Something I’m very, very sensitive about is the way feminists often talk about women in fundamentalist religions. You can’t understand a culture unless you have been inside it yet fundamentalist cultures are often unilaterally condemned by people who have no idea how they work.
I am an exile here, grew up in a different culture, with a different language, and different norms, and different dress codes, different morality and different gender expectations. And that’s partly why the world I live in now, the world that most of the people I love have always lived in, baffles me, why I move through it awkwardly like it doesn’t belong to me
This is not my mother culture or my mother tongue, and although I love it, I choose to live in it, I do not understand it as well as the country I grew up in. Its rules are too fluid, too changeable, too arbitrary.
The country I grew up in damaged me irreparably and rejected me or I wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t be an exile but I understand its internal coherence in a way that people who grew up here do not.
The people I come from are not stupid, are not by and large un(der) educated, they do not misunderstand the way the world works in the way you think they do. They are not selfish they do not not care about community, they do not follow rules for the sake of it, they do not hate women anymore than this culture hates women, they just hate them differently, but like this culture they do not see it as hate, they see it as the natural order of things.
Where I come from is irredeemable, there is nothing can be done to save it, so much would have to change in it that it would become somewhere else, but that doesn’t mean every single thing about it was bad.
Until I was seventeen it was possible for all the people I loved to be in the same room at the same time and that is never going to happen again while I am alive and there is a loss there.
When my mother was sick enough to need hospitalizing, which happened frequently, the women in my church made sure there was always a hot meal on the table every meal time and that we were washed and sorted and loved enough when bedtime came round.
The night I ran away there were hundreds of people out looking for me.
When I hear people disparage women in fundamentalist Christianity, they are disparaging the women who grew me up, who nurtured me, who did the best they could with what they had.
The reasons women do not leave fundamentalist religion do not amount to them being unenlightened, stupid or brainwashed. They may have a deep spirituality that is tied up in their community, their sense of community may be more important than their sense of individuality. They may feel safer in fundamentalism than out of it.
And contrary to secular opinion, women in fundamentalist religion are not all about the men. The religion I grew up in had women only meetings and retreats, as a matter of default, it wasn’t something that had to be argued about or fought for it just happened, it was seen as normal.
I don’t think Christian fundamentalism is healthy at all but I know how it works, I know the weak places and the strong places in it, I know what gets lost and what gets gained in the staying or the leaving of it.
