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

by Marlene Winell

when she first left, all she knew was that her favorite color was pink and what her name was.

Because your religion took care of so much, defining and dictating reality in so many ways, you are now faced with largely reconstructing your life. Recovery begins with deciding to take that responsibility.

make a real break, you need to call a halt to life as you once knew it and create some space and new direction for yourself.

God is what is important, not me. Am I worth taking care of?

Guilt is often a continuing issue, because it is one of the only feelings indulged by religion. You are probably used to feeling bad for many things, and now you no longer have the old means of forgiveness. Because fundamentalism splits everything into black and white, you may have developed an unrelenting perfectionism.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is always tempting to judge. The awareness you have now can make your past involvement in fundamentalism seem very strange. Therefore, it is vital for you to realize that you are not the same person now. The choices and commitments you made in the past were ones that made the most sense to you at the time — just as you may have chosen a spouse or a career that you later outgrew. The point is you are human. You try to do the best you can; no one deliberately plans to create unhappiness.

Irving Yalom (1980), psychiatrist and existential humanist, describes four core human dilemmas: death, responsibility, isolation, and meaning. Christian fundamentalism appears to resolve each very neatly, eliminating ambiguity and satisfying a natural, human desire for safety.

Since the source of all the benefits offered is external, requiring dependence on God and the church, internal resources atrophy. This process degrades the self and becomes a serious threat to human well-being.

People tend to worry about the future. We want to predict events and circumstances; we would like to have guarantees. Marriage vows, insurance policies, pensions, savings accounts, legal contracts, and oaths of allegiance are all examples of this desire. It is difficult to live with uncertainty and ambiguity, especially if you doubt your ability to handle whatever happens. Fundamentalism preys on the normal concerns people have by painting the world as completely out of control and humans as essentially helpless.

With fundamentalism, difficult issues in life are made concrete and relatively easy to deal with. For example, you can externalize your internal experience — by projecting good and evil onto such images as Christ, God, and Satan — and thereby simplify the complexity of the psyche.

natural inclination to escape the challenging work of achieving personal maturity. The self is untrustworthy because of its essential evil and weakness; thus salvation from the dangerous self is as absolutely necessary.

In the fundamentalist framework, decision-making is a matter of discerning God’s will, to the point of looking for God’s blueprint for your life. The only clear desire that you are really permitted to have is to love God and do His bidding, as in “Not my will, but thine be done” (Mark 14:36). This can be quite a relief. As great philosophers attest, human freedom is indeed a deeply troubling dilemma. We must make choices. We are responsible for our lives. At the most profound level, our perceptions create our experience. As Yalom (1980) describes it, confronting responsibility can be enormously unsettling. Humans are strangely “doomed to freedom.” Thus, he says, we seek structure, authority, grand designs, magic, something that is bigger than ourselves.

The “God-shaped” void I had may not have been spiritual but, in fact, emotional. I used my faith as I was growing up to fill emptiness. I wouldn’t know if I have a spiritual void unless my emotional void was filled first — then see if there’s a “leftover” void.

Thus remaining a perpetual child in a cosmic family helps the individual avoid the developmental task all young adults have: to let go of parents and face their limits and mortality. You can refuse to grow up and feel justified about it.

I remember in high school going out on the back porch of our house at night and looking up at the sky and feeling this oneness with God, thinking that he was really there. It gave meaning to life, I think. You could see that your life here on Earth was really part of a great high-stakes game and that the consequences were tremendous, and it gave you a meaning to your life.

Intellectual ambiguity can be very uncomfortable. It is always easier to be sure of something. A religion that neatly provides all the answers saves you the frustration and anxiety that inevitably accompany a struggle with difficult questions.

When you believe in the fundamentalist master plan, you no longer have to face the challenge of creating meaning through your own choices and perceptions. In Christian fundamentalism, God’s purpose is revealed, and you can find a place in it. Put most simply, your purpose is to be saved and to help save others. This is straightforward and significant, making other lifestyles seem pale in comparison.

Since it depends on God and does not translate to true self-worth based on inherent goodness, if you leave the belief system, you lose your acceptance. The acceptance is always understood as being vicariously earned through Christ’s atonement. The message is not “You are acceptable as you are and have always been.”

There is often an allusion to an intense and shimmering light, which suffuses the mind and being of the person and dominates everything. Out of this experience emerges an indescribable joy, a sense of bliss, ecstatic happiness, a buoyant experience of peace, and an inner sweetness.

