“These yuppies want to have good kids,” I told my wife. “But they are terrified of being like people who actually do what it takes to raise good kids.”

Via Andrew Sullivan, here’s a blog post by a woman named Lana Hope, who was raised in a homeschooling Christian fundamentalist family, and who has left all that behind. She writes to say that people who assume that only crazy people are drawn to fundamentalism are flat-out wrong. She lists good reasons why fundamentalism appeals to folks, and then says:

A few years ago one of my friends had a birthday party, and he invited all the homeschool families he knew to his party. It may seem odd to an outsider to have young children at his 20th birthday party, but it was not the least bit weird to me (parties with my family are the same way; there were as many kids under 13 at my 18th birthday party as there were teens). But after an entire evening of playing board games with people of all ages, washing dishes together, and praying for each other, one of my public school friends (the only person who had attended public school at the party) said to me, “That was so much fun. I never experienced this in my life.” She explained that she never had an evening playing board games with children of all ages. In fact, she never went to someone’s house and had them pray for her either. It was foreign to her, but she liked it.

Fundamentalism offers that kind of community. Yes, the community creates pain and breaks sometimes, but it’s still community that often attracts people to fundamentalism.  I was looking through photos of my teen years earlier this week, and every photo of me has a child in the picture. Our community valued children.

I received an e-mail last week from a reader of this blog who explained how he had come through an abusive childhood and ended up converting to fundamentalist Islam because it explained the world to him, and met his emotional needs. He is no longer a Muslim fundamentalist, but I found his letter helpful in explaining the psychology of fundamentalism, with which I have very little experience.

People find that surprising, given that I grew up in the deep South, and live here now. Here’s Lana Hope in another post, talking about how much she hates her West Virginia home, feeling like an alien there (emphasis below in the original):

I left fundamentalism and evangelicalism behind, and the Southern culture in our region is totally anti-people who have liberal ideas. Just the other day I was trying to explain to someone that “no, people who are so not dispensationalists-the-world-is-about-to-end kind of folks are not stupid.” Those kind of conversations are, quite frankly, exhausting, and they can result in hurtful replies back, “what? You don’t believe in the substitutionary atonement. Have you said the sinners prayer?” FROM THE CASHIER.

I can’t be myself in my home state. I can’t explain myself. Not my personality (the hiking, the traveling, the experience), not my goals, not my beliefs.

I swear, when God made me, he put me on the wrong place on earth. People talk about being transgendered. I’m transcountried.

I get that. Honestly, I do. I guess I was simply blessed to grow up in south Louisiana, which is Christian and conservative but so much more laid back than other parts of the South. It’s the Catholic influence, I think. I grew up in a mostly Protestant area, but living in Dallas, the only time I’ve ever been in a city where Evangelicalism set the tone for Christianity, taught me how cultural Catholicism moderated a lot of the public Christianity in south Louisiana. I don’t know about north Louisiana. People around here referred to those folks as “hard-shell Baptists,” which meant “not like the Baptists around here, who are normal people, but fundamentalists.” Honestly, we didn’t know. North Louisiana was like another country. It wasn’t until I went to boarding school there in 1983, aged 16, that I actually met some north Louisiana people. None of them seemed hardshell to me. Anyway, I digress.

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