In the Shadow of Fundamentalism

perspectives on chapter 4, i.e. a teenager's case against fundementalism

Sitting in the snow.
I could feel the crust melting slowly through the layers of my clothing. The fun would be the moment I stood. Somehow ice magically freezes into the weave of one’s fabrics and bonds with the layers beneath. It’s a small miracle when you consider how hot our body is, melting ice and radiating warmth, and how cold the snow is beneath us. It’s like the extremes form a truce, and there medium of exchange is the mesh of the cloth between them.
I wasn’t thinking too actively of these things. I was actually trying to catch my breath. Flexing my wrists to work out the severe aches built into their rotation, I watched my breath pour out in big wet billows of locomotive steam.
Gingerly I reached down with two thinly gloved fingers and peeled back the sleeve covering my right arm. In the sharp winter starlight I could see the rorschach pattern of purple bruises covering the inside of that arm. I knew from the feeling in my left that the two were a matched set.
It was 1999, and I had agreed to something that would completely change (and save) my life forever. A sort of an experiment on my part, and an exercise in patience for the man I was sharing a distracted conversation with.
For about nine months we convened in the elements, like some ancient church of stone. Three hours every Sunday night spent in intense competition - three hours that would change my whole perspective on HCA and what it meant.
What we did was unimportant compared to what we talked about. He was someone who had survived a similar Christian school almost ten years before. He had seen the formation of Christian Hope Center, and the regime change when David Hackett replaced Harry Jackson.
In that starry sylvan splendor I learned that I was at least partially normal, a shock to my mind made more acceptable by physical exhaustion.
Yes, it’s normal for young men under stress and in close contact with young women to form romantic attachments in their minds. It’s normal for those same young men to fear rejection. It’s normal to feel awkward expressing those feelings, confronting them, and eventually growing beyond them. This is the very essence of teenage melodrama.
What is not normal is feeling isolated and alone, being unable to discuss these feelings with anyone else for fear of religious condemnation. It is abnormal to have only a dozen or so young women in your entire world, so that rejection by one equates to rejection by the whole world. It is not normal to feel that those dozen women represent the ONLY acceptable matches for your romantic future, and that women outside this social paradigm are somehow inferior morally and spiritually.
All these ideas were implanted into our impressionable minds by our lives at HCA. As a teenager I heard constantly the verse: “Take not unto yourselves wives of the Philistines,” which was used as a Godly admonition to only marry a fellow Christian. Dating was expressly forbidden, and talk of sexuality was entirely taboo.
In short, we were socially stunted and romantically repressed.
And now, on this 28th day of January in the year 2007, I sit facing the age of thirty with the same issues.
Not once in my life have I had a long-term, viable romantic relationship. Not once have I had what I believe constitutes a normal courtship progression; from meeting, to friendship, to romance, to attachment.
While I have the strength to own that the mistakes and failings are my own, I have only recently had the power to recognize where I learned these backwards views on relationships and why I insist on enacting them whenever I am confronted with a romantic opportunity.
The failures are my own, but the inability to properly socialize and present myself as an acceptable mate comes from being raised in a fundamentalist atmosphere, completely isolated from contemporary cultural behavior.
Unable to learn from my peers or from women as an adolescent, I am now ill equipped to locate and communicate my intensions to a woman.
My romantic life is an incontrovertible argument against evangelical fundamentalism.

posted by NY Monk @ 12:51 PM