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The Myth of the Recovering Fundamentalist
I’ve been a fundamentalist. I’m not one. Do I consider myself to have “recovered”? I left fundamentalism. I separated from it. I didn’t escape it. I didn’t recover from it. I stopped being a fundamentalist. I didn’t go through a process of recovery. I saw it was wrong to be one, so I stopped being one. I did some separation from fundamentalist organizations and institutions, but that’s not all that I’ve separated from in my life. Sanctification itself is a process of separation. Be ye holy means be ye separate.
If someone really understands fundamentalism, what it is, he knows there are good things about fundamentalism itself, including ideological and institutional preservation or conservation. The idea of fundamentalism, which some fundamentalists like to use to describe their continued support of fundamentalism, has good parts to it, worthy of respect. Those parts should be and can be kept. They are biblical. In other words, don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.
On the other hand, the concept of recovering from fundamentalism smacks of going back to something of normalcy in the realm of psychology. “Recovery” is a common terminology now for “getting better” from mental illness. Very often today it is used for the process of discontinuing an addiction to drugs or alcohol. These are considered diseases and recovery includes treatment for the addiction so as to prevent a relapse. People who use recovery to speak of fundamentalism or anything religious are treating it parallel to types of apparent mental illness or psychological disorders.
Fundamentalism itself isn’t a disorder or a mental illness or an addiction. The use of “recovery” isn’t true. Someone does recover from some illness or physical injury. He might even recover from the pain of a difficult time in his life. There may be a death in a family, a runaway child, loss of a job, repossession of a house, a splintered marriage, or a lingering illness. Using recovery as a description of departing from fundamentalism is a pejorative to deride what someone came from. It isn’t helpful anymore than it would be to mock Mormons after someone left Mormonism.
John Ellis professes to have been a fundamentalist and then to have become a drug addict. He testifies that later he was converted to Jesus Christ, and on July 8, he wrote a post advocating the Recovering Fundamentalist podcast. Ellis starts with this paragraph:
For those who didn’t grow up in it, the world of fundamentalism is beyond weird; it’s utterly foreign. How do you make sense of rules that often include things like prohibitions on women wearing pants and the condemnation of music with syncopation and watching movies in the movie theater? For those of us who grew up in fundamentalism, those rules, and their many, many companion rules, are well-known. However, most people lack a touch point for our fundyland experiences. This has resulted in ex-fundies using the internet, specifically social media, to connect and share our mutual experiences. These online relationships take many forms, from the nostalgic all the way to embittered wholesale denunciations. For many ex-fundies, though, our reminiscences take the form of an honest appraisal of the good and bad found within fundamentalism. Count me among that latter group.
Recovering Fundamentalist features three evangelical pastor friends, who, having left what they call IFB (independent fundamental Baptists) or fundamentalism, talk about their experience. I would contend that they left a mutation of fundamentalism, a virulent, pragmatic form of revivalism or Charismaticism, a strain that especially affected the American South, even as sampled in their video, that is neither independent, fundamental, or even Baptist. This contrasts almost 180 degrees from the beginning of fundamentalism, tied to The Fundamentals. The perverse variety of revivalism that arose in the American South bares much resemblance to the new religion of the recovering fundamentalists. They kept the philosophical underpinnings, while dropping the symbolism. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
Fundamentalism itself isn’t the boogie-man of the recovering fundamentalists. Southern revivalism had deep theological problems. At the root of them was a form of mysticism, continuationism, and ongoing divine revelation. God spoke directly to the leaders as manifested in numerical growth spurred by counterfeit manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Also aiding the growth was pragmatic methodology the results of which were used as evidence of God’s work. The standards set themselves up against cultural decay and the anti-intellectualism against the Northern, liberal elites provided a natural enemy, like Mormonism does with its persecution syndrome. None of what I’m describing, again, is independent, fundamental, or Baptist.
The three “recovering fundamentalists” do not get an audience based on dense exposition of scripture, but based on the shared bitterness and malice of the misfits of Southern revivalism. The Holy Spirit doesn’t manifest Himself this way either. Their niche group isn’t holy or spiritual. “Recovery” isn’t moving to something biblical, but shared experiences, another generation complaining about their teeth set on edge because their parents ate sour grapes (Ez 18, Jer 31). Their authority is eerily similar to Southern revivalism: audience size and anecdotes, like what would come in the illustrations of the revivalist preacher. It’s like a Goth girl laughing at everyone else because they’re all just following the crowd.
