Aiding an Exodus From Fundamentalist Folds : Religious Support Group Helps Disillusioned, Draws Wrath of Conservatives

They came to revel in each other’s company. Gathered comfortably around a coffee table in the living room of a modest two-story home, they shared their stories and their pain.

There was a 35-year-old woman who had given up an education to read her Bible for 15 years and now can’t hold a job. And a 30-year-old man who, five years after leaving a fundamentalist Christian church, still can’t speak of the experience without weeping.

‘I’m Struggling’

“They predicted I would lie, steal and be a murderer,” said George Guzman, a hospital custodian from Santa Rosa. “They said God would kill me because I’d be in the enemy’s camp. Now I’m struggling; I don’t know exactly what I believe. Leaving was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

Laura, the unemployed Bible reader, wouldn’t give her last name for fear of ostracism by fundamentalist friends still unaware of her recent inward break with their beliefs. But she spoke of her reaction to the long religious experience, which she believes left her emotionally unhinged to lead a normal life. “I am really, really angry that I gave up my goals,” she said. “I gave up a lot of things that meant a lot to me. When I look back on it now I feel like throwing up.”

Welcome to Fundamentalists Anonymous--an idea, organizers say, whose time has come. Since its formation a year ago, the New York-based group said it has garnered a membership of 20,000 in 31 chapters nationwide and the wrath of conservative Christians everywhere. “We are now ready to do battle with those persons who hate Christ and . . . are spewing out bigotry and prejudice against Bible-believing Christians,” read a recent letter sent to followers of the Rev. Jerry Falwell in which the founder of the Moral Majority (now a subsidiary of the Liberty Federation) announced the formation of the Christian Anti-Discrimination Committee. Topping the committee’s list of “enemies of the gospel” is Fundamentalists Anonymous.

“It is time,” Falwell wrote, “for God’s children to rise up in righteous indignation and join hands against the devil.”

Said Fundamentalists Anonymous founder Richard Yao: “We’re not anti-Christian. We simply want to give people a way out.”

The idea, Yao said, grew out of his own early experiences with fundamentalism, which Webster defines as “religious beliefs based on a literal interpretation of everything in the Bible and regarded as fundamental to Christian faith and morals.”

A Fundamentalist World

“I was immersed in this fundamentalist world from my first day of school until I went to college,” said Yao, 31, who grew up in the Philippines but now lives in New York City.

Eventually, he said, he strayed from the strict and narrow values of his youth. But later as a divinity student at Yale and a law student at New York University, he said, he kept meeting people who, like himself, had suffered what he considered grave psychological damage due to their struggles with fundamentalism.

“There can be a lot of emotional addiction,” Yao said. “When you get away from that you can go through a very devastating withdrawal.”

Some of the people he met, Yao said, were stuck in fundamentalist groups, no longer believing their theology but unable to leave because of guilt and peer pressure.

Yao said he founded Fundamentalists Anonymous to help disaffected fundamentalists in three ways: by forming local support groups in which they can discuss their feelings with others whose experiences have been similar; by publishing a newsletter to let them know they are not alone; and by creating local and national hot lines for anonymous personal support or referral.

Patterned loosely after Alcoholics Anonymous, the group has spent about $70,000 in just over a year, Yao says: $40,000 to $50,000 from his and co-founder James Luce’s pockets, the rest from grass-roots donations by individuals and organizations.

A Church Basement

“Our group exists because it is reflecting an increasing exodus from the fundamentalist fold,” said Yao, who left a Wall Street law firm to direct Fundamentalists Anonymous from the basement of a New York church. “A lot of them are extremely disillusioned and are coming out shell-shocked, traumatized and devastated.”

Margaret Singer, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, who has done extensive research on cults, sees some parallels between the experiences of cultists and those who have entered certain fundamentalist churches. “What has grown up in some of the smaller (fundamentalist) groups,” she said, “are some very closed, intense situations in which people’s lives are extremely controlled (through the) misuse of shepherding and confession.”

As examples, she cited groups in which members are required to confess “every little aberrant thought they have” including the “normal thoughts that pass through everyone’s mind each day.” This practice, she said, often results in intense feelings of guilt and humiliation that may take years to overcome.

Marsha Norris, a licensed marriage and family counselor who has treated former fundamentalists through her San Rafael-based practice, said she finds many of them to be living in fear. “If you have trusted in the Lord and believed it in a major way and then you discover that trusting in the Lord hasn’t really helped you,” she said, “it’s hard for you to trust other people and allow yourself to be vulnerable again. You believe you are ugly and sinful, that without God’s grace you can never be anything. Recovering fundamentalists have no self-concept.”

