns out, if you follow all the writings to their end, you have to be saved from God. Whose holy prison is this?

Christians are also made to feel guilty when they focus on their own priorities. It is seen as wrong and sinful to be aware of your feelings, honor your intuitions, or seek to meet you needs. You should be above this kind of selfishness and consider God first and then the group. But, since people naturally have needs and feelings, sincere Christians who want to avoid guilt must, in essence, annihilate themselves. This makes for more cooperative adherents.

Music, prayers, and a mesmerizing preaching style can create a state of relaxation and suggestibility. When a congregation proceeds to sing and pray aloud together with enthusiasm and speaking in tongues, an individual can easily conform. The aroused emotions and the group consensus about reality are convincing enough to inspire a response to get saved, “rededicated,” or “filled with the Spirit.”

In the typical evangelical service, after a rousing sermon comes the “altar call.” This routine is strikingly similar to hypnotic induction methods in other contexts: The key is to get people to focus attention inward rather than outward, so that they see, hear, and feel internally rather than externally, through the five senses. At such times, you are much more susceptible to suggestions and less able to use your critical abilities. After an emotional sermon, which has likely already employed manipulative techniques such as fear and guilt, you are asked to bow your head and close your eyes. Soft music plays while everyone focuses inward. Quiet hymns repeat “Jesus is calling” or “Just as I am.” The minister then speaks softly into the microphone, suggesting that the Holy Spirit is present and moving in the congregation. Feelings are interpreted for you, as “conviction of sin,” “answering His call,” and so forth. With perfected timing, the preacher asks, “Can you hear Jesus knocking on your heart’s door? Won’t you open it today?” You are then asked to raise your hand while keeping your eyes shut; then to get up and come forward. The effect is powerful, carefully orchestrated, and effective.

I think I’m going to be sick

In the fundamentalist system, the self must be rejected because it is essentially bad and cannot be trusted.

The key is that you are considered fundamentally wrong and inept, beginning with the doctrine of original sin. Everything about you is flawed, and you desperately need to be salvaged by God.

Which says so much more about the God who created us than it does about ourselves

esteem. Your confidence in your own judgment is destroyed. As an empty shell, you are then open and vulnerable to indoctrination because you cannot trust your own thinking. Your thoughts are inadequate, your feelings are irrelevant or misleading, and your basic drives are selfish and destructive. You cannot challenge the religious system because your critical abilities are discredited and your intuitions rendered worthless.

Sandy never went back, unwilling to accept a religion that made thinking a sin.

As Cohen points out, God is defined in terms of these words and they are all redefined in terms of him.

Likewise truth in the Bible does not refer to facts or sincerity, but rather to correct scriptural doctrine. And a lie is any deviation from such doctrine:

Love to the evangelical is simply a willingness to put up with a sinner in order to obey the commission to preach the gospel.

In this type of love, there is no desire to know or be known, which in our everyday understanding, underlies the condition of love.

Yet many other former believers have had the same disappointing and damaging experiences. When people do find a way to talk it over, they often discover they have had similar reasons for breaking away.

change is more likely to occur if we are frustrated and we have access to information about alternatives.

Adults learn to accept the grays in life — the ambiguities, the complexities. We learn to appreciate paradoxes and become wiser in the way we deal with our existence. As we change and grow, we have a normal urge for expansion.

If you are prevented from developing your critical thinking abilities and trusting your own feelings, it is very hard to evolve. You stay stuck in a dogmatic, authoritarian framework, which operates on a simple dualistic basis of right and wrong, reward and punishment.

Questions about doctrine emerge easily when the ban on thinking is lifted,

With increasing self-respect, contact with small children, knowledge of humanism, or connection with nature, it becomes emotionally and logically untenable to view the world as totally fallen and wicked.

My church even believed that when push came to shove, it was only faith that counted; works didn’t count.

No wonder we have so many issues with empty words and promises in the church. Deception is at the heart of their theology. You just need to have the right words but it's okay if you don't change. All that matter is what you say. It doesn't matter if you actually do it. This doesn't fly ethically for most people and yet they get away with it and teach it as truth. Not only this, but I don't even believe the Bible completely supports this. IN James, there's a whole section about faith and works and Jesus talks in John about how you will know us by our love (what we do) and Galatians even talks about the fruit of the Spirit. Faith without works is dead. It means nothing.