The movement from which the three former “fundamentalists” recovered isn’t independent, because the Southern revivalists were tightly banded together around Charismatic figures and large organizations, based upon cleverness and oratorial abilities. Part of their mystique was holding up the Bible and then preaching things that weren’t in it. They were spouting their own opinions and gave people the impression that their thoughts were received from a direct pipeline to God. There was vice-grip like control about the emphases of Southern revivalism, everyone taking from the same script or talking points, and if anyone left that script, he would or could be excluded from the group, and miss out as a headliner for a main conference roster or prominent mention in the newspaper or magazine.
As I have already written, the movement wasn’t fundamental either. Fundamentalism was preserving the old and Southern revivalism is untethered from historical Christianity. It is akin to all the various heresies that have risen since the first century, actually emulating some of the ones that have come on the scene. At the root, it isn’t even Christianity. It doesn’t represent the Jesus of the Bible, but for some of the same reasons that a perverse evangelicalism emerging from Southern revivalism doesn’t represent Him either.
The movement isn’t Baptist, because Baptists believe in biblical repentance and have the Bible as their authority — for doctrine, for practice, and for worship. Practice includes methodology. Baptists regulate their practice by scripture, not by non-scripture.
The Southern revivalists had standards, ones actually closer to the Bible than the recovering fundamentalists. They are not examining their standards based upon the Bible and the practice of biblical Christianity through history, but based upon a reflex rejection of the old standards. They deem their new standards superior because they are different than Southern revivalism. Mussolini may have got the trains to run on time, and throwing out fascism doesn’t mean slower trains.
Recovering fundamentalists emphasize standards as much as who they criticize. They are left-wing legalists, who require wokeness, more egalitarian marriages, and worldliness. The pragmatism is a left-wing pragmatism still using fleshly means to gather the crowd. It is a new symbolism that is equally untethered from scripture.
Post-reformation church leaders said, semper reformada, always reforming. I’m not attempting to validate reformers, just to say that mid-twentieth century fundamentalists saw a need of semper reformada, perhaps semper fundamentalista The fundamentals of early twentieth century could not meet the downward trajectory of biblical sanctification. True fundamentalists and non-fundamentalist true churches reacted with repulsion to cultural degradation that they saw entering the church. Their militancy on cultural issues mirrored the early fundamentalist movement. This should not be confused with Southern revivalism even though the latter took the same tact, much like Jehovah’s Witnesses go door-to-door. The liberalism that started with doctrine moved to unravel holy living, and true Christians rose up against corrupted goodness and distorted beauty.
Hollywood isn’t a friend of biblical Christianity. The movie theater that Ellis talks about is a danger. It is a pollution of idolatry that the church in Acts 15 prohibited. The explosion of homosexuality and transgenderism didn’t start in a vacuum. The symbols of God-designed roles were abandoned to conform to the world system. Professing Christians who join them do wrong but also ignore the ramifications. Ellis chooses to engage important issues with sound bytes in favor with lasciviousness. Satan and the world system do not attack only the transcendentals of truth and goodness, but also beauty, and the avenue of an attack on absolute beauty does more to distort a right imagination of God than a distorted doctrinal statement.
Southern revivalists popularized a false gospel accompanied by unbiblical methods. That isn’t the interest of the recovering fundamentalists, because both the former and the latter depend on pragmatism. New “converts” of Southern revivalism might never indicate conversion. Neither will the evangelicalism of the recovering fundamentalists. This is an identical perversion of the grace of God. Southern revivalists mark sanctification by keeping the rules, but left winged legalists, like the Pharisees, reduce the law to the rules they can keep.
Ellis and his recovering fundamentalists do damage to the belief, practice, and preservation of the truth, goodness, and beauty. They don’t even recover from their earlier error. They just change the label. Do not be fooled by them. Do not join them. Their god is their belly, their glory is their shame, and they mind earthly things.
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