Communities get these ideas sometimes to live together and re-enact their ideals. It’s part of being human. But things can go hideously wrong in authoritarian groups, and I’ll show you how today.
I still remember where I was standing and what I was doing the first time I ever saw a tornado. I was in my late 20s by now. I lived in the smack middle of Kansas in a tiny town notable mostly for being a convenient stop on the highway Read more
All this time, despite my misgivings about the very un-Christlike people in my church’s leadership and in my own little family, I spent a lot of time at the church, as one might expect. My mother’d been downright alarmed when she’d realized I was spending five out of every seven Read more
Now that I wasn’t involved in weird evangelical churches anymore, I blossomed at last in the late 80s. I discovered the Drama Club at school, slowly made normal friends, and tried to fit in. I got involved with a historical re-enactment group called the Society for Creative Anachronism and found Read more
I’m out of the Southern Baptist megachurch by now and sitting in the school library at a long table with some girlfriends researching something or other. The library is built right in the middle of the school building itself, with glass walls so anybody inside can see everything going on Read more
Over the years of my youth, I got involved first in comic books, then in Dungeons & Dragons. Mom was just happy I was out of the house and talking to real people instead of staring fixedly at the tiny little television in my bedroom playing Atari games. Once my Read more
Everybody says their Catholics are the most hardcore, but I’m here to tell you that my German-Polish family is probably a front-runner for the gold medal winners of Catholic fervor. I grew up thinking everybody had an aunt named Sister Seraphia and uncles with fancy collars. We even had a Read more
I’ll talk more later about my path to fundamentalism, but for now, just know that I was born into an intensely Catholic family but became a fundie in my teens, eventually marrying a preacher. I hung out there in that general vein for about ten years before walking away from Read more