This is a system of absolute black and absolute white.

unlike religions that expect you to engage in a spiritual discipline such as meditation, you are not asked to do anything.

In fundamentalism, there is no understanding of character development, only miraculous transformation due to God’s grace.

Although they were familiar already, in writing this book I had to look up the verses I quoted from the Bible to get the wording exact. As I did this, I gradually became aware of interesting feelings. I found myself turning the delicate pages of the Bible with care and affection, the way I did many years ago. The pages felt precious as I smoothed them out. I read whole chapters in the Gospel of John, and was moved by the words of Jesus at the Last Supper. Suddenly I recognized my experience. It was like reading old letters from a lover I had left. The old bond was still present, the feelings of attachment and love, and a wave of sadness, a strange sense of betrayal. Here I was quoting my old love to build my arguments. “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.

So even though I was a real good kid, every time that I thought anything bad or felt anything that I thought was bad or did anything that somebody else thought was bad, I automatically thought that if I died at that moment, I’d go to hell.

we want to believe we are rational, in control, and making our own choices. Thinking that other people can control your mind is scary.

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

The anxiety of this doctrine is determining whether you were ever truly saved. Especially for those who did not have a dramatic experience of rebirth, this belief is not much comfort. Believers work hard at making their salvation “take” and blame themselves for not believing enough or not being humble enough to be accepted. This problem is especially relevant to children of fundamentalists. Since they inherited their belief system, they often have not had a distinct conversion experience. Or if they have, there is no lasting evidence that salvation has definitely taken place.

no one knows what “lukewarm” really means.

the Christian can never feel totally secure, even with the promise of salvation.

Another unfortunate aspect of this end-times focus is its effect on thinking about the future. The impact on political issues, such as environmental concern and peace making, is profound. Fundamentalists are generally unmotivated to better the world because they see it as doomed.

Christians are expected to live lives free of sin. This is not possible, of course, since so much is considered sin.

The notion of personal responsibility in fundamentalism is a curious one. You are responsible for your sins, but you cannot take credit for the good things that you do. Any good that you do must be attributed to God working through you. Yet you must try to be Christ-like. When you fail, it is your fault for not “letting the power of God work in you.” This is an effective double bind of responsibility without ability.

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.

in the fundamentalist context, all of these experiences are claimed as evidence of the religious doctrine, not simply an experience to be explored.

The idea of the sacred gives a supernatural authority to their doctrines

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

The damage to self is more than hurt self-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.

the first reason to discredit the world is because it is simply irrelevant.

Outsiders are discredited as sources of valid information or enrichment simply by virtue of being unbelievers.

The fundamentalist thus develops contempt for most human efforts.

In the fundamentalist view, unbelievers have only two relevant attributes: They are potential converts and sources of temptation. As objects of evangelism, they are called “crops to be harvested,” “sheep to be found,” and “fish to be netted.” Because of danger of worldly influence (much like a contagious disease), relationships with “them” must be handled gingerly. Contacts must be superficial, geared toward evangelism only, and cut short if there is no positive response. Since Christians are already full of truth, there is no need for them to listen, nothing for them to learn, and much for them to lose by admitting alternative views into their consciousness.

This is always an either/or argument because of the dominance of black-and-white thinking.

The true believer, then, is to trust neither inner guidance nor any information from the environment.

Going it alone, as a believer is considered both dangerous and arrogant.

the only respected source of knowledge is authority.

In the fundamentalist system, the idea of being a “child of God” has a charm that many relate to. You remain a child, dependent on and cared for by your heavenly father. You never have to learn self-reliance or turn to yourself for strength and wisdom. And you have no source of knowledge but outside authority. Like the hymn says, you simply “trust and obey,” much like a child should listen to a parent about bedtime or staying out of the street.

in Christianity, some key words that are also important in human experience, generally, are redefined and become so overburdened with ponderous, contrived, and dissonant meanings that they are “put out of commission entirely as vehicles for articulate thought or communication.” He examines the distortions of the words life, death, truth, wisdom, righteousness, justice, liberty, bondage, love, hate, will, grace, witness, and word. For example, Cohen points out that wisdom is used so as to exclude any basis except divine commandment.

The definition of wisdom in this system is a simple tautology: Since wisdom is the province of God, anything God does is “just,” “wise,” and “righteous,” even though it seems wrong to humans. As Cohen points out, God is defined in terms of these words and they are all redefined in terms of him. Any wisdom from other sources is declared null and void.

love, which translates to obedience:

It is a mental activity of adhering to code.