9 Books and Podcasts Helping Me Process Fundamentalism

I've been thinking a lot about fundamentalism the last 15 months.  I'm not even sure fundamentalism is the right word, but I'm trying to understand the "we have all the right answers" attitude that I absorbed (and wholeheartedly embraced!) while I was at Bethlehem.  I hope to post more (I drafted a post over a year ago and keep getting stuck when I try to finish it).

In the meantime, here are 9 books and podcasts that have helped me along the way.  Many of these books are not explicitly about Christian fundamentalism, but they all contained nuggets or insights that helped me as I tried to process fundamentalist impulses at Bethlehem.

1)  Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious by Chris Stedman

Stedman is the humanist chaplain at Harvard.  His reflections on fundamentalist strains within the atheist community helped me think through fundamentalist dynamics within Christian communities.  Also, I love memoirs, and his story of converting into an evangelical youth group, then moving to an LGBT-affirming faith, then becoming an atheist, was fascinating in its own right.  (Fun fact:  the author grew up here in the Twin Cities.  At a playdate last summer I was describing the book to a friend and she said, "That's my second cousin!")

2)  Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back by Frank Schaeffer

Schaeffer put words to things and captured fundamentalist dynamics in ways that made me squirm in uncomfortable recognition - I see those things in myself.  Fascinating life story, and he's a great writer.  (Note:  I love L'Abri and still love L'Abri even after reading this book.)

3)  The Good Faith Podcast:  What the Heck is a Fundamentalist?

I love this podcast in general, and this episode was helpful.  Here are some quotes I scribbled down that resonated with my experience at Bethlehem:

"combines a certainty with a degree of ferocity and a flattening of values"

"very little tolerance for deviation"

The fundamentalist psychology is defined by four relationships:  your relationship to the world, to your co-religionists, to truth, and to the text.

• to the world:  us vs. them
• to co-religionists:  "highly factional, we have it right and you others have it wrong"
• to the text:  literal and strict particular interpretation, text elevated above all else
• to truth:  "high claim to certainty" and "truth defined by propositions"

Fundamentalism can exist in any religion, and also on the secular left.

From the next episode:

Over the last 25 years, as people have moved between different churches, "the lines have been blurring between evangelicals and fundamentalists"

One solution is diversity and exposure to differing views.  80/20 is fine, so long as the 20% are welcomed and will speak up.  

(This set off huge alarm bells for me.  This is exactly what went wrong at Bethlehem:  the dissenting voices got summarily shut down.)

4)  Pillars: How Muslim Friends Led Me Closer to Jesus by Rachel Pieh Jones

I enjoyed learning more about life in the Horn of Africa (the author is such a good story-teller).  But what I really appreciated was her reflections on Americanized faith and many of the cultural assumptions we've absorbed.  I found it refreshing and eye-opening. 

5)  A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband 'Master'  by Rachel Held Evans

Very funny and well-written.  I laughed at the image of her carrying around a stadium seat to sit on during the week of her period.  I liked how she described Proverbs 31 as a celebration of women rather than a checklist.  I was reading mostly for the storyline, but it was also interesting to consider her approach to Scripture.

6)  Struggling with Evangelicalism: Why I Want to Leave and What It Takes to Stay  by Dan Stringer

There's a lot here to digest, and it was a very helpful birds-eye-view overview for me.  I appreciated his analogy of how the river of orthodoxy has various streams and that it's really helpful to know what stream you're in.  (This was so humbling - I didn't realize I was in a particular stream, I just thought Bethlehem did everything right!)  Plus his suggestion that if something goes wrong in your church/denomination, try a different church/denomination/stream before chucking the faith altogether.

7)  Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristen Kobez Du Mez

There's a lot I could say about this, but it was a very helpful historical overview that helped me put things in context.  Mickey and I first read this in July 2021 and remember thinking "she's sweeping with too broad a brush; she lumped Piper in with all these bad guys."  And then everything blew up at Bethlehem and I realized, "oh wow, she was onto something.  These problems go deeper than I thought and are present at Bethlehem in ways I didn't realize."

8)  Heavy Burdens: Seven Ways LGBTQ Christians Experience Harm in the Church by Bridget Eileen Rivera

This book is written by a celibate lesbian Christian who holds to a traditional marriage ethic.  However, her argument that people should be free to wrestle with the Scripture texts for themselves and choose where to land, was fascinating to me.  My whole approach to Scripture has been "figure out the right answer and then teach people to believe that."  The idea that you would encourage people to wrestle with the texts themselves (and be ok with them landing in different places!) was mind-boggling to me.  Note:  the book has a lot to say about how LGBTQ Christians have been treated in the church, which is really important in its own right.  But I'm including it here because it touches on how we approach Scripture, which helped me get at some of these fundamentalist tendencies.

9)  This last resource is not a book, it's a quote.  But it's been so helpful to me in thinking about fundamentalism that I want to include it here.

This was one of the questions that was sent to the Bethlehem elders in January 2021 to be discussed at a church meeting (they had solicited questions from the congregation and received over 20 pages' worth in response).  Pastor Jason read this one aloud in a church meeting in March 2021.  I'm putting in bold the part that stuck out to me.

BCS and BBC tend to have a view of Christianity that feels like a mountain peak, where the peak of it is Mount Nuance Perfection. It is about 5 feet wide. Anybody who is standing not there, is on a slippery slope. This is a problem for working with, communing with, learning from the rest of the Christian world. How can we start to make BBC-DT more of the reality that Christianity is more like a plateau that is 5 miles wide. There are still things that fall off the path, but it allows us to grow in our culture of understanding, love, care, winsome speech. It creates a place for us to partner with other churches that maybe have some different views but we can be winsome with each other.  Or is this something that is not desired at BBC-DT or disagreed with at BBC-DT? I am not saying we go all in here and drop convictions on key primary issues. I know one question that is going to change for all is, what are the primary issues?

I think that is SO perceptive of the issues at Bethlehem.  (And I didn't see any of this at the time.)  And it's such a good description of the fundamentalist posture more generally.  I wish I knew who sent it in so I could thank them for it.  That image of the "5 foot wide" mountain top and the slippery slope vs. the "5 miles wide" view has been such a helpful image for me as I wrestle through these things.  Having been immersed for 20 years in the "5 foot wide" mentality, I want to try and cultivate more of a "5 miles wide" attitude.