Jonny Scaramanga, author of the Leaving Fundamentalism blog, shares his thoughts on his fundamentalist Christian upbringing and why encouraging questioning is an essential part of a good education… Enjoy.
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I grew up as a fundamentalist.
I’m very proud of that sentence, now. For years it was my guilty secret. I pretended to understand the pop culture references my friends made (I’d missed those TV shows because I’d been in church). When I moved schools for my GCSEs, I pretended to understand my school mates’ jokes, even though I’d spent the last three years in a fundamentalist school and didn’t know what ‘wanking’ meant.
Then I became a professional musician, and people asked me what the first CD I’d ever bought was. That was awkward, because until I was 15 I only listened to evangelical Christian rock music. My first CD was Wake-Up Call by Petra, and I didn’t want to tell anyone that. I always said I’d been a diehard rock fan since I was 8, and then had to explain how I’d managed seven years of that without listening to any music. I also didn’t want girls I liked to know that I’d never even held hands before, and then nothing ever happened because they couldn’t tell why I was acting so weird.
So learning to own my fundamentalism has been huge for me. I’ve learned to realize it wasn’t my fault; I was indoctrinated by adults who should have known better, and by escaping and making a good life for myself, I’ve beaten them.
And the way I beat them was by doing what they hoped I would never do: Asking questions.
Fundamentalism doesn’t do well with questions. The whole thing rests on the belief that the Bible is the Word of God. Obviously, God doesn’t make mistakes, so if the book turns out to contain even one slip, the whole religion is out the window. It’s a precarious place to live. Even doctrinally unimportant contradictions become a matter of life and death.
For example, the book of Matthew says that, after Judas betrayed Jesus, he flung the silver into the temple and hanged himself. The book of Acts says he acquired a field with the money, and fell down in the field, his guts spilling everywhere.
I can’t tell you the raw exhilaration I still feel from uncovering discrepancies like this in Scripture. I was a good Christian boy. I was told the Bible had no errors, and I didn’t go looking for them. I don’t think the satisfaction of taking a coach and horses through the oppressive life I used to lead will ever go away.
To you and me, the Judas stories contradict each other. But to the geniuses at Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry (CARM), both are true: Judas hanged himself, and then fell down. These are the kind of reconciliations you have to try really hard to believe if you want to keep being a fundamentalist.
But fundamentalism made me miserable. There were two main reasons for this: One was the intense loneliness. There aren’t many fundamentalists in Britain, and I was strongly discouraged from being friends with non-Christians (meaning non-fundies), who might corrupt my soul. I had no close friends and spent entire summers alone in my bedroom.
The other reason was that I was a part of the cult-like fundamentalist movement known as the Word of Faith or prosperity gospel. You’ve seen the televangelists on the God channel, promising that if you give God some money (via the televangelist, naturally) he will bless you with a life of unimaginable joy, health, and prosperity. I’d spent my entire life being promised that if I was faithful to God, I would have my every desire. Instead I was alone in my bedroom, listening to Christian imitations of the rock bands I wasn’t allowed to listen to.
Inevitably, I flipped. My mum, seeing that I was dangerously depressed, removed me from my fundamentalist school and put me in a relatively normal secondary. Which was also hell because I was a raving evangelist and my new classmates didn’t really appreciate my message.
But I got an education. And slowly it began to drip through. My old school had misled me about the theory of evolution. They’d also misled me about politics (my school used ACE, a curriculum which could have been written by the editors of Conservapedia), and history.
I began to read books again. In the fundamentalist school, the books were censored and only approved Christian texts allowed. I read philosophy, and it was agony. The entire fabric of my reality had to be torn apart. Everything I thought I knew was wrong. It got too much after a while, and I ignored the questions for a couple of years. But they came back. I couldn’t leave them alone.
Here’s the thing about education: You can never teach children all the facts. There are too many, and too many perspectives on those facts, and they change all the time. But if you teach them how to ask questions, they learn how to find stuff out for themselves, and they learn how to tell if the information they’re getting is bullshit or not.
My fundamentalist teachers didn’t like questioning for exactly that reason. That’s the best reason I can think of to teach critical thinking in schools.