And Donald Miller, director of the University of Southern California’s School of Religion, said he isn’t surprised by the arrival of a group like Fundamentalists Anonymous at this particular juncture in American history. “Fundamentalism is an all-embracing sectarian movement,” Miller said, “and like any such movement, when someone opts for an alternative, they seek a new system of social support.”

Such support is particularly important now, he said, because “there’s a sense in which American society is more pluralistic than it’s ever been, so individuals have greater freedom of choice than they’ve ever had. Previously a lot of people born into a fundamentalist environment would never consider changing.”

‘Poignant Experience’

Members of the Oakland group, which meets twice a month, said they help each other by providing an environment in which they can commiserate without feeling exposed. “It’s a very poignant experience to become a fundamentalist and then leave it,” said Nancy Williams, 40, a vocational counselor and former fundamentalist who leads the 10-member group. “Only those who’ve been through the experience can really understand. This gives us a place to be ourselves.”

A newer group meets in San Jose, she said, and a third is planned for San Francisco.

“California is about our hottest state,” said co-founder Luce, who estimated that the organization has about 3,000 at-large members throughout California, nearly half of them in the Southland. Of the 1,400 supportive letters he has received during the past year, he said, about 400 came from Los Angeles.

Yet organizing efforts in the Southland have been slow. A group based in Ventura disbanded after six months, according to its founder, because people tended to “come one time, dump their stuff, take a pamphlet” and not return.

Chip Stinnett, a former data processing manager in Huntington Beach, was recently named the Fundamentalist Anonymous representative for Orange and Los Angeles counties and charged with forming an active chapter in Southern California. “I feel the need is there,” said Stinnett, 34.

Fundamentalists are less than thrilled with the new organization’s work. Dale Wolery, associate pastor at the Church of the Open Door, a 1,200-member nondenominational church in Glendora, acknowledges that people have suffered as a result of the excesses of some fundamentalist groups. But they do not represent the mainstream of fundamentalism, he said. And while Fundamentalists Anonymous provides emotional satisfaction to some, Wolery said he does not consider its work to be constructive.

“It casts a bad light on fundamentalism,” he said. “It puts me in the position of fundamentalists who practice excesses that I haven’t practiced. I think Fundamentalists Anonymous hurts everybody who believes in the fundamentals; a good church is a better place to go than to a splinter group like that.”

Group Is Criticized

Ed Dobson, associate pastor of Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va., editor of the monthly Fundamentalist Journal magazine and vice president of Liberty University of which Falwell is chancellor, was a bit more vociferous in his criticism. “They are decidedly anti-fundamentalist,” he said of Yao’s group. “We are not a bunch of anti-intellectual, obscure, sweat-drenched, pew-jumping, Appalachian hillbillies. We are simple Bible-believing Christians who love God’s work. What Fundamentalists Anonymous has done is take a few exceptions from the lunatic fringe and applied those exceptions to the movement at large. There are millions of Americans who are fundamentalists by choice.”

None of them, presumably, were at last month’s Oakland meeting where a handful of ex-fundamentalists spent several hours sharing long woeful tales of life under fundamentalism.

“I think it’s very important that people have a commitment to the Lord,” said Laura, the woman who had given up her education, “but they take the Scriptures and twist them. The thing that really made me think about it was the realization that I didn’t care for my family anymore. If you have a really close-knit family, that’s hard.”

Added Steve Wilson, 34, a San Francisco nurse who said his wife of eight years left him as a result of his disaffection with fundamentalism after 10 years of involvement in it: “My emotions are still jailed.”

Experts say it is too early to tell just how effective an organization Fundamentalists Anonymous will turn out to be. Gina Holomon, an anthropologist specializing in religion and ritual at Stanford University, said she is in the early stages of a three-year study on the group to track its cultural and emotional style and significance.

“The question will be: Do people simply jump from one extremism to another or do they loosen up and let go of their fear and anger?” Holomon said. If they end up freer, she said, then the group is a healthy thing. If, on the other hand, what the organization ends up with is a “bunch of atheists--people who have to go out and proselytize against fundamentalism in an emotional way,” then the process has clearly failed.

“My prediction,” Holomon said, “is that both things will go on. The question will be one of balance.”