How to Know You're in a Christian Fundamentalist Church

If you’re like me and you grew up under Christian fundamentalist teaching, then you probably know the Bible backward and forward, never dated (or at least wore a purity ring), and were told Democrats are demonic and Halloween is Satan’s holiday. And maybe, like me, you’ve since grown up and learned a lot about the world outside church walls, talked with people from different backgrounds, and looked at the Bible with fresh eyes and lots of questions. You might be deconstructing or reconstructing your faith, finding real freedom in the escape from legalism.

I’ve been working on deconstructing the worldview I was brought up in for quite a while now, and the more I move away, the more I notice fundamentalism, legalism, and patriarchy growing in evangelical churches. And I’ve been thinking about the people in these churches who didn’t grow up with this ideology--who didn’t have the consequences of living with perpetual shame and false guilt--because they probably won’t understand right away the impact that Christian fundamentalism and patriarchy can have on people seeking God. I’m concerned for the children who will grow up being imprisoned by legalism and distanced from the love of God.

So I’ve been thinking about signs or red flags that warn me that fundamentalism is in play in a church, and I hope my laying these out here might be helpful. . . .

Silent No More

Sometimes I write because I want to talk back to the patriarchy, the fundamentalists, the Vision Forum thought leaders who spoke into my life so much, with so much damage. Who put law above love. I want to be authentic with who I am and what I have experienced, speaking after so long of being unable to use my voice. . . .

Shelter

This isn’t the first time I’ve had to shelter in place.

The world seems off-balance this year, but the deep part of me has found the old tracks through the forest, hidden due to years of absence, but still there.

During the work week I can muffle the echoes of the past, stay busy in my virtual office, stay connected with the present.

But on my days off, I’m reliving something I haven’t experienced in the seven years since I left my life as a stay-at-home daughter. . . .

MemoirCait WestOctober 14, 2020stay at home, stay at home daughter, shelter in place, covid-19, pandemic, learning, hope, remembering, memory, changeComment

In the Hollow

Lay down the wounds like canyons, like caverns in your ocean heart. Cuts in the deep where the water runs coldest. Let the currents of salt fill every crack. Let go of the empty.

You are a world formed in rock and volcano and hurricane. You are the undersea mountains, hidden in the dark. You are the valleys in the hills at the bottom of the earth. . . .

LyricCait WestAugust 18, 2020loss, memory, emptiness, prose poem, canyon, healing, hope Comment

Choosing to Stay Home

The rain and the waiting and the forgetting of days—all this that we are dealing with together from our separate homes—remind me of a time years ago, a time of habitual rain and endless waiting and how it didn’t really matter whether you called today Tuesday or Wednesday. A time when I lived on Kaua`i as a stay-at-home daughter, an available bride with no groom in sight.

Under the stay-at-home order, I am returning to the long stretches of afternoon stillness, quiet moments that turn to hours, a deeper familiarity with my walls and windows, time to read books without the focus to read them. Pen in hand, nothing to say. Aimless walking in neighborhoods that seem to have no neighbors. . . .

The Education of a Stay-at-Home Daughter

They called it Babylon. A place without God. A place where you would lose your faith, lose your innocence, lose your soul.

We were told the professors were armored with the “liberal agenda.” We were told they hated God, that they spoke lies. College was a place where the naive were brainwashed.

For us daughters, college was off-limits. Women who went away to university would forget their calling to be wives and mothers. They would become obsessed with careers and displace men in the workplace. They would get ideas. . . .

On BarlowGirl, The Prince of Egypt, and Purity Culture

BarlowGirl was a band made of three sisters, who wore a little bit of black leather, used black eyeliner, had hair with layers, and played guitar and drums like real rockers. To make it all okay (at least in my mind at the time), they sang about topics that had real impact on my life: modesty and purity. I was in love. I could listen to music with an actual beat and still be able to say I was being edified in my faithfulness as a stay-at-home daughter. . . .

MemoirCait WestSeptember 11, 2019BarlowGirl, music, Prince of Egypt, purity culture, modesty, purity, CCM Comments

Review of Linda Kay Klein's Pure

Church has often felt like eyes staring at me. The eyes of other churchgoers: women who have given me the up-and-down modesty assessment, men I have been afraid of “causing to stumble” by any accidental skirt blowing, the little girls for whom I was taught I should be a model of virtuous womanhood. And then, of course, the eyes of God, which felt much further away, but still always watching me as if to catch all my mistakes. It felt like the eyes were always staring in judgment, looking to see if I fit the description of a “godly young woman.” I didn’t feel grace in those glances. I didn’t feel acceptance. I had a difficult time imagining God looking down on me in love. . . .

ReviewCait WestMay 24, 2019purity, shame Comments

Delta

The slip of moss and pebble underfoot. Slime of algae and bacteria, bubbling in the tepid water of the shallow creek we follow. My feet on the slip: bare uncalloused toes feeling for some kind of grounding, some kind of earth, some kind of level. . . .

LyricCait WestApril 17, 2019church Comments

Sewing Room

Flannel folded on top of linen on top of velvet and taffeta and silk and calico. Smell of the dryer and iron, tinge of hot metal. The soft cut of thread on dry fingers. The whir of the machine behind the door.

The sewing room was more like a closet, hemmed in at a back corner of the house. Space as a wide as the window that let in the afternoon sun like a silent hallelujah. . . .

LyricCait WestApril 1, 2019sewing Comments

I Remember

Remember the scrawl of initials on aspens, bark thin and scarred. The flutter of heart-shaped leaves, butter yellow, glowing in the sun.

Remember the shuffle of damp pine needles underfoot, the sifting of thoughts that fall on forest silence.

Remember the want of solitude, threaded to the want of freedom. . . .

LyricCait WestMarch 25, 2019lyric essay, memory, remembering, reflection, natureComment