The Rules of Fundamentalism

We never called our churches “fundamentalist.” We were Reformed. We were Presbyterian. We were Calvinist. We thought we were the true Christians.

Now that I’ve left, I use new language that I would never have used before to describe my childhood church and the homeschooling world I grew up in: abusive, high-control, legalistic, cult, fundamentalist. These words help me explain what really happened. But of course, they weren’t words that we would have used for ourselves back then.

I’m using the term fundamentalism in a broad sense. The church I grew up in was literalist in its interpretation of the Bible, dogmatic, and focused on an us-versus-them mentality. My family reflected this ideology in creating strict behavioral and emotional rules for us children.

But fundamentalism isn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of ideology. The rules could change. One example is the issue of eating out on Sundays. For a while we weren’t allowed to eat on Sundays because that would mean causing other people to work and break the Sabbath. But then our new pastor said it was okay to eat out on Sundays because it gave wives a break from their work.

I remember Santa being a part of our Christmas tradition until I was about four years old, when suddenly, all the Santa decorations and ornaments had to go in the trash. The angels were also thrown out because they were called graven images, but they were later brought back in. I never understood why.

I went to church with a lot of families who believed women and girls should never wear pants. But for some reason, I was allowed to wear pants outside of church services and church events. They had to be loose fitting, of course, and there were many other restrictions on my clothing, but we prided ourselves that we weren’t that extreme.

Some fundamentalist women wore head coverings, others didn’t. Some families were allowed to watch movies, some had no television at all. Every family was different because every father was making his own rules as the head of the household. Pastors and leaders had very strong sway in this, but where there weren’t clear instructions, fathers decided because that was how Christian patriarchy functioned.

The rules in fundamentalism didn’t always make sense. When I was eighteen, I was allowed to watch Die Hard, but not Harry Potter. We could listen to Motown and Oldies, but not Christian rock music. 

This inconsistency created a sense of cognitive dissonance in my mind. I truly wanted to follow the rules because I thought that meant I would be obeying God. And most of the time, I was good at following the rules. But the rules continually shifted, and I saw how they were founded on cherry-picked scripture verses.

Fundamentalism pushes for perfection, while at the same time making perfection impossible. 

I now understand that fundamentalism at its core isn’t really about finding the only way to obey God. Fundamentalism is a method to control. For many of us, we stayed in fundamentalist groups because we thought anything was worth being right with God, even if we were suffering. But we failed to see that the men who made up the rules were there to hold power over their congregations, their wives, their children. 

I wasn’t able to make sense of all this until I left though. It is so difficult to break away from a black-and-white mindset, to take in the world as more complex than I was taught. I’m still learning this way, to make decisions based on various factors like evidence, intuition, and results, rather than a few words pulled out of an ancient text.

It is not an easy path, but it is a freer one, as I no longer have the fingers of fundamentalism choking my spirit and holding me back.