May 20, 2002
Two authors tell all in their journey as 'recovering fundamentalists'
___By Steve Rabey
___Religion News Service
___WASHINGTON (RNS)--Stop the presses and e-mail Oprah! Two of today's better-known and more thoughtful Christian writers have abandoned their typical objective styles in order to divulge their innermost secrets and private struggles.
___Neither writer is gay, nor even an unrepentant shop-aholic. Still, in recent books, Philip Yancey and Randall Balmer, both editors-at-large for the evangelical magazine Christianity Today, confess that their lives--and their faith in God--are a whole lot healthier since they outgrew the arrogant and judgmental fundamentalism in which they were raised.
___Yancey, a best-selling and award-winning author of a dozen-plus books, came out of the ultraconservative closet in "Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church," his first project for a mainstream publisher, Doubleday.
RANDALL BALMER
___"I have spent most of my life in recovery from the church," writes Yancey, who now marvels at the arrogance of a Georgia church he attended as a youth: "Our little group of 200 people had a corner on the truth, God's truth, and everyone who disagreed with us was surely teetering on the edge of hell."
___Balmer, a professor of American religion at Columbia University and a past host of three PBS documentaries on the same subject, told his story in "Growing Pains: Learning to Love My Father's Faith," a book that was just named Christianity Today's book of the year in the "spirituality" category.
___The son of a preacher father who was "too busy doing the Lord's work" to love his family, Balmer writes, "Throughout my life, my perception of God was very much tied to my childish perception of my father--distant, austere, disapproving and abandoning."
___Testimonies by those who wandered in the darkness of sin before finding the light of salvation have been a standard feature of evangelistic services at American churches since the Great Awakening of the late 18th century.
___But confessional memoirs like Yancey's and Balmer's, which balance deep Christian commitment with straight talk about sin and silliness within the church, are a relatively new phenomenon.
___"There is something very fitting about folks who learned from the fundamentalists how to 'give testimonies' deciding now to write testimony books about their experiences with fundamentalism itself," said Richard Mouw, author of his own Christianity Today award-winning book, "The Smell of Sawdust: What Evangelicals Can Learn from Their Fundamentalist Heritage."
___Although Yancey and Balmer both came out of the same hellfire-and-brimstone variety of Christianity, their two books couldn't be more different.
___"Soul Survivor" is Yancey's tribute to 13 people--most of them writers and all but one Christians--who helped him "ransom a personal faith from the damaging effects of religion."
___Martin Luther King Jr.'s courage and Christian conviction stirred Yancey, even though people in his church had their own name for the civil rights pioneer: "Martin Lucifer Coon."
___Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Annie Dillard, whom Yancey first interviewed 25 years ago, helped him see how writing could be a holy calling.
___In the long run, this "cloud of witnesses" helped Yancey "absorb some of the worst the church has to offer, yet still land in the loving arms of God."
___Balmer's book is a memoir of his struggles with anger, resentment and doubt and his constant longing for love from a father who showed more passion for preaching than parenting.
___Saved from a life of sin at the age of 3 and raised to follow in his father's footsteps, Balmer received an unusual Christmas present when he was 5 years old--a 3-foot-tall pulpit that was a spittin' image of his dad's.
___"I was a quick study and learned from an early age to detect who was saved and who wasn't," he writes.
___In time, though, Balmer grew disenchanted with his father's version of Christianity.
___"Growing up fundamentalist meant living in a tiny world where every question had an answer. It was a world inebriated with rhetoric and obsessed with chains of command ... and all of it dominated by authoritarian preachers, too many of them sporting egos roughly the size of Montana."
___Balmer never completely lost his faith in Jesus, and as he now contemplates the challenge of passing on his faith to his own teenage children, he salutes his father who, for all his faults, succeeded in "seeing your sons safely to Jesus."
___Many Christians experienced similar growing pains during the 20th century as the evangelical movement emerged from its fundamentalist roots, Mouw argues. He is the president of one of those institutions, Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif.
___"For all the painful experiences that so many have suffered at the hands of fundamentalism, I for one will always be grateful for people who impressed upon me the need to experience in a very personal way the Savior's love, and who taught me to take a strong stand on the deep convictions that guide my life," Mouw said.
___"We know we can never go back--but if evangelicalism is going to remain a vibrant movement, we need to embrace the worthy elements in our fundamentalist heritage."
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