No sane God would do the things that he was said to have done.

The fundamentalist mindset feels stifling to the individual and cruel in its implications for others.

She was actually encouraged to have sex with men.

You can't be gay and you're not supposed to have sex before marriage, but go have sex with men that you aren't married to so you won't be gay anymore because being gay is way worse? TF?

For many women today who have developed a feminist consciousness, the church becomes an impossible environment.

Church attendance and Bible reading can become compulsive as an effort to fend off doubt.

Wonder why OCD is a problem

You may become more aware of all the judgments that go on in the group, the fear of outsiders, and the selective reading of the Bible to bolster favored doctrines.

Hearing about the private affairs of TV evangelists or the disgusting frequency of clerical child abuse is enough to make you question the religious system.

one has a right to reserve one’s judgment.

it’s important to keep very clear in your head as you’re working that you don’t know this and you don’t know that. It feels like a better way to go through life for me than the old way, which was to not allow myself to doubt, not allow myself to question.

It feels good to belong to the human race, to be at home on Earth, sharing basic human struggles, being part of society, caring for the planet. It’s great to go dancing, have a cocktail without guilt, see a controversial play, and generally enjoy life without constant censorship.

I would rather be honest and irreligious than to be religious based on fundamental dishonesties.

fundamentalism allowed me to ignore my true feelings and stunted the natural evolution of my psyche.

a common thread is the courage by which former “true believers” take on the responsibility and joy of living their own lives.

The cost of dogmatic thinking is to severely limit your own range of thought and experience.

to ignore family is to ignore yourself. Understanding your family experience is to understand yourself and move on with your growth.

“AMK’s [Adult Missionary Kids] and children of alcoholic parents have almost identical problems.”

In fundamentalist families, there is a core belief that people are basically bad. Therefore, human errors are interpreted as sins instead of as innocent mistakes. Children are seen as small adults, with the same sinful tendencies and the same need to be saved. There is little recognition of child development, that children are different from adults and that they progress through various stages of cognitive, emotional, and moral development. From a fundamentalist point of view, issues such as egocentrism, aggression, sexuality, and teenage rebellion are treated as problems instead of natural processes.

Any alternative ways of thinking about major life questions would be highly threatening.

Consequently, the fundamentalist household rarely encourages children to explore their own thoughts, to be open-minded about ideas, or to come to their own conclusions.

In authoritarian families, children grow up resentful, and they learn to conform in order to get approval. They often have difficulty forming and expressing personal opinions later in life.

This is how Christian private schools rooted in fundamentalism operate too

It was all-important to be “right with God” and “good” according to the Bible rather than being what you intuitively felt was right or good. That is, your feelings were not respected as a gauge for values or decision-making.

In the family, feelings are more likely to be punished than heard.

Conflict is considered sinful instead of an opportunity for learning.

Again the costs for the child are heavy. It means a loss of self-respect and trust. In learning to deny their own feelings, children lose touch with themselves.

Another common pattern is for the family to avoid handling conflicts until the point is reached when emotions boil over. Then chaos reigns as explosions of anger, producing much pain and even abuse.

Too often, well-intentioned Christian parents treat their children as though the kids’ opinions and feelings have little, if any, worth … Evangelical parents who do not listen are creating danger points for their children because they are communicating through their actions that they do not care about their children at a personal level. This contributes to a negative self-concept in the child.

One of the things I hate most that Carrie’s over into our daily culture in the South

With parents ever conscious of issues they consider to be of cosmic importance, the family can never be the top priority. The well-being of children can never compare to parental loyalty to spiritual matters.

What happens when children become secondary to a greater good is similar to the neglect that happens to children in families where one parent is addicted to drugs, alcohol, work, or money. Religious devotion, however, tends to involve both parents and can thus be especially problematic. Even more troublesome is the insistence that devotion is a higher calling. Children cannot question this without feeling guilty, selfish, or absurd. With other kinds of neglect, society is more likely to respond with censure or punishment, require treatment or suggest alternatives, but this kind of intervention is very unlikely within a religious family system.