Why I am No Longer Fundamental, Part 2

It’s easy to blame other people for the problems in our lives. The most uncomfortable feeling in the world is seeing the ruins of your life and knowing that everything that is wrong is a direct result of your own actions. Sometimes the only thing that can ease that discomfort is casting about for someone else to blame: society, friends, family, your parents…the list is quite literally endless.

That’s not what I’m here to do. I was shaped by the culture I grew up in. The atmosphere in my church. Parents who loved me and wanted to protect me, who wanted what was best for me. All of these circumstances just happened to correlate with the massive fundamentalist movement that happened to be taking place in American Christianity during my formative years.

It’s this movement that directly influenced the most pivotal moments of my adult life.

But it was in no way responsible.

I do blame the fundamentalist movement for a lot of what I see wrong with Christianity in the world, and for the way the world relates to Christianity. I have seen far too many broken hearts to not hurt for those who have been hurt by this movement, both in and out of Christianity, and in and out of the Church in general.

Mine is one of those stories.

However, rather than blame, I overcame.

I got married at the ripe age of 19. I was young. I was naïve. I was marrying a man who had a sex addiction, who was, and would without a doubt continue to be, unfaithful to me at any given opportunity.

I divorced him after four years and untold counts of infidelity. The exact details of the marriage are not important right now. I may save those for another time. That is not this story. My story is about what happened to me after I left this man.

I left my ex-husband on Good Friday in 2010. I was lead singer on the praise team, he was the drummer, my brother played the bass, my brother’s best friend (who also happened to be the associate pastor at the teeny tiny small church mentioned in the previous blog) was a guitarist, my mother was the youth pastor, and the list of connections in that church are, too this day, endless.

My immediate family, along with a small handful of other people at that church, were the only ones who stood by me in the months that followed. I was, in a roundabout way, dismissed from the praise team. Efforts were made by the pastor to coerce me to reconcile with my husband. I left the church almost immediately, initially with the intention of returning. However, due to my treatment any time I have returned to that church, I have not regularly attended that church since then. I was, for all intents and purposes, ostracized.

I was 23 years old, and had considered that church to be my second home from the time I was 13. This was the church that was immediately responsible for my spiritual upbringing.

…my fundamentalist upbringing.

And there lies the root of the problem.

Looking back now, all of those memories seem so bizarre. At that time, I was hurt but sadly not surprised at the reaction of the church. I was in so much pain from what my husband had done to me, and feeling abandoned by the church seemed inevitable.  However, being abandoned by the church was so much more painful, and the betrayal was so much deeper, that to this very day I am still recovering.

But…I don’t blame a single person there anymore.

Rather, this movement. This fundamentalist idea that somehow we have a God-Given right, and maybe even duty, to sit in judgment on people whose circumstances we will never fully understand, these are the things I blame. And these are the mentalities that I used to buy into!

Because you see, I used to sit in judgment on people. I used to preach at friends that I knew were struggling with homosexuality. I used to parrot to them all the catchphrases and scriptures that I had memorized for such an occasion. I am thankful that those amazing people still consider me a friend today. To those people: you know who you are. And I am so very, truly sorry.

And then I was on the receiving end of different catchphrases and scriptures, those reserved for those poor, ignorant, unfaithful souls contemplating the “sin of divorce.”

A shift began in me at that time, one that is still taking place today. My heart was broken, but my eyes were opened by this experience. That is the story that I will tell in the next two weeks, the fruition of my story of why I am no longer a fundamentalist.